I know it's a gradual process for most people, but I assume most of you had a decisive moment of "yeah I am no longer a liberal, fuck liberals."
I'll share mine.
Occupy Wall Street. Yeah, I was idealistic enough to really believe in that movement, and more than that, in the idea that it was going somewhere, that there would be a Civil Rights Act style moment of legislative change that would make things seem (emphasis seem) sane again since post-9/11 madness. Again, like I said, liberal at that point.
Then I saw how many useless liberals nodded along to "too big to fail." I saw all the useless liberal comedians and other opinion leaders call for absolutely nothing but spectator smugness. I saw some of the key organizers sell out entirely to the suits, one in particular outright joining Google and then calling for Google's CEO to become an enlightened dictator for life of the United States.
Then I read this.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/mouthbreathing-machiavellis
I finally understood at a gut level how conveniently and easily liberals could become cryptofascists, a term that I didn't even know at the time. I started to see and understand how capitalism under pressure much prefers fascism to even a slight reduction in the rate of the rich becoming richer, no matter what. I learned that the Democratic Party, when it is not being paid opposition, really doesn't stand for anything different than the GOP at a material level except more performative inclusiveness in the corporate police state.
I stopped calling myself a liberal. You can call me a liberal especially if I have a bad take, but at least I stopped identifying with the label intentionally.
What's your story?
2020 was what made me realize communists were right about everything. Bernie was the only one who even entertained notions of fighting capital, and the Democratic Party fucking crucified him for it, instead opting to boost a faux-Native Reaganite, a racist bougie Indiana mayor, and a cop who bragged about jailing parents. All of these candidates proved to be substanceless as the nomination went to Biden, a barely-functional shambling corpse whose only promise that mattered was "fundamentally, nothing will change." All around me, liberals responded to this by gushing about how presidential he was and calling him the next FDR, while at the same time screaming that all of America's ills were the result of manipulation by the sinister Russians.
I'd been tuned into politics since the Iraq War, so I really should've learned sooner. Better late than never, I suppose.
I’d been tuned into politics since the Iraq War
Which one? :chomsky-yes-honey:
The day I learned about how Russia basically beat the Nazis and America rewarded them for the sacrifice by immediately pivoting to economic and proxy war with Russia.
I was poking around Reddit and found myself in some random right-wing subreddit where they had the compilation of all the evidence doxxing "Bike Lock Antifa" and I was like "what the fuck is an Antifa"
Turns out it was a guy who hit Nazis with a bike lock and I was like "that owns, what else are these Antifa up to" and I found the PhilosophyTube video about Antifa and then that led me to /r/anarchism which led me to the Chapo sub which taught me about Marxism, and that validated basically all of my experiences workin shit jobs to make shareholders rich.
I think Standing Rock was the breaking point. Obama was president, and it was impossible to watch this struggle and not see that for him and the entirety of the capitalist class, accumulation and concentration of private capital was more important than anything sacred or even human life itself. It was the most appalling event I had ever (briefly) witnessed with my own eyes, and I saw so little that I'm embarrassed to even talk about it.
I went from "Obama is useless" to "Obama is a tool of the ruling class" during Standing Rock. :cursed:
The experience broke a rationalist streak I didn't even know I had. I learned (again, and hopefully for the last time) that your people, your ancestors, and the earth matter a lot. You don't need to justify your values, because they can't justify their's either. They can't refute what's in your heart.
I considered myself left but really only had liberals as an example of what left was. I've always held leftest views, but I kept them mostly to myself because liberals treat you like an extremist if you dared to be left of Obama.
After Trump won I became more and more annoyed with the way liberals treated the right with kid gloves. They just came across as wanting to lose. Like Adam Curtis said (paraphrasing)- "It's like they're afraid of power. You weren't allowed to have power"
Then I discovered breadtube and later the Chapotraphouse podcast and was like "holy shit, finally, people with teeth" then I learnt that liberals weren't left and it lead me to investigate more into what leftism actually is and it was like a light went off and everything in the world finally made sense.
These days I roll my eyes at breadtube and chapo but they were a helpful stepping stone to breaking through that fog that liberalism puts up.
Really feel the "people with teeth." Listening to liberals was like punching in a dream. Seeing anyone even just a touch to the left of that was like having trained in 100 gs. It truly hit different.
I stopped calling myself a liberal around the time of the first Bernie campaign. I flirted with certain socialist ideals unknowingly before then and was more "progressive" than the bulk of the democratic party, but it wasn't until that campaign that I took up the label of socialist to describe my politics.
I stopped thinking liberalism was in any way good after a few weeks on r/cth. It took that goddamn shitposting subreddit for me to actually learn the differences between political ideologies and take a firmer stance towards socialism.
I think I stopped actually being a liberal after months within an explicitly socialist organization, specifically after I started branching into theory that we weren't covering in meetings at the time. It takes a concerted effort to work out those brainworms and I probably have a ton of them to excise still, but I'm at least committed to doing so now
I stopped thinking liberalism was in any way good after a few weeks on r/cth. It took that goddamn shitposting subreddit for me to actually learn the differences between political ideologies and take a firmer stance towards socialism.
That is why it had to be purged
This thread makes me feel very old, but it's also really nice reading people's transformational moments even, and perhaps especially, when they're recent. This is kind of long, sorry...
For me I remember Labour winning in '97. I was still living at home in a soc-dem to dem-soc household that was honestly just ecstatic that the Tory rule they'd hated, suffered under, and fought all through the 80s especially (mining strikes, CND, poll tax) was done. I remember everyone in street coming outside their houses with drinks in the middle of the night and talking excitedly about the future. Some things got better, or at least less worse, but I was also confronted by the a bunch of barely-cryptofash people in that very government using genocidal logic about immigrants and refugees, gay friends being targeted and scapegoated whenever it was convienient, and authoritarian projects like ID cards that were trialled uniquely in poor areas like my own simply as an excuse for police to hassle, send home, and arrest teenagers and kids, younger than myself, for doing nothing more than existing outside of their homes. I worked shit jobs for shit bosses and got screwed by a major business going bankrupt weeks after they'd assured us, the press, and politicians they were secure and our jobs were safe.
I still considered myself some sort of soc-dem in the way a lot of people were around me, although started reading more about anarchism.
The build up to Afghanistan and Iraq were the end of any sort of electoral or soft-left allusions I had. Even mostly relying on British mainstream media and the ability to Google things like UN reports in the library it was obvious the rationale was total bollocks. I was part of some of the biggest modern protests in history against the invasion of Iraq and it simply did not matter, even when polls showed the majority of ordinary people opposed it in wobbles between propaganda campaigns.
At one, we managed to slip out of a police kettle only to get trapped down some side streets between two police lines. All the shops had shut and there was no where to duck inside and chill so we went down an alley only to land right in another kettle with a bunch of anarchists. I was sure we weren't getting out of there until we joined the black bloc (covering our faces and still in our nice stop the war tees as best we could) and they actually fucking pushed back a police line several streets, held them at a distance, and then dispersed as we made a dash for the train station. I was like, damn, maybe Anarchists get the goods.
I started volunteering and doing a lot more local activism. There was some good mutual aid stuff in nearby cities, but most of the groups near me were socialist or even communist. So I started considering myself an Anarchist in the streets and a Communist in the (sign-up) sheets.
A lot of underemployed friends and neighbours teenage kids that had joined the military started dying abroad, one was killed by his own squad in a vaguely suspicious friendly fire incident, and at least one fucking ditched and hid on my couch before heading up to Scotland after going AWOL totally disillusioned after his first tour. But the media and political class were now fully on board either out of fear or motive and actually more ordinary people around me seemed to support it than before the invasion of Iraq.
The media was bullshit. Electorialism and ideas of democracy were simply overruled when it wasn't in line with the security state. Even enormous popular protest didn't work. And just about everyone who's lives were supposed to be getting better were getting worse, assuming they didn't go off and die in a desert somewhere for oil and family vendettas. I was fucking done and explicitly identified as an anarchist.
