I originally read Marx to impress a tall socialist in my college dorm and it's been a sound strategy since tbh

I have children, which let's me get a super up close look at what genuine goodness looks like in a way I never experienced before.

And then when I'm out in my community or with strangers I can see it. Sometimes it's subtle or hard to translate. But sometimes it's blaring. People are generally good and want to take care of each other. Some through empathy and some through shame, but good nonetheless.

As long as I keep seeing that I will remain hopeful.

I'm a leftist because my goal is the improvement of people's lives.

Marxist materialism is the only ideology that seeks to properly explain a methodology for doing that, one that is without "it's complicated" bullshit to explain away gaps or holes. Frankly if an ideology tries to explain something away or avoid addressing contradictions I toss it in the trash.

when i was a kid i was told god made us all equal and to love each other. i dont believe in god now but i have the same values. also the propaganda never stuck with me.

I’m a leftist because learning about the history of world war 2, it didn’t make sense why immediately afterwords the United States became enemies with the USSR and I wanted to understand why that was. It’s all pretty obvious now, but when I was younger it was a very confusing question. It led to sympathies with socialist ideology and then turned into me turning red.

Basically the gist of it is they shouldn’t have made the red army look so cool during call of duty world at war.

Big heart, big cock.

Grew up in a pretty traditionally conservative family and environment. Had several terrible experiences with the American healthcare system. My family, despite being bad, at least mostly legitimately believed that we shouldn't hate anyone else (excepting maybe gays and atheists lmao), so I wasn't the worst off. Early teen years I nearly got dragged into true chud shit, gamergate, etc. Luckily I kinda snapped out of it.

I got my mind on the right path when I learned about what Liberalism was from Victoria 2 of all things. Really opened me up to looking at politics in reality. Then I started to realize the socialists of that game were the good guys. Seeing them support healthcare was a brain changer. Slowly picked up more and more socialist ideas, and began identifying as a "fellow traveler", and from there became more and more fed up with liberals and conservatives.

I've voted for fucking Jeb (2016? primary, in a closed state), Hilldog, and Bernie like 3 times. Now I'd only vote for Parenti, the ghost of Lenin, and all of the politicians to slip on a banana peel.

One thing that hasn't changed is I feel like I always liked John Brown. Even as a chud I saw him as a true believer in personal freedom, someone actually getting shit done. From little seeds .

I want better for everyone and this is the only way to do it

I was cursed with a conscience.
I would have been so good as a sales/marketing ghoul, instead I am depressed because people suffer

Well, I don't like racism and I don't believe people should live in hell for not having money

It's amazing how few ideologies and philosophies hold to these principles

I was raised Catholic and the concept of stewardship got lodged in my brain. Any religiosity faded over the years, but that concept stuck around and gradually morphed from "care for the earth because it's god's" to "care for the earth because all of humanity needs it."

I read The Jungle in middle school and the "trivia" that everyone missed Sinclair's whole fucking point got lodged in my brain.

I was a basic lib for a number of years, and then Trump happened and everyone pointing out that 80% of his horrible shit was just carried over from Obama so why didn't you oppose him too, and I decided huh, maybe I do. Maybe the meatgrinder was the friends I made along the way and I need new friends with a better idea of the future.

I honestly feel like my fall into the alt-right pipeline was a necessary wake-up call. I grew up in a borderline cult and managed to deprogram myself from it when I was 13-17, when I started to see the conflict between the teachings of loving everyone equally and the attitudes towards women and sexual minorities. After that I basically coasted for a few years identifying as "progressive" or "left-leaning" because I disagreed with the most blatant discrimination without doing any self-reflection on any of the more internalized bigotries I harbored at that point.

The rabbit hole obviously started with the youtube atheist sceptics a few years before the anti-sjw brainworms first really manifested, at that point I was just looking for validation for breaking away from the religion I grew up with. It ended up with watching way too many "owning feminists" compilations and I started being pedantic about which waves of feminism I support.

At some point I realized I was in the middle of even more sexist and homophobic people than I thought I left behind in my enlightenment as a teen, and that brought along pretty uncomfortable questions.

A big part of that realization was all the more leftist friends and family, I'm forever thankful that they kept me out of the bubble enough that I realized where I was heading.

