Comradeship // Freechat

I was raised in a really right wing household so that was my default ideology as a kid, like tea party right libertarian shit. Then I learned from my Black and Latino friends how openly racist my family was and how uncomfortable it made them, and made friends with queer kids in school which shattered my learned homophobia, so I became more like a socially progressive liberal. But I was a kid, it was not super involved political consciousness or analysis yet. I was in high school for Bernie's 2015 primary bid, which inspired me as it directly addressed issues of poverty I'd experienced my whole life. So I guess at that point I was a Soc Dem. I got involved in volunteering for the campaign, met new left wing people, educated myself, toyed with anarchist spaces, but ultimately was openly calling myself a Marxist Leninist by the start of 2016. Been ML for ten years or so now

Right Libertarian -> Socdem -> Demsoc -> ML

In my early days (late teens-early twenties) I'd say there were even times I flirted with fascist ideology, but in retrospect, I was a deeply unhappy and insecure person and that was manifesting in my politics in very unhealthy ways.

ML here, I was lucky enough to grow up in USSR, so I never went through a lib phase.

confused > anarchist > ML

Conservative (child) -> libertarian (young teen) -> liberal (teen) -> radlib -> ancom -> ML

Neoliberal until 2020 -> right-libertarian until 2023 -> anarchist until 2025 -> general unlabeled leftist 2025-Present

Both of my parents are deeply reactionary and rabid Zionists, this initially got me into politics. For several years I just sorta listened to reactionaries and sat in reactionary spaces until I got a good understanding, then I started reading theory and talking to leftists. Both of which confirmed what I already know, that reactionary ideology is a disease on this world and the solution is clear. Over time I got involved in more leftist spaces, got into some drama, and now im here :3

Like a lot of us living in the imperial core, grew up a lib, mostly unaware of the details surrounding politics up until I got out of high school and wondered why I had to pay so much money (if at all) to go to school and housing. Then Black Lives Matter happened and I started to become aware of my position as a Black person in Amerika (we used to call it woke back then when it was actually cool), and gradually became more radical over time.

The 2016 election with Bernie and everything was my turning point. After he got screwed I sought out the next best thing which was the Green Party, who at least recognized the need for reparations for Black people. I found myself on Leftbook (yes you read that right, on Facebook lmao) after coming into contact with "watermelon" groups (supported the Green Party but were actually communists) that led me into a ton of leftist tendencies. Flirted with anarcho-communism for a while until I realize that anarchism would not nor ever be able to systemically dismantle racism, and officially became an ML. The BPP had the answers the whole time.

Oops, this was a lot longer than I thought it was going to be!

From a kid all the way up to 2022 I would probably say I was either apolitical or Republican. However, even then I never supported Trump. I didn't think he had the experience being a politician as all I knew at the time was that he was a businessman and was known for firing people. Then I became more and more politically active and started the evaluating where I stood on issues. Then two things happened over the next two years: one, I left a cult that pretty much my entire extended family had been involved with for 150 years and became an atheist and two, I became an environmentalist. I had always wanted to stop pollution, but I had always until that point denied climate change. But now I was convinced that we are causing it. Then I started challenging my ideology and became pro-lgbt. I probably considered myself a democrat for a brief period, but then I started looking into third parties and I found myself mostly aligning with the Green party (the biggest point of disagreement was nuclear energy), but I didn't vote for Stein because I was playing the game of "if you vote for third party, you're effectively giving your vote to Trump".

This part bothers me to this day, because despite how recent it was, I cannot for the life of me remember what gave me the final push to socialism. Maybe it was an interest in China as they are developing their space technology (I wanted to go to the space industry). Maybe it was having a bad experience with a landlord at the time and finding a Paul Murphy clip about how no value comes from landlords. Maybe it was finding r/antiwork. Maybe it was the election results. Maybe it was all of those or something else. But I distinctly remember that on January 1 2025, I declared myself a socialist. As for my current label, I call myself an eco-socialist. Maybe once I read enough theory it will change, who knows?

Apolitical till about 2016, then had a brief libertarian phase for about half a year before realizing it's just conservative with anarchist window dressings so I became an anarchist instead

Think I started identifying as a communist about 4 years ago now? Idc to identify my label further than that.

Social Democrat -> commie

It seemed that everything capitalists were saying, kept sounding like bullshit and/or were self-contradictory. Also, reading.

Lastly, "The game was rigged from the start" - Benny (Fallout: New Vegas)

what are you now

Marxist-Leninist(?)(SWCC)

what were you before you became what you are now?

