My radicalization was as unremarkable as my lived experience, or lack thereof. I and my family all work for a living but we have been lucky to be reasonably comfortable. Gradually went down the leftist pipeline, first as a left-liberal, then demsoc, before I read Marx and realized that the obvious problems with society are not due to campaign finance or electoralism or individual bad actors.

So I’m in the awkward, probably common, position of being a leftist without any immediate “need” to be, outside of an awareness of the fragility of my own position. While I’m comfortable now, it would not take much to put me on the streets. This is further strengthened in interacting with leftists, befriending people who are genuinely screwed by capitalism, and hearing perspectives I have not lived.

I try hard to listen to others experiences, not to prioritize my experience above theirs which is common for Western leftists. It has been a process to hold my tongue, to realize that my initial idea of how things work is from a middle class perspective. The last few years especially have opened my eyes to significance of imperialism in propping up my Western standard of living, whereas before I was focused more exclusively on domestic exploitation.

One memory that sticks out to me is, I was reading some comment thread about like unemployment or something, and somebody wrote a comment that was something like the following:

"Republicans dream of a country where everyone is their own small business owner, but that's literally impossible to achieve because then there wouldn't be any workers. Capitalism needs workers."

Suddenly a lot of things about the economy started to make more sense. I became a socialist not long after that.

I think it was an r/politics thread, strangely enough

Realizing capitalism is fundamentally incapable of even mitigating climate change. I'd rather we not all die in the water wars.

When I discovered that communism has and does work (i.e. learning about the achievements of USSR, China, Cuba, DPRK. Never hated any of these countries, I just knew nothing about them)

Pretty much always had the same values as I do now but I was extremely captured by capitalist realism and believed only through that system could anybody escape wage slavery

The overall feeling I had as a kid that our society is inherently unfair came to an explosion when I was 13 and became friends with someone from Gaza and learned about Palestinian oppression.

Growing up in a country destroyed by neoliberal shock therapy

Childhood, being raised by a single mother

I worked at a giant News Media conglomerate in 2014-16.

I can say with absolute certainty that the Bernie ratfucking was an actual conspiracy from things I heard from producers and on air reporters off camera. They also very much enjoyed Trump for the ratings.

I then worked min wage jobs to get into a new career and meeting working class people for really the first time in my life

Many things, but here's one that's fairly unique:

I was fixing some C-level executive's email, and somehow wound up with that person's email password. Since I didn't get paid that much, I started snooping in their email to see that's up. I focus on their sent email because people usually don't pay attention to their sent box, but since people are usually replying to other people, I could still see the conversation that's happening.

And what did I find? Absolutely terrible spelling and boomer ellipses for one. Like "r u serious...that was r biggest cleint." level of misspelling. A complete cold disregard for the people who are actually doing the fucking work. So many emails of them rejecting someone asking for a raise. I also got payroll records and that pissed me off. Seeing the owner give himself a Christmas bonus that was more than double my annual salary plus my Christmas bonus pissed me off. Every C-level asshole acted like a big baby and are constantly having emotional meltdowns and temper tantrums. That really burst my bubble of capitalists somehow deserving their spot because of their genius compared to us unwashed workers who should know our place and grovel at their feet.

Can't say I ever had faith in capitalism. Started listening to anti-capitalist punk music when I was fairly young and was like "yeah that makes sense to me".

But I guess my best answer is seeing homeless people living in tents on the streets of San Francisco, probably before I even knew of the word "capitalism". I didn't know how the world worked but I knew however it worked wasn't the right way.

Before depression kicked my ass outta school, I was an ecology major

Not being able to hold down a job because of mental illness and depression but not being able to get any kind of assistance because I didn't have a medical history or a doctor to confirm I had any problems but not being able to see any doctors because I couldn't afford one since I could hardly hold down a job. Having to pick between being homeless or having to live in abusive situations and was constantly having suicidal thoughts. Covid was the best thing that ever happened to me because that two grand got me a shitty car and I milked the rent relief they had in my state for as long as I could until I found a job that doesn't immediately make me want to die. Also I'm pathetically allergic to work and I hate nap times.