I started to look more critically on what my actual values and feelings were compared to what I wanted to project to the world, and that combined with looking for more information directly from the marginalized groups instead of the easily consumed and regurgitated liberal talking points my radicalization snowballed.

One of the funnier parts of my radicalization was my relationship with edgy humour and how it helped me to actually read theory. I didn't really want to give up shocking and annoying people, because it can objectively be funny. Then I realized, that edgy humour from leftist perspective shocks and annoys the right-wing edgelords and the floodgates opened. I started with the obvious ones like Mussolini doing yoga, but I needed better material so I started memorizing funny quotes and studying history for bits and ended up reading theory.

So why am I leftist? Because of the people around me. They taught me empathy, patience and love, they showed me that even an asshole who belittles you is worth at least an attempt to change their mind.

And because nothing is funnier than a crypto fascist trying to hide his genuine anger and offense with a pitiful laugh at my joke about murdering nazis because the room is full of liberals that cannot be allowed to see their power level, but we both know that the other one knows.

love for humanity & a hatred of human suffering. obviously there are some more tedious details in terms of how i unlearned a lot of pro-capitalist propaganda and learned more about theory/socialist history, but those two drives are really at the base of it if i boil it down to its bare essentials.

The only thing stopping the world from being a safer, more fulfilling, more nurturing place for all humans is that the system we live under is purposefully designed to let the greed of the few thrive on the needs of the many.

Someone doesn't need to be pulling a trigger to be causing someone else's death, someone doesn't need to be cracking a whip to be causing suffering and pain. Social violence is violence, and should be combated and disrupted at every turn.

I'm not an intellectual or whatever, I was just raised by a super lib mom who made it clear from the jump that Bigotry Is Bad. Racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. It's all evil and it all needs to be fought. I just kept going further left as I found new forms of bigotry to oppose and eventually found myself in good company.

got into radical punk music in my early teens which helped to articulate what I had been feeling about how fucked our society is

seeing the bombs drop in Baghdad on live TV at age 10 had definitely primed me to hate the US military. also I remember being like 12 and thinking "ohhh the cops are just another gang, but with a lot more power"

edit: oh and even younger than that, I remember the first time I saw homeless people living in tents and thinking that was fundamentally not okay. probably my first inkling that something was inherently wrong with how the world works

I choose my politics like I choose the football team to support: just pick the one my dad/grandpa liked

I'm a simple person and neurodivergent. As far as I can tell capitalism is evil and promotes the worst of us. Its only salvage would be to use its capital to institute some form of socialism at this point. The greater minds have digressed on it. Being honest with myself I can't tolerate a government that deigns to rule me because of where i was born, so why would I expect anyone else too? ODD guides me to anarchism.

Because I have hope that things can be better.

Also because marxist analysis provides an actual coherent framework for understanding the world. I stumbled around in different versions of fairy dust explanations for way too long.

I’d say because to the best of our knowledge, this life is the only one we have. Yeah yeah I understand that most people turn to religion to find meaning in their lives, but what I will never understand is why people with beliefs about how reality (as we know it) ought to be are seen as lesser than compared to people with feelings about how life could be after we’re dead.

Just really baffles me why it’s seen as so extreme to advocate for an equal distribution of resources to the best of our ability. I’m just an advocate for trying something different for once and haven’t at any time said it would be a utopia.

The more leftist I get, the more it seems that most people fundamentally believe that the world is how it is because of something beyond our control (whether it be god or an anthropomorphic universe). The more I do real world work and see I can have a tangible impact on the people around me by doing the bare minimum, the more I see that couldn’t be further from the truth.

But I think what truly keeps me going is seeing that people are people at the end of the day and operate within systems that allow them to survive. No better example of this than how someone who once worked a job making a comfortable salary can be homeless in an instant but still retain their views they had while living comfortably.

I was always confused as a liberal. The data was always so clear what the solutions were, transit, welfare, socialized medicine, renewable energy. But those solutions were never implimented. Only through marxist analysis of power did I ever understand why. My view of the world is more grim now, but at least I'm rarely confused or surprised.

Im the weird autistic kid thats been angry about climate change since I was single digits. I would never accept a system that couldnt offer a comprehensive solution.

I was all in on the Bern in 2016. When the candidate who represented what the voters wanted (and needed) lost because of a party that hated its consituents and a corrupt media I lost all faith in American liberalism.

