I’ll start first: at the height of reddit going absolutely mad and frothing at the mouth I heard r/genzedong mentioned a lot as this evil evil tankie place, so I checked it out. Was a bit overly china fanboy-ish for my taste back then but alright overall and leagues more civil than people on other subs. So I started lurking over there to preserve my sanity until it basically became my most frequently viewed sub. I’ve kinda warmed up to the whole idea of socialism during my stay. And then it got quarantined. I’ve heard of lemmygrad even before the quarantine, so I switched to this place instead. As of this moment, lemmygrad remains my primary source of news and entertainment where I dont have to risk running into some flavour of wehraboo.
I’ve always hold sympathies for leftist causes. It is not that I was a red diaper as they say, but I was raised by my mother to help others and be compassionate. I think it is fair to say that her interpretations of Christianity and catholisism also had an effect in that, although I’ve never been too keen on the church. Even as a kid I admired Hugo Chavez, because while I didn’t understand everything he said at the time, I knew he was talking and acting in favor of the working people in Venezuela. As an adult with class consciousness today I realize that growing up in a world where there’s no Soviet Union has been quite fucked up and feel hopeful thanks to China’s rise.
I feel I was primed to turn left in my politics since childhood and being a biologist the appreciation I gained for life in the planet was also a huge influence, but the pandemic was the turning point where I realized all the lies and the capitalist system as the driving force behind the crisis more than the virus. Marxism and dialectical materialism have exactly both the scientific outlook I always look for and the call to action that reminds me the world can be changed for better. Also, one day a colleague posted a video on facebook about K-pop’s late stage capitalism and it was a rabbit hole from then on due to my ADHD making me hyperfixate on it.
I don’t even remember how I found GenZedong, but I think it was through BayArea415. Damn, I miss him.
BayArea415 was doxxed by BadEmpanada. I was a friend of BayArea415 myself.
Wait really? How did he even find out who he was? I knew BE didnt like bayarea415 but doxxing’s just bad, weird n obsessive
He had a feud with him and kept attacking him relentlessly.
He would not leave him alone.
A Marxist politely told why I was wrong about almost everything and told me to read Marx.
It probably helps that I already had the same broad political goals, I just thought they could be achieved through liberalism and voting. They calmly and respectfully highlighted the contradictions in that way of thinking until I said, ‘But how can we achieve any progress, then, if none of it is possible in capitalism?’ 💡
A real lightbulb moment! Now read Marx, young redtea, he has the answers you’re looking for.
So it took a while to get my head in the right space, where I needed to know the Marxist perspective on everything. Then I gorged on Marxist texts until I had re-educated myself.
Funny enough, people rag on the whole “x won’t work lib, read Lenin!” tactic on Reddit during the Bernie and early Trump years as antagonistic but that actually worked on me. I was like “…Fine!” (Reads) “see wtf these people are talking abo–oh!” 🤩 “…I get it now…man I really was wrong”. I know that doesn’t work on some or perhaps most and I’m pretty open to learning but I just want to say in their defense it does work occasionally 😁
You’re spot on. There’s a challenge in not coming off as confrontational or dismissive, but the tactic does work. In fact, one thing I really appreciated when I was trying to make sense of Marxism were the quotes from Marxist texts that were copied as answers to questions on Reddit threads, like r/communism and r/communism101.
I have a feeling that some of the people saying ‘don’t just tell people to read Lenin, it won’t work’ are people who don’t want others to read Lenin because they know it’ll work.
Others may have tried this tactic with bots, feds, trolls, etc, under the impression that they’re talking in good faith and could possibly change the other person’s mind. This will surely make someone skeptical.
Then there are those who have spoken to people who have read Marx, etc, but with a closed mind, which won’t let them fully accept the message. The same thing can happen with people who experience too much cognitive dissonance when reading Marx (actually, this was me when I’d read the Communist Manifesto years before meeting any Marxists).
Could be. I always assumed it was because they themselves wouldn’t have listened if someone told them to read theory but you make a good point.
That’s always a possibility, too!
I found r/GenZeDong through r/Sino. And I first heard of r/Sino from some Vietnamese gusano on r/AsianMasculinity (liberal brainrot sub) complaining that the sub is “becoming r/Sino.” I was in these pro-Asian subs like AsianMasculinity and AznIdentity because of the spike in anti-Asian/anti-Chinese racism in 2020.
