I'm betting most of us were much more lib/right-wing in the past, so let's retrace the steps of our political journeys to figure out what works best for getting people leftpilled
I will share my own experience soon.
I will share my own experience soon.
Being Black and being confronted by the open fascism from the right made me look for anything and anyone who would oppose them. In a way, my leftism is a counter-reaction to the rise of the alt-right and right-wing movements across the West.
It's kind of funny when you think about it. Fewer people would turn towards leftism if white people could just be chill.
What do you think of the uptick in younger black people "stanning" Trump because they promote him in spaces like hip-hop podcasts?
A bunch of disjointed thoughts.
Okay, as a disclaimer, I'm not from the US, but I do have many relatives in the USA, which is why I keep a close eye on the situation there. I think the situation for Black people in the USA and in Europe (where I live) is somewhat different. I think this whole topic would be deserving of its own thread, but I'm not sure we have that many Black posters on Hexbear.
US culture is hyper-individualistic, and toxic masculinity is sadly still pretty common in Black spaces. Both of these things are upheld by the US right-wing more so than by the liberals. (There is also a ton of manosphere overlap with right-wing culture, which is another avenue for Black people to embrace conservative brainworms.) Plus, I think a Black person can have quite a bit of success in the conservative sphere if they abandon their principles and stab their own people in the back.
I don't blame Black people for wanting to make a good living under capitalism, but I don't take lightly those who throw all other Black people under the bus just so they can get money for being one of the 'good ones' for the Republican Party.
EDIT: Plus, I imagine there is quite a bit of difference between US-born African Americans and fresh Black immigrants regarding their feelings toward the Republican Party. You can't look at Black people as a monolith. Keep also in mind that some Black people are still big supporters of the Democratic Party, last time I checked
not to mention black (usually evangelical) christians that go down a rabbit hole of televangelists, podcasters and right-wing pundits that all lead to far-right figures. pretty messed up imo
Some things that moved me from squishy western "leftism" into actual leftism:
Some sources that opened my eyes along the way.
Normalizing Marxist theory as an approachable thing to read is important for onboarding a certain kind of person.
Many people never even read the Manifesto because they think it’s akin to reading Mein Kampf. It doesn’t help that many associate the word “manifesto” with unhinged ravings a la Ted Kaczynski.
Literally just reading Marx with an open mind is what it took for me. I’m sure I could psychoanalyze some more from my past, but ultimately, Marxist theory stands on its own and is proven to connect with many types of people around the world.
In order for something to be normal, it has to be casual. So my suggestion is don’t be afraid to talk about communist ideas, but also don’t be weird or aggressive about it.
Wage Labor and Capital is probably a better recommendation because it seems less unhinged to a lib.
Its so corny to hear people talk about it like a redditor or like you were a guy from mid 1800s in real life
I totally agree but please use plain language
I assume they are elaborating the last sentence I wrote, not commenting on the way I personally stated things
Ahhh, that makes sense. I was like reading your comment and trying to figure out what was objectionable about it
Sometimes I feel like telling people to read Marx is setting them up for failure. Idk maybe I'm just not smart but I find the way Marx writes to just be... so obtuse. I read Engels and the difference was like night and day, so much easier to understand.
Are there people who have rewritten e.g. Capital to be not awful? Because if I struggle with other works of Marx, I don't think there's any hope of me reading Capital.
I fully concede that reading won’t work for everyone. Only some types of people, I suspect especially (but not exclusively) college educated types, which describes many liberals.
Anyone is susceptible who genuinely works at developing their political thought. Even if right now they are obsessed with Libertarianism or some other vulgar economics, someone who is already book-smart will be more likely to grasp Capital.
People not matching the above description might be better swayed with direct organizing. I think that the vast majority of Marxists across the globe, historically, have understood the basic conclusions of Marxism intuitively from their own experience and not from reading a book.
Anyway, perhaps your issue with the style of Capital is due to the translation you read?
