I never get tired of 'em. I know we've discussed this before. I know the process is ongoing, not necessarily based on a single event, and depends a lot on your position in society. If discussing the radicalization of others, don't mention any methods unless people specifically told you that certain things radicalized them.

For me, I was a left-liberal for most of my life. Long story short, I ran in a state senate election trying to be as friendly to everyone as possible. The one thing I really wouldn't budge on was universal health care, since I knew from experience that it worked. I lost my election BADLY to a guy who ran on no platform at all, although he had much better name recognition. I worked so hard on that campaign and really was devastated and had to look for answers. Stupid as it sounds, at around that time I found the r/chapotraphouse subreddit and started listening to the podcast. That led to me listening to much better podcasts (like Revleft Radio), reading actual theory, and giving up on the Chapo podcast entirely once Bernie lost the last primary.

I'm always trying to radicalize others but I just usually get nowhere. George Floyd's death plus coronavirus I think resulted in a lot of people reconsidering things, but it seems like many of them have kind of swung back in the other direction now, at least as far as I can tell from watching my friends on Facebook. I've been arguing with my lib dad for months about all of this shit, with the result that he has actually gotten much better at deflecting Marxist points than the average lib lol. Sometimes I can get him to admit that everything is fucked and that Marxism is the only answer, at other times he'll say that we need to make friends with local business owners (some of the worst fucking people in the universe) and not alienate them.

Anyway, if you feel like writing your radicalization story or the radicalization stories of others, I'm happy to read.

  • PermaculturalMarxist [they/them]
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    edit-2
    4 years ago
    • 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.