Hello everyone

[Nevs]

What's up RevLeft, it's really good to meet you guys. I'm 22 years old, American, working class, and the political climate of my country throughout the last 2 or 3 years has caused me to become very disillusioned. Disillusioned with the government, with law enforcement, and especially corporations and special interest groups that have hijacked American democracy with their lobbying and bribery.

I was one of the millions of young people who embraced the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, as I felt he spoke honestly about these issues and offered solutions that, for the most part, made sense to me. He branded himself a Democratic Socialist, something I later learned isn't quite true, but it caused me to look in to the ideology of Socialism and not long in to my looking did I discover the works of Karl Marx.

I had learned about Marx in school briefly, that he was an influential philosopher who outlined the evils of Capitalism and called for international revolution to bring about Communism. I had learned that his ideas were utopian, and that in reality, human nature made his vision of Communism impossible. I accepted this for most of my life, and was basically a Liberal. Now, a couple years later, I had rediscovered Marxism and took my first real look.

I now understand Marxism as an analysis of history, a sociological philosophy. I read The Communist Manifesto and plan on trying my hand at Das Kapital. I read about Marx's life and ideas, and feel as though I now have names for and a slightly better understanding of things I've known my whole life -- class struggle. I live in an urban region of my country and I realized that I have watched the industrial Capitalism Marx wrote about with my own eyes, and seethed with anger at the exploitation of the Proletariat. The Marxist outlook has clicked in my mind.

So now I'm still reading, still learning. I've never read so much in my life actually. I have accepted Marxism as an analysis of socio-economic history but I have little to say about what I think should replace Capitalism. I'm just not sure, and won't pretend I am. My mind is completely open on that front, I'm just reading about the Marxist revolutionaries of history and trying to separate truth and falsehood about their lives and ideas, forming my own opinions along the way.

This brings me here, to RevLeft. I found you guys in my nightly scouring of the Internet for some revolutionary reading material, and I'm hoping jumping in to some discussions and asking some questions here will help further my journey as I delve in to Marxism. All I know is I'm fed up with social and economic injustice, and I'm going to keep building my knowledge. Thanks for reading and I look forward to talking with you soon.

[Blake's Baby]

Welcome to RevLeft, I hope you find what you're looking for.

I'm really glad you're at least claiming to be approaching this in a spirit of trying to learn, instead of deciding that some important historical figure (Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, or whoever else) has all the answers; or alternatively just asking us to put a label on an eclectic shopping-list of political positions.

And if you don't know what comes after, you're in good company, Marx didn't know either. That's up to us all to create collectively when we get round to overthrowing capitalism.