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How I Got Radicalized (a thread).
I was raised in the imperial core by working-class far-right racist evangelical cryptofascists. My dad never went to high school. My pastor was a Christian-identity racist. I'm white.
In my 20s I was basically proto-TPUSA. This was mostly
I was raised in the imperial core by working-class far-right racist evangelical cryptofascists. My dad never went to high school. My pastor was a Christian-identity racist. I'm white.
In my 20s I was basically proto-TPUSA. This was mostly
because (a) I was deeply ignorant and (b) I needed to justify my deep hatred of the dumbest aspects of what I thought was "the left", i.e. liberals. Thanks to propaganda (Orwell, Solzhenitsyn etc.) I knew nothing about communism other than that it was idiotic, evil, etc.
Importantly, my knowledge of Marxism was exactly what the empire wanted it to be: learned in undergrad through postmodernist academics in the English department where it was just cultural studies gobbledygook and not the fundamental key to understanding human existence.
I was poor. I got into law school. Suddenly I was faced with the possibility of not being poor. I quickly became a liberal. Mostly I just wanted to feel like a good person and look down on rightwingers. Like most liberals.
The more I learned about how capitalist society works--
The more I learned about how capitalist society works--
both in law school and then as a corporate litigation lawyer earning a lot of money--the more I realized that capitalism is based on legalized fraud and depredation by the worst people on earth. It was also clear that the upcoming climate disaster which will kill
billions of poor thru displacement and starvation was caused by my wealthy clients whose behaviour I was enabling and they could not give less of a fuck. It was also clear the main purpose of the government was to facilitate this obscene crime against all living things.
Still, better lib than con, and those are the only options, right? I became a radlib. The 2016 election was a huge shock. Since I used to be a conservative, I knew what most liberals don't which is that they are way, way more despicable, racist and evil than radlibs in NYC
ever imagine. I was in despair. I read more about the climate crisis and realized that the liberal approach was 100% guaranteed to fail. The Green Party approach too, i.e. all completely 100% dedicated to preserving capitalism. They even think green capitalism is a real thing.
It's not. Anybody aware of the VW diesel scandal, or who has spent 5 minutes behind closed doors with corporate directors, will know that capitalism is racist and dedicated to destroying 99% of human life and is exploiting the climate crisis to do it even more profitably.
Around the same time, I made a connection that had eluded me because I'm dumb: there's a causal relationship between wealth and poverty and it's like a zero sum game. You can only be rich by hoarding resources that poor people need but you took from them because you're a POS.
(People don't realize that most libs/cons genuinely don't get this. They're not deep thinkers, obviously, but really, so many of them do not know *anything* about economics.)
Anyway, just as the empire intends, like most people who realize the system is fucked,
Anyway, just as the empire intends, like most people who realize the system is fucked,
I immediately got sucked in neutralized by the libertarian left: Chomsky, anarchism, Trotskyism, Orwell... the usual garbage designed to make you think there is no alternative to capitalism. Mark Fisher identifies this problem but the poor man also perpetuates it.
And then luckily some wise people pointed out that my entire "education" about communism, Stalin, and the USSR had been learned from CIA-approved books published by for-profit American and British corporations. The other shoe dropped. I read Blackshirts and Reds.
And then I actually read Marx non-academically for the first time. It was like reading The Selfish Gene and understanding the world for the 1st time that Baby Jesus did not make all the animals. Suddenly the world made sense. Then Lenin. Turns out all the problems
of capitalism were very obvious 115 years ago, but nobody knows this because of capitalist propaganda. E.g. I'd assumed regulatory capture was a recent issue. Nope, it's in Lenin.
So finally, understanding that capitalism and oppression is the root of our woes (racism, poverty,
So finally, understanding that capitalism and oppression is the root of our woes (racism, poverty,
climate crisis) it became clear that communism is the *only* real enemy of capitalism. That's why it's the only ideology the capitalists suppress. Anarchism and social democracy are the tools of capital: they make sure people who otherwise might threaten capital *never will.*
Besides Lenin, "Pacifism as Pathology" by Ward Churchill was key in making me understand that non-violent protest is another capitalist lie to neuter the left. Gandhi is BS. As long as you think wearing a pussy hat is doing something, we're doomed.
Read Lenin.
Thank you.
Read Lenin.
Thank you.
I should add thanks to those whose tweets were most helpful to me and without whom a white person raised by nazi hillbillies may never have ever read Lenin, let alone Ture, Fanon, and Stalin: @andraydomise, @eshaLegal, @RodericDay, @TomFrome and @UnpaidComintern. 