Over time I've read more and more theory, history, and focused as much on the type of society I would like to build instead of just tearing down the current one and I grew to consider myself a communist for a variety of reasons. I still think that when it comes to clashes in the streets or agile opposition to the current state though, that Anarchists get the goods.
The government wanted to introduce mandatory identity cards. I know lots of places in Europe have these, a bit like a passport, but the way they were being pitched and implementation was the biggest issue.
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It was deeply unpopular because since WW2 people hadn't had to carry any kind of identifying papers. It was seen as a relic of an imposing wartime measure. A feeling that was amplified by the fact that Labour's original excuse for the scene was to do with combatting terrorism post-9/11.
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They soon pivoted to the real reason, exclusion from public services and police targeting of minorities. The idea is you wouldn't be able to claim any benefits, use public services, or things like the NHS without showing your identity card. This like everything else was focused specifically on so called benefits cheats and immigrants.
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That would make it extremely difficult for so called 'illegal immigrants' (although mostly people awaiting asylum decisions, on expired student visas etc) from renting homes, using services, accessing grants, or even going to the doctor. That last one in particular angered even some anti-immigrant people as it would be the end of the NHS being free and open to all. Perhaps the deepest held and only real public institution almost everyone is proud of.
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It was also tied to the push for increased policing and Labour's ASBO (anti-social behavior order) scheme which basically allowed fines, house arrest, and other punishments without legal due process or the need to establish a crime had been committed. They also included banning orders for certain areas. They trialled both these and ID cards in mostly poor areas like mine along with increased policing. While the press pointed out lots of ridiculous uses like people being given fines for singing in the bath or issuing the penalties to historic trees as an excuse to cut them done when they were otherwise protected, the most common use was simply to ban people from being in public...
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Near us police demanded ID cards - which no one had because it was a trial and you had to pay £35+ for them out of your own pocket - combined vague non-crimes like loitering to target teenagers, kids, and homeless people in order to move them on or even ban them from certain areas (parks, near businesses etc) as a form of 'social cleansing'.
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Plus because of the terrorism and immigrarion focus it was another way to target an harass minorities especially, with cops regularly implying that anyone non-white might not be a citizen because they didn't have their papers (ID card) on them as an intimidation tactic.
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The fact that white middle class people were never going to be asked for them really, while minorities, the working class, teenagers, and the homeless were constantly targeted meant that making people pay for them was essentially a tax on the poorest / most vulnerable / least represented in society.
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I always called myself a socialist, but for most of my life I was really just some kind of dem suc that thought the government owning every business would be cool(no plan as to what happened to the business owners in this scenario, they just kinda accepted it). Then I started toying with further left ideas when Bernie looked like he had a shot, watching some breadtube and learning there was more possible than I imagined. Then Bernie got screwed over, submitted to the DNC and the racist neoliberal Joe like a dog, and I realized liberals were at best too stupid to let me and others make things better, and would be in many cases my enemies who would actively oppose my ideals. So I became a big-boy leftist, sorted my way through ideas, and settled on Marxism-Leninism, because I like winners. I like people that get things done, and Lenin got the job done.
:lenin-laugh: I consent.
:mao-wave: I consent.
:trot-shining: I don't.
Forgetting someone? :troll:
So I became a big-boy leftist, sorted my way through ideas, and settled on Marxism-Leninism, because I like winners. I like people that get things done, and Lenin got the job done.
:stuff: Are you me?
When I read theory and realized all the fucks I kept fighting with weren't just a less-left version of me I could bring to me side with a couple of great points, but rather held a distinctly capitalist ideology that I wanted nothing to do with.
Fortunately I've never identified as being a lib. Country with a socialist tradition and all that. I have certainly been lib-minded though and education cut through that (read theory).
