"You hate capitalism, and yet you make MONEY!" is not the own you think it is. Everyone has bills to pay and food to eat regardless of their politics. It's so disappointing (yet hilarious) watching people unironically behave like the ignoramus in the Matt Bors comic. lol
The 2016 election of Donald Trump was what really drove me to the left - or more accurately, drove me to gain a fuller understanding of my own, progressive political leanings. I used to not follow politics closely at all. I was pretty much apathetic to politics in general before that time. I voted for Hillary in 2016, thinking that she would win and when she didn't, I was left bewildered at first, but then eager to understand exactly how such an odious figure could be elected. That really drove me to wake up and understand how brainwashed we are as a society and fully resent the corporate propaganda that has all but destroyed our culture.
"The system isn't broken, it's functioning as intended." This is most sobering, frightening, disappointing, and radicalizing statement that one can make about the modern world, and it needs to be heard.
I already felt radicalized before watching any of the Lefttube channels, but that is a very powerful statement that really helps frame things. That's what I love the most about Renegade Cut and the Lefttube channels, they reframe things in a way that makes sense and exposes the right-wing hellscape that we live in
this is important. people who arent as advantaged, such as by not being born as men in the '1st world', are usually more aware of these truths from the start. its just that the globally disadvantaged don't get a voice in anything.
Doing so WITH THE INTENT OF CHANGING IT is. Remember: the neoliberal pitch is in claiming to be for equality while leaving all the exceptions in the fine print.
I guess its more related to not actually wanting to accept the current status quo. I don't think (or feel) I am "radical" but In comparison to society I am.
@@mitchclark1532 Nothing. That said it can and often will create friction and disadvantages for your life. There are days where I wish that I would be different. I probably could have had a "career" and different relationships if I would have been more comfortable with how things are.
I was raised by an anarchist and a socialist, and I grew up learning how shitty this system is. But I grew up in a place of relative privilege, and it was a sort of theoretical knowledge. Only about a year ago when I started getting out on the streets and organizing did it really sink in. I thought I was fully radicalized, but it turns out there’s a lot more that you can learn by holding your hands above your head at gunpoint while a cop pours bleach on the food that you spent all day cooking for your hungry neighbors.
@@Justanotherconsumer I am exclusively that. Unless of course I know people, I try to help whenever I can but I'm a lazy fuck so I usually don't organize, plus I don't even know where to start with that.
@@teergeret Similar story here. I don't have the resources, time or knowledge to organize, and the fact that I live in Quebec doesn't help. Seriously, we've got quite a lot of right wings political parties because most of our population is right-leaning (since there are quite a lot of racists here), which causes even the federal government to be afraid to call out our bullshit. Bill 21 is a pretty good exemple of this, but there are other exemples - such as the fact that our PM lowered so much immigration that it hurts our economy and when he tried to increase it for economical reasons, he had to back down because his racist base called him a traitor trying to destroy the nation. In this climate, it feels like being the only man in a boat realizing that it's a bad idea to pierce holes in the haul while everyone else compete and brag about being the best at sinking the ship - and not knowing how to stop them from doing so.
How does someone justify doing that to people, even to himself? If I put something like that in a fictional story I'd get in trouble for writing such a cartoonishly evil strawman villain.
In German left circles we call it "Die Gesamtscheiße", "the aggregate crap" or "the entirety of crap going on". www.drstefanschneider.de/images/TakToJest/Sommertoern_2007/12.jpg
@Johanna Geisel - could you possibly provide an english phonetic breakdown for pronouncing Die Gesamtscheiße? I'd love to be able to say it would murdering it :)
Yes, it does seem a whole of people out there have absolutely no idea what anarchism actually is, as they seem to view it as a drive towards chaos, and associate it with terrorism, when in fact it is primarily concerned with making democracy as inclusive and direct as possible, by questioning and dismantling dangerous and unnecessary hierarchies, essentially giving people a fair say in the things that affect them at as local a level as possible. What I find, is most people tend to agree with the central tenets of anarchism, just so long as you don't mention the A word, which is why I mostly refer to myself as a libertarian socialist.
@@deadnoodle3801 but just as there are various flavors of socialist or capitalist, there are various flavors of anarchist. All of these "isms" are sets of theories and ideals that weave together into big fuzzy pictures. One can stand for many ideals in any social theory and reject some others. I'm certainly that way with capitalism, socialism, liberalism, progressivism, futurism, objectivism, good-samaritanism, pacifism, globalism, etc etc etc. A danger arises when one begins to identify with a particular school of thought with the adherence of a zealot. These philosophies should be there to guide and clarify the world, not to collect religious followers. They're just ideas, man. But many ideas get used by the powerful to hold on to power, and the masses just follow. The world might indeed be a better place if no one social theory was adhered to so vehemently. Oh, I guess that makes me a kind of anarchist too. :-)
@@deadnoodle3801 well, there's lots of anarchist thoughts and thinkers, with radically different positions. try reading the Oscar Wilde essay, "Soul of Man under Socialism", and remember consider that at the time socialism and anarchism were used interchangeably by political thinkers. Wilde wrote this essay after reading Kropotkin's work, which is also important (though I think Kropotkin's writings are flawed in some aspects). I really like Pierre Clastres, he has two great books that deal extensively with anarchism, philosophy and, of course, anthropology. they are: Society Against the State and Archaeology of Violence. he studied and lived for quite some time with the Guayakis in Paraguay. exiting the so called "Western" thought is always good. we tend to think things are immutable and totalizing everything. terrible. I don't know about this Abbey guy, but by reading your description he sounds awful. I stand by my recommendations. great sources that were important for my political formation. if you have the time, you should read Pedagogy of the Opressed too. many insightful propositions to a new form of education. great book. Freire does not get enough recognition. he is brazilian, after all. Latin America is a land forgotten by the rest of the world, unfortunately. let us strive to fight oblivion and abjection. take care. hope you are well in this pandemic.
working at a landlord's office threw me to the far-left, seeing all the blatant disregard of laws, disgust of heir own tenets and the toxic work environment
I could say that I had something similar but from the other direction, (I'm an attorney at a non-profit who represents those tenants), but I was on the far left long before then. Also, want to know why they can get away with blatant disregard for the laws? Because nobody has any interest in enforcing those laws. There are so many cases that I've had that could be dealt with if only the laws were be enforced in any way other then spending too much money on litigation-money that the landlords can afford (while complaining that they can't) and my client's absolutely can't. Getting an actual enforcement agency to force a landlord to make basic repairs takes so long and is so exhausting, most of the time, the tenant just moves out.
I was still in middle school when 9/11 happened, but I do have a later "moment" of when I was radicalized. In 2016 when a certain foot ball player took a knee to protest police brutality, I thought it was the perfect protest. After all the criticism prior to the BLM movement was that they were being destructive, and here we had a peaceful protest that everyone could see. Yet instead of addressing and talking about the actual issues, people changed the subject to disrespecting the flag/troops/etc. That is when it clicked for me, it was never about protesting in "the right way", or about the property damage, etc. It was the simple fact that the protest existed at all.
You know Kaepernick actually got the idea of kneeling from a servicemember lol? For the first few games he simply sat out the National Anthem, which people took as ignorant or disrespectful. Someone within the military told him to kneel for whatever reason, I guess it shows respect in some way or another in some kind of military tradition. Can't remember the whole reasoning behind it.
