Comradeship // Freechat

I grew up in USSR, and I was generally happy with my life there during Soviet times, and I lived through some really horrible shit during the collapse. That said, I was a kid at the time, and I didn't really think about politics all that much. All I knew was that my life in a communist country was just fine, and that things got worse after we transitioned to capitalism.

My family moved around a lot after the collapse, and I got to live in a few different western countries. I saw incredible amounts of opulence contrasted with incredible poverty. It never sat right with me that some people should live on the street while others live like royalty.

As I got older, I reflected more on these things and it became clear to me that the capitalist model was fundamentally exploitative and unjust. Reading history I realized that Marxism-Leninism was the only ideology that provided a clear and consistent path away from capitalism.

I think that the theory that Marx and Engels built is fundamentally sound, and it lucidly explains material relationships within our society. Why things are the way they are makes perfect sense when seen through the Marxist lens. Marxism is not utopian, and its application provides real and tangible improvement in the quality of life for majority of the people. This is why I'm a Marxist.

I taught high school in an impoverished neighborhood of the richest metro area in the state

I'll start with my background and material conditions, because of course that is pretty important.

I grew/am finishing growing up pretty privileged. Still working class, to be sure, but you know. Straight, white, male, and never have had to worry about money issues. Progressive liberal single mother, worked hard to take care of me. She never had the time to really dive into the why and get a great understanding of it all, just meant the best for people and kind of that well-intentioned social Democrat type.

I had always been interested in how we organize our society, though. Liberalism/Social Democracy, which I had subscribed to until the Ukraine/Russia conflict, still left me with so many questions. I really had no understanding of the world around me.

A very small but impactful moment was when I was watching Bo Burnham's Inside in 2021 and he sang a line about private property being inherently theft and neo-liberal fascists destroying the left and it was like "whoa. I'm a liberal. What's wrong here?" It also didn't help that I didn't know the difference between personal and private property then, so it caused a lot of anxiety.

That kind of kick-started a little exploration into the real left and sticking my toes into some Second Thought. Watched all his videos, read some of the Manifesto, and got on Lemmygrad.

Since then, I've read State and Revolution, Blackshirts and Reds, watched tons of informational videos, and am getting into 'What is to be Done?'

I am now a developing Marxist.

If anyone made it this far (apologies for taking up so much space, I don't know how to do the spoiler thing), can you help me understand Dialectical/Historical Materialism a little more or recommend some reading? That's really the only part of all of this I don't understand fully, and I'm aware it's one of the most important.

My development was similar to everyone else’s but I’d add that I was always questioning the disparity between rich and poor since I was very young, why we had to pay for food and water and housing, why the people with money don’t help. Why charities exist but there being a lack of progress.

Why, when my mom has been working since she was a toddler, wasn’t she rich like everyone said she’d be. I mean, hard work pays off, right? While I’ve always had a comfortable life, you’d think we’d be rolling in dough with how long my mom has been a labourer.

I also looked at my own privileges and want others to have it and more. There’s the fury that has grown with the knowledge of solutions to the problems we have and yet nobody wants to go through with it. My fury at the complacency of the people around me, especially family. My opposition to the “fuck you, I got mine” attitude that permeates.

I grew up learning that the word “communism” was bad but never knowing why (except Holodomor, I guess), and yet all my values lined up with it. Reeducation is a big one for me, trying to undo all the damage created by a red-scare propagandized education system.

There was no decision.

It's like Bertell Ollman warned: if you read Marx and understand historical and dialectical materialism, you will become a Marxist and accept HiMat as the most advanced scientific framework known to humans.

It can take a while to understand Marxism. But anyone who reads and understands Marxism and doesn't become a Marxist is being wilfully ignorant.

They could understand and accept Marxism and still say, 'Fuck workers, I'm in it for myself'. That's one thing. But to understand and refuse to accept? It's way beyond cognitive dissonance at that point.

Of course, I really mean 'understand' when I say 'understand'. Skimming the Communist Manifesto might not be enough. I resisted it for a while but the more I read the harder it became to reject Marxism.

