2013, spent the entire year unemployed. While it’s a stereotype that’s not always true about my country, in my city I do live near a jungle (and a mangrove). So I hunted and fished to eat, but somedays, I literally had to dig through the trash of the local paramedics. You see, the city gives them free meals, but the doctors throw it out because it isn’t to their liking.

I also have a coconut tree and a banana tree on my property, which also helped me get relief.

And what actually pissed me off the most, was that five minutes walk from here, near the mangrove, I knew people in an even worse situation than me. In this city, there’s many more.

I already leaned left before, but could be considered more like a typical Western-style “socialist” than anything. but that pushed me over the edge. I figured that if countries like PRC, DPRK and Cuba gave guaranteed food and housing to their peoples (my house is pretty much a shanty and it rains inside in places when it rains - and I can’t afford to repair it), in exchange for some supposed “freedom of expression,” well, my “freedom of expression” didn’t put a plate of food on my table or give me decent housing or a job. I saw no point in being able to say “oh, this government sucks” while there was mine and so much more misery all around.

So, I decided to read more into said nations and, eventually, Marxism. A former boss had given me a Communist Manifesto book that I never had read, so I began with it. And that’s that.

Bear in mind, my country was ran by the PT at the time, even though it was during the beginning of the orchestrated uprisings against president Dilma Rousseff, it was still more stable than it is now. I believe if I had to go through the same experience now, I’d be royally fucked.

(Edit: Typo)

Genzedong memes, a WWII related research project, quora syndicalists, and catholic mls on quora.

I was a “Free Market Libertarian” for most of my adolescence. Mainly because the selling point of individualism to a outcasted socially awkward autistic queer kid was a massive power fantasy. What happened was two things.

1. real life and experience with real people who didn’t hate my guts (no pun intended).
2. My vaguely socialist/social democratic irish republican father. I came from a pretty well off family of teachers and other academics so money wasn’t a major issue (until recently at least) and i was pretty sheltered as a result. Combine that with plagues like r/PCM and other internet personalities and you have a dumb kid who thinks he’s smart but unable to see through the bullshit because the height of her struggles was people at school thought they were weird and a couple of mental health incidents related to being outcasted or treated poorly. I had no real lived experience and as such just spouted bs because the internet forum guys made a half assed argument and i bought into it.

But then, real life happened. My friends start being directly affected by capitalism, as i got out more i started to directly see people struggling, as i got more involved with other queer youth and pride and the like it only became even more apparent and then, a mentor i looked up to and helped me so much through rekindling my love for reading and my love for the world takes her own life over the stress of keeping a stable living. That was the breaking point where i couldn’t lie to myself any longer. This is where my da comes in. I was ranting away about how abhorrent it was that a society could just let someone down that hard and how her death was completely avoidable and unnecessary it was. This lead to a long conversation of him telling stories of his involvement in left leaning movements and irish republican movements in his life. I was always pretty patriotic and that seed of an idea of “end all unnecessary suffering in Ireland” being a serious, attainable goal rather than just a naive fantasy really broke a lot of mental boundaries that liberal ideology had instilled within me. This lead to me to getting into different leftist spaces eventually reading lenin’s state and rev and joining r/genzedong.

I’ve come along way since then and I’d just like to thank you guys for being unfathomably based and stuff like book recommendations over the past 2 years of shitposting, it’s been a real inspiration to go out and make real change in the world.