Yeah, if you march peacefully they still get their underpants in a bind...And this is on any issue. It's considered unpatriotic, somehow, to some people, to express dissent with the way things are? Which it isn't. But I am pretty unpatriotic, due to all the horrible things our government has done. If one doesn't live in ignorance or in denial, one has to come to grips with the fact that our government has done a lot of evil things.
The unfortunate beauty of what occurred in the Capitol is that it exposed that it's not even protest that bothers our government but specifically *progressive* protest. Better not advocate for anything that would improve the life of the proles.
My mom died at 43 years old. I was 18, just out of high school, my sister was 13. What did she die from? Complications from being unable to afford medical treatment for nearly ten years. Denied medicaid over and over. Denied disability. Denied anything that could help her. This was the moment that radicalized me.
My radicalization started with my parents. My dad bought into the whole "lost cause" cult, and taught me and my sister to be "proud of our heritage". That was when we were kids, back when I was 7 and my sister at 12. She knew better and would sit me down and teach me what she knew. It wasn't much, since we were both children, but we grew up with the internet. We would learn about income inequality by the time I was 10, why poor people never seem to escape poverty, things that conservative parents wouldn't tell their kids, or would outright lie about. We would learn about how lgbt people were and are treated, how people of color are systemically disenfranchised, how 9/11 was a tragedy, but the government has warped that sorrow to kill spy and steal from other people, whether foreign or domestic. When she left to washington at 17, her girlfriend had picked her up. It was about 4am, and I had woken up to say goodbye. Primarily, she was the one who looked after me, but our parents had only gotten worse. They went from misinformed people who fell for a lie about the civil war, to people who called on eugenics, and for stripping people of their rights. When they found out my sister was bi, that she had a girlfriend, they began to physically assault her. After that, it was quiet through high school. I mourned quietly for each protest under the Obama administration, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, etc. Every time it happened I listened to my parents theorize how secretly evil the corpse on tv was. How they shouldn't have sold those two loose cigs, how the kid shouldn't have had a toy, how james brown shouldn't have been there, and it made me sick. It made me hate that I was related to people who are so willing to hate someone because authority can simply wave a gun or strangle a kid, and get away with it, like they dream of being the authority with abuse privilege. I witnessed what right wing ideology does, over the course of half my life, how it ruins people, and how it isolates even family, how it makes people bloodthirsty. I'm 20 now, and I spent a good deal of time learning policy, the differentiation between each wing, how authority is abused, historical context, to sort of piece it together, and so far, yeah, it's working as intended, in the worst way possible. My time at University at age 18 brought me up to speed with what my sister had probably already knew by the time she ran away at 17. I'm planning to move, similar to how my sister did. Quiet, early, no warning. Neither of us deserved growing up like that, and nobody deserves to live in a society where it's a norm or acceptable to be raised like that.
What radicalized me was when I was 7 or 8. I was in a summer reading program that awarded kids a free pizza. My sister and I won and we got our certificates. My dad wanted to treat us, so we went to a local Pizza Hut in the next town. For some reason the lady at the register didn't think my dad was being truthful and denied us our pizzas, even though we had the certificates to show her. She called a police officer over that. Some minutes later the cop came in, looking mean at us and told us to leave (even did that authoritarian stance they typically do), over pizzas. I was shocked to see that and never understood why that had happen. I think it made me look at cops as thugs for the state. I was still told to trust them afterwards tho.
I applied for a job in another state and got an email back about how "We don't hire immigrants". I was so confused. I'm not an immigrant and nothing in my resume or cover letter suggested I was. I traveled to Japan and back and thought there was some kind of confusion over that part of my resume. It took me a few years before another friend, an actual immigrant, told me it was because my last name is Spanish (my ancestors in Norway and France moved to Spain and changed their name to the Spanish equivalent, then moved to the US shortly afterward, so I don't have any Spanish blood in me whatsoever). "They can do that?" "They do it to me all the time." I've always been socially progressive, but until Trump was elected, I always thought I was center, maybe center-left. Then things got crazy and I studied general politics a bit, coming to the realization that I was never center in the first place.
I didn't know that was a thing, but you're welcome, I guess. I started putting MLA style bibliographies at the end of my videos around 2014 and then switched to the more convenient and accessible links in the description a couple years ago.
@@jo0rd73 no sources, since you can at least form a group to infiltrate the patreon and then distribute the sources to the masses, if there are no source listings anywhere, best you can do is guesswork after a lot of research.
What radicalized me was going from “atheist-tube” to alt right videos thanks to the algorithm and anti SJW videos. I was watching Ben Shapiro and Gavin Mcciness. Thankfully I found Kyle Kulinski, Krystal Ball, and Contrpoints. Far right talking points are so easily debunked, I just hadn’t been around anyone who wasn’t conservative (small town) and had no idea how far left I actually was/am.
Krystal and The Hill are still shills to right wing talking points. They are critical of both GOP and Dem establishment positions but overall paint a more disenfranchising view of leftist ideas. But glad you haven’t been trapped in the algorithm like a lot of my peers are. Stay well
Seriously, far right talking points fucking fold over with the slightest level of critical analysis, it's stunning to me that the anti-sjw cottage industry on youtube gained as much steam as it did. They're so pathetically bad.
Being Black radicalized me realizing you can’t do anything without be compared to other people in your race having teachers think you cheated on a test when you score higher than the asian kid walking down the street and automatically assumed criminal activity is going to happen going to a job interview and receive the “you know i didn’t expect you to be urban” response
I feel this my man, Black people in the U.S. get to deal with the perpetual stress of living in a nation of people who do not view them as entirely human and more of a second class citizen. The state itself feels entirely justified in killing and sending its second class citizens to prison en masse because it can exploit them like it's been exploiting them for this entire damn nations history. When I was a kid there was a lot of shit said to me that was entirely based on the stereotypes and prejudice you listed, as a kid I knew it wasn't right and as an adult this shit makes me furious.
The founding father of my parent’s country-Ghana- was a socialist. So as I went through the education system and saw the discrepancies with how the west views the rest compared to how the rest view the west-things began to click. Since I went through AP courses there existed a kind of internalized caste system within the school as if this group of test takers was better than others. And my existence largely discredited the claim that black people are inherently below. I then largely applied that concept to nationstates and then watched some Parenti lectures. Alongside this, being black in the education system puts me in a position of perpetual scrutiny. So I began to realize that a lot of my white friends in these classes took my willingness to talk about the third world as confrontational or obnoxious or would call it favoritism when a teacher would say I wrote a particularly good paper. What pushed me over the edge completely was when I was playing Minecraft earlier this year and this kid I knew, at the time, said “Idk why illegals are getting upset when their children are taken away. I mean like you’re breaking the law.”
holy shit, the last part really threw me off i get how that was the tipping point it really never is like Big and Scary, it's always seeing a Normal Person sometimes who you know personally, say something that just sounds atrocious without even batting an eye
The fascist white supremacy lie that socialism is an existential threat is true though: it’s a threat to their totalitarian plan because it favors people before profit and democracy before nationalism. I’m grasping on the last socialist parts of our Western European democracy because Anglo Saxon neoliberalism is turning us into the same fascist third world country as the USA is. I used to think that America was this great place where I’d want to live but now I see it in the same light as South Africa in the eighties.
