Comradeship // Freechat

I didn't start reading theory until this most recent phase of the Zionist genocide, but it was the Collateral Murder video leaks (and subsequent leaks) that raised the contradictions enough for me to realize that there is an empire.

Then I spent over a decade slowly radicalizing while the contradictions kept sharpening, I went from left-liberal to left-libertarian to anarcho-communist to some kind of Third Worldism with anarchist characteristics after Trump won the first time. Still not reading theory, just watching current events and hating the US empire more and more at a very constant rate.

Then the pandemic showed China was one of the only countries on Earth to give a shit about public health over profits, and I finally dropped my anarchism. I've been an ML ever since, and after Oct 7th I've read Lenin and Mao and Fanon and Walter Rodney and W. E. B. DuBois and others. I just finished Black Jacobins and I'm set to read Empire of Borders next.

...I'm still procrastinating on Capital. It's intimidating okay??

I grew up pretty conservative too. All the right information (capitalism bad, elections and peaceful protest don't change shit, politicians are liars, wars are made by the rich to get richer) was rolling around in my head in my late teens but so was all the reactionary bullshit and anti communist lies. They just took a long time to shake out into the conflicting sides of an argument.

The tipping point for me was the Ukraine war. It was one lie too many. I've got a memory that doesn't let go when it comes to media. So I never forgot that ukraine had a nazi coup. The liberal "democracies" openly supporting nazis was too much.

All the nazi symbols that the msm didn't know it was sposed to be blurring were like pins stabbing my eyes. Suddenly I could see that "both parties bad" wasn't even going far enough. The entire system was built by rich white supremacists to maintain power. There is no middle ground there are fascists and there are anti fascists and all the western governments are fascists.

After a short while I realized the only anti-fascists who have a plan to eradicate fascism and make sure it can never return are communists.

i suspect that being brown, autistic and queer did it for me since this trio guarantees that i will never fit into the dominant social groups within this country.

i was into the classic "that cultural marxism and the nationalization of my toothbrush sound bad, but i don't know anything about that jew marx, maybe i should try to read something to have more arguments to refute him...."

later

"wait a minute...that guy marx and engels have pretty good points, everything was a lie...the capitalism was the issue all along this manifesto seems pretty cool!"

and now i'm here

I was pretty deep in the liberal propaganda and was even a redditor at one point. It was the racism from liberals that first threw me off. Then when they started this xinjiang genocide narrative, that's when the illusion finally broke. I speak Chinese, I saw a clip from the bbc and from John Oliver deliberately mistranslating people. The whole charade fell apart the second I did even the smallest bit of research. I started looking into the stuff they convinced me was bad. That's when I found Marxist leninist thought. Suddenly everything made sense. The rest is probably the same as everybody else.

Being Palestinian, growing up on the receiving end of Islamophobia post-9/11.

I always had "progressive" stances but fell into the pro-ukkkraine. Russia bad mentality. I never really cared for China at that point other than "police state! Whinnie the Pooh!" I never really understood the fearmongering of TikTok harvesting our data, why should I care more about a country across the world accessing the same data US has been harvesting?

It wasn't until post-October 7th when my eyes were fully open. The rampant disinformation by all these western media outlets, even from the "progressive" ones like CNN.

I always knew Amerikkka was a terrible country, but they're good at whitewashing their actions after it's too late to do anything about it. This country committed genocide against the indigenous population. Of course they'll shed fake tears about their previous actions while stifling all reporting of current atrocities being committed against the indigenous peoples (all the land grabs, water rights being stolen, crimes against them being unsolved due to not allocating federal resources, etc.)

They're still gonna apologize years later, and pretend they didn't know how terrible things were at the time. The same playbook is seen with movies and public perception alike. From "Killers of the Flower Moon" being a box-office hit while the media is silencing all current indigenous affairs, to the public perception of the invasion of Iraq being a "bad call" after a million people were murdered. They even have the gall to release movies about how soldiers feel bad for killing children (American Sniper).

When isntreal falls, they'll try to whitewash that as well, saying they were lied to about who they were targeting, or that they truly thought there were command centers under Gaza's hospitals. They know it isn't true, western media knew it wasn't true, but they still peddled the lie until they got what they wanted out of it.

The Amerikkkan public will all pretend like they were against it, even though they only were once the tides were already shifted.

Went on a long rant, but western governments are REALLY good at maintaining plausible deniability, which allows them to garner public support for the next atrocity that will be committed.

recommendation from one of my professors

holy based

It feels kinda cringe/privileged to admit, but I only started to take leftists positions seriously after I graduated college and was struggling to find a job in the field I studied. My whole life I internalized a type of meritocratic worldview, where having credentials is enough to make a place for yourself in the world, but through job hunting in the Real World I found that you're basically selling yourself on a market, and because of these market dynamics, you have to mold yourself into the perfectly optimal commodity, with the exact perfect skillset (they call it a "stack" in tech, and there are many stack permutations possible, though some companies will also go for someone who will perfectly perform on all their coding puzzles) that matches exactly what they're looking for.

It's not enough to be someone who is knowledgeable enough to grow into a job, you have to already be The Guy to even be considered. I did eventually become a type of Guy who some companies were willing to hire, but the whole process was enough of a shock to lead me to question why it's like this at all, why a college degree and some Gumption isn't enough to get a decent job even though that's what I was led to believe my entire life, and why being a worker means constantly prostrating yourself for employers if you want to survive.

All this led me towards people like Richard Wolff, who offered explanations for why it's like this (in summary this period of my life was when I realized the interests of workers and employers are not the same, ie. I learned about class conflict), as opposed to the chuds I was hanging around who blamed it on "diversity hires" (this was a few years before DEI became the buzzword), which didn't make sense to me, because despite whatever fuckery may be happening on that end, US tech labor is still like 85% male and 70% white? or foreigners stealing jobs, which also didn't make sense to me, because "get a job doing something in demand" is the general response to anyone anywhere who's struggling to make money, so how can you fault these foreign workers for wanting to learn to code?

I think it was like various things building on eachother. As i became educated in each area the contradictions led me to other areas until i got to a cohesive worldview.

I'm good at systems level thinking so all it took was one crack in the propaganda facade, and over time the rest of it came down too. Took me a few years tho to fully get there as i investigated different things, and educated myself. The first crack was just being born queer, and poor i gues.

First time I had to pay $2000 a month for health insurance for me and my family I got smart right quick

It all comes back to material conditions

Pretty long story for me but to summarize it, things don't add up under a liberal framework.

My journey was something like liberation theology -> narco war in mexico -> leftist alternative in mexico -> lost trust in media -> israel atrocities -> communism

The israeli atrocities and their clear connection with US imperialism was a key part of my radicalization, Abby Martin coverage really helped me.

Born Muslim and I slowly went down the Bernie-Hassan-ML pipeline, and began reading Marxist texts. I think I started with the Manifesto, then chapter one of Capital, then maybe Blackshirts And Reds. From there I can't remember what I read exactly but I used multiple reading guides on what to read next. I've also reread chapter one of Capital a few times but could never stick with the whole text. I'm going to come back to it after reading a few more things on my horizon which I feel will be useful. (Also so far my favorite text to simply read was Wretched of The Earth)

I'm currently reading Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and The World, by Malcom Harris, which I'd recommend to any Californian Comrade. Even non-Californians could take something from it as well because I'd say it does a good job at providing an easy to follow narrative for how Capitalism in CA developed, which has been helpful to teaching me how to think about the logic of capital. (At least on a way that is easier to convey then some of Marx's writings.)

My parents are from Syria and Iran, and weren't particularly anti-government (not exactly favorable eitheir but considered them better then US puppets) so I was never really inundated with the Imperialist propaganda about foreign adversaries. When you apply the logic that most of the what the US says about your community is bullshit, it becomes very easy to apply that to other countries, making you open to changing your biases when provided with enough evidence.

disillusioned Bernie bro here lol lol loool . I was younger than you are, now. I was a construction worker in an airport. no trees, just hot, wet, blistering concrete jungle. hearts die fast there. Two, three hundred men. Boys really. work n sleep, until the only thing i could remember was work n sleep.

Then one day, i started to itch. all at once, i could feel my skin coming alive.

It was the hexbear. They had a leak. You could feel it before you could smell it... .world panicked and ran away, but... it was new to me!

That... itch, that burn... You feel how badly she wants to explode.

Look at us. Unloved, hunted, bannin fodder, we'll all be defedded before the revolution n yet... here we are.

We're the triad, kid! we're the thing that explodes when there's too much PPB in the air! Let it in! That's freedom calling! Let it in, let it run! Let it run wild!

In not American but still very much from the imperial cow so I'll answer anyway. To be honest I think my mom has a great part of the honour. I was always a bookish kid and (among many other things) she pointed me in the direction of communist authors who were, among other things, writing about bourgeois hypocrisy and deconstructing anti-communist propaganda. So from my early teens I was familiar with the idea that bourgeois media is full of bullshit.

It didn't make me a convinced communist for life (like so many others, I've had my lib cringe phase where I believed the worst anti-communist nonsense) but I always had an open mind to listening to the other side.

Later on, around the 2008 financial crash, I was listening to a lot of leftist lectures on YouTube, trying to make sense of it all. Parenti was one of them and that man simply made sense.

The trick to overcome them is to look at their hypocrisy, self-contradiction, over-reaction to unproven human rights violations, story inconsistency, plot holes, plot armor, deux en machina, and handwaving previous allegation of human rights violation.

Liberalism to me was always a carbon copy when I seen it to conservatism. At a young age I immediately stepped over it towards anarchism, then later Marxism-Leninism. It's hard to be mindful of liberal propaganda if you don't know what to look out for. Becoming an anarchist didn't protect me from it, but becoming an ML did. I unlearned subtle liberal propaganda and once I understood the difference between a liberal view point and a communist one, I began remaining vigilant of all forms of liberalism that I seen around me and either ignored it or called it out.

The first step to avoiding liberalism is knowing it, then remaining vigilant of it infecting your worldview & calling it out when able or worthwhile.

9/11 was my first break from the induced slumber. When the country went absolute rabid apeshit over night I was caught offguard and suddenly found myself outside the thought-bubble. I'd always felt like even the "liberal democrats" weren't going far enough for my tastes. From there it only worsened and eventually when Bernie ran I logged into Twitter for the first time in 7 or 8 years. I found a bunch of actual leftists and I realized that I wasn't a liberal.. I was far more left than the little bubble in American politics. That lead me to sites like this one and to read more books. Parenti videos on youtube were preaching the to choir.