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.
I used to be a part of the “skeptic/atheist” crowd back before gamergate. Then when that sort of stuff hit, suddenly all of these “skeptics” and “rationalists” started actively raging against feminism instead of religious fundamentalists. I found this very strange at the time, as these so called “skeptics” were spouting the exact same sort of vitriol against feminists that the religious fundamentalists would. So I ended up no longer associating with that group, becoming a sort of socdem type, interacting with, though never joining a local socdem sort of party, my local representative of the party even went to the US to assist with the Bernie Sanders campaign. I was pretty comfortable in a western chauvinist faux-leftist “Free Hong Kong” kind of mindset for an embarrassingly long time, full breadtube type, thinking that the “tankies” were just authoritarian apologists who liked the aesthetic of these evil regimes. Then I actually spoke with a “tankie” and they called me out on literally every generic “million billion dead” point people make about socialist states, I listened to what they had to say, as I had never heard any of this before, I had only ever heard that Mao and Stalin were horrible and did horrible things, the idea that life expectancy increased for Chinese peasants during a civil war was a major shock to my worldview. As a fan of learning about history, I realised I had never actually examined the history of any socialist states properly, only accepting the western worldview on them, so I learned more about them, and began to actually read theory and became an ML, even tried joining local orgs, but their stance on AES is identical to the one I held before becoming an ML, so they’re just ultras unfortunately. Now I spend too much time online talking about Marxist stuff because I don’t really know anyone irl who I can discuss things with. People open to education, sure, but I don’t want to be the one doing the educating all the time, I like to learn too.