Anyone who supports a state that can separate parents from their children without them committing any act of violence, provocation or threat whatsoever other than 'being from a different country' is against the very principles of a free and equal democratic society... that isn't just anti leftist, its anti-liberty, anti-democratic, and certainly in line with fascism and racist ideology.... and when you say that, people call you alarmist... no one ever said a free society should had the right to arbitrarily separate families. Inalienable human rights are inalienable to all humans, if you don't universally apply this to everyone, you inevitably begin to support ideologies of supremacy and dehumanization.
"Maybe I avoided learning the worst things about the world in my youth because my brain knew that my heart couldn't take it." That line hit me like a kick in the guts. Thank you for this video, and for this channel.
@@NAdorableYoung if it helps I'm sure I'm going to ball my eyes out and have to sit with animal crossing after it 💖 I know everything is pretty awful rn but take care of your self
I was assistant to a CEO. Old money millionaire high school drop out with fancy mansion and high status. Their job was to go on expensive outings (dinners, biplane tours, wine tastings, etc) with clients. They have a lot else they claim as their job description but I did all of it. They worked a few hours a week for fun (they told me they wouldn't be working if it wasn't fun) and I worked 60 hours a week minimum for a shitty salary no benefits and a lot of stress. Then I discovered that's how it is for every CEO and Executive position. I had held on to that illusion of "people who work hard and deserve to reach the top will get there" until it finally clicked that I was there to be used until I broke down and needed replacing.
As my girlfriend puts it "I'm disabled, queer, and of Romani decent. The Nazis would have killed me thrice. I know exactly where they want to take it."
in art school i befriended a feminist and she told me how the world actually sucks... i was like "no way" and she was like "yes way", then i went down the rabbit hole from there
@@appleslover why is that? anarchism sounds pretty nice to me. no more government and capitalism to oppress us and instead society based on free association and consensus
I was radicalized by this year. I'm 19 right now. it was going to be my first election. I was sure bernie would win, and he'd make everything so much better. then he got fucked over on super tuesday. then a pandemic hit and the government decided to sacrifice people's lives for the sake of the stock market. and they helped no one when the biggest unemployment spike in history happened. and the stock market crashed so hard oil prices went negative, so they just created more money, which made me realize that money means absolutely fuck all and we can just say that we have more of it, apparently. and police started gassing peaceful protesters, and shooting at them. and I realized I'm neurodivergant in a way that would make wage labor seem like hell on earth, and the thought of being forced to do it every day just to not starve to death makes me start to panic. and I realized no one in charge gives a shit about whether I'm okay or not, just whether i can make some rich asshole richer. amd I realized that I would probably never feel truly fulfilled unless I was able to somehow escape this capitalist neoliberal hell.
Yeah I don't know when exactly it really happened though once it hit a certain tipping point & I started "reading theory" I've been watching myself get more and more radicalized. Originally it was growing up conservative Catholic listening to Rush Limbaugh & shit and realizing Catholicism wasn't true then wanting to figure out what exactly, if my whole previous worldview was wrong, *is* true about the world? Went from calling myself republican to classical liberal to social democrat to libertarian socialist to anarchist to anarcho-communist to now i just say communist/socialist/Marxist depending on who I'm talking to and I'm about to get back to some Mao I've been reading that has been really surprisingly great & fascinating and unexpectedly easy to read.
I was actually a conservative teenager, going to my rich catholic school from k-12. I didn't know the rest of the world, or even the rest of my own country, wasn't like that. Then I went to university and worked at mcdonald's part time. I was not very political at the time, didn't even vote in the first election I could vote in. But then my life took some turns. My long term relationship ended, I dropped out of school and moved away from family. Really did things totally on my own. I ended up going to college after, did really well, until effects of living on my student income(which is mostly still owed to this day in debt) took their toll on my home life. I couldn't afford a car or a nice place, I had room mates in the slums and they kept me up all night, had raving drunk parties, stole my things. I didn't grow up rich, but I grew up around rich people. I was quite sheltered from this kind of thing. I called the police, they said "Call us after they hurt you". Kinda seemed more like they are the punishment and not the prevention. Between semesters I stopped feeling safe in my own home and I could not perform at school, there was also a staff strike at my college that year, so it was convenient to get my tuition refunded. Since then I have worked full time in fast food and the lack of respect and generosity I am shown for going above and beyond on a regular basis honestly disgusted me. To be treated like human refuse by the man that I am generating wealth for. How can he hate me, I am why he's wealthy. I more than made up for part timers that wouldnt work enough to ever really become efficient at the job. And all I got was extra responsibility, expectations and attention from people that had nothing good to say to me. For no extra pay or benefits at all. I was talked down to like a child by corporate staff, appointed through nepotism with no formal education. It was dehumanising. New year's eve my co worker that ran the store with me received a call from corporate. Even though we had been following their demands, cleaning the hard to reach and difficult to clean areas, reducing crew hours(aka more work for the people that stay on), reducing our food waste, etc., she was being transferred out of her store that she had been running for 6 years, 2 of which with me assisting. I put in my 2 weeks a few days later. Working full time as a wage slave radicalised me. I don't see how it hasn't radicalised every single one of us/them.
I watched Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, The Dark Knight Rises Shooting and Sandy Hook before I was 12. And it just kept happening. That's what radicalized me.
same here, the constant every day school shootings. the every day occurence of another man getting killed or abused by the police. the boot put on the working class. all of this brought me to socailism
When I lost my faith, realized Obama fixed nothing, and saw that someone like Trump could get nominated. Everything since has only served to confirm my convictions.
Probably in middle school when a lot of people called me a terrorist, while simultaneously accepting the reasons for the US to go to war in the middle east.
Growing up having an Iranian-Canadian best friend definitely got the ol' radicalization ball rolling. While I don't remember any overt racism directed at him, I was aware of the amount of hatred for anybody that looked like him, especially south of the border. I feel like this had a bigger impact than any discrimination I personally experienced.
I was radicalized when I was in elementary school. We were hiking in Germany and saw a long fence with an open gate. Nothing imposing. It was even too short to keep puppies in a yard. A sign on the gate declared it was the boarder between germany and Czechoslovakia. That was a national boarder... a tiny gate open along a walking path. My sister and I jumped back and forth thru the gate. It was fun until I tried to run along the fence off the trail. By dad grabbed me and gave me a lecture about landmines. I realized national boarders are stupid and people die for invisible lines.
Always depressing to live in a world where wanting the world to be a better place is considered radical even though we so easily have the means to do it.
What radicalized me was visiting a "first world country" for the first time. Despite having a grasp on the intrinsic exploitative nature of capitalism (including neocolonialism and imperialism), I used to have the impression that strong Keynesian policies would be sufficient to significantly improve everyone's lives to the point of no scarcity. Then I visited one such country and finally realized that no matter how well wealth is actively redistributed by the government and how accessible essential services are, consumption in capitalism is ALWAYS exclusionary. Prices are always set so as to maximize capitalists' profits in detriment of those who cannot afford. This is true of everything, from a pencil to a plane ticket. This means that no matter how well people earn on average, how eagerly the government attempts to redistribute wealth, every product will always be less accessible to a significant part of the population in capitalism. Again, this is true for everything, from food to books, from plane tickets to housing, etc.
Being raised poor, watching my husband's aunt die from lack of health insurance, reading the autobiography of Malcom X, having untreated depression and anxiety, I could go on
Honestly, I feel always a bit upset and angry when an American claims theirs is the greatest democracy or that they are the moral leaders of the world. That being said, I don't hate America or its people and I really wish you get your house in order.
