ML here, I was lucky enough to grow up in USSR, so I never went through a lib phase.

Comrade Shark Fucker said,

“I know a lot of people who travelled through levels of radicalism before ending up where they are now but that hasn’t been my experience. Marxism-Leninism was the first political ideology that made sense to me. It made the world make sense after it seeming so nonsensical for so long.”

This resonates with me and my experience very strongly.

As a child my mom struggled to raise us kids; As a young adult I found it hard to find and keep down a job; I was homeless for 3 years in my early twenties; When I finally got housed, I spent all of my time working at physically punishing jobs and spending my free time trying to recover my body for the next workday. At no point throughout all of this did I ever feel compelled to want to think about politics. Not even a little bit. To me, politics was about complaining and worrying about other peoples’ lives. I had enough shit to complain about and enough worrying to do over my own life. In this way I had always been apolitical. The few times I tried to understand something political being discussed on the news, I could never come to an understanding that seemed to hold up to scrutiny. Eventually I came to the conclusion that I just wasn’t smart enough to understand the political sphere.

Once some time passed and I felt that my life was more stable, and I had the time and energy, I decided I wanted to learn about politics. I in fact remember telling myself, “This year I want to develop my political beliefs.”

Growing up, I had always been distrustful of big businesses and the government. When I was in the 3rd grade, my teacher handed me a Time magazine with the front cover showing a burnt-out tank from the US invasion of Iraq, it was then that I decided I hated the US military for what it was doing. I think it was because of this that every political and philosophical ideology that I ended up trying to understand when I got older made no sense to me at all. Everything was hypocritical and contradicted itself and seemed to just support the very status quo that even 3rd grade me knew was evil. It got to the point where it seemed like it wasn’t even possible to develop a coherent political worldview. I was so frustrated with reading philosophy and about political theory, that I even missed out on scoring with this guy I liked because I told him I hated philosophy and it turns out that philosophy was like his main passion. Oops.

Eventually I stumbled upon Marxism-Leninism, and everything finally clicked. With Historical Materialism, History stopped being an abstract list of disconnected events and finally became something that could be understood as a progression of human interactions that follows laws of societal development. I remember the first time I made a prediction about something geopolitical I saw on the news and seeing my prediction be proven correct a couple weeks later. It was very exciting. Materialist Dialectics, as a scientific understanding of development in both nature and humanity, finally put to words the natural way I thought and viewed reality, even as a kid. The humanist elements of Marxism allowed for me to pour my heart out, grieve deeply, and love fiercely without relying on moralizing to be the basis of my analysis. Marxist economics was the clarity that allowed me to finally understand the exploitation that I and everyone I know was/is suffering under. Understanding the settler contradiction and the concept of the labor aristocracy allowed me to understand why people I loved were behaving and being so awful. Indigenous liberation, black and brown liberation, women’s liberation, trans liberation, queer liberation, it all just made so much sense to support, especially when viewed through a historical materialist lens. And it felt so good to finally be able to understand and explain all the shit reactionary behavior that I saw everywhere from the news to the workplace to the schoolyard.

I went from being completely apolitical and uninterested in politics directly to being a Marxist-Leninist actively organizing and fighting for the liberation and dignity of workers and oppressed peoples. Strange how life turns out.

When i was younger i had what could broadly be called liberal views, because that is the default growing up in a capitalist society. Now i just call myself a communist. It was a gradual process catalyzed by learning history and reading the works of Lenin and other communists.

I don’t like when communists split themselves into dozens of different tendencies with increasingly complex labels. I think that’s bad for the revolutionary movement and to some degree probably a bourgeois psyop. Labels, especially when overly elaborate, are divisive and generally not that useful. It is better to just explicitly say what you believe in, how you see the world and what kind of world you are fighting for.

If you disagree with someone on certain things, identify whether that disagreement constitutes a primary contradiction or secondary. If it directly hinders your ability to implement your primary goal, then it is a contradiction that cannot be temporarily set aside. If it is not something that fatally contradicts your main objective, you can still work with them toward the shared common goal, and later, once that is achieved, you can address the differences you still have.

If someone is anti-imperialist (without exceptions – no “but China is revisionist!”, “but Iran is a theocracy!”, or “but Russia is capitalist!” excuses), anti-fascist and anti-capitalist, that is enough to consider them a comrade. I might strongly disagree with them on other issues but it is important to recognize that people will have diverse views on a lot of issues and that letting secondary disagreements divide us only serves the class enemy.

confused > anarchist > ML

Conservative (child) -> libertarian (young teen) -> liberal (teen) -> radlib -> ancom -> ML

I was largely apolitical. When Bernie Sanders looked like he would win the primary, I became sort of socialist aligned without realising it. When he got ratfucked and I read some theory (unrelated events), combined with noticing how anglo leftist online spaces are, to various levels, derisive of global south countries largely because of racism and Western chauvinism, I became a communist.

