Share here how did you approach or was approached to studying Marxism-Leninism. I’ll start.

I was initially drawn into understanding communism because of the fascist wave in Brazil, especially after the 2018 elections that got Bolsonaro into power. The liberals and fascists (frequently synonyms) were openly anticommunist, and their bizarre behavior and disregard for the poor was enough for me to realize they were enemies of the people.

So I began researching about communism to understand why they were so “afraid” of it, and downloaded some works of Marx to start reading, but I couldn’t read it by myself because I was never an avid reader and didn’t know where to start, because most of his works are dense. Until I found the subreddit r/communism, which at the time had a growing community around Marxism-Leninism, which through threads and comments got me started on it.

  • gun
    7·
    4 years ago

    I could write pages on that, but basically,

    1. Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020 made me realize I was not a centrist but a leftist.
    2. Stumbled on radical left subreddits, then youtube channels, podcasts, and discord servers.
    3. Listened to a history podcast on the russian revolution. This helped me understand what marxism, socialism, and communism were even if I wasn’t ready to say I agreed with them.
    4. Everyone online told me to read theory. I learned about Marxism. Always knew the economy was rigged and bullshit, but couldn’t explain why until I had some basic theory.
    5. Bernie loses in 2020. Lose faith in electoralism. System is too broken, but I don’t know what the path to fix it is.
    6. Hakim on YouTube changes the way I think about Marxism-Leninism. Because, he said, Marxism-Leninism has succeeded in creating socialism, and really, nothing else has.

    But all of these things did not happen without my observation and experience of the material reality in the US and the world. The pandemic, police killings, failure to address global warming, corruption, jan 6 insurrection, medical bankruptcies and deaths due to the cost of healthcare. The failures of liberalism made me discontent with the status quo and more receptive to the voices who had radical solutions to these problems.