I'd like to believe that a lot of people don't think that at all. It's pretty important to be very critical of each and every one of our presidents considering the far-reaching effects of their decisions. Spoilers: most of them have done immoral things.
As an American: Yeah, we fucked up. Bad. Although to be fair, this was always a country run by the elites. And the elites hit a gold-mine for keeping the working class divided with the institution of slavery.
I think everyone has the right to hate America and Americans. Many Americans are privileged and willfully ignorant. It's common knowledge that "developing" countries are the source of cheap labor for rich corporations in America. It's just that no one cares. I hate America. I think it's just fine that other people hate us too.
I was Radicalized by learning more and more about Feminism. Learning things in terms of systems open my eyes to view the world in different ways. And most of the Feminists I was listening to, on UA-cam of all places, we're also Socialists, Communists, Marxists, Anarchists, or just Anti-Capitalists of some kind. I combine with my own thoughts and experiences and began being a Socialist. Learning about Anarchist critique about The State through Thought Slime's video on the subject made me an Anarchist. And I have been one ever since.
feminism is a form of anarchy. they identified an unjust from of hierchy (patriarchy) in society and are succesfully dismantling it. that's what they have in common with other leftists/colective in nature movements.
I don't know why, but my radicalization began around the time of the Christ Church shooting. Something about that event, how people reacted to it, knowing that nothing was really gonna change after it, that it was just gonna be "thoughts and prayers" and that would be the end of it. I realised that this wasn't just blind violence happening in a vacuum, that this was motivated by stochastic terrorism. It wasn't even anything that I already didn't know... But then, everything else fell into place. It was like something clicked inside my head. Like the cognitive dissonance between my perception of the world and how it really was all came crashing down. I looked back at all the shit that had happened over the last decade. Over the 20 years and it finally made sense. It was capitalism. It was not only the rise of facism but the failures of liberalism to handle it. Things were no longer the product of a cruel world but infact a cruel society that was knowing in its cruelty. All by design. I didn't know a thing about socialism or anarchism at that time. But what I knew was that there needed to be something. A third option. I knew that we couldn't keep doing this anymore...
I was deeply conservative for most of my life, until my sophomore year of college. I took a philosophy class. The class didn't have a left leaning bent but it did teach me to question my ideas and thoughts and when I did they didn't stand up to scrutiny. So I became a liberal and thought I could make things better by voting. Then 2016 happened and my belief in our institutions was shaken, but not destroyed. Over the last four years I have been slowly opening up to left wing ideas until now I'm an anarchist.
I was radicalized because my society left me hanging when I needed it. It sounds like a trivial reason compared to the suffering in other places of the world: I had to quit my first attempt at studying due to health reasons and wanted to retry years later. But my country has no financial support for students with such a broken biography. If you have no money and are not able to work parallel to your classes, then you cannot study. I found that stupid and unfair, because it held me back from doing what I was good at. I ended up having to quit my second study again, this time because I ran out of money. My country could have gotten an engineer in applied sciences, but it got a welfare recipient instead. I realized that the same callousness and uncaring attitude that shattered my life dreams also was responsible for a lot of other things going wrong. The same old, same old: "There is no money for that." approach to all that could better the lives of people. Everything social is underfunded, understaffed, cancelled or non-existent. As a person with a very systemic way of thinking it didn't take me long to identify the capitalist system as the culprit. Capitalism may not cause all the problems on the planet, but every single problem is being made worse or becomes unable to solve due to capitalism.
While I had the first stirrings when I was younger through my interactions with the LGBT community, I became fully entrenched when I worked for amazon. The sheer dehumanization of the warehouse as well as the constant output of capitalistic waste combined with my family further falling into poverty, cemented my socialist beliefs and my loss of faith in the system. All around me were people who had done the "right" thing. They kept in line and worked hard. Many had bachelor's degrees. They still received little to none of the American dream that is constantly being promised. It only took the smallest of financial setbacks, (small medical problems, replacing breaks, etc.), for them to fall behind on bills. My own mother, who had a master's and several years work experience, had to work at the warehouse and later became a housekeeper, all due to her age and lack of social mobility. This system is designed to keep those on the top in power and ocassionally allows a few exceptions through in order to keep us complacent. A carrot on a stick we can strive towards so we don't turn on them and show how many of us their truly are.
Rodney King... when I was 10 years old... My dad told me about the beating, and informed me that that is how people of color are treated in America, our lives aren't as important to police and white society at large. As little black boy I realized that life in the US for people like me are marginal and lucky, but that at any moment, I would become a villain or a thug, just because I have the wrong skin color. It wasn't until much later as a grown man, that I realized why, and how that system links up with capitalism and how even socialism isn't immune to it's ravages. It is considered radical to be unhappy with the current system we live in. It is considered radical to want it to change and be willing to protest for it. It is considered radical by people who the system benefits more consistently, and who use ideologies to make the suffering of other humans needed, and justified. I think right now we are witnessing a huge number of others having that moment during the worst and most dangerous presidency of our lifetimes.
For me, the system was "broken" when I looked at the "rational actors" and "voluntary arrangements" free market folks love so much just absolutely fell apart in the context of health care. A man telling you to pay him $1000 for life saving medicine was no different than a man telling you to give him $1000 or he'll shoot you. I realized the system wasn't an accident when, working a shitty low paid warehouse job I was hit with some variation of "work hard because they can just replace you with some one else" line of thought. I don't think it was even a manager, just an older cynical co-worker. I started thinking about supply and demand, and when how you start to look at workers as resources instead of people, poor desperate folks are a very valuable resource to businesses. Well paid workers are simply bad business when you can manage to have poorly paid workers, while despite the talk that "you get what you pay for" in reality a large enough group of desperate workers uses market forces to select for the "best worker who is willing to accept the least pay". Anyway you asked a question in the first 30 seconds and here's my answer, hopefully it boosts your al gore rhythms.
Greetings from Montenegro! We finally outvoted the corrupt goverment. There is hope! While I don't believe in capitalism, this is a breath of fresh air we desperately needed. After semi dictatorship, democracy is a step in the right direction. Well of course we could argue that we are all under dictatorship, but I am talking about the direct, transparent, no-limits type.
@@9UWmember What is even more significant is that the overthrown government was ruling all the way from the 1991. They were the formal successors of the League of Communists of Montenegro, so it's not that easy to pinpoint the formal date of their ascension to rule:) Leading to the elections, more than 8 months of fierce civic protests and intense conflicts between the people and the government prepared the scene for the Belarus scenario, even with major European press calling that nothing has been made to stop the inevitable bloodshed following the elections. As a citizen of MNE, I was deeply worried also, but the elections turned out to be remarkably peaceful and democratic, with new people in their thirties emerging to the top and signing an agreement that is obliging the 3 winner parties on eradication of deeply rooted corruption, getting the country back on pro-European and pro-western track, securing political power to the minorities and establishing an intermediate technical government that will see experts instead of traditional political figures until the whole mess of the former semi-dictatorship as Mate said it has been eradicated. This indeed was an unexpectedly progressive step, which all other neighbouring Balkan countries yet have to go through.
Capitalism is not something to “believe in”. Either is work in xyz way or it doesn’t in xyz way. Capitalism will work for people with capital-and for those who can work for a certain pay and that pay can meet needs. The problem is...Capitalism wants to gain capital and or profit...