It wasn't until occupy that I realised that a campaign to get liberals to stop identifying with the word was necessary. It was at that time I really started to learn about US politics and discovered the lack of an american left, but here I was looking at a crowd of people that absolutely should not have been calling themselves liberals but they didn't really understand why, or weren't ready for it.
Either way that's changed now. The key task is making sure the next wave of kids becomes socialist, and then the next wave. They can be soft left if they want it doesn't matter. They'll harden up into the left proper when class war thrusts itself on them.
How many more waves of kids do you think there will be until the west turns into Nazi Germany v2.0?
It took me a long ass time, I was a pretty big :LIB: circa 2006, marched against the Iraq War in 2005, was too young to march in the one in 2003 in the lead up to the war. Supported OWS, went to the one in my city.
It was honestly the Obama administration radicalized me. The way they handled the bailouts, didn't put up a fight and let all the CEOs get their bonuses while their companies went to shit, Snowden revealing that Obama was taking what the Bush administration started, and expanding it, I was looking for alternatives to explain why all this keeps happening. I still felt that maybe Bernie could turn it around in 2016. I went and voted for Hillary because I live in a swing state, but I didn't like her. On election night I didn't freak out, because she ran a shit campaign and it wasn't that surprising to me. After that I started listening to Chapo and the rest is history.
The coup in Bolivia was what pushed me over, too. I had been a socialist before then, but I was a "no, not like those bad socialist countries" guy. Bolivia showed me what lengths capitalist states were willing to go to to crush socialism and what lengths socialist states must go to to protect themselves
Occupy was a big part of my awakening as well. I was like "hey this giant movement is surely going to be reflected in the government because we have accountable representatives, right?"
....
"Right?"
The fact that I could have kept pissing into the wind until I ran out of piss was very illuminating. I'm drunk so I think this makes sense. Like they just ran out the clock on the social movement same as they did to BLM in the past few years. It was around 2009 I started to read Lenin.
Another big moment for me, and it's really silly, but it was when Obama bragged about increasing USA oil production. "That was me, people!" I had seen the photos of the tarsands and it looked like fucking Mordor, it looked like hell on earth. "That was me, people!" Imagine bragging about being the harbinger of the Death of All Things because on the smallest scale it allowed you to rhetorically "own" a handful of reactionaries, aka the worst people on earth who deserve neither time or attention. It wasn't the straw that broke the camel's back but it was definitely the straw that kept this camel from ever going back.
Then came the election of Trump and I was re-reading Lenin and yes, it was the same Deutsche-Bank in his treatise as the one that was being impugned for laundering dirty Trump money. The same fucking bank. Whoever let it survive WWII deserved to be imprisoned alongside Hess and bulldozed with the ruins.
Another moment from the past few years was when it was after a nice dinner with my parents and my dad and I started to talk about politics and I was discussing how globalism etc means local boycotts are meaningless and because of the shifted power dynamics, absent larger scale strikes, there is no 'consumerist' solution available, and if it did work in the past it no longer works. He brought up the "lettuce strike" and how it changed some things. Broke my heart. I quietly asked him when that was and he said "oh, the 1970s." Oh cool, something 50 years ago worked so I need to content myself with slowing obliteration rather than avoiding it. And both my (older gen boomer) parents wonder why I am reluctant to have kids. Dad, my dear dad, you were born in 53. Shut the fuck up. Kent State changed shit in your lifetime and a score of dead elementary children won't change a thing in mine... "Four dead in Ohio" rings really fucking hollow when you compare it to kids so mangled they had to do DNA testing to verify the tiny corpses. I'm sorry if I went bleak but it its a big part of why I became a leftist even before this shit. I was tired, so tired, three decades of being tired.
When the libs were sucking off John McCain's fresh warm corpse, juxtaposed with people like you all stunting on him and making plane crashing jokes.
That cracked the facade, and then chuds going "well obama did [horrible thing] too, did you hate it when he did it? :very-intelligent:" backfired on them and pushed me toward the left. Realized I was kinda already a socialist, but just didn't realize it because I had been successfully scared away from the label :amerikkka:
