I’ll start first: at the height of reddit going absolutely mad and frothing at the mouth I heard r/genzedong mentioned a lot as this evil evil tankie place, so I checked it out. Was a bit overly china fanboy-ish for my taste back then but alright overall and leagues more civil than people on other subs. So I started lurking over there to preserve my sanity until it basically became my most frequently viewed sub. I’ve kinda warmed up to the whole idea of socialism during my stay. And then it got quarantined. I’ve heard of lemmygrad even before the quarantine, so I switched to this place instead. As of this moment, lemmygrad remains my primary source of news and entertainment where I dont have to risk running into some flavour of wehraboo.
I’ve always hold sympathies for leftist causes. It is not that I was a red diaper as they say, but I was raised by my mother to help others and be compassionate. I think it is fair to say that her interpretations of Christianity and catholisism also had an effect in that, although I’ve never been too keen on the church. Even as a kid I admired Hugo Chavez, because while I didn’t understand everything he said at the time, I knew he was talking and acting in favor of the working people in Venezuela. As an adult with class consciousness today I realize that growing up in a world where there’s no Soviet Union has been quite fucked up and feel hopeful thanks to China’s rise.
I feel I was primed to turn left in my politics since childhood and being a biologist the appreciation I gained for life in the planet was also a huge influence, but the pandemic was the turning point where I realized all the lies and the capitalist system as the driving force behind the crisis more than the virus. Marxism and dialectical materialism have exactly both the scientific outlook I always look for and the call to action that reminds me the world can be changed for better. Also, one day a colleague posted a video on facebook about K-pop’s late stage capitalism and it was a rabbit hole from then on due to my ADHD making me hyperfixate on it.
I don’t even remember how I found GenZedong, but I think it was through BayArea415. Damn, I miss him.
BayArea415 was doxxed by BadEmpanada. I was a friend of BayArea415 myself.
Wait really? How did he even find out who he was? I knew BE didnt like bayarea415 but doxxing’s just bad, weird n obsessive
He had a feud with him and kept attacking him relentlessly.
He would not leave him alone.
A Marxist politely told why I was wrong about almost everything and told me to read Marx.
It probably helps that I already had the same broad political goals, I just thought they could be achieved through liberalism and voting. They calmly and respectfully highlighted the contradictions in that way of thinking until I said, ‘But how can we achieve any progress, then, if none of it is possible in capitalism?’ 💡
A real lightbulb moment! Now read Marx, young redtea, he has the answers you’re looking for.
So it took a while to get my head in the right space, where I needed to know the Marxist perspective on everything. Then I gorged on Marxist texts until I had re-educated myself.
Basically I started to have left-wing beliefs like anti-capitalism and LGBT tolerance during my edgy neocon days.
I’ve always been a leftist. In fact, I think I was always a communist, I just didn’t know it until a few years ago. I grew up hating most Republicans, and eventually I started hating Democrats too (I’m in the US so that’s about all we have to choose from), especially after what happened to Bernie Sanders in 2016. After Bernie’s run, and hearing many people talk about how he wasn’t a real socialist, I decided to look into what socialism actually was, because I agreed with Bernie on almost everything. I found I agreed with that even more than I agreed with Bernie. For a long time, I was scared to call myself a communist with all of the bullshit propaganda we are taught in the US, but eventually I got curious about that too and looked into how everything I knew about it was complete bullshit, and I never looked back.
As for how I found GenZedong, I forget if I found it on Reddit’s main page (before they took it off of there, for obvious reasons) or if someone in a communist org I used to be part of mentioned it to me. I found Lemmygrad from people expecting it to get banned from Reddit one day and offering it as an alternative.
I found r/GenZeDong through r/Sino. And I first heard of r/Sino from some Vietnamese gusano on r/AsianMasculinity (liberal brainrot sub) complaining that the sub is “becoming r/Sino.” I was in these pro-Asian subs like AsianMasculinity and AznIdentity because of the spike in anti-Asian/anti-Chinese racism in 2020.
‘Identity politics,’ as some Marxists like to pejoratively put it, was what put me on this path and is what still keeps me here. I reckon a lot of the more dogmatic Marxists out there won’t like this, but fuck them… I worry the fuck out of what will happen to me or Chinese people in general within the next few years.
Identity politics is not a bad thing, but I prefer the term intersectionality.
I am not really sure how I became a communist like equality was always pretty important to me and I guess communism is just part of that but I found genzedong somwhere after r/chapotraphouse got banned and I made my lemmygrad account when genzedong got quarentined
I wanted to find out what “socialism” meant
glad you walked the right path
I actually walked the left path
I’ve written out long-form versions of my radicalization journey. But I’m realizing that I may have always leaned towards the political left, and simply needed an awakening moment to know it.
Sounds like mine. I was raised on defanged, liberalised readings of Civil Rights leaders; and the more I tried to dig into their works later on in life as an addled, blue-dyed Democrat servant of empire, the more I found the people I was researching… Had pernicious, seemingly ‘missed’ references to being ideologically communist, if not socialist. References and ties that were literally ignored during my time in grade school.
The more I dug into the empire’s lies, the more confused and angry with the empire I became-- and then I got to watch my ‘brothers-in-arms’ resoundingly cheer for a civilian getting blown to salsa shrapnel on a drone feed. That day messily broke something in me, but it also cleanly broke my allegiance to the west, and made me that much more willing to dig into anything that the empire considered a threat. Think it’s been about nine years I’ve been making my reading lists spicier, and five since I started working with local food pantries.
i have a feeling that one inevitably ends up left if they have that “not an asshole” gene. I’m a social worker and like 90% of us are leftists because you either have empathy or become right wing
I’ve always considered myself left but my education started when an old friend whose parents were communist invited me to a student union. I had read about materialism online previously, and started to analyse what I learned in highschool history class through that lens. I remember talking to that friend and saying something like “it’s normal that the the USSR was undemocratic, they just went out from feudalism” and my friend casually said “actually it was democratic, even under Stalin yknow”.
So I just noded because I found this interesting, but that was the start of the deconstruction of cold war myths.
Later I subbed to genzedong just because I saw people hating on it lol
the good old “redditors collectively hate that sub and thus i got into it” pipeline that led most of us to Genzedong
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When I learned about the atrocities that were committed by the British Empire, especially in India (I’m of Indian descent so that was of particular interest to me). I needed an outlet for my hatred of Anglos and I somehow discovered Genzedong. The memes were hilarious and simultaneously enlightening. One thing lead to another and I found myself supporting AES and eventually reading theory.
I was previously on the path to anarchism so I’m really glad I found GZD before I became a baby-brained idealist.
The rest is history.