When I realized how expensive a medical emergency would be while I was working an unpaid internship.

The answer is naturally "lots of little things", but I would like to mention in particular:

• Norwegian e-waste in Agbogbloshie, and other failings relating to the global south and the environment
• The shutdown of Google+ and other grievances with Silicon Valley
• The Christchurch mosque shootings and their context and response
• COVID-19, what made it worse, and its potential for societal change
• Being trans and autistic, having an autistic brother, and a widowed immigrant mother
• My dad's death itself
• The faltering of our support network in Norway, the health system etc of Minnesota
• The state of Leech Lake reservation
• The fall of Norwegian culture in Minnesota

Not all of these were necessarily major factors, but some of these I think are more unique grievances.

I have faith the damn thing is writing it's own slow gradual ending and I'm gonna do my best to make it work double time.

Doctor Stone says: Der Antz colony is run by all der Antz not just the queen.

O'Bummer's drone strike on al-Awlaki was the last individual straw. "But how could hope and change guy murder and american citizen without trial!?." I knew about all sorts of bad shit Murica did but i bought Obama's propaganda line and though he'd be different from bush and turn things around and blah blah blah blah.

Ironically, I got radicalised by a book written by a Milquetoast centrist, Capital In The 21st Century.

It's essentially a capitalist thinking through the fundamental implications of capitalism, especially that the market demands that the rate of return must be higher than the rate off growth. Piketty goes through the history of the 20th century and how the post-war boom came about, and how it's equality was dismantled in the eighties in order to fuel greater returns.

Then he comes up with his policy recommendations, and it's.... a wealth tax. Which you know, I'm not opposed to, but the idea that's going to have the same sort of impact as the creation of the welfare state and WW2 is insane. Never mind that there's nothing in place to prevent the rise of austerity again. At that point I knew the only way to proceed was to dismantle the capital class in it's entirety.

Not the final straw, but the first thing that shook me out of “capitalism is great and leads to the best outcomes thinking”… in the span of a couple weeks, I took a flight on Frontier Airlines and a train ride on Amtrak.

If you’re not familiar with Frontier… it’s one of the airlines that has “cheap” tickets but they get you on a lot of small charges. Flight was miserable, mainly because the flight attendants were kinda pushy about selling beverages and snacks. And more than once, they got on the PA and you were forced to listen to their sales pitch for the Frontier credit card. All around miserable experience.

Then shortly after I took my first trip on Amtrak - the US’ government supported train network. People always shit on it but it was actually kinda nice. Affordable ticket, comfortable easy to get on/off compared to flying. There wasn’t a bunch of ads plastered inside the cabin. Overall a very nice experience.

It seems small but up to then I had a firm belief that the private sector always did things better than the public sector. Losing that helped shake other things loose later on.

Moving back to France and seeing hundreds of homeless people, everywhere, all the time. Yellow vest protests crushed by the militarized police, essentially ignoring and suppressing poor people. Retirement reforms protests also crushed and bypassed by the state using 49.3 protocol to force the reform into law. Those protests getting ridiculed and activists patronized by french mainstream media, most of em owned by 10 billionaires who are all friends.

I'm not sure I ever had faith in capitalism. There's just some shameless and obvious wrongness about it, like watching the Disney dog skinning movie and believing Cruella de Vil is the protagonist. It's always felt like thinly veiled post-hoc justifications/cover ups for might makes right, victim blaming, kleptomania, etc.. Lot's of mental gymnastics for "it's in my hands, therefor should be mine" and "there's nothing wrong, you shouldn't do anything to fix society". It's like having faith Santa Claus is real, past the age of children, you just have to be gullible or benefiting from others being gullible to believe this.

Although in debates most people argue like they have this weird idea that capitalism means personal freedoms like the right to flea markets, as opposed to the ideology that justifies the authoritarian control of society's capital concentrated into the hands of the capitalist class.