‘Identity politics,’ as some Marxists like to pejoratively put it, was what put me on this path and is what still keeps me here. I reckon a lot of the more dogmatic Marxists out there won’t like this, but fuck them… I worry the fuck out of what will happen to me or Chinese people in general within the next few years.
Identity politics is not a bad thing, but I prefer the term intersectionality.
I’ve always considered myself left but my education started when an old friend whose parents were communist invited me to a student union. I had read about materialism online previously, and started to analyse what I learned in highschool history class through that lens. I remember talking to that friend and saying something like “it’s normal that the the USSR was undemocratic, they just went out from feudalism” and my friend casually said “actually it was democratic, even under Stalin yknow”.
So I just noded because I found this interesting, but that was the start of the deconstruction of cold war myths.
Later I subbed to genzedong just because I saw people hating on it lol
the good old “redditors collectively hate that sub and thus i got into it” pipeline that led most of us to Genzedong
Not me lol.
Welcome. 🤝
When I learned about the atrocities that were committed by the British Empire, especially in India (I’m of Indian descent so that was of particular interest to me). I needed an outlet for my hatred of Anglos and I somehow discovered Genzedong. The memes were hilarious and simultaneously enlightening. One thing lead to another and I found myself supporting AES and eventually reading theory.
I was previously on the path to anarchism so I’m really glad I found GZD before I became a baby-brained idealist.
The rest is history.
I am not really sure how I became a communist like equality was always pretty important to me and I guess communism is just part of that but I found genzedong somwhere after r/chapotraphouse got banned and I made my lemmygrad account when genzedong got quarentined
I know these types of comments are annoying, but nevertheless: YOO MY POST GOT PINNED
Congrats :D
spoiler
When I was less politically developed, I was honestly closer to an ML than I would be for years after. I never quite fit in with what I saw as “the Left,” being liberals, on issues outside of most social issues. Of course the general pollution of US politics ensured that my egalitarian and pragmatic sensibilities were distorted in many cases.
2016 to about 2020, I got sucked into Breadtube and the Compatible Left. It wasn’t all a waste, I learned a lot about anticapitalism, racism and queerphobia. However… the pettiness, pretentiousness, spoiled ignorance, a general upper middle class white hipster affect of this space kept me (thankfully) from ever really wanting to put down roots because it never felt 100% right to me. Around 2020 the poison of this space reached a head with the podcast “It Could Happen Here” and I reached peak doomerism.
Public figures like Hakim, Michael Parenti, BayArea (RIP), and passively absorbing bits of theory from all the big names, all softened me up to the point where I briefly identified as a Trot, in an effort to find some sort of enlightened middle ground between the liberal hipsters and the genocide-denying “tankie scum” I feared I secretly was. The Trot org I joined, however, very quickly didn’t feel right either.
I don’t remember how I found GZD but it was that community that sealed the deal for me, right as the Ukraine War was breaking out. Learning about Ukraine, China, on top of what I had already learned about the USSR, finally learning actual substantial information on geopolitics and history…it was a rush. I also hate to admit that it felt like I was “sticking it” to the very same hipsters of the Compatible Left that had been a very negative entity in my personal life growing up. Suddenly, my doomerism melted away as I learned the truth. Finding communities with an actual variety of races, nationalities, and walks of life told me I was in the right place.
(No hate btw if any of ya’all are hipsters, I myself have had some aspects rubbed off on me, you know the types of people I’m talking about, the spoiled shitlibs who treat politics like a social club and who LARP being poor, etc)
I discovered in old notebooks of mine some drawings of a hammer and sickle. I was 18-20 years old at the time, but I couldn’t remember my association with communism then. Though at an early age I used to draw swastikas since I was frequently exposed to it because of my father’s obsession with the Second World War, so drawing these symbols didn’t mean I knew their true meaning.
I think I began leaning left based on my personal and abusive relationship with my father, which leaned towards right-wing fanaticism, so I was inclined to anything against what that asshole believed. After the 2013 protests in Brazil, I saw firsthand how a corporate-sponsored movement called Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL) began influencing people using sensational clickbait articles basically creating a moral panic against leftists, “corruption”, and the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), the social-liberal party which governed the country for years. Since then I became a general “leftist”, usually influenced by some exponents of the liberal left in Brazil.
I began grounding myself politically in 2018, with the elections that led to the victory of Jair Bolsonaro, who was openly anti-communist. I used the same reasoning I had used with my father, I would probably look into anything that was against this jackass. So when I saw his Minister of Education removing university directors in a fight against “cultural Marxism,” I was drawn upon looking into Marxism.
Hence I began studying Marxism mid-2019 and since then it was a straight path towards exactly where I am right now lol
My father was also abusive. It’s never easy. Downright very difficult.
I wanted to find out what “socialism” meant
glad you walked the right path
I actually walked the left path
this oughta get you tempbanned
I think I deserve a medal of some kind
hakims channel, discovered r/genzedong and the rest is history
Hakim definitely played a huge role in demystifying the USSR for me, which was a huge key to all the rest.
I used to watch Vaush. Then Hakim converted me with his debunking of Vaush’s ‘Lenin and Mao would of voted for Biden theory’. I had to watch it a 2nd time just to get any of Hakim’s arguments since the 1st time was me brainrotting trying to defend Vaush and just trying to find anything attackable.
My grandfather was a veteran of the War of Liberation, my mom was raised a leftist and raised me one, my dad comes from a nationalist family with some leftist tendencies.
I joined her a couple years ago because I liked the idea of a free and fair social media platform for Marxists and Marxist adjacent folks to meet and talk and meme and such. Then when reddit went on that 6 months leftist ban festival, I shifted over to here for all my online English political discourse.
Well I realized during COVID that liberals are just as stupid and braindead as conservatives, so I decided to seek out likeminded people.
There are a lot of reasons why I turned left, but as of now I want to highlight just one part.
The multiracial makeup of my home country where not a single ethnic group holds a majority, meant that my politics had to be international to properly address the material conditions of my home country. When 30% of your population consists of Indians and Chinese (as of currently), you are practically forced to learn from the experiences and cultures of the countries they were originally from, consciously or not.
I have also lived in multiple countries throughout my life. This pushed me to adopt much more internationalist perspectives than perhaps someone who was accustomed to only living in one country. Even when I used to have more centrist or right-wing views, it never really stuck. I was implictly inspired by Pan-African and Pan-Arab movements, and even Islam’s call for one united ummah or community.
When your cultures and families are seperated by colonial borders, you develop an internationalist vision because of necessity. What truly seperates Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, East Timor, and arguably Papua New Guinea, the Phillipines and even mainland Southeast Asia from eachother?
A simplistic overview of British or Japanese history makes it seem like that the sea acts as a barrier and allowed you to be isolated from the world but that was never the case in Southeast Asia. The Malay word for homeland, tanah air, literally means land water, showcasing how the sea acted as a bridge in connecting islands that would span across the entirety of Europe if it were transposed1. Even the Indonesian language is based from a Johor-Riau Malay dialect found in the straits of Malacca, rather than the more spoken Javanese.
It is specifically Marxism that has always been the principled anti-racist and internationalist force within my country (and region), reconciling the contradictions and rejecting the colonial borders and labels that has defined us for too long. Right-wing ideas in it’s social-liberal or neocolonial forms could never hold up to this.
As of r/GenZedong, the only thing I can remember is that I used to lurk a lot on the Chapo subreddit which eventually lead me to the sub and the rest, as they say, is history.
1 The picture for reference.
What truly seperates Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, East Timor, and arguably Papua New Guinea, the Phillipines and even mainland Southeast Asia from eachother?
Didn’t these countries develop language and culture independent from each other? Or are their languages similar?
I wrote a very long response but I’ll keep it short.
To answer your 2nd question: yes and no. Maritime Southeast Asia (SEA), consisting of East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and the Phillipines all speak an Austronesian language. Mainland SEA, consisting of Viet Nam, Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia have their own language families.
This is not including “non-indigenous” languages brought by immigrants over the centuries.
Prior to Islam’s introduction in SEA, maritime SEA culture actually was quite similar to that of the mainland. Hinduism, Buddhism and other local traditional faiths were practiced in the archipelago. Furthermore, when Islam did get brought over by Indian and Arab traders, it reached the Phillipines and as far as Western Papua.
The archipelago was also a regional hub for trade, with continent wide trade routes that would bring goods from very disparate places, similar to that of Africa prior to colonization. So our cultures were intimately connected and only grew seperate due to colonization starting in the 16th century.
Basically I started to have left-wing beliefs like anti-capitalism and LGBT tolerance during my edgy neocon days.
