There was no decision.

It's like Bertell Ollman warned: if you read Marx and understand historical and dialectical materialism, you will become a Marxist and accept HiMat as the most advanced scientific framework known to humans.

It can take a while to understand Marxism. But anyone who reads and understands Marxism and doesn't become a Marxist is being wilfully ignorant.

They could understand and accept Marxism and still say, 'Fuck workers, I'm in it for myself'. That's one thing. But to understand and refuse to accept? It's way beyond cognitive dissonance at that point.

Of course, I really mean 'understand' when I say 'understand'. Skimming the Communist Manifesto might not be enough. I resisted it for a while but the more I read the harder it became to reject Marxism.

As for why I started to read Marx? A very patient Marxist asked me, over quite a long time, questions like:

• if-X-then-Y-
• can-that-be-solved-under-capitalism or
• what-conditions-are-necessary-for-Z

This made me challenge my own liberalism. They mentioned very little Marx, nor told me that Marx/ists had a better answer or what that answer might be. No jargon or explicit frameworks, and very few sources. It was enough to get me to apply a contradiction and class analysis to my own ideas until I realised the bottom had fallen out the box. At that point I needed to look somewhere else for answers. Then I was recommended Marxists texts until I could piece the world back together again.

Yes, this does involve and require brainwashing. As Mao said in a speech to Chinese students in Soviet Moscow, the brain must be washed clean of it's bourgeois education (quoted in Roland Boer, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners).