Who or what got you into Communism or Anarchism?

[RedBen]

At the risk of being laughed off this board, the man who inspired me to think as i do now is Jacque Fresco. It was his interview on Larry King, the "Our System, Our Structure, Our Illusion" documentary and the Zeitgeist docs that asked important questions and made me think. I had Anarchist tendencies before, and although Jacque claims not to be a Communist, he calls for a classless, stateless, moneyless society. He also says we need to declare all earth's resources "common heritage". I am not a member of either movement, but it was a starting point to get me reading, learning and asking questions. What was yours?

[cyu]

You can see my political progression in my revleft profile, but truth be told, I was never really "out" of communism.

You know how some people say "Communism sounds great, but it would never work in practice" - and then they reject communism? I was more the type that says "Communism sounds great - how can we make it work in practice?"

So I mainly see my political evolution as investigating different roads or vehicles to reach a destination, without the destination itself really changing much.

[DudeImNeo]

i had a polysci teacher in my first few yrs who really turned me on to tha idea that things are not as they seem. shit like zeitgeist threw me off in another direction which sent me spiraling into a whole new genre of theory, but Karl Marx n Engels' Communist Manifesto was gifted to me by a homie who thought it would really resonate wit me..and it did. I don't know much, but I know theres much to know ! A classless moneyless society-Utopia. If only people were willing to work for tha sake of product-instead of money. then we could have given our own resources n talents for tha sake of tha community, and get a fATASS CHILLASS SOCIETY in return, not a fatass paycheck we give back. UTOPIA! someday..oneday...once we're willing

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

The Communist Party USA.

No, seriously. I started out as your standard American liberal, then right around 2003 when the anti-war movement was in full swing I started to notice all of these various revolutionary socialists, communists and anarchists that started popping up seemingly out of nowhere.

Well, I've never been the type of person who seems something mysterious and just lets it alone. I have to find out what's going on. "Socialism: What's with that?"

So I read about Marx, and the subjects of socialism and communism and what they were, and the history of the labor movement. I was surprised about all of this history that I couldn't find in my textbooks, as if they had all been swept under the rug by someone who didn't want me to know about it.

So I went onto the computer at my school's library, and found the website for the CPUSA.



Now, I should point out that I went through a libertarian/agorist phase for a couple of years after High School (mostly because I'd gotten kind of sick of the American Left in general and its self-indulgent character in particular).

Then I got laid off from my first job and that pretty much put an end to that. :grin:

[RedBen]

The Communist Party USA.
i am a supporter. i found them first and support them. here in chicago they are very active in petitions, protests, rallies... ect. i'll not get into comparisons, i have been looking into psl and iso. i support any work or contribution to the advancement of socialism and ultimately communism. if that means supporting or cooperating with multiple groups to push in our general direction, i'm fine with that. i believe in cooperation and solidarity to all our red brothers and sisters.

[Polaris]

So I mainly see my political evolution as investigating different roads or vehicles to reach a destination, without the destination itself really changing much.
That's a very good way to describe different tendencies.

What got me into communism was, slightly ironically, all the bullshit that schools tell you about it. Being the rebellious preteen I was, I researched it on the internet and somehow ended up here. You can figure it out from there.

[Questionable]

I was always impressed with Marxism. Upon hearing about it for the first time when I was very young, I never thought the workers versus owners analysis was incorrect, I just didn't think anything could be done about it.

State and Revolution by Lenin made me realize it was an achievable reality, not a utopian fantasy.

[Don't Swallow The Cap]

The funny thing is that it was the often repeated question of "What if Trotsky had led?" that sparked an interest in Communism.
Having been a Progressive Liberal since I can remember, the transition was pretty gradual as I became more and more disillusioned with not only the liberals, but also electoral politics in general.
I was further radicalized during the OWS in my city. The tipping point was when I noticed I was agreeing more with the "no good radical anarchists" than the liberals I had been familiarized with. This was especially true when John Lewis tried to speak at one of the GA and was denied. :lol:

[Comrade Jacob]

It may sound very sad but it all started with a simple YouTube video. I'm not lying! It is no longer up (taken down 2 days after I watched it, lucky). It was called socialism for dummies, in which the person (Maoistrebelnews2) explained the basics of how a socialist-state would use surplus value. It blew my mind mostly because it destroyed a large amount of lies I thought about a socialist economy. I was drawn in by my curiosity so I watch more videos on basic socialist economics and Marxist economics before I read Marx for myself (so I could comprehend some of it instead of being completely lost). After, I read the communist manifesto, then I moved to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Engels, then I moved onto Lenin and Mao before I tackled Capital and The Origins of Family.
So it went from there, who thought a few rightly-timed megabytes would end up changing my entire outlook. :/

[tuwix]

At the risk of being laughed off this board, the man who inspired me to think as i do now is Jacque Fresco. It was his interview on Larry King, the "Our System, Our Structure, Our Illusion" documentary and the Zeitgeist docs that asked important questions and made me think. I had Anarchist tendencies before, and although Jacque claims not to be a Communist, he calls for a classless, stateless, moneyless society. He also says we need to declare all earth's resources "common heritage". I am not a member of either movement, but it was a starting point to get me reading, learning and asking questions. What was yours?

Zeitgeist movement was one of the elements that attracted me to Marx too. But the moste important factor was this blog:

http://touchoftheabsolute.wordpress.com

"You
can adjust this question to question how often arises communism? Not
necessarily in different planets because this is a form of existence
for reasonable creatures. The most developed one. This means that it
is the final shape. It appears in the same way everywhere which means
that everywhere has the same rules of development and existence."

[International_Solidarity]

I used to be a Liberal and a bit of a Nationalist, until I picked up A People's History of the United States at the library my sophomore year of high-school. Howard Zinn painted Socialists in a light different from what I had always heard. I began to research Socialism, Marxism, and Anarchism. I became an Anarcho-Syndicalist at first, and remained that way for most of highschool. But I eventually became more interested in Marx than I previously had been. After reading The Communist Manifesto and Engel's, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, I knew that I was definitely a Marxist. After reading an article from the ISO entitled In Defense of Leninism (http://www.internationalsocialist.org/pdfs/DefenseofLeninism.pdf) I came to my current ideology; although I continue to read works written by Socialists of all tendencies. Since then my focus has been on expanding my knowledge and training myself to think dialectically.

[Yuppie Grinder]

RMJSQElozcA
mostly this

[Don't Swallow The Cap]

RMJSQElozcA
mostly this
Despite the multiple recommendations, I have yet to hear this album.
Is there a political connotation to this album?
I've heard only musical praise, so I never expected it to be stimulating, from a communist's perspective.

[Yuppie Grinder]

Despite the multiple recommendations, I have yet to hear this album.
Is there a political connotation to this album?
I've heard only musical praise, so I never expected it to be stimulating, from a communist's perspective.

Refused and the singer's other band, The International Noise Conspiracy, are Marxists and have political lyrics.

[Hegemonicretribution]

Rage Against the Machine of course :grin: well to an extent...

I have always been very analytical in certain respects, and I have never responded well to authority. My biggest peeve as a child/teenager was logical fallacies, followed closely by hypocrisy.

I was 'camping' (well we didn't have tents, but we had a shanty, and a fire) and I just looked around me with ratm playing and conducting a very juvenile discussion when I had a moment. I looked at the brands around me, the coca cola I was drinking, and it all went in the fire. I then started a lengthy journey of boycotts and lifestylism. I read No Logo and boycotted everything. As I withdrew more and more into my own world as a result I started reading, and I began to form an idea of things I was for, and not just those that I was against.

Once I had began to settle on more and more ideas I needed an outlet that was more than secondary school could provide, so I began to look on line. I actually stumbled across che-lives site whilst looking for some papers about the Cuban revolution, and I began to ghost the place. I joined up, changed some ideas, dropped out of school, changed more ideas, and began working, and changed even more ideas.

One word answer to the OP; Life.

[SonofRage]

Growing up in a Latino working class family and seeing all the racism and bullshit of the system we live under. Originally that meant becoming a Ralph Nader/ Green Party supporter and I just kept moving left the more I studied history.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 4 Beta

[Sasha]

My family on my mothers side where communists (fought in the international brigades and the communist resistance) but dropped out after the put down of the Hungarian uprising. Since all where dead by the time I came intrested in my family history I had to research them and their motivations through other means.
The books by Klaus Kordon where really important for me.

[TooManyQuestions]

I was always anti-government, anti-corporation I suppose. In high school I became a libertarian, that lasted until I found out what they actually believed in. In college I started reading more about it and I thought, "Let big companies do whatever they want? How is that not tyranny?" I had really thought the LP was about individual freedom. So I was stuck. I always felt that American politics was a choice between being told to live by someone else's idea of morality or being told to live according to someone's idea of social engineering. Either way, lobbyists and corporations were really pulling the strings. The second choice seemed less evil, so I became a marginal and unwilling Democrat. However much I despise bigotry of any kind, the ultra-PC nonsense I found around me was just laughable. I grew up in black neighborhoods, went to black schools, and I have never heard a black person use the term African American or person of color, aside from professors. If black people call themselves black, I am not going to stand for some self-righteous twit with no black friends trying to tell me I'm a bigot.

Long story short(er), 9/11 happened and my first thought was "those poor people." My second thought was, "oh my god, the repubs made that dummy president." I predicated the rise of Operation Bomb Everybody that same day. When Bush decided to invade Iraq, I thought that surely the progressives in Congress would stop him, that the anti-war protestors would be listened too. I mean come on, what was the point of that again, there was a new reason to invade every week, and Bush's answer to every criticism was, "Why do you like Saddam so much." At that point my politics became less sophisticated and boiled down to, "Fuck Bush."

When Obama ran for office, said "I like this guy, but come on, a black president?" Then the banks pulled off the biggest crime in world history. Well fast forward a few years and the repubs have been pissing me off something fierce with their violent rhetoric and insane policies of fighting education, unions, even their own pro-capitalist health care ideas.

The breaking point came when they took control in the states and started running amok with their ideas of blatant oligarchy.

I wanted to like the dems, but for god's sake, could they be any more pathetic. They supported the Iraq war, threw a trillion dollars at the banks to reward them for wrecking the economy, support only the most moderate and trifling welfare state handouts, and a re generally a bunch of pussies.

I had always read about communism, socialism, and anarchy but never really bought it. When the cons started making my blood pressure boil, I started Googling "left wing militias" because I feared a spate of right wing violence, both from reactionary "citizens movements" and from Private Military Companies that have real combat experience and are legally allowed to do "security work" here in the use. That search led me to Democratic Underground, where the OP was mocked, and to Revleft, where everyone thought the OP was a cop (because cops are really that dumb, a lawman or CI would build a personal relationship with someone before proceeding, not posting on a random board).

Anyway, I started reading the posts on here, and despite the irritating presence of pro-Stalin types and plain old fashioned assholes, I did read a lot of thoughtful stuff on how left economics and social structure could work. OWS also did a lot to inspire be to more away from the center left.

In the end, I'm not sure if you'd call me a reformer, Marxist, anarchist, or what, but I'm here. Sorry if this is long, but my views have moved a long way over the years.

[RedBen]

are generally a bunch of pussies.
i've often said the repubs are nuts and the dems have none. if RAHOWA erupts, the right is gonna lose. there are alot more lefties that will fight than they like to think. we're not a bunch of pansy nerds, we just don't need to go around waving a flag and gun to compensate for something.

[Sasha]

My family on my mothers side where communists (fought in the international brigades and the communist resistance) but dropped out after the put down of the Hungarian uprising. Since all where dead by the time I came intrested in my family history I had to research them and their motivations through other means.
The books by Klaus Kordon where really important for me.

I got into anarchism through the punk/squat movement though, posed as the only commie among anarcho's for a long time but eventually had to admit that my brand of communism was way closer to anarchism than people assumed with me putting up hammer and sickles over squats like anarchists put up circle A's on banks.
:lol:

[Quail]

and a re generally a bunch of pussies.

Verbal warning for prejudiced language.

I notice you're fairly new to the board, but please try to avoid words like "pussy" in future. It's a sexist insult.

[Jimmie Higgins]

The antiglobalization movement got me into both. I was inspired by seeing news coverage and reading about the WTO protests and then started going to protests and getting involved in some activism. I also started reading about different radical political philosophies at this time because I began to feel dissatisfied with aspects of activism and a certain lack of open political decision making in favor of narrow discussions of tactics. Occupy was a vast improvement from that movement... The GAs may have been tedious at times, but it was exactly what was missing from the antiglobalization movement.

[Landsharks eat metal]

My annoying history teacher who spent half of the world history class telling us how terrible communism is and how all communists should die inspired me to look into communism and from there I found anarchism.
I can be an ornery little fucker.

[OHumanista]

Partially because of my father, old time trotskyist with a lot of history but didn't just accept his ideas at first. I first had a jerk phase where I drifted towards fascism then I had a "realising I was a jerk" phase were I became something like a radical social democrat. And finally I got into a "well, now that I am over my ego let us actually bother to hear my old man as well as do some research and reading of my own" phase. And since then I became a communist. So I guess it was a mix of good parental influences, growing up and overcoming bad past experiences.

[G4b3n]

As a child, I was always one of those people who believed that socialism was great "in theory". I accepted socialism and eventually anarchism my senior year of high school after deciding my true passion was the study of world history. One of my history teachers was a socialist, not a revolutionary by Marxist standards, but a socialist none the less and he taught history from a sort of people's perspective, rather than extreme bourgeois garbage. I thought it to be a very enlightening experience.

[TheIrrationalist]

There were many reasons, and for me (and it seems to be the same with many other) anarchism functioned as a 'gateway drug' to Marxism, or Communism of the non-anarchist type. I can't really track it so well, but I think it started with classical liberalism, or libertarianism, and I thought it stood for ultimate liberty and freedom. Then on one history lesson I wondered why would anyone want to live under communism, or in a communist state (to be more correct) and looked further into it. Or it might be because my interest in avant-garde art, mainly Dada and Surrealism. Third explanation is that I watched Sergei Eisenstein's Strike, which is basically propaganda (I'm brainwashed by the Communists!:scared:), and of course felt sympathetic to the cause of the workers, and it was a damn fine film.

It might be just because of one of those instances, or because all of them or non of them, I don't know. Anyway I became a anarchist communist and sometime later ditched the anarchist label.

[Flying Purple People Eater]

I was repulsed by communism believing it was ultra right-wing, like the fascist movements of the 20th century. The main reason being that I was confounded when I saw American politicians link communism to leftist politics.

'Leftist politics!?' I thought, "You mean like marching for better living conditions, and equalising the playing field for everyone!? How the fuck does that translate into China!?"

So I started to learn about radical leftist politics and needless to say I'm now a commie.

Also I was against nationalism before I even had any major political beliefs. The idea was just so ridiculously cultish and stupid to me that I'm sure I pissed off a lot of peers at school because of it. For example: while I was in primary school, we had to stand for eleven minutes of silence to 'remember the sacrifices of the nation'. I started laughing, and this guy in my class was like "How dare you! You're disrespecting our ancestors!' etc. etc., to which I replied 'They don't care. They're dead'. That shut him up.

"The refuge of scoundrels" - being against nationalist traps is part of what drew me to leftist politics for sure.

[MarxSchmarx]

I think for most of us it was a combination of things.

For me, I can still remember as a child I had heard about socialism by then, how the government would take care of everyone and how that breeds laziness etc... Like most people, perhaps, I had been under the impression that this infantized people.

When I must have been around twelve, I first encountered 3rd world poverty on a personal level, particularly with the beggars in a large city.

I remember being struck at that time that "this" was what the struggle to share the wealth of society was about. All the "bad" ideas promulgated by the dreaded opponents of capitalists now seemed very viscerally real. I remember my father trying to tell me how "all socialist countries" ended up with such poverty. It was then, I think, that I started to really rethink a lot of what I had been taught to distrust. Not only was socialism "not bad", but it was the best chance we had to make a real difference in the lives of the disfigured beggars I remember being struck by. Never had I had to confront the fact that pretty much all that separated me from the men prostratring themselves on the street was the mere accident of my birth.

I still remember those beggars several years later. I know it's perhaps patronizing but the desperation as vivid as ever. Perhaps it's only gotten louder.

[DasFapital]

I went to several nut job right wing Christian churches as a child that made me hate religion. In high school, being an angsty teen who was tired of all of the conservative shit around him, I became somewhat of a radical lone wolf environmentalist nut and did a lot of less than legal shit that nearly got me arrested. Anywhoo, busting into the houses of rich people got me thinking. After I graduated high school and found myself with more time to pursue self education I began reading a lot of Chomsky and Hitchens. Chomsky got me thinking about things on a global scale, especially the Israeli-Palestinian issue and globalization. Hitchens made me a convinced atheist but more importantly he introduced me to Leon Trotsky, which got me to rethink some of my views about the Soviet Union. Absorbing all this info is what turned me into a radical leftist.

[slum]

heh i remember being eight or so and looking up one night at the ceiling and having this seemingly totally profound realization that everything i saw around me was made by human beings. i was in a box made by many different human beings filled with objects made by many other human beings. this was a problem that remained unresolved for me until i discovered marxism ;)1

like a lot of people here i radicalized messily through a combination of life experiences (mainly violence, public education, low-wage jobs/unemployment, and interacting with various 'social service' bureaucracies and the psychiatric establishment) and literature that was not explicitly communist. i had a mish-mash of ideas gleaned from reading in ancient history, geopolitics, trauma theory, and postcolonialism which were of interest to me in high school. i went looking for socialist theory after reading an essay on greek drama that discussed ruling class cultural hegemony and cited marx. i was initially hostile to marxism but became convinced of the validity of the approach (and the primacy of materialism) after reading wage labour and capital and engel's socialism: utopian and scientific. the LTV and origin of the family cinched it for me, as they helped answer many of my questions related to economic inequality, the existence of human organization, and the origins of violence against women in a way identity politics, mainstream narratives of human history, and feminism were unable to.

oh, and i was finally freed from the shackles of the "human nature" argument, which has made my best friend (a devout hobbesian) very angry.

[Rocky Rococo]

I needed a job out of high school, so I joined the military. The USAF put me in its branch that is effectively part of the NSA, I had the security clearance and all that. Reading the nightly intelligence summary cable, then comparing to what was in the published newspapers the next day was eye-opening to say the least.

After my 4 years of service I was pretty radicalized, joined a local ISO chapter back home where I did a lot of the basic reading, but also discovered my "anarchist and syndicalist deviations". Eventually I heard that from other ISOers often enough that I looked up anarcho-syndicalism and after a bit of study said, "oh yeah, this is me." That was 35 years ago and I stay true to those basic views and values to this day. I have no hard feelings toward the Trots and ISO, they helped me find my way "home" politically so to speak, and Marx was an absolute genius in his critique of capitalism, which I try to use myself on most occasions, so I guess you could put me among those "Marxist anarchists."

[Buzzard]

I had a teacher in my junior year of high school who was sort of a hippie activist and he pointed me towards some new direction of thought, me being vaguely liberal at the time, even though what he gave me wasnt the best it lead me out of the hopeless reformist mindset I had, once I was set on this path I simply continued reading various political things till I came across some marxist/anarchist books that put me where I am now.

[TooManyQuestions]

Verbal warning for prejudiced language.

I notice you're fairly new to the board, but please try to avoid words like "pussy" in future. It's a sexist insult.


Could you recommend a substitute?

[Quail]

Could you recommend a substitute?
Anything that doesn't use my anatomy to imply someone is weak or useless.

If you can't think of anything, improve (http://thesaurus.com/browse/timid?s=t) your (http://thesaurus.com/browse/ineffective?s=t) vocabulary (http://thesaurus.com/browse/useless?s=t).

Seriously, it is not that hard to describe people you don't like without comparing them to a vulva.

[cyu]

If you want a better description of the Democratic Party, they're the boxers that are paid by capitalists to pretend to put up a good fight, then take a dive and make it look like "your" side lost fair and square.

[TooManyQuestions]

Anything that doesn't use my anatomy to imply someone is weak or useless.

If you can't think of anything, improve your vocabulary.

Seriously, it is not that hard to describe people you don't like without comparing them to a vulva.

"sissy" is a homophobic slur. Wimp means "unmanly" which can be seen as a sexist / gender role thing. Coward doesn't quite imply my meaning. "Soft human being" is awkward.

It seems you can't think of anything either, else you would have suggested it.

Notice how nobody freaks out if you can a jerk a "dick?" still using gendered language that refers to body parts. I know there is a power diference involved, but is it less sexist to imply that men are boorish then it is to imply that women are weak. All language is loaded, if we have to dance around these minefields it will be very hard to say anything.

Isn't it more important to judge a meaning than the words that are used? Words are important, meanings are more important. A person can say something incredibly racist or sexist without using 'forbidden" words

[Quail]

World English Dictionary
pussy 1 (ˈpʊsɪ) — n , pl pussies 1. an informal name for a cat (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cat) puss , Also called: pussycat 2. a furry catkin, esp that of the pussy willow 3. a rare word for tipcat (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/tipcat) 4. taboo , slang the female pudenda 5. taboo , slang a woman considered as a sexual object 6. taboo , slang chiefly ( US ) an ineffectual or timid person usage Though possibly not quite as taboo for most people as the c… word, many still consider this item out of bounds in normal conversation and writing

From http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pussy. (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pussy). Emphasis added.

The problem with words like "pussy" is that they reinforce the idea that women are weak. If "womanlike" is equated with being weak, timid and useless in language then those same associations are made subconsciously. For example, people using "that's so gay" to refer to something they think is bad reinforces the idea that being gay is bad.

Instead of resorting to a sexist insult, why not actually explain why you think they're ineffective/cowardly/etc? Or if you must insult them, be more creative about it.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

Verbal warning for prejudiced language.

I notice you're fairly new to the board, but please try to avoid words like "pussy" in future. It's a sexist insult.


Its the way he used the profanity that's the issue here comrade. We shouldn't be liberals and feel the need to set up politically correct terminology.

[Quail]

Its the way he used the profanity that's the issue here comrade. We shouldn't be liberals and feel the need to set up politically correct terminology.
I can't think of a context in which calling someone a pussy doesn't have sexist connotations (unless you're referring to a cat!) but I see your point.

[Ace High]

Verbal warning for prejudiced language.

I notice you're fairly new to the board, but please try to avoid words like "pussy" in future. It's a sexist insult.


I think we are all very against sexism, and I hope I don't get myself banned saying this, but I think you are reading waaay too much into that. Political correctness is becoming absurd to the point of censorship over very trivial phrases that mean no harm.

Again, this is just constructive criticism, I know you're the mod and I'm not, so please don't ban me. :lol:

[Ele'ill]

I think we are all very against sexism, and I hope I don't get myself banned saying this, but I think you are reading waaay too much into that. Political correctness is becoming absurd to the point of censorship over very trivial phrases that mean no harm. Again, this is just constructive criticism, I know you're the mod and I'm not, so please don't ban me. :lol:

or, just don't use the words

[Ace High]

or, just don't use the words

Why? What's the point in getting offended so easily? That's no way to live life is it? They're just words. I find it ridiculous the amount of offense people take over simple words. But I don't want to derail this thread, so I'm done.

[Quail]

Why? What's the point in getting offended so easily? That's no way to live life is it? They're just words. I find it ridiculous the amount of offense people take over simple words. But I don't want to derail this thread, so I'm done.
It's not the words themselves, it's the context. If you think a word might be construed as sexist/racist/etc just pick another one. It's not hard and it's just having basic respect for other people. I don't understand why some people find this concept so hard to get through their skull.

[Ace High]

It's not the words themselves, it's the context. If you think a word might be construed as sexist/racist/etc just pick another one. It's not hard and it's just having basic respect for other people. I don't understand why some people find this concept so hard to get through their skull.

Ok, ok, fair enough. If people truly find them offensive, I completely respect that, and I would never advocate trying to offend someone (I mean unless that person is a racist/sexist/homophobic scumbag themselves).

My point though, was that I guess I didn't see it used in a sexist context. More like a very casual slang context. Also, the particular word "pussy" was never meant to refer to a woman's vagina. That IS sexist to refer to a woman's reproductive organs as such. When I think of that word, I do not relate it to that. I relate it to an empty word with an empty meaning of "weak". BUT I do see where you're coming from as well.

Sorry for the huge speech, I just wanted to make sure you knew where I was coming from and why I thought that way is all :)

[BIXX]

"sissy" is a homophobic slur. Wimp means "unmanly" which can be seen as a sexist / gender role thing. Coward doesn't quite imply my meaning. "Soft human being" is awkward.

It seems you can't think of anything either, else you would have suggested it.

Notice how nobody freaks out if you can a jerk a "dick?" still using gendered language that refers to body parts. I know there is a power diference involved, but is it less sexist to imply that men are boorish then it is to imply that women are weak. All language is loaded, if we have to dance around these minefields it will be very hard to say anything.

Isn't it more important to judge a meaning than the words that are used? Words are important, meanings are more important. A person can say something incredibly racist or sexist without using 'forbidden" words

To the bold: duh.

To everything else: calling someone a dick isn't comparable to calling someone a "pussy". That's like saying calling someone a cracker (a term derived from the sound if the cracking of whips) is comparable to calling someone a nigger (if usage of the word is unacceptable in this case, feel free to edit it out. I just figured saying "n-word" sounds patronizing and it is just a way white people found a way to say it and get away with it).

In other words, comparing the two is at best ignorant, at worst, dickish and reactionary.

There's just some shit you don't say.

[Rocky Rococo]

White plantation laborers, and overseers in particular, were drawn from the large pools of Scottish and Scots-Irish run off their lands in the 18th century by the "Clearances" made necessary by the sheepwalks. In the Scots of that period, to speak was to "crack"; the main surviving example of that language usage is in our term "wisecrack". What this meant in practice is that Scots and Scots-Irish began to be called "crackers". The whip sound connection was karma, or serendipity, or synchronicity, something of that sort. They were "crackers" because they spoke Scots.

[cyu]

There's also the practical matter of being a successful propagandist. If you are using terms that alienate various sections of your target audience, then you will be a less successful propagandist compared to those that do not alienate their audience.

Then again, I have no problem alienating capitalists - who knows if that's the optimal strategy, but considering the amont of power they have in proportion to their numbers, who are they to demand equal treatment.

[LovingEmbrace]

rave and sex.

mostly sex.

you see. it was 1995.

i had hitchiked to a medium-sized city. i befriended some guys who handed out drugs. then i went to a rave party three nights later. met a girl. we danced. and danced. she had dreads and glasses and a vegan t-shirt. i kissed her neck. she kissed me. we went out. had sex in her mom's apartment all night.

then the next day, she was prepping for a demo against the skinheads. so i joined her. the demo went into a fistfight, and then we ran away from the nazis. i could taste blood. it was amazing! so i joined up with the AFA!

[d3crypt]

Well i was a radical social democrat for a long time. Then i finally read the communist manifesto and changed my mind. Also i listened to a lot of bands like The dead kennedys and rage against the machine that helped steer me towards communism.

[BIXX]

I was pappersprayed by the police when I was working for a union that I later rejected.

[Zukunftsmusik]

A friend in high school (13-16 yrs) with parents from Turkish Kurdistan and links with more or less radical elements in Turkey (not really sure about this). I was a left social democrat with a humanist heart at the time, and used a Palestina scarf. One day someone asked me why I used it, and I answered that it was in solidarity with the palestinian people, and this guy heard it and said he was surprised, and thus started our friendship. He introduced me to some ideas and we discussed a bit. Sadly, we're not close friends anymore, we only keep brief contact.

That was the beginning, but there've been some years since that. Learning about Karl Marx/worker's movement in school inspired me to read on my own when I was older. Embarassing as it may be, RevLeft has been important too.

[argeiphontes]

Well, I hate to admit it but in high school I started a Young Republicans club. Don't kill me yet, there's hope--but at the time I bought into all the usual BS you're indoctrinated with in schools, like *ism is just a utopian dream based on an appeal to altruism, etc.

At a library book sale I picked up a copy of an anthology called "The Capitalist System" (Edwards, Reich, Weisskopf, 1986) and that got me started toward dedoctrination. In college I met people who were in the ISO and started doing my own reading and eventually joined the organization for a while. (I eventually realized I have more of an anarcho-syndicalist/libertarian socialist bent.)

I also heard about Noam Chomsky and saw a screening of "I Am Cuba" (this was in Madison, WI of course :grin:) which led me to read some speeches of Che Guevara, who I still love. In the meantime, I was also learning what real life was like and realizing that everything you're fed in school is just propaganda. That it's really capitalism that promises things it can't deliver and is based on an unrealistic incentive system.

At one time, I wanted to go into sociology or philosophy so I could be a professional Marxist. (Un)fortunately I ended up in IT. Maybe someday I'll start that worker cooperative... :grin:

Good times, good times...
Peace.

[fahadsul3man]

our history textbooks always demonized the eastern bloc history , until my late teens i disliked communism but in early twenties i started studying the actual teachings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin , i became totally attracted by this ideology of taking care of the poor and needy , stopping the corporate theft of nation's resources and stopping the capitalists exploiting the proletarians too bad communist movement was totally crushed in the 60s here but i believe we were better off on the path of socialism .