I was in high school during the Regan era. I remember constantly being in fear of a nuclear WW III. I remember Nancy saying “Just Say NO” while her husband said nothing while thousands of people were dying from AIDS. Trickle-down economics, the “welfare queen” myth...and then came the Iran Contra Scandal. Before them I didn’t know too much about communism, only that Ronald Regan hated it. That was good enough for me, as I hated him. I began reading Marx and Engels. That was in 1985. I started college that fall. Radicalization had begun P.S. I ❤️ your channel.
Renegade Cut: Maybe I avoided learning about the worst of the world in my youth because my brain knew that my heart couldn't take it. Me, who just turned 16: Yeah, it hurts...
I'm 36 and still not able to take it. But seeing young people drift to the left gives me hope. Here in Germany the majority of people is still not fed up enough to want any change. But the younger generations seem to be much more aware of the dangers in our future if we don't act, than my generation was at this age.
Love this. Wouldn’t say I became an actually lefty until college. Become an activist now if you can. I learned so much during my time at the Occupy protests.
Young people aren't dumb and they aren't stupid. They may not be able to see everything their adult counterparts do, but they see more than said counterparts think they do. The most naive idea many hold is that the adults around them are doing what they're supposed to be doing and I can't bear to hold that against them
What keeps radicalizing me is the "good boy" stuff I internalized as a kid. Doing good stuff, taking care of others. I cant recall huge moments of realization like you do. Its a constant feeling that gets let down over and over. And every time I see society failing to care for people, one step to the left.
People like to grandstand and act like they know how the election process works, but if you really ask them details, they don't have a clue. That's also by design. They give people a very shallow description of the process while leaving the details blank. No one can know when you cheat if only the cheaters know the rules.
@@angrymoses gosh, there is no better example of this than the last election here in uruguay, the neoliberalist party stated "the first thing we gonna do is mess around with the laws so we can "fix" the problems, but we won't tell you what now, but after the elections", that's it, an empty check, and people still voted for them... because they wanted "change" , what a stupid yet powerful word in politics... and people fell for it every single time. oh and about the empty check, the usual, police brutality, more power for the military, less restrictions for companies, extreme budgeting of all state services for later privatization, rolling back in all social equality laws....politicians doubled their salary because "they are the best"... fascism is in the air, there are fears of a new dictatorship yeah, it sucks bad, fuck ignorant people.
@@Badbufon we had the same thing a few years ago. This orangutan looking dude said that on day one he was going to start trying to pass a new health plan. One that was better, cheaper, and would cover everyone. When asked about the plan, he said if he gave details, his opponents would steal the plan. Fast forward to today. The details have not been forthcoming, and no legislation has been proposed. Go figure.
I think growing up without a stable place to live is what radicalized me. Jumping from apartment to apartment, roommate to roommate, having to leave anyplace we couldn't afford. That's what radicalized me.
My radicalization came when I left Christianity. I applied the same critical thinking that made me give up religion, to other aspects of my world. It took about a decade, but I eventually saw the US for what it is and always has been. The modern Roman Empire. I agree with the conclusion that the system isn't rigged, the system was designed this way. Poor people are poor by design, criminals are such by design, labor rights are suppressed by design. Clinging to the idea that such a system can be reformed is the last vestige of someone who is out of options, but fears the unknown alternative. Much like a person on a sinking ship, praying to god to save them, but refusing to jump off and begin swimming, not knowing if they'll ever be saved.
Funny that you say that, before this year, it occurred to me that as a modern empire that the USA is, it’s downfall is inevitable. All empires fall. I said this before 2020 but man this year seems to be speeding that shit up lol.
I think mine also came after I turned my back on Christianity. When I saw the disparity between the Jesus in the bible and Christians in the real world, I figured out it was a tool of mass control. They insisted on the whole "present your other cheek" and "the last will be first in Heaven" and barely ever touched the parts about caring for each others, living modestly, etc. I know some even corrupted the words of the bible, ever heard of Republican Jesus? A meme, sure, but he's convinced people that capitalism is good, slaving away is good, laziness is evil and junk like that. Truth is, religions are man made. What I've described is also by design. There's some good stuff in the bible, but there's some horrendous stuff too. The whole point of blind faith and dogma is to keep good, servile sheep. (Sorry about my bible quotes, my first language is French and that's the bible I was used to)
Lol, part of what radicalized me was trying to be an actual Christian, given that Jesus was pretty much a communist it was only logical to dig up info on that. Nowadays, I'm not very religious, but I'm still a dirty commie.
Christianity is a faith, not a religion. Christianity was high jacked by the powerful in a successful attempt to control the masses for financial gain & security i.e. Constantine. Jesus was a radical change agent who believed the rich were likely to burn in Hell. Does that sound like tenets of any major religion claiming Christianity today? Of course not. Research Christian Socialists. You'll likely be surprised how much in step real Christian values (not the fake ones bigots & racists claim) & socialist ideals are. I respect your conclusion that this system is wrong, not broken but, I also feel you have been misled on what Christianity is actually about. Which is not your fault. Capitalism seems to seep into everything. Sources: www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/practical_christianity.php christiansocialism.com/christian-socialism-statement/ democraticsocialist.fandom.com/wiki/Christian_Socialism sojo.net/articles/when-american-christians-were-socialists
It was 2016's elections in both my home country of Australia, as well as in America. Then I found Innuendo Studios, and then HBomberGuy, and then PedanticRomantic, and then Jim Sterling, and then ThoughtSlime, and then you. You played a role in helping me wake up, and thank you for that.
I've always had an interest in anarchy, even as a child. i never trusted the government, i never trusted bosses, or people in power. (not cuz I'm smart, because I'm paranoid and anxious.) a while after i started researching capitalism, i found a video about how cops are trained to shoot you in your homes. that made me pissed. so i started fantasizing about an anarchist society again. what pushed me over the edge was Bernie losing and George Floyd's death. I started researching anarchism and comunism. so now I'm an anarchist lol. acab and trans rights
The killing of Michael Brown radicalized me two days after I turned 18, then I was radicalized even further when Trump won the election two years later. Some of my friends believed that I was too radical in my beliefs until all the events of this year ended up radicalizing them as well.
Ironically I'm a Brazilian but was radicalized by american politics, and I started this all by listering podcasts and youtube channels to improve my English :-)
I got radicalized for good when I discovered Olavo de Carvalho and Bolsonaro were not outliers and fringe lunatics but had a legion of followers. When I saw Olavo's book on one of my best friend's house my world turned upside down. Since then we had lots of fights and our friendship is in tatters. And I'm not willing to fix it. Now he keeps making memes and posts decrying covid measures and making fun of people trying to keep safe. Meanwhile my grandfather-in-law got the virus and is in a respirator while a family friend died of it while pregnant. And now, even with the disastrous response, unrepentant pandering to the US, nosediving economy, several scandals I have no idea how Bolsonaro's approval dont fall under 30%. That's too much people.
I was a righty all the way, thinking that everyone makes their own decisions and everything was up to the individual till a couple of years ago. I was dating this girl, we were watching the news, and shockingly, the police had just killed a man in Texas. She was disgusted, I replied “well let’s see what he did first”, she looked at me like I was an asshole (I was) and simply said “it dosent matter”. She left, we broke up. At first I was just mad, but for some reason, it sparked a little curiosity. so I started watching a video here, reading a book there and slowly but surely I came around. Now I’m all in. I still don’t trust people enough to do the right thing on their own (look around), But I know anarchism and frankly all leftist ideologies needs to be the direction we should be heading in. That girl breaking up with me was the best thing that ever happened to me....... or worst cause now I see how the world works and I’m mad all the time for different reasons hahaha
Paper Mario I used to do that all the time, eventually I figured out, maybe that’s why things never change. Our friends and families we make excuses for, but everyone is doing that to their friends and family. It sucks, but we almost have to be like parents, be firm but correct. In the short term it’ll suck, but man we have been living in the short term for way to long.