I've always believed to my core that the world could be better. It took me forever to realize that others dont think so. Its so obvious. You just have to build the right stuff, learn the right stuff. Its not hard. And yet capitalism will never do it.

Robspierre was the first and last good liberal.

I probably have one of the dumber stories here. I was a reddit brained nerd originally. It was the rationalist Harry Potter fan fiction thst really got me thinking that a better world was possible. The mission statement of that movement was to apply scientific principles to life. I think they pretty widely failed at that. However in attempting to apply scientific principles to history and politics the logical conclusion can only be comunism. Which let me to some weird conversations at the few meet ups I went to. Just like OP said the sate of the world and capitlaism defies logic and fails on it own terms. The reason I started investigating anything was working in Healthcare. When you see how much money nursing homes make and how poorly people get treated it is enough to make you depressed and question everything.

Why am I a leftist?

The material conditions in which I was raised had me hungry for more from life, and a bit upset about it. Perhaps like some others, I found some wrong answers first. Had the you tube pipeline been around then I may have had a more difficult time navigating out of libertarianism. But I was mostly skeptical of everything until I was exposed to socialism, which happened later. (It's so great that younger people are exposed to it sooner nowadays)

If someone is raised with different advantages it can drastically change the outcome of their life. I saw what was a relatively small disadvantage for me have huge implications for me and my siblings. Then I extrapolate that to the enormous disadvantages that historically disenfranchised peoples have had, and it filled me with rage. It's not even comprehensible, that amount of violence. But I did get a sense of it. I suspect that all my comrades have a sense of it too. It's the continuation of this violence that we wish to stop, and the only way to do that is with socialism.

I think there's a dialectical contradiction between "was I born a communist?" and "did I become a communist at a specific point in time?" I've spent a lot of time thinking about this because I'm obsessed with changing people's minds. In one sense, it started when I was a lib and couldn't understand how Trump won in 2016 after the entire liberal corporate media reassured me a million fucking times that he could never possibly win. How could this happen? How could anyone vote for this guy? I started reading and getting involved in politics. I also moved back to the USA with my young family after living abroad and couldn't get a job or healthcare no matter how smart or hard I worked (I had gotten a little too used to some of the perks of living abroad, which included universal health care). I also started running into a lot of extremely hostile white liberals who always seemed to have their hands on the levers of power. I had initially thought that Trump people were the enemy, and although I still think this, the libs were the ones standing in the way of me having a decent normal happy life 99% of the time. Then someone on reddit recommended the r/chapotraphouse subreddit, and I found that you could criticize these horrible dickheads from the left. I started seriously reading theory for the first time, listening to a lot of leftist podcasts, and here I am.

But the thing is, I can also remember moments from deep in my past when I was displaying communist characteristics without actually being a communist. I noticed a homeless guy asking for money when I was like five years old. I can still see him jingling a styrofoam cup full of coins. I know it's unusual to actually notice homeless people, that homeless people themselves complain about feeling invisible. There are other examples. Loving Star Trek. Never going through a fascist phase. Never fitting in somehow. Being against the Iraq War from day fucking one. In high school, I started radicalizing because I was tired of constantly being ordered to perform pointless arbitrary tasks. At that time I was reading books about alternative education, and I once asked myself: "we have political democracy, but why can't we have economic democracy?" I had discovered Marxism on my own (like many people) because nobody, and I mean nobody, had ever taught it to me, even though I had been surrounded by liberals for my entire life (and had also taken all of the advanced social studies classes in high school). I ended up asking my lib dad about it, and he said it was impossible because of human nature. I had no answer to that, and ended up going to a college I loved and having a great time there. It actually reaffirmed my liberalism, to the extent that I even sometimes ran into communists there and ended up making the same bullshit arguments we make fun of here on hexbear all the time.

My radicalization also went through stages, from me supporting Bernie to becoming a Trotskyist to moving straight into Marxism-Leninism after reading non-lib sources about Stalin. I volunteered very hard for the Bernie campaign in 2020 but was fully and completely radicalized after I witnessed local liberals stealing his state delegates right in front of me. This was as the pandemic was beginning and only weeks away from George Floyd's lynching. I never stopped masking, either, and so lately as I've been listening to the Tankie Group Therapy series on The East Is A Podcast I've been a little shocked, I guess, as the people on that podcast keep saying that they had no idea that liberals were so indifferent to human life. Meanwhile, I am surrounded at all times by anti-maskers whenever I venture into public, so I am fully aware that liberals don't give a fuck about anything except keeping the gravy train of suffering on the rails.