[DOOM]

Since I'm a child, i have this obsession for justice. I never believed in racial differences and nationalism (even though I'm from the balkans).
At the age of 8 my father told me how my grandpa fought the Nazis in the 2. WW and how the life in Tito's Yugoslavia was. Years later I started to read some stuff about communism. The only problem i had with the real socialism, was the lack of personal freedom. That's when I started to read about anarchism. I decided, that this was the real thing for me..and yeah that's my story :)

[Dr. Jay II]

Seriously, until now, I was kind of scared of communism. There's a big stigma against it. I did'nt questionned the "Communism kills" "communism makes you poor and invisible". And then, instead of reading capitalist propaganda, I start reading about genuine leftist. I totally saw myself in that. When I read quotes of famous leftists, most of the time, I totally agree and I find myself quite stupid to deny my ideas.

Now, I know that the world that I want is communist. Still, I'm learning. And I'm only on the internet. The knowledge that I hold is poor, so I won't make too much assumptions !

[Flying Purple People Eater]

"communism makes you poor and invisible".

It's hilarious because this is exactly what describes the capitalist production process.

[StringsofG]

Studied alot of capitalist ideology, got sick of the word profit. Who was profiting, it sure was not me. Have a job that pays good, but the money isn't what I want. It is the recognition and respect for the effort I put forth. Picked up a copy of the Coming Insurrection, it sparked a fire in me. A few weeks later I read the Manifesto and that was it.

[3OPNCA]

I have always been quite interested in this type of stuff, and, when my English teacher noticed (he's a hard-core anarchist), he really got me thinking deeper. Plus, my Dad's side of the family are all Communists.

[Comrade Dracula]

Alright, you're all gonna laugh, but eh. That's kinda the point.

It was a cellphone message. Though, to be fair, RevLeft too played a part.

See, I was but a whelp, and it was some celebration or another - probably of religious nature. The point is, my dad was home, relaxing by watching TV or whatnot and suddenly his cell phone, an old Motorola rang (it was rather small and round thing, if I recall correctly, and it had this odd green-and-black screen, 'cause white was too high tech for it or something).
He read the message, left the phone and for some reason left the room. I was curious as to the contents of the message (see, at the age I had no conception of this thing called "privacy"), so I grabbed to phone and read it.

The message was rather unremarkable (it was some colleague of his congratulating him, as is the tradition here), but there was one part that caught my eye. In the message, he called him a "commie" (or in my native tongue, "komunjara"; retrospectively looking, he was probably pointing out the irony of a communist celebrating some religious festival). I didn't know what that word meant, and so curiosity sparked within me.
When he returned, I asked him what "commie" meant. He answered that it was short for communist, and I probably inquired further, but my memory fails me on that point.

What followed that, I remember quite clearly. Being an impressionable youth who thought his father was pretty much the most awesome human being alive, I decided to imitate him and proclaimed myself a communist.

It was mostly a sentimental thing (since I hadn't the foggiest idea what a communist actually was), and my "politics" were horrible to the power of eleventh (essentially an ultranationalist with a fetish for former Yugoslavia, as well as its leader, Tito - something inspired by my family's voting choices as well as their nostalgia for "the good old days"). Slowly but steadily, my fetish extended to the former Soviet Union and I evolved from a pure reactionary to a reactionary of the tankie sort.

However, my interest in the politics was always of the mild and uninformed sort, so it wasn't until I stumbled upon RevLeft two years ago that they started to develop in a more proper fashion.

Slowly. Oh ever so slowly.

I guess the moral of the whole tale is that you guys are kind of awesome. I also wager that I should thank you all for it. So... Thanks?

[helot]

This thread is really interesting especially the amount of people that started their political journey as a child.

Not me. No, growing up my only concerns were having fun. As a teenager my only concerns were sex and partying. It was entering the workforce at 18 that started my awakening. The first job i had (ununionised callcentre) after a while management were trying to get us all to do unpaid overtime, to stay longer and to take shorter breaks (all unpaid ofc) claiming that it's busy... It was always busy. I wasn't having it. I hated working there. Thankfully, i had a good relationship with my colleagues and so we started complaining about it to each other out of management's earshot. None of us were happy with it so we decided to all refuse. Management were taken a back, probably never having faced anyone saying no to them before, they decided to let it go. For the remainder i was working there they didn't try anything like that again.

The next job i had, another callcentre, it was going fine until they started underpaying us. With the previous job still fresh in my memory It was at this point i started to realise that it's not going to be an isolated incident. So ended up doing the same thing again, chatting with my colleagues about it and we decided that one of us would go speak to management. It wasn't me. Management told them that they'd have it sorted out by Friday. Come Friday it still wasn't sorted so we all decided to leave our desks and all crowd around the manager demanding they sort it out and we threatened walking out if they didnt. Then they decided to pay us the outstanding amount that very same day.

It was on realising that my life's probably going to be filled with shit like this that i started researching information on previous disputes, trying to gain some ideas to more effectively defend myself and i stumbled across anarcho-syndicalism and i was intrigued. After learning more about anarchism and communism i couldn't fool myself anymore and ended up realising the necessity to abolish class society.

[RedBen]

This thread is really interesting especially the amount of people that started their political journey as a child.

Not me. No, growing up my only concerns were having fun. As a teenager my only concerns were sex and partying. It was entering the workforce at 18 that started my awakening. The first job i had (ununionised callcentre) after a while management were trying to get us all to do unpaid overtime, to stay longer and to take shorter breaks (all unpaid ofc) claiming that it's busy... It was always busy. I wasn't having it. I hated working there. Thankfully, i had a good relationship with my colleagues and so we started complaining about it to each other out of management's earshot. None of us were happy with it so we decided to all refuse. Management were taken a back, probably never having faced anyone saying no to them before, they decided to let it go. For the remainder i was working there they didn't try anything like that again.

The next job i had, another callcentre, it was going fine until they started underpaying us. With the previous job still fresh in my memory It was at this point i started to realise that it's not going to be an isolated incident. So ended up doing the same thing again, chatting with my colleagues about it and we decided that one of us would go speak to management. It wasn't me. Management told them that they'd have it sorted out by Friday. Come Friday it still wasn't sorted so we all decided to leave our desks and all crowd around the manager demanding they sort it out and we threatened walking out if they didnt. Then they decided to pay us the outstanding amount that very same day.

It was on realising that my life's probably going to be filled with shit like this that i started researching information on previous disputes, trying to gain some ideas to more effectively defend myself and i stumbled across anarcho-syndicalism and i was intrigued. After learning more about anarchism and communism i couldn't fool myself anymore and ended up realising the necessity to abolish class society.
i had some troubles working at target, trying to start a union and speaking out against unfair and illegal practices. this was part of my journey also. i was a liberal back then...

[the debater]

I recall the first piece of socialist or communist literature I came across was "How to Succeed At Globalization". It was a political graphic novel, and pretty cool. I also liked the fact that the book came across as being fair and balanced, and it made a lot of sense to me. The author was a Hispanic political cartoonist, so as a non-Hispanic American, I was only able to read the english translation. Likewise, when I was in my freshman year of high school, I had a teacher who taught us about the Gilded Age, and its atrocities. It was around this time and due to these two major experiences that I started having doubts about capitalism, and that was the beginning of my journey, if you want to call it that.

[drunken-radicalism]

I got into politics pretty young. Everyone I went to school with was unbearably racist/ sexist, and while I was young I didn't know anything about politics but I knew i didn't want to be like them.
In the seventh grade my older brother introduced me to immortal technique, and I loved it, though had no idea of how to make sense of it. Shortly after that he was nearly beaten to death by the police at protest against the Iraq war. Around the same time I started listening Mumia abu jamal's prison radio recording and it helped open my eyes to so many different ideas. After that I knew that any system that could produce imperialism, and racism, and virtually every other problem i could think of had to be destroyed.
Throughout high school i was all over the place politically. I started out as a stalinist, and basically tried to be a cheer leader for virtually anyone who claimed to be against capitalism. By sophomore year I gave up on that because there was too many things that i simply couldn't reconcile. For the next year and a half I went through a really ultra left phase. I was really angry all the time, and felt completely hopeless and isolated because I had no way of acting or changing anything.
Part of the way through junior year one of my friends joined SO, and introduced me to trotskyism, and it game me the answers I was looking for. After reading a few basic trotskyist books, some more history, and some of SO's literature, I jumped at the chance to do some real organizing.

[Maximus]

Well I grew up with my dad constantly talking up the Republican Party and going to a throughly conservative Lutheran private school so I naturally started life as a conservative so it is somewhat of a minor miracle that I came to believe what I do. But once my parents got divorced and my dad lost his business (I hated the man and lived with my mom which started my antipathy towards the Republicans) I was drawn to radical politics. Having no guidance but that which was given to me by my conservative private school I tended towards fascism.

After a few years in the wilderness, and with my mom taking care of me on what amounted to starvation wages, I developed a strong sense of class consciousness. I started to easily read through all the populist bullshit surrounding right-wing politics and realized that their positions would just hurt me and my family. Plus in the era of George W it wasn't too hard to see what the right was all about and I didn't like any of what I was seeing.

It took me until high school (public high school since my mom couldn't afford to send me to the extremely overpriced private school) to really get an independant mind on politics though. In order to access the internet and burn time my mom started taking me to the local public library once a week. I wondered from here to there with books and then one day stumbled up my library's only copy of the Communist Manifesto. Having read and heard a lot about it I decided to see what all the fuss was about. I was immediately engrossed in reading it. I found myself loving every word I read. I can honestly say I converted almost overnight.

I delved into looking for more information. I read Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and just about anything else I could get my hands on. I was, and still am, surprised to find all these books in a library in rural Missouri but I took what I could get.

As luck would have it, the same year I had a world history teacher who would further push me forward in my beliefs. He was probably the best teacher I ever had and he was a very vocal communist (how he kept his job I will never know). His lessons on the Industrial Revolution and its social and economic effects could persuade almost anyone that capitalism is not a good thing. When I started talking to him about politics we would go on at length on the minutiae of Marxist theory. Something about my whole relationship with him just bolstered my faith in Marxism. Ever since then I have evolved to my current position but it all began with the coincidential meeting between my public library and my favorite teacher.

[Chris]

Quite a few things. Family was important, though. Family on mother's side are petty-farmers (and back a century or so, serfs), so the views there tend towards the agrarian and traditionalist. Family on father's side are workers (lorry drivers, factory workers, welders, whalers, railway workers etc). Early on, I learned about class division and class differences (even if the distinction between workers and farmers are non-antagonistic in nature). That I grew up in an area marked very obviously by inequality (one family was obscenely wealthy, the rest struggled to get by) also made me realize early in life that Norway was not egalitarian, and certainly not socialist (as many here proclaim).

A series of family disasters I don't care to mention made me lose any faith in the social-democratic system. I tended towards fascism for a while, or rather violent ultranationalism, realising that something was deeply wrong with society, but laying the blame on the wrong groups (immigrants, intellectuals, urbanites and politicians). Eventually I realised the idiocy of it all, part in thanks to some personal experiences, as well as a history teacher in the final year of middle school, who had overt socialistic sympathies.

I decided to join a party shortly after this, and did some research on the Norwegian political parties. All the mainstream ones disgusted me for various reasons, so I checked the minor parties. The platform of the Communist Party of Norway was an eye-opener, as most of it was opinions I already had. I decided to head in for a meeting to ask some questions, and read up on Marxism, and decided to join then and there.

So, it's a mixture of family, neighbourhood, life events, a teacher and the internet.

[Goblin]

Not sure. Probably reading up on capitalism and finding out what it`s really all about.

[Lenin1986]

For me I'v always felt there was a lot of injustice in the world.A few years back a friend of mine that was a Marxist and through going to different protests and stuff with him I came into contact with the ideas of Marxism. One day i bought a biography about Che Guevara. I knew of Che but I knew nothing about him. And the book made me be more interested in Marxism so I asked my friend for advice on what to read and he gave me two books. One was the Communist Manifesto and the other was State and Revolution. And after reading them two books it was like a vale had been lifted form my eyes. And Iv been hooked ever since.

