Hello, baby Marxist here!

Personally mine was reading.

When I was a liberal I loathed reading and found it hard to even read a short article. I rarely researched everything I heard, and as a teenager, I was like every other liberal, getting my news off social media.

Now I make sure to research everything, however, getting into theory is a bit hard. Most of the information I learned about communism was through fellow comrades, because like before, I got my information from other people's comments.

Currently I'm restoring my motivation for reading by starting small. Reading long comments from comrades helped a lot. I've now moved on to reading information from leftist sources without effort, and I'm starting on reading the communist manifesto.

Enough about me, what were your side effects?

First, my story. As a teenager I used to believe that just letting everyone "do whatever the hell they wanted" (whatever that means) was the best way to build a state, even if that meant letting people's freedom be taken away by others. I didn't think that stuff because I was right, but because people who believed it were really good at making me feel like they were making a reasonable point.

Now, as a Marxist-Leninist, I feel exactly the opposite. I feel I'm more critical and better informed than ever, but a lot of you (sorry) are terrible at conveying that. Ideologies don't just exist in a vacuum, they need to be consistent and understandable from the highest level of logic to the lowest primal instincts they seek to evoke. Nobody should have to read a truckload of theory just to think "oh, ok, they aren't lunatics".

I feel this is something we should really dive into and discuss as a leftist community. I insist that people ultimately only want to feel like they're doing good stuff, and what that exactly means is affected by their material conditions. At a bare minimum, we should try to be kind to others (and especially to other comrades!), even if we don't wish to go the extra mile to hear their opinions or explain ours to them.

I really wish we can one day see more people posting here... We're fortunate enough to have come across what leftism is all about, so we should not keep that truth as a secret to ourselves, as a reason to look down upon others and divide the working class, but as a common good that can be spread, a hard, undeniable fact to unite us against oppression.

Please tell me what you think about this. And note that this rant is not related in any way to the Wolfballs events, I just wanted to let this out for a long time.

Yours sincerely, your comrade @pancake <3

Breaking out of the whole liberalism thing is pretty hard and very rare, especially in the imperial core. There often isn't anyone else who listens or respects your political opinions, much less shares them. How do ya'll get by? I don't feel like I am.

I still cringe a small bit when saying or even thinking the word "communist, but for some reason fucking fine with "Nazis" or "fascists". Programming is fucking wack.

I was a wehraboo obsessed with german tanks, classic one of those "history buffs"

I used to be a Tojoboo (before I learned about the Nanjing massacre) I said "wW2 jApAn wAsN'T tHaT bAd tHeY jUsT cHoSe tHe wRoNg sIdE" and "tHeY sHoUlD hAvE lEt jApAn kEeP kOrEa tO pRevEnT dA eBiL kIM jOnG uN")

Thanks for the suggestions! I finally decided on the image of the community, and I decided to with a really cool image of a red clenched fist breaking through the floor:

I thought it could be symbolic for socialism/communism "breaking through" the lens of liberal propaganda. What do you think?

I also thought this one might have been cool, but it's US centric and also was originally meant to mock the Democrats by comparing them to evil commies, which I feel is the antithesis of this community. Either way, anyone actually prefer the one below?

I also like @[email protected]'s idea of someone reading communist works, and do want to use something like that as the banner, but unfortunately couldn't find an image with sufficient resolution or a horizontal aspect ratio. If anyone knows any image like that, please hit me up!

Anyone have some ideas for what we could put in the community icon and banner to represent this community?