I searched and havent found anyone asking this. what is your personal story of becoming a communist? I will share mine. but im going to try not to reveal any personal info and id suggest anyone else do that too. I want to keep this short but…
I became a leftist in late 2019 early 2020. before this i would say i was a “centrist” or just non political, it just seemed like a way to argue with people. In short, the corona virus was what lead me to being radicalized. since we weren’t allowed to leave our homes, i spent time on obscure apps meeting many people around the globe, most of which were from the third and second world, a surprising many of which were communists. one asked if im a marxist, and so we talked about it. they ended up telling me the basic concepts of surplus value and how businesses must care only about profit, how universities and hospitals are run as businesses in places like america, and how workers are screwed over by the bosses despite doing all the work, and that all of this is what socialism is trying to fix. after some internet research I found the marxist internet archive, and i read lots of short readings, a few books, and watched lots of youtube videos by people such as non compete and Hakim, and now here I am today cursed with knowledge that I am exploited by my boss. sadly i’ve yet to do any real organizing. but I might get there some day.
just to be clear, i’ve left out many details of stuff that helped me become a marxist to keep it short. it was a long process that is still happening too
For me, it was pretty simple. I’ve known for a while about surveillance capitalism: large companies like Google, Amazon and reddit abusing tech users for profit. The 2016 US elections made people discuss politics more, and it wasn’t too hard to start noticing massive problems like insulin prices and lobbying and billionaires abusing money while people starve.
At some point, you try and look into why things are like that, and hopefully realize it’s systemic rather than merely conspiratorial. You notice that abusive people rise to the top and you look at even social liberal governments in Europe (like Nordic and Portugal) and how they approach and sometimes solve social issues, sure, but at some point it’s plain to see, even from left-liberal chatting with some applied logic, that running businesses first and foremost for profit inherently makes them abusive and that our economic system of capitalism explicitly promotes that. It’s a systemic issue, not just a ‘we should tax the rich and distribute it to social causes instead of military’ pipe dream that social democratic liberalism can achieve hand in hand with regulated capitalism. The people in capitalism aren’t the cause, it’s the system.