I also learned, thanks to Marxists like Wilhelm Reich, the people's minds don't usually change unless their circumstances change. Marxists in general have much deeper and more thoroughly researched explanations for whatever you can imagine, in contrast to liberals, who will just say something about authoritarianism, church, and Fox News when you ask them why so many Americans love Trump. Only very superficial answers come from them.

Marxists I think are also more optimistic, actually, in spite of our reputations. The liberals in my life have virtually no hope of any kind for the future.

Essentially, I believe people deserve to have basic needs met. I don't see the inability or even refusal to work as some sort of sin that deserves to be punished with homelessness and starvation, nor should we rewarding people for the luck of being born to have all the "right traits".

I can't explain it further than it's instinctual to me and everything I was raised to believe is what pushed me to become a leftist.

Born First Nations, had family in the mac-paps, had a grand uncle arrested for distributing communist lit, parents had a inherent distrust for the government. Was still a lib when i was young, but got involved with people who worked with The Black Panthers and had communal kitchens. Was involved in the punk scene early on. The communism came from years of refusing to read due to stubbornness, but eventually caving and reading Lenin.

Just born that way, started waving a hammer around at my dirty capitalist of a doctor

Fuck if I know

This thread is beautiful ya’ll are making me cry no cap

I was one of those well-meaning libs. All the supposed organizations libs run just want to collect money off of you. The proper leftist orgs actually want you to help.

What drives my leftism is a profound sense of universal empathy. We cannot freely choose our circumstances, so every tragedy, every casualty, every single person left to rot, there's this overpowering sense of 'that could have been me if I rolled the dice differently.' It's a conviction that not a single luxury is worth the immiseration of even a single member of society; that the amenities for one to live should not be a privilege granted to the lucky but an inalienable right; that we all equally deserve to experience the one shot at life we for sure know that we have, as the value of life is immense and fundamentally equal across the board.

I started exploring leftism-proper because I seized on an internal contradiction after experiencing something akin to ego death in the throes of a 104ºF fever on my synagogue's Israel trip between what I was raised to see Israel as (as a Jew) and the militaristic ultranationalist existence I had thus far experienced.

I love my motherland. I love China.

I'm a leftist because the world is deeply unequal and in my mind there's no good reason it should be that way. Leftist ideologies, but more specifically communism, have the most realistic vision of a more equal world. If I had to pick a specific leftist genre to describe myself it would be probably ML (but poorly disciplined and read) because it and its descendents like Maoism seem to be the most pragmatic and realistic about the antagonists and challenges of socialist states operating in a capitalist world.

Because I feel bottomless hate for conservatives and their ilk, and if there's no way to live a life totally free of them I might as well make them as miserable as they make me

Peace of mind:

Whenever I ask myself why literally everything about being alive is horrible these days.

when I had to stop repressing and admit I was trans to myself, the fact that so much of the world wanted to do violence to me meant reconsidering my politics and admitting that I was lying to myself about how effective liberalism actually was.

I've always hated seeing people suffer. But is a better world possible? I read some stuff like Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution and saw how it was not only validated, but spurred on a whole, lasting field of science. Then I realized that not only is a better world possible, it's already existed. I tried to build a consistent worldview from science and theory. Anarchism was my framework for understanding how to connect the internal experience to external material conditions, as the discussion of liberty of the individual directly intersects with the discussion of human behavior. Where there are different classes there will be different stakes that drive behavior. If we want to free everyone, we must end class so that all people are eligible for freedom, or else the struggle will always continue.

I also considered the alternatives from nature. Hiveminds, close relationships like parasitism, etc. There are alternatives. But the consequences of each, for humanity, horrify me to my core.

And so I believe in community, communality, organized statelessness, opposition to oppression and exploitation, and sustainability. These ideals, in my opinion, can only be fulfilled by leftist action. And so I am a resolute leftist now, as I finally possess the convictions and consistency that I long aspired to.