:hammersickle: :star2: :marx: :engles: :trotski: :che:

[Skyhilist]

Well, for the longest time I was a social democrat.

On facebook and other places online, I had seen various communist (and a few anarchist) posters. I thought to myself, "From what I've learned about communism, it will never work. But these people seem pretty intelligent, so why are they communists? How do they possibly envision it working?"

So basically, I Googled "communist forums"... revleft came up. I asked some questions, learned that the things I'd learned in school were mostly lies, and eventually became deprogrammed. From that point on I have been a libertarian socialist.

I'd also like to say, thank goodness I was not restricted while I was in the process of being deprogrammed of my silly social dem views. If I had been, I probably would have left this forum and never become a communist. That would be one less class conscious person in a world where us radicals have already been marginalized. That should show you how effective "restricting" people is.

[Fourth Internationalist]

I googled "communism" and liked the idea.

[bluemangroup]

For starters I started looking at the world a different way; I had always been against corporate greed and greed in general, and eventually around my second year in high school I read the Communist Manifesto.

People I met introduced me to communist politics, while in the meantime I found the Marxists Archive and the Kasama Project online.

I was also politicized by the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan. As a child growing up in Tennessee I always heard about the war, about the casualties but was far too young to truly understand the ramifications off the two wars.

As I got older I became more and more against the wars, until I became anti-war and a Marxist in my second or third year of high school.

I also was and am big on helping alleviate poverty (I'd done meal charities in low-income neighborhoods before with my folks), and currently as a college student I want to help out my community as much as possible and get involved in student activism.

[TaylorS]

The Communist Party USA.

No, seriously. I started out as your standard American liberal, then right around 2003 when the anti-war movement was in full swing I started to notice all of these various revolutionary socialists, communists and anarchists that started popping up seemingly out of nowhere.

Well, I've never been the type of person who seems something mysterious and just lets it alone. I have to find out what's going on. "Socialism: What's with that?"

So I read about Marx, and the subjects of socialism and communism and what they were, and the history of the labor movement. I was surprised about all of this history that I couldn't find in my textbooks, as if they had all been swept under the rug by someone who didn't want me to know about it.

So I went onto the computer at my school's library, and found the website for the CPUSA.



Now, I should point out that I went through a libertarian/agorist phase for a couple of years after High School (mostly because I'd gotten kind of sick of the American Left in general and its self-indulgent character in particular).

Then I got laid off from my first job and that pretty much put an end to that. :grin:

Oh gosh, This sounds EXACTLY like me, except instead of Libertarian I was a Karl Popper influenced Left-Liberal for a while.

[sixdollarchampagne]

I can honestly say that it was Lyndon Johnson, the President who escalated the US war in Vietnam, that got me into communism. I was a college student, and I was determined not to end up face down in a rice paddy, another statistic in a war with ever-diminishing support back home. So I went to a lot of antiwar rallies in DC, where I went to college, and in NYC, on April 15, 1967 (me and thousands upon thousands of others) where I encountered the SWP and the YSA. By the time of the monster antiwar rally in front of the Pentagon in October of that year, I had joined the DC branch of the YSA, and my politics were pretty much set. Most things that I have read and thought about since then, have confirmed my conviction that Trotskyism is the way to go. I remember a remark by another student at college, to the effect that Trotskyism was where it's at, and when I think about my friend's further evolution, into a conventional pro-Obama Democrat these days (he turned out like a lot of the people I knew in college – they're mostly Democrats), I am convinced that I caught him on one of his better days, back then in the sixties, when he mentioned Trotsky, and, to quote Robert Frost, "that has made all the difference."

EDIT: I should clarify that my college friends, when we were all young, were way to the left of me, and, after a while, they came to consider the mass antiwar movement of the sixties as passé and uninteresting. From 1967 on, I was a Trotskyist, working to build the antiwar movement. A number of my friends ended up in the "new communist" movement, which, I think, was Stalinist, and those folks are now Democrats. They appear to have abandoned, for whatever reason, the commitments of their youth completely. I guess they were not the first to have done so.

[Red_Banner]

In my highschool years I experimented with various political ideas.

And one day I thought "well what is the big deal with this communism thing?".

And it isn't something that happned over night.

There's alot of stuff to sift through that I still am.

Ie. "are the Trotskyistys correct, are the Titoists correct, are the Maoists correct, are the Kruschevists correct, are the Stalinists correct, are Bakuninists correct", and to what extent and how these relate to eachother.

[Ritzy Cat]

My first year of high school teacher was comparing the US to the Soviet Union. Did a little experiment that apparently symbolized that Communism = Redistribution of wealth, and that was it. Never talked about it in a positive light... So I looked into it, and for a while I knew I agreed with a lot of the socialist ideas, but I was not sure exactly where I stood.

[edwad]

it sounds pretty lame but actually v for vendetta kinda perked up my ears to the other ideologies - especially when my sister started leaning toward the anarchist movements after the movie came out and from a work of fiction she got really interested in the real movement, whereas i just strayed left toward democratic socialism and finally in the real deal of marxism. now my sister is an anarchist and im a commie. :thumbup1:

[Stalinist Speaker]

russian revolution, great patriotic war, and well the awesomeness of the soviet union:lol:

[Dennis the 'Bloody Peasant']

First became aware of the concept of socialism and communism during history lessons at school. Read up on it some more outside of school and my dad got me a couple of tapes when I expressed an interest in the subject (one with Tony Benn and a folk singer whos name I forget and an audio book of Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell). Just grew and grew from there really.

[Tolstoy]

I was a starry eyed supporter of Obama up until shortly after becoming disgruntled after spending my weekends ringing phones for the man in 2012 and still seeing the situation for the homeless keep getting worse and witnessing much warmongering, ive decided that capitalism cant be reformed. Im still agnostic about government