A 17-year-old kid started working with me, and he was talking politics with another co-worker. I was staying out of it, but then he asked me what I consider myself to be, politically. I hit him with, "I'm a pretty hardcore communist, actually." His jaw dropped and he laughed, and he was like, "No, really. What are you, actually?" When I told him that I was a Marxist-Leninist, he responded with, "Dude, that's terrible. Why?"
I'm normally not super open about my politics unless I gauge that someone is accepting to hear some theory, but I just wanted to fuck with this kid lol. I told him that the incentive for ever-increasing profits in the interest of a small group of elites is destroying the planet and exploiting people all around the world. He came back with, "You really need to read more. If you understood more about what you were saying, you wouldn't support such a violent ideology." I'm literally twice his age, lmao.
Then he asked me if I ever read 1984 :michael-laugh:
He asked what led to me becoming a Marxist. I told him that I used to be a libertarian like him when I was his age, but as I grew older and started learning historical materialism, my worldview changed.
We went back and forth a little over the next 20 minutes. I kept it cool and respectful because I wasn't super invested in debating him. But he was getting all flustered and started playing all the hits, like workers not being entitled to owning their work because the boss took all the risk. Humans are naturally greedy, so socialism could never work. Marxism is responsible for over 100 million deaths. I rebutted what I could when I felt like it, but I'm not a debate bro and I didn't really care what he had to say. I just thought the whole thing was funny.
My favorite part was his face when I told him that I don't support liberal democracy, and that a one party state is actually far superior. :che-smile:
I had someone ask me what I believed in, and I just said “whatever helps poor and hungry kids.” He responded with “oh so you’re a communist?” And I said “sure if that’s what communism is.” And for no reason he just gets really mad and goes on a tirade about communism bad no food 9 trillion dead even though he was the one who implied communism is good lol
Pretty mask off to immediately freak out when someone is like “I wanna help poor kids”
“FUCK POOR KIDS” :frothingfash:
My mil (who is definitely a republican) has been watching a lot of Russell Brand lately, we don't anymore but thought it was at least a bright spot in her ideological diet. Has he taken a turn?
Oh God he didn't get hit with the hippy to Hitler pipeline did he?
“FUCK POOR KIDS"
Most :libertarian-approaching: seem to want that literally, too. :guts-rage:
The funny thing is that I didn’t necessarily disagree with him cause I was an anti communist chud at the time. But it just weirded me out how that was how he decided to respond lol. That was my ‘belief’ at the time because my school was full of poor kids and children of immigrants who worked all the time (including me) and I felt it was fucked up
I had someone ask me what I believed in, and I just said “whatever helps poor and hungry kids.”
:parenti:
You could bust into a pile in the corner of your room everyday for a year and the cum golem would be 200x smarter than this guy
There's an audio clip where Archie Greene is interviewing folk singer and labor activist Aunt Molly Jackson and she says something like she got involved because "I wanted the little children to have something to eat".
'sweatshops are good actually' types are so funny. an easy dunk to sway bystanders because they are so obviously evil.
Once when I was in high school some kid wore a punisher shirt to work and kept trying to talk to people about the importance of capital punishment and harsh policing so I got everyone to act like it was a pirate logo and say pirate things to him. He did end up crying but in retrospect I feel like I may have stopped a mass shooting
I am dying laughing over here imagining this kid listing out FBI arrest statistics and you're going "arrr me mateys"
When everyone was signing out that day someone was in the bathroom (off the locker room with a paper thin door) and yelled out "yargh me sharteys" and then shit really loud. God summer jobs were so much better than adult jobs. But we were also all making like $8 an hour so maybe not lol
The benefit of a summer job is that there's an end in sight. You don't give a shit because no matter what, you're outta there when school starts. Adult jobs just keep going until they grind you down so far that you quit, get fired, or die.
He did end up crying
Good. A lib would've tried debating him out of that shit and it only would've further entrenched him.
"Don't you understand how ignorant that is?" will never be as effective as "You just posted cringe bro".
I told him that I used to be a libertarian like him when I was his age, but...
:data-laughing: You fucking hit him with the :grillman: "when I was your age"beam, you bloody legend.