I think my brain was primed for socialism from a very early age. Growing up middle class in a third world country, wealth inequality is always in full view and I didn’t like what I see and the justifications of it felt dubious.

Right Libertarian -> Socdem -> Demsoc -> ML

In my early days (late teens-early twenties) I’d say there were even times I flirted with fascist ideology, but in retrospect, I was a deeply unhappy and insecure person and that was manifesting in my politics in very unhealthy ways.

Different flavors of liberal until I actually critically engaged with Marxist-Leninist theory.

Growing up in the USA, basically the beating heart of the imperial core, you’re propagandized in a really clever way. As long as you have been convinced that electoralism is the only acceptable mode of political action and that ML socialism is bad and authoritarian, that’s really all that matters.

Gives you the illusion that you live in a free society and that reforming it is the only moral way to change it. Looking back there’s very little difference between ancaps, centrist liberals, social Democrats and yes, straight up MAGA fascists. Because at the end of the day all of those people will choose compromise, preserving the status quo and ganging up on any movement that actually want to move beyond private ownership and imperialism

From the US so with that in mind:

Progressive-ish(anti war/pro Palestine) hardcore Democrat as a teen who voted for Obama in 2008 -> protest vote in 2012 -> organized for Bernie in 2015/2016 -> watched the US descend more -> 2019 firmly in Marxist territory

Initially my political views were an amalgamation of anti-imperialist (my mum is very anti-imperialist) vaguely demsoc-leaning ideas. I was a young child at this point so I didn’t really know all that much about politics in general.

Then things kind of just accelerated, and I shifted from being an anarchist, a Trot (when I realised that there should be a proper transition to a classless and stateless society, I had realised this when I was an anarchist but didn’t have a word for it. For obvious reasons I wasn’t quite there yet though) and an ML, all within roughly the span of a year or so.

apolitical -> Marxist -> Mostly Marxist-Leninist

I was pretty much apolitical and mostly focused on gamedev and video games in general rather than politics. I did however have some liberal tendencies due to both the gamedev scene and me being queer.

A lot of things changed me and for me after the 12 day war. I decided to understand the world and be more knowledgeable on politics, in short why do the things currently happening happen. Seeing that a lot of my countrymen didn’t show much concern about our country being bombed by the countries they ovulate for, I decided to question whatever they hate. One of those was and is “the left”, as they put it. Throughout all my life I always heard about how everyone hates “the left”. No one would say what “the left” in question actually believed in. The only thing everybody would repeat was that “they caused the revolution and took the freedom we had under Pahlavi”, “they were islamists”, “our lives suck because the Islamic republic is leftist”(!!!), ignoring how, in 1988, thousands of the same leftists were executed by the IR, and the rest had to escape, leaving the Iranian workers’ movement paralyzed (besides like a hundred more reasons). In short, they didn’t make sense, so I decided to find out the truth on my own. The communist manifesto, being as famous as it is no matter the amount of anti-communist propaganda, was my first choice. With reading it I started the journey that would make me a Marxist.

After I became a Marxist, I came to despise most pro-capitalist social media. Also since I had a little experience with lemmy after the reddit blackout (I’m not a redditor anymore) before moving to tumblr, I decided to take a look again to see if it has become more populated or not as I actually did like the idea behind it. This brought me into lemmygrad and eventually into the ProleWiki project which has since made me a more mature Marxist and a helped me become a Marxist-Leninist.

Social liberal now. Before that, libertarian.

Like many, I started adulthood as a Democrat and found I aligned with Bernie (social democrat). When they did him dirty, I left the Democratic Party, got active as a Green, and now I’m a socialist. I think I’m more of a Marxist-Leninist these days but there are so many labels and sub-ideologies under the socialism tent that I’m never quite sure. I wish I had the time to read every single book and essay on theory. Maybe in retirement.

Apolitical to US Dem supporter to Nordic system supporter to Marxist Leninist. The transition to the latter happened when I scored 100% communism on a politiscales test and wondered what communism is.

But nowadays I feel alienated from most others. Most people hate me and I hate them so I probably wouldn’t be a good ML.

Apolitical due to religion -> sort of socdem / anarchist -> Commie

My religion forbade politics in any meaningful way. After I stopped believing it, I thought that the Nordic model was alright. I also thought Anarchism had some good ideas since it was pretty obvious that the US was going down to fascism (but I still thought the EU were good boys and China ebil) but I didn’t know how disconnected communes could produce a cell phone or publish a book.

Then I watched a lot of Disco Elysium content and remembered about Dialectical Materialism (something that I heard about in the past. it was supposedly “debunked” but I was still intrigued by it). Went to r/Communism and saw the reading list. I wanted to read.

Then I saw “Stalin” as one author of a book and I was completely confused by this. Wasn’t Stalin a dictator? Then I read more about the Soviet Union and Marx and who Stalin was. Now I’m here.