I just had a very strong sense of justice from an early age and always felt things were wrong. I was a communist in high school, and when I met a girl and started working I was sort of catapulted into the lib-o-sphere by my need to make money, fast. I was surrounded by successful people and felt finance / investment banking could be my path to a better life. I even joined the Lib Dems for a time in 2016 or so and bought into some of the hysteria against Corbyn (ie that they were unelectable because reasons) . Mostly it was the people I was around, but I think I was also suffering indoctrination from neoliberal economics courses that I was studying.

When Trump got elected, I bought into the hysteria about Russia, and even turned on Julian Assange who I had written essays on for my A-Levels. About the same time I learned a former friend of mine had become a red hat "contraversial" MAGA / PUA guy themselves. Anyway, with Trump's election, I automatically knew my own country was going to vote to leave the EU, in a vote which I viewed as a good proxy for how stupid and racist somebody was. This came to pass, and I was increasingly drawn to new online communities on reddit. To begin with, this was things like The Mueller, and as stuff progressed and my own gammon-pilled countrymen voted for the third time in ten years for the shittest political party on planet earth to ruin things even further, I spent a lot of time on r/ChapoTrapHouse, r/GenZedong and r/GreenAndPleasant (and when this got infested with libs, r/GreenAndExtreme).

By this time, I had come back into the fold, but I think the tipping point was when we elected Boris Johnson prime minister and Corbyn was ousted as leader of the labour party. I feel like this is when anti-semitism really started getting wielded as a mallet against the left. Then when Bernie got snubbed in the US elections, and a senile Biden got put in his place, I really started to think what the fuck, how can things be this bad.

After writing all this, I realise the question I have answered is when did I give up on electoralism. I gave up on capitalism when I was forced to pay rent to increasingly shitty landlords for ten years straight in an economy that had been in the shitty for my entire adult life and was clearly never ever going to get any better, in a country where I had never received a pay rise, despite increased costs every single year, with shitty public services that become shitter every year. Seriously, in 2010, a graduate salary was £23k, and today in 2024, the graduates I know are still paid £23k to begin with. It is completely fucked.

Now I know better, and I feel it is a massive shame that I ever got off track, having gotten everything right already when I was a kid.

Probably it was realizing democracy and capitalism are incompatible. The essential needs of a majority (food, healthcare, shelter) being ignored by political representatives that were bought off by an organized minority of capital holders was where I broke from liberalism. From then on I wanted democracy to being in the workplace to prevent the accumulation of power in the hands of the few. It's a bit of a generalization but, it was a point where I really departed from liberal political thought.

Working. That's what made it clear it was all bullshit. It took getting into the Sanders campaign and seeing the rat fucking to bring me to though.

Started reading State and Revolution the day after Super Tuesday 2020

finding out about people getting arrested for feeding the homeless

Being a dipshit libertarian like 18 years ago and then imagining the end game of libertarianism and, every time, it came back to becoming everything I was supposed to fear Socialism would bring.

Bonus thinking about the fear of automation and realizing at it’s foundation it wasn’t fear of technology it was fear of capitalism that couldn’t be articulated due to being the most propagandized people on earth.

Old enough to see everything generally getting shittier. Maybe it's an age thing, but post 9-11 everything just keeps getting shittier. I realize now it's by design, to enrich the few.

I think it was having a genuine joy making things and doing engineering, then getting a degree in it and realizing it would slowly make me hate what I thought I enjoyed.

Honestly, it was probably having to search for jobs and hearing all the advice about "networking" and all that bullshit about "hidden jobs" and how most people don't get jobs through open job postings. To me, that was the sign of a system that didn't work and the proposed solution was for everyone to do neoliberal "self improvement" and utilitarian social relationships instead.

That and realizing how much of our supposedly great social democratic safety net was being gradually destroyed and the succdems were all in on it. reasons, I know.

As a child of a single mother but in an affluent area I have friends from both ends of the economic spectrum, I’ve gone on to see some of the wealthy failsons go on to have high paying careers and some of the much smarter harder working lower class friends suffer to make ends meet. This ain’t a meritocracy and some of the most deserving and hardest working get the least. That can’t be right.

