Warning: Yapping

So basically, I'm 16. I never really said this before because I was worried about people disregarding my opinions, but after learning of a lemmygrad user who's about my age, I warmed up to sharing that fact. I guess I just forgot or something, but I'm not sure why I continued omitting that I'm a innocence. Maybe I forgot. Anyway; the introduction!

I'm a queer Marxist teen from the U.S. I was exposed to the internet when I just spawned, so by like 8 years old I was watching those stupid ass "feminist debunked!!!1!!!111" videos (alt-right pipeline), but as my prefrontal cortex formed I gained compassion as well as sentience. I evolved into an 'apolitical' 'person' (I was like 11 so idk if that counts) and lived my life not really giving a shit.

An important thing to note going forward is that my parents are labor aristocrats, I won't be elaborating too much further for opsec reasons. We live in a town with a lot of wealth disparity, and many of my friends were not nearly as well off. This was always confusing as hell to me as a kid who was pretty sheltered from actual reality, and was always a point of contention with my (conservative) parents. It never made sense to me why some people had to struggle to get by and others lived lavishly, which led to me becoming really, really angry at everything.

The cognitive dissonance had apparently not infected me yet, because I still considered myself in the 'apolitical center' between democrats and republicans (cringe), until I came across that Second Thought video about how centrism favors the right wing. By some miracle my mind was still malleable enough at 14 to be swayed by it, and I actually changed my mind about life. An even bigger challenge to my world video was those "Why you should be a Socialist in 20XX" videos, which I at first laughed off. Eventually though, I actually watched them, and my mind actually changed! I was convinced socialism was right.

So naturally, as any dumbass 14 year old socialist does, I downloaded a PDF of Capital and gave up immediately, eventually just reading wikipedia pages about different micro ideologies and watching Hasan Piker. Now, I was still an Amerikkkan, so my anti-AES and brainworms were still deeply rooted, and my 'one of the good ones,' Stalin was ebil, brainrot led me to be a Trotskyist. I read the permanent revolution, a bit of the manifesto (I wasn't much of a reader, if you couldn't tell by me being a trot), and got very zealous. Like, VERY zealous. I almost lost some friends over it.

A year or so passed and I discovered Lemmy somehow, and ended up on .world after a while. Now, this is where the .world admins made me the most dedicated teenage marxist in bumfuck nowhere, USA. They preemptively defederated from this super extreme socialist instance, putting up such shocking takes as "NATO is bad actually" and "the USSR wasn't as bad as Nazi Germany." Even as a brainwormed usonian, I wasn't dumb enough to believe that gommulism killed 2139438905 marxillion innocent babies, and I quickly left .world to join Hexbear.

And that's it, that's my leftist story. I was corrected in most of my shitty viewpoints by other marxists and anarchists here, I began reading and shit. Yeah. I don't really know what else to say or how to end this. lmao

Thank you for making me a well read Marxist, if anyone has any questions I'll answer it, I like answering questions.

Salutations! 07

tldr I'm a child

  • anarcho_blinkenist [none/use name]
    ·
    2 months ago

    I would recommend starting with simpler things than Capital. for the economics there's Wage Labour & Capital and its complimentary text Value, Price, and Profit. For the grounding and connection then to Marxist analysis of history and society, and lessons on the development and evolution of class society and emergence of capitalism and how it all relates to historical and dialectical materialism, I recommend Engels Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (and re-read the dialectics section a bunch).

    Then for developing the philosophical methodology just the first chapter of the first Volume of The German Ideology (If your copy has an abridged/abstract version of the 3rd chapter of Vol 1 like this has that can be good too, but the full thing and other chapters and volume isn't really too significant for us imo, just debunking long-forgotten dead people and their now-fringe ideas; the first chapter is most important); and then maybe Marx's Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts of 1844. These would help give you some very strong philosophical grounding and connect things all together into a framework along Marxist lines of historical and dialectical materialism and class struggle as opposed to bourgeois Liberalism in its lines of idealism, individualism, and great man history; and give you the tools of Marxist methodology to analyze things today. Without the philosophical methodology, you're only stuck on the dead past and 'vulgar materialist' copy/pasting of old analyses from bygone eras as they were onto the circumstances of today, rather than accurately and critically discerning the true nature of things and the forces which make them up as they are, in the moving living unfolding present and future

    From that point even without yet delving into Capital much would be opened to you. Lenin's State and Revolution and Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism would provide you no issues from this point here.