It's good that you were willing to challenge your own beliefs and opinions like that. That takes the kind of courage and honesty that a lot of people don't have.
Yo Mr. glad to hear that was an awakening moment for you. Yeah if we are all honest with ourselves we will probably all admit we came from a more close-minded, bigoted, sexist, nasty past (even people of certain colors like me). The whole world is moving toward less of that crap, which means we were all a little more of guilty of in the past. The trick is - as you learned - to evolve into a better person and move on. Right now, there's so much pain in America from people doubling down on stupid inherited bigotries that frankly should have disappeared 100 years ago, or never existed at all. Nobody should be judged for the person they were yesterday, only for the person they are today. I bet if your xgf knew you now she'd be proud.
lol I've broken up with dudes over vastly different politics a few times and it's always been my hope that it helped radicalize them. good to know it can work lol
Scrolled down to see else thought this. That quote is so on point. Opening up to this world has been a painful process. When I see my family's inability to recognize injustice, I can sense the fear of the pain they subconsciously know they will have to get through in order to process it. They probably won't ever get to processing it, and that has taken a long time for me to accept. I want to call them cowards, but I don't think that helps. Instead I now show them how perceptive they actually are about the world and their feelings towards it. I just try to encourage any semblance of insightful thinking. Much like how Zizek debated Peterson.
Democrats are right leaning in their economics after all, only culturally progressive to try and get the votes of minorities. It's why certain members excuse... Unsettling aspects of other cultures if they have any significant presence in US soil, while the Republicans demonize anything different to stoke fear. There are no values in the parties, only power. And if power can be secured by dining with your enemy, then they're not that much of an enemy now are they? The parties are the cancer feeding off the body of our nation, spawning so many of it's ills. The best reform we can do is eliminate first past the post voting for something like instant runoff so there is no more strategic voting based on what other people vote for.
Yup, 2016 definitely moved my perspective leftward, and I knew the DNC would rather lose to Trump then let Bernie win this round, but watching the partie's voters turn around because of a few endorsements, against their own self-declared interest (as the vast majority reported in exit polling that they wanted M4A, GND, etc.) but forgo their own critical thinking skills and vote for Biden who to this day 2/3 of them report in polling that they don't even like they are just voting against Trump. Watching that happen made me just want to burn it all down because frankly as a nation we don't deserve better if that's how we operate.
@@KeeperOfTheSevenKeys. I really hate both the Democratic and Republican party, its not just because they have some very bad candidate's (Trump and Biden), its also that they are so similar to eachother that there's basically no difference one side(Republicans) don't care about what the people want, not even their supporters, while on the other side(Democrats) only say they will make a change but as soon as they get elected, they never do it and the thing is Americans think that they are very different, but then I showed them a political chart and told them that today's Republican and Democrat candidate's were all Authoritarian Right, with people like Bernie Sanders being Centrist but being called a Communist.
@@rafaelsantibanez5204 by this election cycles' end the Overton window should have shifted so far right, that the public concept of "leftism/socialism" will be sat entirely to the right-of-center.. disturbing how red can be so green and 2 may even be 3 in this brave new world.
I come from The Netherlands and my political journey towards Anarchism also came from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I remember hearing in school and my surroundings that this war was to catch the guy who did it. But I had the priviledge to grow up in a highly educated and socially aware family on my dad's side. One of my uncles was very outspoken against the war. Just before we sent our troops, a guy briefly entered the public stage. His name is Maarten van Rossem. He condemned our support to America as an overly emotional gut-reaction. He got shoved under the rug by status quo officials as a "9/11 relativist". Looking back at this footage it's painful how spot-on his conscerns were, and how correct he is about other issues that plague our country today. He is framed as a spectacle, as a historian that is way too cynical and low-energy. But I despise how the media frames him, because he has been spot on in his analysis from day one he entered the public stage. Later in life I got an internship at a multi-media company that literally exploited interns as slaves. This might sound as dramatic retoric, but judge for yourselves: He had a company with 4 employees. Every single one of them was an intern. We did not get a pay, not a single dime, and we worked from 9 to 5, 5 days a week. He did not have any knowledge about graphic design and could not guide us in our endeavours. He frequently cruised on his motor cycle while he left us at the company to work for his shitty projects. He frequently had people come over for business deals. We were forbidden to say we were interns, while he scammed them by asking way too much money for the projects. We had several conflicts of people walking off angry after he scammed them, like a painter who painted his entire house in exchange for some shitty stickers. One day, he asked me to photoshop scratches on his car to scam an insurance company. I refused to do this and stood up for myself and the other interns. He punished me by barely giving me a passable grade at the end of my internship. I was there every day, I worked my ass off, I did everything that was asked of me - except for that one thing. The only reason he let me pass was because others were watching and he knew all other interns had resentment. I was 16 and taken advantage of by our school system, government and companies without pay. It was exploitation, plain and simple. Now I live in a society where I cannot buy a house, where we have ever growing alienation and mental health issues, that is on the brink of climate collapse, is ruled by far-right demagogues, has a crumbling democracy and rapidly growing inequality. And I refuse. Radical ideas are my only option left. I started reading Socialist and Anarchist literature, joined our socialist party and Marxist forum (a thinktank). And I now firmly believe we should dismantle each and every unjust hierarchical structure in our society. Neoliberalism must go.
For me it was growing up poor and often being homeless and reading a lot of history. Then the 2016 elections. Then it was my family and their friends radicalizing to the right or at the very least being too cowardly to challenge them. Then it was the rise of fascist terror. Then I started watching more and more actively left wing content and learning about a bunch of different systems. Then I started reading theory. These things radicalized me. Then I started working and overhearing my liberal boss telling a story about him calling the cops on a homeless person. Which radicalized me some more. Then the events of this year radicalized me even more.
Seeing the horrible way that my paraplegic mother was treated in various rehabilitation centers radicalized me. I had, at first, blamed individual nurses that neglected to give her enough water, or who failed to turn her over properly to avoid giving her bedsores. At one point, my grandmother and I had waited in her room for someone to come in and clean her sores out, which were at stage 4, and infected to the bone. The last available RN said that someone would be coming in, but we didn't believe them, so we waited for a half-hour until one appeared with a cart and began actively cleaning her. It was then that I started noticing how few nurses were around, and how the ones that were around were rushing between rooms that had called for them. How they had to put her in a second-floor room during one of her many transfers that only had a bed frame, a mattress, and a window. There was no AC in that room, and it was in the middle of the Texan summer. These aren't individual issues. This is the result of capitalism siphoning money from the places that most need it only to line the pockets of the impossibly wealthy.
By "now" I don't mean that as of this video I'm an anarchist. I've just been saying it out loud this year as opposed to implying it over the past couple years.
Mostly because the media is strongly dictated by the interests of capitalists. Check Tom Nicholas' upcoming video. If you like Renegade Cut, you won't be disappointed.