A child

I grew up in a really depressing environment with vandalism, crime and all sorts of bad stuff happening, due to post-neoliberal shock therapy. Which pushed me to subscribe to somethin akin to Legalism - People are selfish and we need a stronger state to keep us safe from each other.

As I grew up and learned more I figured that punishment in and of itself doesn't achieve healthy long term changes. I kept questioning things and eventually arrived back to Marx. (I've read children books about Lenin and also about Pavel Korchagin, but the world I grew up in was so miserable socialism seemed genuinely impossible, it read like a pipe dream.)

I don't currently use any labels, mostly because I've been quite isolated to be honest. Which is understandable since I am not exactly socially adjusted and so most people are wary of me, find me uncomfortable to be around. If I had to self describe I would say: An aspirant trying to make the best interpretation of the world I live in and it's history, how to use that information to change it for the better. Dialectical-materialism has been immeasurably practical in keeping my hope's up, because it let's me realize how people's disregard and indifferent towards me is actually a keen asset, putting myself in a position where I am able to do things an admirable person who's loved can't.

At the same time I recognize that this really isn't socialism it's more like self-sacrificial egalitarianism, with the hope that people in the future might see socialism as a feasible option.

Thanks to my family, I grew up a communist (always anti-imperialist, but utopian, I was a child), had a brief interest in anarcho communism in school, before becoming first a Marxist, then a Marxist-Leninist.

A friend of mine said I'm privileged to have grown up like this and they have a point. I'm glad I didn't grow up in a liberal, white, racist family. But I don't feel that privileged. With a family of refugees and victims of imperialist wars, I was forced to develop my consciousness quickly. Like everyone else, I was surrounded in school and society by a constant onslaught of liberal propaganda. But I couldn't tune it out. These wars were directly effecting me and my family. The racism was effecting us. I couldn't choose not to be interested in politics. I had to deal with the dissonance.

Presently a Marxist-Leninist, fan of MZT/XJT and researching juche, not really as a way to change my views but more expand my understanding. I started off as a true liberal, then socdem, then anarchist, then ML, and have been an ML for the longest time out of those.

Neoconservative until 2018 Anti-war Conservative 2018-2021 Right-wing Libertarianism 2021-2023 Confused Leftist 2023 Socialist 2023-2024 Marxist Leninist 2024- Present

My parents are neoconservatives, but I started getting more interested in politics and become against the American wars in the Middle East. Eventually after wanting to learn more about colonization, I learned about austerity programs the United States weaponized against Haiti such as American "Miami" Rice it eventually lead to me being a leftist and from there it took me time to consider myself a socialist and more time to consider myself a communist and Marxist-Leninist.

Apolitical due to religion -> sort of socdem / anarchist -> Commie

My religion forbade politics in any meaningful way. After I stopped believing it, I thought that the Nordic model was alright. I also thought Anarchism had some good ideas since it was pretty obvious that the US was going down to fascism (but I still thought the EU were good boys and China ebil) but I didn't how disconnected communes could produce a cell phone or publish a book.

Then I watched a lot of Disco Elysium content and remembered about Dialectical Materialism (something that I heard about in the past. it was supposedly "debunked" but I was still intrigued by it). Went to r/Communism and saw the reading list. I wanted to read.

Then I saw "Stalin" as one author of a book and I was completely confused by this. Wasn't Stalin a dictator? Then I read more about the Soviet Union and Marx and who Stalin was. Now I'm here.

im a communist and i used to identify as many things before this but i was just a fascist really. i never identified with nazism or right wing social ideas but i was still anti-communist due to my indoctrination even if i was never outright bigoted. i believe that im still not perfect and have some reactionary ideas to unlearn.

Like many, I started adulthood as a Democrat and found I aligned with Bernie (social democrat). When they did him dirty, I left the Democratic Party, got active as a Green, and now I’m a socialist. I think I’m more of a Marxist-Leninist these days but there are so many labels and sub-ideologies under the socialism tent that I’m never quite sure. I wish I had the time to read every single book and essay on theory. Maybe in retirement.

I've written about it in detail here before, but the short version is it was pretty gradual.

Something like: vaguely anti-capitalist cause of persistent video game industry nonsense -> vaguely socdem cause of Bernie's campaign and getting into twitter political sphere (and being in an economic situation that saw the sense in what Bernie was pushing for) -> languished a bit in "libertarian socialist" ("I'm not the scary socialist, I believe in bottom up power!") -> gradually started to understand anti-imperialism and warmed up to ML -> read / was introduced to some actual theory -> mind blown, realized how small my political world actually was up to that point and how big it was outside of what I'd known -> from spending time here, became more solidified as ML and anti-imperialist, and as understanding imperialism to be the primary contradiction.

Nice try mossad

I had a somewhat familiar journey: right wing Christian child -> liberal teen -> socdem/green adult afraid of “authoritarianism” -> communist now

I will say that being exposed to rural life on an exurban fringe planted a seed early on about endless growth. Namely: “if they turn all the farms into suburban housing developments, then where do we get food from? If they cut down the trees to build big box stores and gas stations, where will the animals live?” I wasn’t really able to grapple with that one until my move to the left.

I was vaguely a social democrat growing up, very nordic model inclined. I had a fairly unfortunate upbringing and got to experience first hand a lot of scum landlords and classist peers. Became a baby Marxist by around 16-18 by reading a bit of introductory theory but was mainly just surviving for most of my teens. Due to the politics of where I live and the history surrounding a lot of ML groups I fell in with Trotskists at university. I will not be elaborating. From there I did become quite grounded in a lot of Marxist theory (from an obviously skewed lens) but the rampant left sectarianism, useless attempts at organising and hate for AES became too much for me as I read more ML theory and watched the events of this last decade unfold. I would say I am a Marxist Leninist these days.

Edgy "Stirnerite" (due to vibes) at 16, left-wing fascist sympathizer at 18-19 (due to environment), typical socdem till 23, Marxist-Leninist at 24 and going. To be honest my radicalization came from watching a theatre performance that said "mortgaged credit = 30 years of serfdom" and then joining a local communist org.

I was largely apolitical. When Bernie Sanders looked like he would win the primary, I became sort of socialist aligned without realising it. When he got ratfucked and I read some theory (unrelated events), combined with noticing how anglo leftist online spaces are, to various levels, derisive of global south countries largely because of racism and Western chauvinism, I became a communist.

I think my brain was primed for socialism from a very early age. Growing up middle class in a third world country, wealth inequality is always in full view and I didn't like what I see and the justifications of it felt dubious.

Social liberal now. Before that, libertarian.

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.

Apolitical to US Dem supporter to Nordic system supporter to Marxist Leninist. The transition to the latter happened when I scored 100% communism on a politiscales test and wondered what communism is.

But nowadays I feel alienated from most others. Most people hate me and I hate them so I probably wouldn't be a good ML.

Mine was gradual until it wasn't (quantitative change into qualitative change hehehe). At a young age I was exposed to the right wing culture war in the form of SJW cringe compilation #832 among other forms of youtube reactionaries. It resonated with me for a bit but eventually lost interest and mostly became a bog standard white suburban liberal. Around midway through high school I discovered the nordic model and thought hmm yeah that's pretty good I think. Sounds nice. Didn't really think about politics other than the horse race of it all until I discovered hexbear shortly before october 7th 2023. I made a post asking what this communism shtick is all about and got a ton of recommendations for reading and watching. In just a few weeks I watched yellow parenti, read blackshirts and reds, and read the state and revolution. By the time october seventh happened I would have called myself a marxist but the western reaction to october seventh solidified it. Within 3 or so weeks I went from effectively apolitical beyond the mild discontent of a comfortable person witnessing the shitshow of American politics with the crazy belief that the state should provide basic levels of prosperity, to being a marxist leninist. For people close to me it was whiplash inducing, saying yes I support Hamas a week after october seventh was absurd to everyone I knew.

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.

Social democrat to ML. It didn't take a whole lot honestly. Just reading the banned reading material, and the realisation that my high school education was woefully wrong.

It's honestly quite silly in retrospect. Lolbertarian at 18 when I was living off my parents' paychecks. Dodged the 4chan fash pipeline because I am AFAB and that shit was obviously misogynistic af. Started moving vaguely leftwards but not really having any serious ideology after dropping out of university, getting a job and crashing into the real world. At some point I got pissed because wtf why are there so many fucking nazis in my video games. Did some investigation, found leftist youtube, spent like 6-12 months being a succdem then anarchist then I started actually reading theory and realizing it makes perfect sense and who cares about the video game nazis anymore this is relevant for my lived experience as a worker drone under capitalism. ML ever since.

Now: Marxist-Leninist Before: Liberal I think but I started getting some right-ish/capitalist tendencies