I unionized my a fair portion of my freshman class in highschool to stand against bullying. This was all pre-cellphone, but post-911. I had gotten nearly 3/4 (it was a fairly small school) of my class to stand against bullying, and we had broken up several figths successfully. We had meetings, and wore badges that had anti-bully messages on them so we could identify each other and stand in solidarity.

Then I was suddenly accused of being the ring leader of a dangerous gang.

Everything I had in my locker, every scrap of paper, every assignment I turned in was suddenly used to build a case against me. Every single bully we had stopped testified against us. They had the police interrogate me. They dragged my parents in and took their testimonies. I was called a terrorist. I was called a criminal. Eventually I was suspended for the remainder of the year, and I wasn't welcome back.

It was a traumatic experience. I had to sit in front of armed police officers as a teenager and vouch for every single scrap of paper in my locker. The fact I like chess was proof I was a mastermind and a manipulator. There were stupid homework assignments I had to do that were suddenly a secret code that I had to answer for. They searched my home. They were trying build a case against me as a terrorist on the behest of the superintendent of the school district because they thought it would make their career.

In the end I ended up with a GED and a life long distrust of authority. I'm still unpacking the trauma of doing something arguably 100% good, and being met with such hostility. I still have issues with privacy, and I'm having anxiety that I've doxxed myself with this.

And all of this is nothing compared to others that have responded. Either way, fuck bullies.

I've shared this before but am happy to do so again:

I found this community (and leftism in general) the night of the 2020 Iowa Caucus. I took a bus to Iowa twice to canvass door to door, the second time was on the day of the caucus so I had a several hour long bus ride home that evening, when results should have started to trickle out, but everything was strange. Bus full of 40 very motivated bernie supporters all scouring the internet to figure out what was happening and we couldn’t find anything.

So when I got home around 11 or midnight I kept looking until I happened across chapo (having never heard of it) while searching, and what I saw was posts on posts explaining what was happening, why it was happening, examples of past events I’d never been taught about where similar things happened, and clearly this was no surprise to anyone. It was eye opening. It was all right there, the pieces necessary to build the conclusion I was being presented with, and I’d never been told about any of this. So when everything checked out, so my only option was to accept that as a valid interpretation, and then as I kept looking I just saw more and more of them.

I also saw some fun memes, people genuinely supporting each other, posts talking about helping people not punishing others, and the line “To each according to their need, from each according to their ability.” I cried after seeing that quote and reading the comments of people discussing it. And then made my first post, something like “Hey I’m new here but I think I like this place!” Within the first couple days I realized that I’d been brainwashed all my life and that the ‘evils’ of socialism/ communism were at the very least overblown. By the end of the first week I knew I was at very least some form of communist, and since then I’ve decided to just sit back and enjoy the ride, not try too hard to do stuff like label my tendency or work out an opinion on china or any of that shit, doesn’t matter to the actual good I can accomplish locally with what I have learned y’know?

my grandparents were commies and my parents are conservatives. i always liked my grandparents more. i'm not really a tankie, im more just a plain marxist. i had an anarchist phase but started to take to heart what my grandparents said and synthesized it

i was a centrist Putin stan that only watch RT and anything anti-american, all i knew of soviet history was that lenin good everyone else bad, i also watch the anti-sjw channels like a guy who used a kangaroo avatar.

after the refugee crisis and crimea crisis, i realise the channels i watch were very racist specialy against black people, i always believe people were influence by their enviroment, but these channels claim blacks and refugees were bad because they wanted to.

so I realise they were fascist, and i never liked liberalism because of my anti-americanism, so i was left with the russia staning, eventually i realise Putin was kinda cringe, so i just care about latin-american politics and history, then reading about my parents country of chile and the history of Mexico i saw the oppression of the communists by the state.

so i read soviet history were i thought communist came from, and i just click, it make sense why America was so evil, and why the western fascist blame everything on minorities, and most importanly why latin america was the way it was.

It was the fucking capitalist class messing with the rest of the world for money.

I became a marxism who like Khrushchev and thought stalin bad, eventually i realise all the death counts were bullshit (thanks to the chapo sub at that time) and i started liking both stalin and mao

and thats how i went from Centrist Putin stan to M-L Stalin stan

Participated in a research project where we interviewed folks who had been evicted from apartments. This usually involved going into public housing projects to interview people in their homes, which I think made people more comfortable with sharing.