Honestly? The internet. Watching capitalism devour the internet allowed me to see it happen in real time instead of reading about it in a book. It happened so fast I was able to track the changes instead of the "frog boiling" speed things usually take.

thinking about the contradictions as a libertarianish person and going into a recursive loop like an android

Lots of little things.

Trying and failing to explain how the capitalist class would become the first ruling class in history to willing give up their ruling class status to the workers

Being in the public school system. The high school I was a student in was blatantly nepotistic and only really invested their resources and staff in assisting the students with rich families while caring little about poorer students. My family couldn't afford higher education (which is virtually a requirement for getting any sort of well-paid job in my country), so me and other poor students had no real reason to be motivated. Eventually, after defending myself from harassment from a rich student I was essentially expelled from school and targeted by police, while the rich student only got a slap on the wrist. This experience made me question everything I knew about capitalism until I recognized that this system doesn't care about people like me and left me behind, leading me to socialism and never looking back.

The final breaking point for me was probably 2020+ growing up in this age we live in.

Knowing that, even with all this information at our disposal about the atrocities happening 24/7, fucking nothing is going to change. We don’t even try to fix anything

But I guess what’s really sent me over the edge lately is being hyper aware of my position in corporate America and how I’m getting paid to do something which provides 0 value to anyone whatsoever. It’s almost gotten to a point where I cannot morally accept what I’m getting paid because the people doing 10x as much work as me are struggling to feed their families or even affording a place to live. It’s a source of anxiety, stress, and guilt that I cannot put into words.

Learning that colonialism is caused by capitalism

Grew up in a pretty standard rightwing house.

Got primed to leftism by losing at least 1 (you could argue 3 or 4 of them) family member to the American healthcare system/insurance. Had others suffer from poor care, high bills, the stupidest doctors, and/or not being able to pick the best options because of high bills. Family functionally shook itself apart over healthcare stress.

Eventually played frickin Victoria 2, which taught me some basic political literacy. IE: Liberals are more with what I identified with at the time, not "conservative". Also started realizing that socialists were the good guys. From there, it was a slow road to now, where I believe Stalin shouldn't have stopped at Berlin. Mostly a lot of little things, becoming more and more dissatisfied with liberals being unable/unwilling to enact any of their stated goals, agreeing more with socialist politics, being blamed for 2016 despite voting for Hilldog in a swing state (that she still lost), etc.

Watching what it did to my parents was enough. They also never bothered to instill much pro capitalist propaganda in me either their stance was generally always "work bare minimum, never trust your boss, businesses don't care about you, join a union"

Weird how they became boomer fascists later in life

Working at a factory. For the first time, I was in proximity with and working together with people who actually did the labor of building the things that keep our society going. It helped open my eyes and realize my own internal bigotry against poor, working class people. These people were not rubes, their lives were a tapestry just as sophisticated as mine. The workers got payed decently well, but they were subjected to constant, slavish overtime requirements, and bizarre out-of-touch mandates from middle management who didn't seem to know what actually happened in the business they were nominally running. The factory was part of a business who was a subsidiary of a fortune 500 company, and they made absolute bank year over year... but none of that ever alleviated the sense of panic and impending doom that constantly permeated the factory. This was only a few years after 2008, and so most people there remembered the Bad Times, and so seemed eager to engage in hamster wheel of unending commodity production and capital growth. I have a lot of mixed feeling from that time, as I genuinely really felt exhilarated by the work of industrial production (and still do), but couldn't get over the aura of bad vibes that hung over the place. It was only after reading and watching more socialist content that I began to learn the words and concepts to describe what I experienced.

When I was 9 both my parents lost their jobs. When the car got repoed my dad had to explain that we would likely lose our home soon.

Going hungry as a child and having no reasonable answer to me asking "why"

Figured out labor theory of value when I got my first paycheck for my first job on high school. Was leaning pretty hard that way before.

Climate change watching since 2013 and then the Chapo boys in 2020, really. Matt's endless Cushvlog ravings turned me around good.