Devils advocate here. You have to be somewhat a member of the fortunate ruling class of capitalism to have the resources available for you to live on, to be able to be against capitalism in the first place. Being poor and "fighting against" capitalism is just starving to death. Being middle class and being against capitalism is a "fun hobby" for plenty of people.
The thing is when it comes to systems of power, they do everything to continue existing (through propoganda and force). The people with the most wealth want to keep the machine churning no matter how many bodies they have to feed it.
Personally, I think it's the hope and belief of becoming rich that keeps people supporting capitalism. The US specifically keeps alive this idea that anyone can go "from rags to riches", so instead of fighting that system, it keeps people believing that you can be "at the top" of it, eventually if you work hard enough...
My moment of no return is when I fell in love with someone who'se extended family is Ruling Class and learning just how unhealthy the system is *even for the rulers*. Nobody wins, some just lose less. It's Toxic Turtles all the way down.
Well, the Trump family seems startlingly unhealthy and unhappy. We all joke about it, but seriously, it seems like a nightmarish family environment, full of mistrust, and even suicide. It's definitely changed how I view the rich- not that 'they're the real victims' crap. I think it's similar to how toxic masculinity ultimately hurts men, too. I don't think being a 1% is emotionally healthy for the wealthy. Maybe when you're raised on exploiting others your relationships are corrupted into another human resource to consume?
We’re the same age and I think I went through many of the same beats as you did in response to the Bush then trump eras. I started out a very neoliberal white feminist. Moving to Seattle in 2014 and the large activist population opened my mind to a lot of social justice discourse. I think Sanders May have been my gateway to socialism and now in 2020 I’m full on Conquest of Bread.
In the UK some people are wondering why younger voters, especially younger minority voters are not becoming more conservative as they age. The reason, we have nothing left to conserve. (Unless you count desperately trying to conserve what is left of the environment)
me: Bush's War on Terror (while growing up Muslim in America), anti-war candidate Obama doing nothing about it, and finally, reading Lenin's "Imperialism: Highest Stage of Capitalism" to make sense of why our foreign policy is the way it is **and** the politics to counter it.
I was 15 for the 2k election, I felt like Al Gore during the debate clipped in this video. The man was clearly unintelligent and vastly underqualified, and therefore should never have even made it as the nominee. The post 9/11 super patriotism was icky. Watching Repubs sink so low as to rename french fries was emblematic of the ignorance and idiocy running rampant through the ranks. Then seeing Fox News' script flip from Bush's "we must support the president" to Obama's "it's our duty as Americans to question all actions by the president" pushed me permanently away from right wing media sources. Working retail during the great recession and listening to customers remark at how happy I must be that my corporate overlord's main competitor was going under was the final wake up. To think that I would be happy about all the now unemployed workers was sickening. Tie in the fact that competition is good for consumers and fewer unemployed increases the bargaining power of those seeking employment and I genuinely could not comprehend how anybody could possibly think I would be happy about the company, that underpaid everyone, gaining a near monopoly.
Absolutely excellent video. For me, it was much less gradual. I considered myself an “enlightened centrist” until I was sitting at work on a slow night, watching the live streams of the Ferguson protests as they were happening. And then Gamergate happened a few weeks later, shortly after I’d learned a webcomic artist I’d followed for YEARS was actually a serial sex abuser and had abused other artists I’d admired for years. It was like a slap in the face that sobered me up real damn quickly.
I keep coming back to this video every month. Again and again. Each time I watch, I am overwhelmed and I cry. I get sad, I get angry, and something just clenches in my throat and hurts. Again and again. I am working towards converting this emotion into action. But it seems such an uphill and lonely march. Thank you for this incredible video.
I'm 38 like Renegade, American History, Kansas History(yeah I'm a Kansan), and US Govt. Classes in High school along with good teachers showed me the key. The Internet developing as I was developing I also think had a big effect on me. Learning about Phreaking, Hacking, and the counter cultures of Punk, Goth, and Rap also gave me a good radicalization.
For me, I think it started with having a group of gay friends in middle school then learning that I too was gay and then being more and more involved in LGBT rights and feminism discourse. Then it grew as I truly accepted the fact that I was black (I'm mixed and was raised by my caucasian single mother) and all of the truly horrific things black people were and still are subjected to that I was sheltered from. Then it kept growing as I learned more and more about the United States through socialist circles as well as from college.
Me too, friend, but I was raised by a black mother in a black majority country, so was treated like a white person for having light skin. When I moved to the UK, I was just like, why do people hate me, now? Even with the racism I started facing, I was lucky enough to _teach_ myself racism, instead of having it shape my early life.
I was radicalized after interning for the State Department, watching breadtube, reading theory, and then working for a big international humanitarian aid NGO that's financed by mega corporations who benefited from (if not outright created) the conditions that made the refugees that we were trying to help.
Gonna get personal, and this comment might not make a whole lot of sense, but here goes... I've been leaning farther and farther left ever since I got to college and away from my very conservative immediate family for the first time. Talking to more people, watching more content like this channel, paying more attention to what's going on in the world and not just taking my parents' word for it--all of that helped me. I started seeing my country for what it is, and I started getting really pissed off about it. So I started speaking up whenever I could, giving donations and signing petitions, supporting protesting friends and their causes, doing small things, whatever I could do to help. And yet... I still don't feel like it's enough. Five years later, I'm working a dead-end job that pays very little, living in a house that isn't even finished, and my mental health is the worst it's been in a very long time. Meanwhile people are dying en masse, either from police violence or the pandemic, and there's still a megalomaniac in the Oval Office. Trump has been the first president of my adult life, and that terrifies me still. The world is on fire, and most days I can't get out of bed, let alone take to the streets to protest. I know it's a stupid and selfish thing to think, but I get scared when I hear people talking about burning it all down and stoking a revolution because people tend to die in revolutions. I've only recently managed to get out of a spiral of suicidal ideation... I don't want to die. But I'm afraid that might be the only worthwhile contribution I can make. Will it do any good for me to vote? Will anything change if I do? How much good am I to the world if everything scares me? Am I just a coward, or am I just used to this unbelievably shitty system? I don't know the answer to any of these... I just needed to get this off my chest because it's something I've been struggling with for a while. This video made me feel a lot of things, mostly fear (no surprise, considering). And I think it's good to feel that way right now--I just don't know how to make my fear productive. I wish I had your confidence, I really do. I could do with some of it.
Hell, Cut and I have so much in common that we might be clones. Same age, same basic paradigm shifts growing up, we even had the same jobs (I did teaching in Japan and am still a teacher, just not there). Only difference was that I went into the military instead of college and that is where my radicalization really took root.
I’m only two years older I was thinking the same thing. Remembering how I voted for Nader in that first election, and someone I looked up to told me - YOURE the reason Bush is the president right now. I was heartbroken.
Idk what radicalized me. But I think the start was realizing hearing about how my family might have to be a little more careful with money due to medical bills. It showed me that you had to pay to even exist, & I refused to accept that it couldn't be changed. Then I just learned more & more.
Seeing Bernie lose twice, hearing about people being put in unmarked cars by police,news that families are being separated on the US southern border , Trump and his cult of personality, I could go on.