Any book translated from the original language has to trade off between precision and flow. I personally like the style of the original Aveling and Moore translation that is free on marxists.org, but I think many people prefer the more modern English of the Penguin edition (Fowkes). I haven’t spent enough time to know if one is objectively “better.”
The first three parts of Capital are hard, after that it’s just hundreds of pages of examples packed with dialectical materialist theory and is generally a lot easier to read. I’m thinking now that I’ll finish Capital and then start reading it from the beginning again. I also use VoiceDreamReader to read it to me.
How come you hate capitalism but most ex-soviet bloc ppl ive met and seen online hate communism instead
I came out of the womb crying what sounded like the melody of the internationale, i learned to read at three by trying to digest all of the volumes of capital. I was bullied in school because I told my classmates that were all going to be wage slaves. I am better than all of them and its true because i am so much smarter and built different than them for knowing the truth.
read The Jungle for a book report 20 years ago
that planted the first seeds with the whole funny trivia about "this is a story about the misery capitalism visits upon the working class" "ew yucky sausage"
was just kind of a dipshit "lib by default" until a bunch of things coincided to push me left: chuds pointing out that trump was just doing shit obama already did ("oh ok well that doesn't make me like trump it just makes me hate obama too"), dems making me sick of them by sucking off mccain's fresh corpse right as I'm in the middle of re-evaluating everything I thought I knew about both parties, and cth existing at the right time and place to catch my frustration with civility theater
then several years of the sub and now you folks deworming my brain
The prob when they teach that book is that they dont contextualize it, the widespread of it and really drive home the point that if they could theyd absolutely make three year olds work in the slaughterhouse
oh for sure, we made the fda and that solved everything forever, please ignore the increasing stream of news stories about illegal slaughterhouse child labor and states openly re-legalizing it in response
Honestly for me it was a lot of small things over time but what pushed me to actually learn about socialism was the memes on lemmy.
Was browising r/redditalternative and found out about some tankie instance called lemmygrad.ml then my whole worldview came crashing down
ShitRedditSays
Oh shit me too
When I started using their IRC I was a dumbass libertarian dude
Now I'm a ML and a woman lol
I was a lib in the beginning purely because actual leftism had successfully excluded from my worldview growing up in Texas. What opened my mind was seeing that there was an actual, effective solution fascism, and a path towards a more empathetic society than just trying your best to make fun of conservatives for being the way they are and hoping it'll convince enough people to vote for someone who might legalize gay weed or whatever.
As for turning still-existing libs towards leftism, I do my best to fan the tiny flames of indignation that inherently exist in their ideology, and hope that they are open enough to come to the realization that a handful of the most ruthlessly monstrous and vile human beings alive having all the power over how the world operates actually kind of sucks for humanity. If they're not open enough, I just move on to someone else.
I was an edgy 13-year old who discovered the meaning of "left wing" and "right wing", repeated Ben Shapiro talking points for six months, then became a lib when I developed empathy. Started going to climate change student protests and I felt amazing, powerful, like I was changing the world. Nothing came of it and I questioned why people would burn our world for profit, which lead to me reading Marx when I was 16.
Grew up in a very liberal area/family, had an instinctive revulsion against inequality and the wealthy from a young age. In high school I read Zinn, Chomsky, and a bunch of Crimethinc type stuff, lived through the reactionary hysteria of 9/11, and became an "anarchist." Anarchist in quotes, because it was a very surface level, lifestylist understanding of anarchism (no shade to any comrades reading).
Without any real theoretical grounding, during college and after I drifted into a sort of standard issue succdem position, feeling like there was no viable alternative to capitalism, but also no path but slow reform. The brief excitement of getting Bush out and Obama in quickly turned to disillusionment when he failed to hold the previous administration accountable for any of its crimes and continued all its worst foreign policy. By the time 2008 rolled around, I was not surprised by the failures of the state.
After Trump was elected. I managed to avoid the worst of the liberal panic, but I also felt that any system that would elect Trump was not one that was salvageable. I knew something had to give. I had been identifying as a socialist for a few years at that point, but hadn't been politically active and nor yet politically conscious. I joined DSA and started trying to learn what socialism was really all about, which led me to the chapotraphouse subreddit and eventually here.
Looking over this whole story, the thing that strikes me the most is that Marxist theory had been so completely excluded from the range of acceptable thought that it didn't even occur to me to seek it out until quite late in my political journey. Even as an adult, cracking open a book by Lenin felt a bit dangerous and forbidden in a way that anarchism never did. I know "read theory" is a bit of meme on here and people whine and complain about it, but honestly I do think it's the most important thing. Your life experience can help radicalize you (the shitty jobs I worked certainly did), getting out in the world and doing praxis is great and necessary, and so on. But without a framework to understand these things within and relate to a larger struggle, you are far more likely to fall into error or disillusionment or to lack solidarity with others.
My parents are middle class turbolibs (Colbert watching, RBG autobiography reading, "Because Trump" wine glass owning turbolibs) so I was a lib growing up. When I was about 16 I decided I was a libertarian. I don't think there was a coherent reason why, I think I just wanted to be different from my parents while keeping true to the social issues I actually cared about (gay rights, racial equality, dude weed lmao, etc.). I was naive and didn't understand how economics or governance or anything worked lol.
One evening when I was 19 I stumbled across r/collapse (good then, less so post-covid), and fell down the rabbit hole of just how bad we're fucked climatewise (accelerating carbon emissions, microplastics, ocean acidification, topsoil loss, severe wildlife decline, etc.). This shattered my entire worldview and I went into a full doomer depression spiral for about a year. Most of the people talking about this stuff were leftists (e.g. the Ashes Ashes guys), and I eventually came out the other end as a communist (though still a doomer, we're really fucked )
No, I always hated this shit. There was never a time where I really believed in Capitalism or that I would have a place in it when I grow up.
The only thing that changed is I discovered that anti-capitalism is a real, legitimate thing and there are other people who feel the same (even if I can only find them on the internet)
Have their estranged parent move in with them for two years because said parent is dying. Let them experience how every facet of our western social contract fails while changing adult diapers and feeding an extra mouth, with the added joy of trying to stay employed and raise a toddler!
I was pretty much a regular liberal in a former life, I would even dare say centrist. And then the above happened to me and I've seen first hand what's waiting for most of us when we're no longer useful to capitalism. Get fucked with any supposed nuanced ideas of liberal incrementalism and voting for the right Dems, and go read some theory. Then ponder, what is the Western answer to global warming, homelessness, and/or any human challenge not associated with making (someone else) money?
After that, welcome to Hexbear.
i feel like this is a pretty regular topic on here, but a recap of mine: arab american child during the bush administration, us government is openly a white christian supremacist plutocracy that lies and kills for profit. then obama wins, cool young guy, first black president, supposed to fix everything. he doesn't, weakens civil liberties even further, cracks down on whistleblowers, bails out the banks. and somehow the people that hated bush still love him. Trayvon Martin is killed. PRISM is exposed. nothing seems to change. I learn about history, both in school and on the internet. how there used to be pitched battles on American soil waged against the workers by the bosses. Sacco and Vanzetti. I learn about the Nakba and about Vietnam. Leaving home gets me out of my upper class bubble and makes me realize just how fucked most people are.
On a personal level I was a basically unhappy kid who became an unhappy and neurotic adult. I was browsing 4chan a lot and steeping in the ambient bigotry of the site, but with my liberal upbringing, i was only able to stand it as long as i could believe that it was all just a joke. i quit when gamergate happened and i realized that some of these guys have real issues with women and black people and also think the jews are coming for their toys. Besides being morally odious, it was too clearly a tantrum. Cringe. Helped me self-reflect. Spent a lot of time on tumblr, read some cool posts, even read actual books where before all i read was scifi novels. Became anarchy.
If there's a theme, it was realizing that things are worse than I previously thought, that everyone already knows, and they don't care. I'm not sure if that still works for young people. Now, everybody cares, no one ever shuts up about how everything is terrible. But also no one knows what to do or why it's all happening, and it's like their goal is to get back to 20 years ago when everything was fine, actually.