Personally, I grew up on a single parent home, where I saw my mom get destroyed by her office work. The lack of unions, no external help and general misoginy, made her get super depressed, and became an alcoholic. In my teenage years I was almost lured by the manosphere communities, but got helped by a group of close friends that were left leaning. Most of them were anarchist, so I started with that. Slowly but surely, I started to understand how sick this system is, and it made me furious, but I never found a way to show my ideas. No political party represented my ideas, and I fell deeper in the anarchist rabbit hole. Yes, I was a hardcore anarkiddie, but I bite me back. When I needed them the most, they turned their backs on me, and fell into deep depression. And in seeking psychological help, my counselor recommended me going back to my roots. So I went back to videogames, japanese culture and most importantly, read again after years The Communist Manifesto. I still don’t know how to position myself in the left, but I know that I’m a Marxist, and that I want change. Stay safe, comrades.
It was a slow process. It started when I worked as a server and was first exposed to the desperation of working people. I met people who had to work a dinner shift after spending the first 8 hours of the day sweltering at a brutal roofing job to make ends meet. People fighting over shifts because otherwise they couldn’t feed their families. Outside the restaurant I’d regularly see undocumented landscapers get chewed out and let go on the spot because the boss wasn’t happy with how the flowers looked that day. The icing on the cake was when the “owner” of the entire shopping complex showed up one day, fat and happy, worth 9 figures. It hadn’t dawned on me until that day that someone actually owned the property I worked in. After that experience I got a corporate job and was completely dumbfounded how different the working environment was. It started to sink in that something was deeply wrong.
My politics have always been heavily focused on the environment though. The real nail in the coffin has been waking up to the fact that capitalism will have us go extinct if it’s profitable to do so. I bought into the neoliberal ideal of trying to “shop green,” and that’s when the cracks started showing. I finally came to my sense and realized that I am at the mercy of whatever the markets want to produce, and most of the “green” companies are just trying to juice profits, further feeding the beast. I started reading up on energy company investment plans only to realize the energy transition under capitalism is a ruse because they will pump oil as long as it is most profitable to do so and neoliberal governments are incapable of putting forward the level of investment and market controls necessary to change that. As Luxemburg famously said: it’s “socialism or barbarism.”