Comradeship // Freechat

Comrade Shark Fucker said,

"I know a lot of people who travelled through levels of radicalism before ending up where they are now but that hasn’t been my experience. Marxism-Leninism was the first political ideology that made sense to me. It made the world make sense after it seeming so nonsensical for so long."

This resonates with me and my experience very strongly.

As a child my mom struggled to raise us kids; As a young adult I found it hard to find and keep down a job; I was homeless for 3 years in my early twenties; When I finally got housed, I spent all of my time working at physically punishing jobs and spending my free time trying to recover my body for the next workday. At no point throughout all of this did I ever feel compelled to want to think about politics. Not even a little bit. To me, politics was about complaining and worrying about other peoples' lives. I had enough shit to complain about and enough worrying to do over my own life. In this way I had always been apolitical. The few times I tried to understand something political being discussed on the news, I could never come to an understanding that seemed to hold up to scrutiny. Eventually I came to the conclusion that I just wasn't smart enough to understand the political sphere.

Once some time passed and I felt that my life was more stable, and I had the time and energy, I decided I wanted to learn about politics. I in fact remember telling myself, "This year I want to develop my political beliefs."

Growing up, I had always been distrustful of big businesses and the government. When I was in the 3rd grade, my teacher handed me a Time magazine with the front cover showing a burnt-out tank from the US invasion of Iraq, it was then that I decided I hated the US military for what it was doing. I think it was because of this that every political and philosophical ideology that I ended up trying to understand when I got older made no sense to me at all. Everything was hypocritical and contradicted itself and seemed to just support the very status quo that even 3rd grade me knew was evil. It got to the point where it seemed like it wasn't even possible to develop a coherent political worldview. I was so frustrated with reading philosophy and about political theory, that I even missed out on scoring with this guy I liked because I told him I hated philosophy and it turns out that philosophy was like his main passion. Oops.

Eventually I stumbled upon Marxism-Leninism, and everything finally clicked. With Historical Materialism, History stopped being an abstract list of disconnected events and finally became something that could be understood as a progression of human interactions that follows laws of societal development. I remember the first time I made a prediction about something geopolitical I saw on the news and seeing my prediction be proven correct a couple weeks later. It was very exciting. Materialist Dialectics, as a scientific understanding of development in both nature and humanity, finally put to words the natural way I thought and viewed reality, even as a kid. The humanist elements of Marxism allowed for me to pour my heart out, grieve deeply, and love fiercely without relying on moralizing to be the basis of my analysis. Marxist economics was the clarity that allowed me to finally understand the exploitation that I and everyone I know was/is suffering under. Understanding the settler contradiction and the concept of the labor aristocracy allowed me to understand why people I loved were behaving and being so awful. Indigenous liberation, black and brown liberation, women's liberation, trans liberation, queer liberation, it all just made so much sense to support, especially when viewed through a historical materialist lens. And it felt so good to finally be able to understand and explain all the shit reactionary behavior that I saw everywhere from the news to the workplace to the schoolyard.

I went from being completely apolitical and uninterested in politics directly to being a Marxist-Leninist actively organizing and fighting for the liberation and dignity of workers and oppressed peoples. Strange how life turns out.