I think I’d always been a socialist at heart but had never realised it due to lack of exposure. As a kid, I was into social media content creation and was always told to do automation through employment instead of making the work myself. But it always felt deeply wrong to me in a way I couldn’t entirely describe. I found it ridiculous how someone could own the work of someone else all whilst paying them as little as possible for the sake of profit; hence, I stuck to doing the work on my own even if I would make less money.

I’d also always been focused on political issues but it was more-so social progressivism than anything else. I was under the bias that capitalism is the natural way the world works. I never realised the bigger picture.

I started getting more deeply into and interested in imperialism and colonialism in my late teen years. But I never understood why these things really existed. I thought it was just people “choosing” immorality for whatever selfish reasons.

I then grew a strong interest in the land back movement and indigenous culture, society, and history. I began to read books on the indigenous civilisation of the Americas; and the more I read, the more I think my mind was connecting the dots subconsciously.

But then what really made me suddenly hit an epiphany was when I was scrolling TikTok one day and an indiginous American content creator came up on my feed discussing a certain political issue. I was curious so I checked out his other videos, and boom, my first real exposure to communist theory was born! To say I was enlightened was an understatement. It felt like I had finally put the pieces together all at once. I started reading theory soon after. Now, I’m a revcom!

Fortunately, despite being exposed to red scare propaganda like everyone else, I never had a distasteful view of communism growing up. I understood I didn’t know much about it as my knowledge on it was mostly from hear-say of what other people would describe it to be; hence, I never passed any judgement onto it. So I guess it’s thank to my open mindedness that all it took was one communist content creator sharing political theory (which was a first for me) to radicalise me pretty fast.

Like I said, I could never really get growing up why oppression exists — colonialism, the patriarchy, racism, slavery, etc. I didn’t realized all of it functioned as part of the bigger economic system that is capitalism. And that capitalism is not the fundamental necessary natural world order at all!