Millennials unlock that move at an absurdly young age for some reason
Grow up in the 90s,bush steal the election when you're like 10 and just aware that it's wrong, 9/11, have a political awakening over the Iraq war, have Obama totally fail you and get a gameshow host business weirdo. It's actually really weird that more millennials aren't radical
Dems are pretty good at their propaganda. They get you locked into the two party view and it almost seems obscene to look outside that lens. Even though people hate the two parties, they pick one and move on with their life regurgitating the slop fed to them. Something must really rock one’s world or a bunch of little things happen and the lightbulb clicks, but even then sometimes they just go further right.
Through these discussions on HB for a lot of people it took Bernie getting fucked twice to finally get the blinders off. All those other events weren’t enough, although they certainly help the process. And even once the blinders are off and you open up to learning more about Marxism, not much changes, but how much more you hate westerners.
Also millennials are starting to get better paying jobs as they get older and as such their class interests are changing.
I was on the path of radicalization from early 2019 thanks to the memes and discussions on /r/cth that shone Cuba and the USSR in a different light. Then, seeing Bernie blatantly getting fucked a second time was the final straw that showed me that our democracy is a sham. Not just the political process itself, but seeing the consent-manufacturing machine work in real time really took the blinders off. After that, I started pursuing what socialism, communism, Marxism, and imperialism were all about.
Things in my own personal life were really bleak at the same time that all of this was going on, so I was primed for hearing something new. It sucks that things really need to go wrong in someone's life before they're willing to consider their worldview might be skewed.
They require structure which would allow them to resist the status quo. In other words, mutual aid…
Millennials were speed-running their mid life existential crises by age 20.
Hahaha I fucking loved that I had that option. "Well kid, the older you get, the more you'll realize how fucked up the world is and how your individual rights aren't the most important thing in the world."
did you tell him to enjoy the century of humiliation he's about to grow up in?
:xi-lib-tears:
like workers not being entitled to owning their work because the boss took all the risk
WHAT
FUCKING
RISKS? :guts-rage:
What’s the worst case scenario if a capitalist loses all their capital? They become a worker
A lot of really fucking stupid people with no capital call themselves capitalists. If you've worked with them before, you already know the type. :bootlicker:
You know, the ones built into Capitalism. The ones that are treated as though they are natural risks.
The ones that are bailed out instantly and at no cost if the capitalist is "too big to fail?" Those risks? :marx-joker:
No but you don’t understand! That’s not capitalism! That’s corporatism! Or crony capitalism? Or socialism? I dunno it depends on who’s making the argument
:le-pol-face: : If you commies opened a book for once, you’d realize why communism is wrong and won’t work :very-intelligent:
:yes-comm: : anything in particular I should read?
:le-pol-face: : …economics :stupidpol:
I wonder how far you could take it if you acted like you had never even heard of 1984.
"Dude, have you ever heard of this play called Romeo and Juliet? It might teach you a thing or two about, like, the meaning of love."
"I don't listen to that Uzi Vert mainstream trash, I prefer way more obscure sorts of music, smarter ones with more culture. You know, like the Beatles. What am I saying? You've probably never heard of them. Did you know that society is like a yellow submarine? And just wait until you hear about my favorite singer, Mr. Pink Floyd, and his Dark Sides of the Moon."
He asked what led to me becoming a Marxist. I told him that I used to be a libertarian like him when I was his age
But then you turned 18, and since you weren't attracted to children you couldn't be a libertarian anymore.
I was really confused when I was 17 too, and I probably would have benefited from someone openly calling themselves a communist. I got primed for radicalization after receiving my first minimum wage paycheck, but had no idea where to look or what to do. I was surrounded by some goofy centrist liberals and an ocean of horrifying evangelical fundamentalist conservatives. I guess I was probably primed to become a fascist too in that same instant and maybe if I were a decade younger I could have been swept up in some online pepe meme bullshit and blamed the problems in my life on immigrants or whatever. I identified as non-binary back then, so that possibly saved me, but it might be different now.
Instead I had to do it the nerd way and read some Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, etc. So yeah maybe you helped out that kid, or at least gave him some perspective.
