Hello, baby Marxist here!
Personally mine was reading.
When I was a liberal I loathed reading and found it hard to even read a short article. I rarely researched everything I heard, and as a teenager, I was like every other liberal, getting my news off social media.
Now I make sure to research everything, however, getting into theory is a bit hard. Most of the information I learned about communism was through fellow comrades, because like before, I got my information from other people’s comments.
Currently I’m restoring my motivation for reading by starting small. Reading long comments from comrades helped a lot. I’ve now moved on to reading information from leftist sources without effort, and I’m starting on reading the communist manifesto.
Enough about me, what were your side effects?
Pure un-cut chauvinism. I was literally that socially progressive but fiscally conservative asshat.
After that phase it took longer than I like to admit to step out of my western leftist phase when again I thought I had it all figured out.
Thank god for patient friends.
“socially progressive but fiscally conservative” I had a girl tell me that and was like ok…
“I’m a reactionary Conservative but I don’t want to be judged for that” is how i’d translate it.
“I accept everyone equally unless they’re poor, working-class, or outside of the Free And DemocraticTM West, then they can go fuck themselves”.
“I also think you are stupid enough to believe I’m not just some reactionary conservative.”
just try to warp “fiscal conservatism” as a label into actually supporting a planned economy lol
“I’m fiscally conservative. I think infinite profit is unsustainable and setting limits on the market in, oh I don’t know, 5 year plans or something is probably the right move.” 😉
“Yeah I’m a paleo-conservative. I advocate for a return to primitive communism, that is.”