There's only so many times you can hear stories about not being able to make rent because you broke your leg and had to pay medical expenses, or getting behind because your two minimum wage jobs still can't afford the new gentrification-driven rent level, before you start realizing how fucked everything is. These were people who had worked their ass off just to try and have a place to sleep at night and food for their kids. It's not their fault that ambulances cost stupid amounts of money or that you can't get anything more than $7.25 an hour to work jobs in their community. One injury, one car accident, one thing goes wrong, and you're out on the street.

There's a person who has really stuck in my mind. This person used some kind of oxygen machine owing to a medical condition and had trouble walking. He'd been evicted because he couldn't afford to pay both rent and his treatment costs. He had no family. When we interviewed him, he said he was about to have the power shut off at his apartment because he couldn't afford his electrical bill anymore. His machine needed power to run. He didn't know what he was going to do. We gave him a couple of numbers to call, but god knows if he's even still alive now.

These experiences absolutely made me look at the current system with hateful eyes. Read a little theory, started listening to the podcast to hear their Epstein coverage, and now I'm here.

Parents are Chinese. Dad is very pro-China and as I was growing up, he would often bring up stuff that Canadian/Western media left out of their anti-China narratives like about Mao and also the Free Tibet thing around the time of the Beijing Olympics.

Fast-forward to last year where I - as someone who:

1. was pretty disinterested in politics cause of the stupid shit I had seen over the years
2. had a generally positive view of China and was very wary of when Western media portrays it negatively
3. used reddit fairly regularly

-was bombarded by endless amounts of the Hong Kong protest bs and the massive amounts of sinophobia and blind support that accompanied it. That along with Xinjiang and COVID, drove me to seek out spaces/voices that pushed back against this stuff. Was also curious about how other asian diaspora was dealing with all this and so I eventually came across Plan A Magazine which exposed me to two twitter users:

https://twitter.com/diaspora_is_red - who coined the term "boba liberal"

and

https://twitter.com/catcontentonly - who was calling out blatantly racist media articles

Looking at their profiles and also that of Ian Goodrum https://twitter.com/isgoodrum which I had come across early on, I was like damn these super based people are all communists so I went to check out communist twitter/reddit, ended up sticking around, and now I'm no longer disinterested in politics. Still need to actually read theory but yeah I'm pretty much sold.

I was the usual "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" type in college: well meaning but completely politically ignorant, and center left for any real policy value. Then /r/cth started popping memes elsewhere during the 2016 election and I realized that fiscally conservative is a crock of shit. Kept tilting further left as I actually learned what a liberal is and that the political spectrum isn't binary.

Eventually got in on theory independently (stop telling people to read theory and instead give them excerpts with explanations folks) and now I'm on board with bread daddy and the destruction of the state. Intersectional liberation is the only liberation.

Some important primers:

-hippy parents teaching me anti essentialism and anti imperialism from the get go.

-seeing anti democrat, anti republican signs at Iraq war protests and realizing that was possible.

-seeing a SAlt campaign flyer and realizing you were allowed to want things like "more money" and "less rent"

-anti obama repubs totally taking the edge off the word socialist

-seeing Cuban revolutionaries ripping down billboards and collectivizing property on an anticommunist documentary and thinking "that's possible? That's pretty neat"

-going to an alternative public school where they let students run the budget and do hiring and review and seeing that shit wasn't falling apart at the seems and was actually... better?

And finally...

Going on reddit where I was exposed to Libertarian Socialist Rants who espoused the first left wing position that resonated with me the whole way through (after being exposed to various flavors of trot, titoist, mlm, all the best /r/socialism had to offer). I've since grown away from that, more towards anarchism as a base with Marx, the situationists, and modern academic theory as influences, but that classic Rockerian Syndicalism is what got me here.

this was from a comment I left in a thread yesterday but I guess it works here

I said in a comment like a month ago that my family was a collection of insufferable bougie assholes. I meant that literally. Two of my close relatives were and might still be millionaires, the vast majority of their wealth earned from being ghouls for hire for corporations looking to crush any lawsuit filed against them. Not gonna name anything specific here cause I don’t wanna dox myself, but one of these involved a voice actor being fired for getting too old to voice a certain role. This actor sued, but guess what, here comes the corporate lawyers. No tactics are too dirty or underhanded for these people. They have zero empathy and are soulless ghouls. They fucking crushed that person. The only way these people could be any worse is if they were pinkertons. These people are the gears that grind any victim of capitalism that gets a little too uppity into a fine powder. The dinner table was a constant outpouring of the most ghoulish sentiment imaginable. Pure hatred and contempt for the working class. Fucking monsters, all of them.

