gestures to everything

Working commisionable sales and seeing me sell $45,000 worth of camera equipment and getting a $2500 bonus for the quarter for doing it. I sold more than my yearly salary to dentists, doctors and lawyers dropping 3-5 grand on top of the line camera systems so they can take photos of pigeons from their living room.

Literally I got that cheque and was like "marx was right"

Capitalism itself, never been a huge fan.

I hadn't really considered what is to be done about capitalism until a relative had this weird bootlicker arc that sent me in the opposite direction.

He started out as a management consultant. Whatever, fresh out of college, in debt, not doing anything they couldn't get the next person in line to do, well aware of how much his clients sucked.

Decided the job sucked, went back to school for an MBA, got a proper non-travel white collar job within walking distance. Decided that sucked as well. Was actually trending based, saying ACAB and that wealth is extracted and not earned. Went back to school, studied organizational psychology.

Now he's fully internalized the programming. He's a free-floating apologist for every corporation everywhere, even if they've never paid him a dime. His opposition to universal healthcare is ostensibly for people who like their insurance company. I told him about a small workplace victory where a colleague and I just didn't fill out the scrum spreadsheet until management dropped the requirement and he acted as if I hurt him personally. I said that it sucked when Netflix cancelled a show we both liked and he stuck up for them, saying maybe it didn't fit with their branding strategy or vision.

He made me realize that I can't just be about my personal causes in a liberal framework and need to battle his class betrayal (he's still an hourly worker, just at a ridiculous rate) with class solidarity.

Well, I was raised by communists so I never believed in the miraculous power of capitalism to begin with.

That said:

Back when I was a child I happened to pick up a copy of Blood Never Dried: a People's History of the British Empire, 'bout the time they I was being taught about the British empire in school. Read it yonks ago so I can't attest for the politics of the book but, I remember reading all the vile shit Churchill oversaw and then getting in an argument with the history teacher when she tried to brush it all under the carpet 'cos he personally stopped Hitler or whatever.

The capitalist class will not just commit genocidal slaughter, they'll demand your children are taught to worship the butchers like saints.

Lots of things, but the Dems refusal to do anything about abortion, the children locked up in cages at the border, and creeping monopolies got me thinking they were almost the same as Republicans. Daylights saving time still being a thing despite everyone hating it made me wonder if the cruelty was the point, if it wasn't just the most galling indifference.

Capitalism in particular - I was working for a company that did some off shoring in Ukraine when the war broke out. I still haven't really processed all this but having coworkers doing the same shit I was while they were getting shelled was absolutely fucked.

I was one of those lucky people who took a sociology class in community college and thought socialism sounded cool as fuck. I thought the Democratic party was the closest route to achieving socialism, so I took a few years to clear out enough brain worms around the time trump was elected.

And thank God. I couldn't imagine being a pro-capitalist Democratic voter who still thinks we can buy our way out of this fucked up system.

reading about it. basically reading about the history and how it came to be, how value works, realizing that working to get money is highly exploited and those that don't work but make their money from money are screwing us all over

Gradual disillusionment with America and the gradual realization that all the countries people on the internet insisted were better had the same problems

It's a bunch of little things tbh.

One of the things is the weird conceptions the capitalist class have invented about what they call "class". I used to think my family was middle class because we had a house and my parents bought me a gameboy that one time. But they were just your average joe: my dad worked at a factory on the line, and my mum was just a low level admin at a small high school. It wasn't until I met some rich kids who's parent's literally bought them everything they wanted, their parents had massive houses and drove expensive cars, had massive yachts, until I realized the capitalist conception of "class" was a total lie, and we weren't "middle class" at all, my parents were just boomers.

Then there's the internet, me and my sister both got sucked into especially YouTube when it began popping off, and the politcal propaganda was insane. Naturally we shared the same channels etc., the same old liberal brainrot. But it wasn't until I actually watched, read and listened to those "evil" socialists the content creators were criticizing that I realized they were lying. What is interesting is she stayed in that liberal brainrot sphere, and now she's a full on anti-vax, reactionary and has taken up religion not out of genuine spiritual want, but because fascist YouTubers told her that's what she needs to do to fight against "woke".

What broke the straw for me especially is realizing that throughout history and present day, libs (hogs or libs) brazenly support fascists when workers try to revolt and demand change. Seeing libs reactions to the fascist rally at Charlottesville really opened my eyes to this. I'm especially vindicated with Ukraine and Israel right now on this point.

Then there's working ans then becoming unemployed, the system absolutely hates it when you try to get welfare. And it doesn't help that the local unemployment office workers treat you like a criminal and degrade you as you're struggling to get by. On top of that is the way I've seen extended family members talk about people on welfare as if they're all lazy, getting thousands of dollars a day (it's not even enough to cover food + rent with the highest), and all in it to exploit the system. I found it disgusting that people just say that without knowing I was on welfare at the time. It's really dehumanizing and shameful.

I got got by propaganda about imperialism. It was 56 military interventions in South America since WW2 by America. That shit broke my heart. It was after that, having had some sympathy for the cause instilled in me, funnily enough, by a guest on Destiny's stream that made me go, "okay, what's this all about?"

When I was kid I wanted to be a weird combination of Seto Kaiba/Pegasus when I grew up, so a suppose I did have a kind of "faith in capitalism", but if you asked me to define capitalism I probably would've said something like "when you do a flea market like my aunt right?"

Tho the straw also kinda broke early in my life, watching my parents watch the Iraq War on Al Jazeera sealed the deal permanently, and I put away childish things

Many smaller things, but there are some notable things in no particular order:

• Getting a job. This might require some explanation. Not only was it a trip to hell and back to get my first minimum wage job, but they would regularly overschedule me while I was in college despite us both agreeing a certain time. Not to mention retail customers that were leagues worse than my boss. Now I'm struggling to find full-time work despite having a degree, getting an internship, and "years of experience". They're just that picky and no for real reason so I have been reliant on seasonal work where I travel to different places. Don't get me wrong, I got to live in a beautiful place California in the spring and really loved it there, but I want to start my life in earnest and actually meet people.

• The climate crisis.

• California. In theory, California should be a utopia and did everything right under capitalism, and ironically 99% of its problems are boiled down to the fact that California is too successful.

• Tying into that, the cost of living. Everything is a luxury these days because "muh shareholder value"

• Rent-seeking behavior. From enshittification to car-dependency, this is the part 3 of California, which got punished for its success. Rent-seeking behavior is an example of laziness being rewarded under capitalism by making things worse in a way that makes you and some shareholders rich. If shareholders would make easy money by poisoning the food supply so nothing we eat or drink is healthy anymore, they'd do just that.

My entire life

When it stopped working for me. When it became obvious that it was the thing holding me back. I know it seems selfish but I was a lib until my early thirties.

Hearing family members in privileged positions scoff at the idea of using their position to help those less fortunate. It made me take a step back and think about why they might feel that way when I had previously assumed humans would always want to work together and support one another. It really shattered the whole "Kumbaya" aspects of my childhood as I realized capitalism encouraged profit and personal success over the welfare of the whole. It made me want to learn more about our economic system and how we could improve it. I was probably 14-15 at the time and by the time I hit college I was a full blown Marxist.

I was born this way 💅

When I was younger, just considering the nature of a system that demands hierarchy among the entire population based on a competition it all puts them in, with that hierarchy being one of deprivation for the many losers, was enough for my part. Even if you have some hustlegrinder who is more productive than anyone currently on Earth, if he is in a circumstance of competing only with equals, then they must nonetheless be arranged in brutal hierarchy where he may be at the bottom. If your supposed "meritocracy" has no interest in absolute productive ability but only ability relative to others, with the punishment being what we see on the streets in the US, then yours is clearly an economic system of needless cruelty.

There are many, much stronger critiques, but that is what I was thinking of when my mind really changed.

I would have been saved a lot of bullshit navel-gazing if someone pointed out to me when I was a teenager, idk, "the Transatlantic Slave Trade was mostly carried out by private companies" or some obvious thing like that which is kept out of the view of children who are supposedly being taught American history.

Getting a job and paying rent lol and I'm upper-middle class

when I understood it was built on violence, coercion, suffering, etc.

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”)

A political science course in community college inummerated all the ways the United States' political system was structured to benefit the rich. From there I tried to find ways to reform the system. I looked into the new deal and the transition from the gilded age to the depression to post war America. Eventually I found that without a great deal of revolutionary potential FDR would have kept on behaving like the child of wealth he was. From there I imagined the States developing a similar amount of revolutionary potential and kicking off some reform that stuck. But the more I read about the slow weakening of the new deal the more disillusioned I was that anything of that sort would stick.

In order to permanently effect change, we need to eliminate the possibility for capitalists to exist and ensure that any political power that exists in society is incentivized to help the people.

I’ve been leaning more left for a while in terms of distain for specific aspects of the capitalist system but, honestly, it was coming to the wider Lemmyverse that made me feel like there was something I could do about it. Interactions with socialists on here, seeing the memes, and actually yellow Parenti (suggested by a Hexbear), made me realize that I didn’t have to just lament into the void but that there was a lot of people who felt this way and had practical ideas for praxis. Hexbear has been great in helping me find resources (podcasts, free access to theory) and perspective from outside my personal bubble to help push me further into taking action.

If you want one thing though - student loans made me realize the banks were taking advantage of both parents’ hopes for their children and said children by promising that once they got a good job from the good degree they borrowed money for, they could just pay off the loans no problem. After 7 years, my 30k in loans was 60k that, no matter how hard I tried, I could not pay down, and I realized that it was rigged. (Luckily, the government came through and I got it forgiven with the Public Service Loan Forgiveness, but not without an epic battle with several different loan servicers.) It opened my eyes to how much power financial institutions have and how they only screw the low income people with that power. That’s when I started questioning a system that bailed those banks out, and the dominos started falling from there.