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.
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.