Lemmy! I was a social democrat when I joined, but then I got exposed to all the communist and socialist arguments and why capitalism has zero saving grace, not to mention all debunks that helped my mostly Western ass (I’m Chinese but came to Canada as a kid) unlearn the propaganda. Thanks @dessalines@lemmy.ml and @nutomic@lemmy.ml!

The start of the COVID pandemic left me disillusioned, starting watching Hasanabi, became a democratic socialist (who was actually open to the ideas of the USSR), regressed into anarcho-communism and thought that every AES project was evil and bad, started to become disillusioned with anarchism and read up on Lenin (State and Rev, Imperialism) and other works (eg Huey Newton).

I’ve always been left-leaning when it came to the types of policies I found to be acceptable, but always tried to be the enlightened cetrist, but ater Bolsonaro’s election I started to become more annoyed at this idea and started to embrace the leftist in me. The pandemic just blew it up to 11 and radicalized me to my core.

I have always been left-leaning in terms of values but was apolitical most of my life. What got.me into politics was the Bernie spam on reddit and them I became a communist after I read State and Revolution and learnt that USSR did the bulk of the work against the Nazis in WW2.

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I grew up in USSR, so communism was where I started. When the collapse happened pretty much nobody had any direct experience with capitalism, and most people were actually optimistic that life was going to get better.

Of course, everybody quickly learned what life under capitalism was actually like when we started having food shortages, rampant crime, homelessness, and so on. Receiving capitalist shock therapy really made me appreciate what it is that was lost.

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.

Before 2013, was an apolitical lib. After that, started hearing about climate change and sustainability issues. Inevitably, that lead to questions about the “system”. From about 2014-2018, I was anti-market, anti-capitalism and I didn’t call myself a socialist or a communist because those had negative associations thanks to what the education system taught me. One day I stumbled upon Abby Martin’s interview with Richard Wolff talking about Marxism. Wolff was a great communicator and I started watching more to inform myself about first Marxism, then slowly socialism proper. In that time, I’d witnessed many arguments between MLs and Anarchists/Socdems on reddit. The ML arguments just made more sense.

Working for several years, feeling that alienation directly on multiple levels, and trying to discover why the highest paid and most vile people tended to make more money and work less than everyone else. Its hard to work for several years and not try to resolve that contradiction either by going into the root causes ( capitalism, class struggle, etc which inevitably leads you to Marxism ), or by going into conspiracy theories.

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So, I started out as a liberal (mostly because I didn’t know anything to the left of that), then I became a SocDem, because I thought cappietalism still had merit, but I was all about free healthcare and such, then I became a market socialist, because I thought that a free market was the way to have the most freedom, but then I got introduced to DPEs (Decentrally planned economies), and I drifted around, identifying as an AnCom, but now, I’m a Democratic Marxist.

Anyways, on to the question!

First Spooky Scary Socialist, he showed me that communists don’t want to take away your stuff, Also Thought Slime, because his leftist videos resonated with my beliefs. Also Viki 1999, because he legitimized Marxism for me.

TL;DR: Spooky Scary Socialist, Thought Slime, Viki 1999

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