Does money just turn off basic empathy? Ironically it was being surrounded by these bourgeois ghouls and future ghoul trust fund babies at an insufferable private school (hell on earth for me. Extreme social anxiety and having basic human decency is not a great combo at these kinds of places. one kid killed himself because of the cruel hyper competitive environment.) that radicalized me. In short, having basic human decency made me a class traitor.

The thought that I could’ve ended up as one of these soulless capitalist ghouls is frightening. I know basically every other kid at my school did (fucking entrepreneurs, self made with the help of a few hundred thousand from their parents.) Even 15 year old me could think “this is bullshit. These people are fucking monsters.” I guess I was the odd one out in that I didn’t have every ounce of empathy and humanity beaten out of me. The world is so fucking cruel.

tldr my family was a collection of bourgeois capitalist pigs (literally; my uncle was a factory owner and my parents were landlords) and I was a contrarian (because I was constantly surrounded by these people) so I kinda started off just to spite them, but unlike my relatives I'm not a horrible person so it became serious.

Also another relative of mine writes anti-China op-eds for a conservative rag. Shitty people all the way down.

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• Immigrant lib parents taught me to be anti-authoritarian, think for yourself, all powerful people are crooks, etc.

• Public school sucked and stoked the anti-authoritarian views I had until I got old enough to be a counter-culture type "alt" kid. Around this time, Arab Spring and later Occupy were happening so I absorbed that kind of vague, individualist anarchist politics but mostly just aesthetically

• Brief libertarian detour after I took my first econ class in high school with a Friedman nut.

• Started taking history with a Marxist (of the revisionist sort) teacher and my politics shifted into a kind of common-sense social democracy and, despite still disliking communism, I became very skeptical of anti-communism and of American hegemony.

• Early college I was a kind of an apolitical Bernie-crat (if that makes sense) but then I met some radlibs who got me to get politically involved and I became involved in my local Democratic Party's progressive wing.

• When we would link up with local orgs on campaigns is when I started becoming aware of the local anti-fascist scene. I felt my local chapter wasn't really being pushed left so I broke off and just kind of hung around the more radical leftists in my area for a while, which shifted the conceptual terrain from "how much means-tested aid should people get if they can't find a job after a year?" to "is a Dictatorship of the Proletariat necessary to safguard the revolution?; is Bernie a crypto-commie or a regular socdem?"

• Was a libertarian socialist for a while after this change, but was always around MLs so I never got super into tankie-bashing. I joined an org that was super local and horizontal and that was a mess and taught me the limits of prefigurative politics and anti-hierarchy as a means unto itself.

• Then I read Bookchin and got into dialectics and joined another org which was more centralised and of the "base-building" variety. Here I got more organising chops but stopped caring so much about adhering to a specific theory and became a big "left unity" type and started calling myself just a socialist.

Cue the pandemic, Bernie's campaign being crushed, BLM protests, and my own personal life being overturned. The limits of my politics until then became clear. I saw the limits of mutual aid, of rent strikes, of labour organising by itself, of the lack of a vanguard party. I also saw vicious opportunism arise in my local area with anarchists joining the chorus of far-right reactionaries tearing into some organisers in the area for their position on AES during the critical weeks after the protests broke out and their org was providing support to protesters. My poltics had already taken a big Marxist turn from what I was reading on the side (political economy books on Africa, Fanon, Freire, bits of Mao), but this accelerated the process by giving me a real life example of the kind of thing I would later learn Lenin wrote a whole lot about. I learned that either these people were ignorant to the point of negligence, or were actively wrecking the efforts in the area, but in either case they were doing the Feds work. Cue a bunch of soul searching, reading, and discussing, and now I am an ML.