As for why I started to read Marx? A very patient Marxist asked me, over quite a long time, questions like:

• if-X-then-Y-
• can-that-be-solved-under-capitalism or
• what-conditions-are-necessary-for-Z

This made me challenge my own liberalism. They mentioned very little Marx, nor told me that Marx/ists had a better answer or what that answer might be. No jargon or explicit frameworks, and very few sources. It was enough to get me to apply a contradiction and class analysis to my own ideas until I realised the bottom had fallen out the box. At that point I needed to look somewhere else for answers. Then I was recommended Marxists texts until I could piece the world back together again.

Yes, this does involve and require brainwashing. As Mao said in a speech to Chinese students in Soviet Moscow, the brain must be washed clean of it's bourgeois education (quoted in Roland Boer, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners).

I was groomed to be a military/state department professional from a young age. There is a long history of anti communism in my family. Not just in a propaganda obsessed kind of way. In a committing war crimes in countries with active communist revolutions sort of way. I always knew my calling was to serve the American project, and, of course, the Christ.

Anyways I slowly grew to hate the US and my family. I was an evangelist for some time and thought my family had a shallow, or otherwise incorrect understanding of Christianity. I started to become more anti war. In the pacifist sense but also structurally I knew there was more to war than religious differences or politics. I would have been a Ron Paul lib at this point. I had some good criticisms of the machine but was ostensibly racist as all fuck and was by no means a socialist.

Later I was exposed to more explicit socialism and Marxism after become interested in the Green Party and losing faith in libertarians and became more aware of what racism is and isn't. I also burried Christ somewhere out back behind the shed and my old life began to really fade away.

My first thoughts about my experience with marxism is how refreshing it was to find the dialectic. Finally something that could cut through the discourse and understand a dynamic world instead of reducing everything to just ideology, intuition, "human nature," or morality. Finally a better way to approach history and power.

Through this I was able to begin understanding America as a project and found myself studying more about the conditions that created and developed it into what it has become today, relying especially on Indigenous and Marxist perspectives. I am very interested in what socialism in this place means and what its prospects are. Now I am back in school hoping to see further beyond the veil, and not shying away from my former calling, though this time with new intentions 😈.

recipe for becoming a marx

1. get job
2. think "why do people just accept spending half of your life working some pointless job with no sign of conditions improving"
3. somehow find lectures on socialism
4. find /r/socialism
5. hmmm maybe we should have worker coops that'd be swell
6. find out that imperialism is a thing
7. learn that amerika is the worst thing in the recorded history of humanity
8. someone says china not bad
9. wait what do you mean china not bad
10. hang on maybe china really do be not bad
11. whoa i think i may be a gommusim now
12. permanently damage relationship with liberal family
13. weep bitterly in a corner for three days and nights
14. congratulations, you are now a marxism and will never feel comfortable in your country again

I "decided" to become a Marxist in the same way I "decided" to accept the laws of thermodynamics

i'm still kinda ambiguous on the political spectrum. All I know is that only socialists and communists are actually active in my city and they are the only ones who provide services to society all

From a young age I started questioning why I have such a comfortable life despite not working very hard while other people worked their asses off and lived in poverty. In my teenage years, I went through the atheist -> "skeptic" -> chud pipeline. Even during that time I suspected that the chuds were wrong and I drifted towards "progressive" liberalism, but that still didn't make sense. I eventually got drawn into breadtube by a pedophilic NATO stan before the 2020 election. I found out what tankies are and discovered that they are correct.

A philosophy YouTuber I really liked at the time (that I now consider worse than trash, read below) made a video and then a stream about Marx, he taught me about the falling rate of profit, inevitability of socialism etc, unfortunately he is very flawed, he is some flavor of leftcom and refutes completely Stalin, considering brezhnev better than him (💀)

Then I discovered hakim and genzedong (on reddit, back then) and leninism made a lot of sense to me, the necessity of a strong state during siege socialism, the necessity for radical measures ettc, in the end, all is good what ends good.

