When I first started to become more interested in politics (when I was VERY young) I was a full-blown communist. I loved the USSR, Lenin, the imagery of the revolution. I loved Cuba, Che and Fidel. Actually thinking back, maybe it was watching those movies about Che, the one about his bike trip and the others about the revolution… but yeah. I started out thinking capitalism was straight up evil. I feel I evolved from that and realised evil and good are not real and communism isn’t about being good at all. It’s about truly understanding the system we have, and what its issues are. And what the solutions would be. Before that I went through a libertarian socialist phase (where I became anti-authoritarian 🤮) and even an individualist anarchist phase. That one wasn’t that far ago, when I was in college. And I feel it shaped me a lot to finally get Marx (more, not fully ofc) and communism. I feel Stirner and Marx would be friends. Both were edgy boys who liked to fuck shit up.

(Just because I know people will riff me on putting Stirner and Marx in the same thought, I feel this sums up how I, a former individualist/egoist feel about Stirner and Marx:

“Blumenfeld argues that Marx acquiesces and accepts for himself Stirner's orientation towards ideology but asks in a historical materialist sense: "How did it come about that people 'got' these phantasms into their heads in the first place?" So while Stirner affirms the negative, ideologically-opposed un-human (unmensch) as the concrete and actual subject, Blumenfeld argues that Marx takes this negativity as necessary but not sufficient for revolutionary change”)