I want the average American to know communists actually exist, like as an extant political ideology with leaders and worldwide movements. Because the average American thinks of communism as some kind of abstract, nonsense, extinct ideology that's best for accusing your opponents of being bad. I want to see how they'd react to organized, existing, and present communist movements who aren't ashamed.
I probably would have benefited from someone openly calling themselves a communist
There is so much power that exists in people just being open about it. There are shit loads of people that can be made amenable in a handful of conversations knowing that they're talking to a completely unashamed and open communist. Just hitting the 101 stuff and teaching people what class they are and how to recognise class carries you half way there.
I wonder how they’d react to CPUSA becoming something other than alphabet soup agents spying on each other
Reminder to join and contribute to your local CPUSA if you're not in an org
Then he asked me if I ever read 1984
I know orwell sucks but don't forget to show him the quote where he said word for word that every single thing he'd ever written was "an attack on totalitarianism and a defense of democratic socialism" if he wants to worship it so much
Honestly this was one of my steps out of my liberalism. “Socialism is like communism, and communism’s bad like 1984!”“Orwell was a socialist actually”“Oh maybe it’s not so bad then…”
Imagine believing that people are inherently greedy and selfish and believing an economic system that expressly wants to prohibit governments from limiting those behaviors is the way to go.
That's the direct conclusion and I don't have any idea how they can even claim that would lead to good outcomes except that they imagine themselves being on top, or maybe some blue curtains takes on the Gordon Gekko "greed is good" speech.
Humans are naturally greedy, so socialism could never work
Reminding lolbertarians to stop projecting their failures as human beings onto the rest of us
Yeah, they just love telling on themselves. "I would not contribute anything to society unless I was forced to" is not the argument they think it is.
Cryptobros that want a "trustless society" can't be trusted, either. :cryptocurrency: :dumpster-fire:
He did the thing where he said, "If money didn't exist and people had no incentive to work, they would all sit at home on their asses."
And I responded with, "Well, maybe that's true for you. If money was taken out of the equation, I think most people would finally be able to put their efforts into the things they're passionate about, without having to worry about paying their rent."
He didn't have a comeback for that one.
A big reminder that the USSR, for all it's many failings, had extensive movies, sports, music, dance, theatre and writing programs that produced some of the most influential worldwide non-Western art. The sheer cultural output of the USSR was unparalleled in relation to GDP, it's just that most of it wasn't commercialized and sold to Western audiences.
Is capitalism really working that great by rewarding the rewarded and making greed a justification for everything? :marx-joker:
Calling conservative boomers libs and watching them melt down is genuinely the thing that keeps me going. There's one guy in particular who's a conservative debatebro and the look on his face is always :chefs-kiss:
Even libs go, 'huh? I'm not like him.' Yes you are lib, shut up.
I definitely would have said "So you're not a libertarian then, you're a liberal" when he got all shocked and defensive about liberal-democracy.
Accidental commentary on how poor the US education system is. Indeed many places do not read it anymore. Shit, do they still read at all in US schools?
They did in my school, but somehow I ended up in the track where we read NONE of these books
1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, we basically read none of the most-talked-about US classics.
What we did read: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Their Eyes were Watching God, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Things Fall Apart, Scarlet Letter, Night, The Things They Carried, Of Mice and Men
I read Of Mice and Men and the Scarlet Letter out of that list in school. Used to work with a devote Jehovah that would read his holy book out loud on breaks that I called Lenny, he had never even heard of Of Mice and Men.
Of Mice and Men was the first classic I read that totally enthralled me. Such a great book. Same thing with Old Man and the Sea and One flew over the cuckoo's nest
Stopping every sentence for the teacher to say “this is why communism is bad!” during the middle of the lesson
the author of that book was a huge misanthrope, and his book is directly disproved by such a situation actually happening, and the children worked together, healed their friend's broken leg, raised chickens which were abandoned on the island, distributed responsibilities and stuck to them, and made all decisions together until they were rescued.
Don't lecture me on human nature until you read The Oddesy.
:ferret-poggers:
human nature is to go eat lotuses and you should give into that nature because everyone who kept going with odesseus died horribly.
the moral of the oddessy is to tell your boss to shut up and instead hang with the weird drug people