I worked in commissioned retail, I needed money as I was getting ready to move out, buy a car, all that good stuff. Picked up lots of overtime, got good sales, first commission check is fucking tiny after the hiring team hyping up how much money I could make and me volunteering for extra shifts so I approach the manager and he explains:

Oh well your commission is based on 2% of the profit and that's only if you sell the extended warranty and the addons, so it does all add up. I saw I made $15,000 profit (since this was all posted on a whiteboard and emailed to every manager weekly) in one month and I "earned" $250 and I remember looking at this shitty commission cheque and thinking

"Karl Marx was right"

Was a bit of a gamer as a teenager. Had a vague understanding of Gamergate as being about 'ethics in video game journalism', was subscribed to /r/tumblrinaction and /r/imgoingtohellforthis. Read about FBI crime statistics once and figured 'oh hey that makes sense I guess'. Luckily I never fell deeper into that rabbit hole, and I kinda drifted away from those communities. I stumbled upon a Lindsay Ellis video one day, and it was This one about Feminism in Transformers. It made me re-evaluate a lot of positions I used to hold. Watched more videos, then was introduced to Contrapoints, and then Chapo. I joined the subreddit because I thought some of the memes were funny, and I stuck around when I realized the criticisms of liberalism were valid. It was like I was surrounded by people who could actually see what was going on in society for the first time. Decided then to read theory so I could be like all these cool people.

Started in the 2000s, started seeing the light around 2014 or so

I'm an INTP internet shutin, so my main foray with the right was in race realism and anthropology.

Uncritically accepted what was being said because there were studies that ostensibly backed some of it up. Meanwhile, the left basically poo-poo'd any discussion of this stuff whatsoever. So my impression was that the left was "afraid of truth" or w/e

However, I began to notice that some of the things that I discovered made the right really angry or were heavily downvoted, despite the fact that I cited sources, data etc.

Also noticed that certain avenues of thought were strictly forbidden (IE: the effect that environmental factors can have, for example on a trait like height, among others)

Eventually I put 2 and 2 together and realized everything they say was just a cope for white insecurity/idpol. Now I'm a leftist with an extravagantly broad knowledge about the anthropology which is still verboten in liberal circles. But w/e.

I still maintain that if the left had a widespread interest in it, anthropology and "race realism" could be used as a force to combat white identity politics. If you know anything at all about the subject (rather than the propaganda the right puts out) it's really the logical conclusion of it.

I had an office job for several years that was relatively unsupervised, spent all day in front of a computer doing rote work, and I needed stuff to listen to. I listened to a good bit of fiction, the Harry Potter books, a bunch of Robert Jordan, R.A. Salvatore, some Podcasts, and inevitably, conspiracy documentaries. The conspiracies were fun because it gives you the feeling of being in on secrets, but most of it did require a suspension of disbelief. There was a common thread that ran through most of them, though, and the more I watched, the more obvious it became what the real source of it all was. Capitalism.

I'mma humblebrag a bit, but I thought I was the only one who had had this revelation, and I tried to write it out, thinking if I just started from the beginning, I could explain the whole thing to anyone. I worked on it for a long time without producing anything finished, because finding that beginning was the real challenge all along. I did do what I realized later was interesting theoretical work, though, but not original theoretical work. I independently figured out several things that Marx wrote about in the first few chapters of Capital, chiefly, the difference between CMC and MCM transformations, though I didn't use that terminology. When I finally read it (no I didn't finish it, are you kidding), I was super proud.

There was also a long MRA and anti-SJW phase that was important to my journey, but not really worth retelling.

This was 2011, and I was still pretty far out there, think David Icke/Jordan Maxwell stuff, but there was a huge TV in the large breakroom always playing news, I think CNN. Virtually everything they talked about referenced the recession, the recovery or the financial crash. Obviously by this time I suspected something was up about it, so I started to look for stuff about economics specifically. I spent a lot of time on ZeroHedge, and got pretty good at deciphering the way they speak, and the charts and types of analysis finance people do. It was while I was in this world that the Euro crisis happened, and I watched that happen in real time. I was absolutely giddy about the end of capitalism, and thought it was about to happen. Ah, well, nevertheless.

Anywho, the depression of working what I would later come to know as a bullshit job, and the fact that I wasn't doing the job, came to a head and I left and went to a restaurant. I've always liked food and cooking, and I still think I made the right decision, but for a few years I didn't have the same ability to take in info. After changing restaurants and working for a little more, they had me doing prep work in a refrigerator, so I could listen to things while I worked again. I did nothing but Chomsky for a while, but eventually started reading more and more. I actually listened to the Chapo book before I ever listened to them or found the subreddit. I didn't know who was who, and I can still hear Matt saying "Are you triggered" when I close my eyes, however, it was the chapos and this community that gave me the final thing I needed....validation that I'm not wrong for being mad all the time, it is the proper response to living in this hellworld.

Cheers, chapos, you're my family.