ExistentialNightmare

Enjoy life and make a world for future life to enjoy.

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  • 16 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
Cake day: December 3rd, 2025
  • ExistentialNightmare@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.ml•General Discussion Thread - Juche 115, Week 5
    4·
    2 months ago

    I’ve been firmly socially progressive ever since I got ever my edgy phase when I was like 13-16 years old so when it came time to vote I was a Labour voter, originally Corbyn and then Starmer. I didn’t go deep into what these people represent or what they have done I just thought it was a fight to keep progressing and getting rid of the tories. I lacked any real political education and feel for the culture war bullshit, like many people.

    All I heard all my life about communism is it is violent and brutal and it doesn’t work and so on, I knew my country was far from perfect but I didn’t think they would lie to me my whole life in so many different ways, so in a way the naïvety kept me anti-communist.

    A few years ago I started getting really depressed and realised I had been quite depressed for a long time, it lead me to question everything, why should I live, what is this society, what type of person should I aim to be e.t.c. and while this was happening I was seeing the end of 14 years of the conservative government, I put all my hope in Labour bringing back hope and progress. Well it became clear maybe about 6 months in to Starmer’s term that these guys are not the solution. Then I started getting into the tax the rich and wealth inequality sort of crowd (AOC, Gary’s economics, JimmyTheGiant, Hasan somewhat) that pushed me to be less of a liberal and more of a demsoc, socdem type of guy and be opposed to neoliberalism and centrism.

    But crucially after that depressive episode and the existentialising that came with it, I had learned to keep an open-mind and I realised that now identifying as a socialist, I was hearing about Marx and Lenin and I just decided to hear out these communists side of the story, because what didn’t make sense was that if the USSR was everything I had been told about it, no one in their right mind would still be a communist.

    I think it might have been Hakim who did the most for me with youtube class consciousness or whatever you want to call it but I can’t remember an exact video that ‘pushed me over the edge’, so to speak. It didn’t take long for me to recognise the genius in Marxism-Leninism anyway, I then had to undo all my anti-com propaganda (that was still making me doubt if I was on the right path) and start learning the theory, science, philosophy, start applying it where I could, and here I am now, still doing that. I’ve come to really love the online culture the imagery, the music - red sun in the sky will always be a hell of a tune - and the community of course, I really want to see that kind of community IRL one day.

  • ExistentialNightmare@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.ml•So...how *do* people get convinced?
    0·
    4 months ago

    Most working class people are not at all happy with the status quo, if we can present them with answers and solutions, show them what capitalism and their government is (nationally and internationally), what their own position is within society, that can push them more and more left so to speak.

    I don’t think there is a straightforward broad strategy to make people aware like this, I think every communist needs to understand their own local people and plan in accordance to that, or in other words, the political conversion process is subjective not objective.

    For me, the failure of Labour to do really anything to change the circumstances of living in the UK made me move away from the mainstream moderate left western views. In simple terms I just recognised, this is not working. I was never gonna go to the right or the enlightened centre and so it was either political nihilism or investigate more throughly ‘this socialism stuff’.

    Once I became some Green Party, tax the rich, SocDem type of guy, I recognised I could still remain open-minded rather than merely, naïvely assume this is what is needed to fix my country.

    So I checked out anarchism and Marxism-Leninism - it’s worth mentioning I had a lot of propaganda deprogramming to do, and that is hard to push through, I think it’s a major barrier for many people who have been told all their life how supposedly evil these movements are - but here I am, now an M-L communist (I found it more logical, moral and factual than anarchism), still learning but knowing enough that I can’t see myself committing to any other political movement. I wanted the truth, I wanted a solution, I wanted hope, and I believe I have found it.