That YouTuber is really bad, like he praises the EU and the Euro (that subjugated and empoverished Italy) and he is pro Ukraine, glad I distanced myself about 2 years ago.

I still need to read my theory, so far I've read:

ABC of communism (💀)

Chunks of the manifesto

Wage labor and capital

Some of Lenin's works

Some Mao

And a plethora of articles and essays

Edit: per i miei compagni Italiani, provate a indovinare di chi sto parlando nel primo paragrafo

My grandma from Belarus dispelled a lot of anti-comm myths for me at a young age. That being said, I was still a lib/democrat for a while bc my parents were. My dad was against the Iraq war since it started and that shaped my politics for sure. The weird book that changed my opinion on modern-day China and got me interested in socialism was Thomas Pikkety’s Capital in the 21st century. I read about how he spoke positively about some of China’s economic policies and how they are generally helpful. I told this to a brother, surprised by the info. He didn’t respond to it well AT ALL. We were mad at each other for a while and he thought I was a Maoist(I was still a lib, just had a few good thoughts about China’s economic policies, I was still dumb about the Taiwan issue and some of their other policies) and I had to confide in my much more liberal brother to let bro 1 understand that China is complex and not just bad. Over time I eventually read Anarchism or Socialism by Stalin and I was beyond impressed and knew I would never be a liberal again by that point. Now, a year and a half since reading Capital in the 21st century, now the roles are reversed and Brother 1 is overall vaguely pro-China and bro 2 is red-baiting China. Moral of the story: Take your wins wherever they may lie. I could go on and on about how Bro 2 red-baits and believes everything about North Korea or Vuvuzela

Because propaganda about AES kept being debunked to me and it led me to realize that AES states are way better than I was led to believe

1. a lifelong desire for justice
2. bernie 2016 + chapo subreddit
3. bernie 2020 + reading state and revolution

A mix of unemployment through an entire year (2013), already having similar personal standards, and my aunt marrying a Russian (ironically, he's now far-right) who said he missed the USSR and how life was there. Also, one of my former bosses gave me a copy of The Communist Manifesto and I liked it. Then I read the first The Capital volume. I suppose it was a gradual proccess and somewhat instinctive in my case - I basically figured out Communism is, logically, the best possible system for people like me.

I used to be one of those stuck-up sinofash dudes with liberal tendencies, but in America. So I was bombarded by China bad. Then I discovered r/sino, and found genzedong through that. @JohannesAdams1212 was with me in the china evil subreddit, and he showed me here. I became a marxist a few months after joining genzedong.

I didn't decide to be a Marxist. I became one when I learned more about the world and communism.

My family got hit very badly by the great recession. Everyone simply named "the crisis" as the responsible of the sudden increase of poverty around me, and being the curious person that I was at the time, I began to wonder: what exactly is that, and how did it happen?

That is how I stumbled upon the texts of a white-bearded German man, and the rest is history.

I decided long ago to use the most effective cognitive tools for navigating my world and to discard tools that led to undesirable outcomes. I gave up on many tools early in life like superstition and religion, picked up tools like science and philosophy, and then I got stuck. I tried tools like zazen meditation and yoga and got a little progress but not much. I tried zen koans and the tao te ching to much the same result. Then I rediscovered Ethics and found a new set of tools that I had previously discarded.

And still there were major cognitive problems that I could not resolve internally. Then I discovered critical theory and started diving in, surveying everything, suddenly understanding why there were entire schools of thought that previously had seemed so esoteric and inscrutable to me. I still didn't understand these things but I had a mental model to approach them finally. I made no commitments but tried a few schools of thought and it seemed random whether or not I got useful insights. And then I traced back things all the way to Marx and Engels and then rebuilt my understanding using dialectical materialism and discovered it to be incredibly effective and consistent.

I didn't decide to become a Marxist, I became a Marxist the same way I had previously become an adopter of any school of thought - I continue to seek useful and effective ways of being and Marxism has been the best thus far.