Warning: suicide mention My parents had inherited money and were big into faith healing (essentially we were privileged enough to distrust "modern medicine"). Despite their reluctance to get me medical treatment for a suicide attempt at age 11, I was taken to a group home and diagnosed with depression and anxiety and took it to heart that I was mentally ill. My parents and I took a trip to San Francisco, later the next year I think, with my wealthy uncle. We ate duck outside of a street full of people, many of them mentally ill themselves, actively starving to death. I went outside to cry and met an apparently homeless woman who told me to smile. At that time it would be another decade before I was radicalized, but that moment was my first turning point I think.
I will try and punch a Pinochet apologist for you. Also, if I ever meet him, Paulo Guedes, our current minister of Economy for Boslonaro, whose sole qualification for the job was "helped fuck up the Chilean economy and now profits over the horribly inhumane pension system of the country".
It was quite a surprise to hear someone with such quality essays mention Montenegro. I'm sorry you didn't have a better experience (as the place does have it's charms if you look really hard) and hope you continue making awesome content. And should you ever decide to visit the country again, beer is on me. Cheers!
"You hate capitalism, and yet you make MONEY!" is not the own you think it is. Everyone has bills to pay and food to eat regardless of their politics. It's so disappointing (yet hilarious) watching people unironically behave like the ignoramus in the Matt Bors comic. lol
You serve the king yet you oppose monarchy?? Ha!
The 2016 election of Donald Trump was what really drove me to the left - or more accurately, drove me to gain a fuller understanding of my own, progressive political leanings. I used to not follow politics closely at all. I was pretty much apathetic to politics in general before that time. I voted for Hillary in 2016, thinking that she would win and when she didn't, I was left bewildered at first, but then eager to understand exactly how such an odious figure could be elected. That really drove me to wake up and understand how brainwashed we are as a society and fully resent the corporate propaganda that has all but destroyed our culture.
it also always comes from the kind of people who would never in a million years even think about listening to anything a homeless person says.
It's almost like there is no ethical consumption under capitalism or something
This is relevant:
pbs.twimg.com/media/DtxGQUdW4AAZ4Z4.jpg
"The system isn't broken, it's functioning as intended."
This is most sobering, frightening, disappointing, and radicalizing statement that one can make about the modern world, and it needs to be heard.
And that is the Stone Cold Truth
I already felt radicalized before watching any of the Lefttube channels, but that is a very powerful statement that really helps frame things. That's what I love the most about Renegade Cut and the Lefttube channels, they reframe things in a way that makes sense and exposes the right-wing hellscape that we live in
I was radicalized when I was born as a woman in a “3rd world country”
this is important. people who arent as advantaged, such as by not being born as men in the '1st world', are usually more aware of these truths from the start. its just that the globally disadvantaged don't get a voice in anything.
@@Dragunlord13
"LmAO juST MoVE To A fIRsT WoLrD CouNtRY *LeGalLy* "
It's amazing that calling out extreme inequality is considered radicalization.
Doing so WITH THE INTENT OF CHANGING IT is. Remember: the neoliberal pitch is in claiming to be for equality while leaving all the exceptions in the fine print.
That means that isn't what is normal, and what is normal must be pretty fucked up.
I don't know about you but as an anarchist, I consider myself pretty damn radical. What's wrong with being radical?
I guess its more related to not actually wanting to accept the current status quo. I don't think (or feel) I am "radical" but In comparison to society I am.
@@mitchclark1532 Nothing. That said it can and often will create friction and disadvantages for your life. There are days where I wish that I would be different. I probably could have had a "career" and different relationships if I would have been more comfortable with how things are.
I was raised by an anarchist and a socialist, and I grew up learning how shitty this system is. But I grew up in a place of relative privilege, and it was a sort of theoretical knowledge. Only about a year ago when I started getting out on the streets and organizing did it really sink in. I thought I was fully radicalized, but it turns out there’s a lot more that you can learn by holding your hands above your head at gunpoint while a cop pours bleach on the food that you spent all day cooking for your hungry neighbors.
@ Misha T: I have a similar story friend. Solidarity. And as always, death to Capitalism. 😌
@@Justanotherconsumer I am exclusively that.
Unless of course I know people, I try to help whenever I can but I'm a lazy fuck so I usually don't organize, plus I don't even know where to start with that.
@@teergeret Similar story here. I don't have the resources, time or knowledge to organize, and the fact that I live in Quebec doesn't help. Seriously, we've got quite a lot of right wings political parties because most of our population is right-leaning (since there are quite a lot of racists here), which causes even the federal government to be afraid to call out our bullshit. Bill 21 is a pretty good exemple of this, but there are other exemples - such as the fact that our PM lowered so much immigration that it hurts our economy and when he tried to increase it for economical reasons, he had to back down because his racist base called him a traitor trying to destroy the nation. In this climate, it feels like being the only man in a boat realizing that it's a bad idea to pierce holes in the haul while everyone else compete and brag about being the best at sinking the ship - and not knowing how to stop them from doing so.
How does someone justify doing that to people, even to himself? If I put something like that in a fictional story I'd get in trouble for writing such a cartoonishly evil strawman villain.
“What radicalized you?”
Me: *gestures wildly in all directions*
In German left circles we call it "Die Gesamtscheiße", "the aggregate crap" or "the entirety of crap going on".
www.drstefanschneider.de/images/TakToJest/Sommertoern_2007/12.jpg
@@johannageisel5390 "Aggregate crap" is an insanely great term. Sorry, but I'm totally stealing that.
@@johannageisel5390 And as usual, the Germans have a word for everything.
@@9UWmember Comrades don't steal, we redistribute!
@Johanna Geisel - could you possibly provide an english phonetic breakdown for pronouncing Die Gesamtscheiße? I'd love to be able to say it would murdering it :)
"Anarchism is Democracy taken seriously" ― Edward Abbey.
This! Liberty, Equality and Solidarity taken to their logical conclusion
Yes, it does seem a whole of people out there have absolutely no idea what anarchism actually is, as they seem to view it as a drive towards chaos, and associate it with terrorism, when in fact it is primarily concerned with making democracy as inclusive and direct as possible, by questioning and dismantling dangerous and unnecessary hierarchies, essentially giving people a fair say in the things that affect them at as local a level as possible. What I find, is most people tend to agree with the central tenets of anarchism, just so long as you don't mention the A word, which is why I mostly refer to myself as a libertarian socialist.
@@deadnoodle3801 but just as there are various flavors of socialist or capitalist, there are various flavors of anarchist. All of these "isms" are sets of theories and ideals that weave together into big fuzzy pictures. One can stand for many ideals in any social theory and reject some others. I'm certainly that way with capitalism, socialism, liberalism, progressivism, futurism, objectivism, good-samaritanism, pacifism, globalism, etc etc etc. A danger arises when one begins to identify with a particular school of thought with the adherence of a zealot. These philosophies should be there to guide and clarify the world, not to collect religious followers. They're just ideas, man. But many ideas get used by the powerful to hold on to power, and the masses just follow. The world might indeed be a better place if no one social theory was adhered to so vehemently. Oh, I guess that makes me a kind of anarchist too. :-)
@@deadnoodle3801 well, there's lots of anarchist thoughts and thinkers, with radically different positions. try reading the Oscar Wilde essay, "Soul of Man under Socialism", and remember consider that at the time socialism and anarchism were used interchangeably by political thinkers. Wilde wrote this essay after reading Kropotkin's work, which is also important (though I think Kropotkin's writings are flawed in some aspects).
I really like Pierre Clastres, he has two great books that deal extensively with anarchism, philosophy and, of course, anthropology. they are: Society Against the State and Archaeology of Violence. he studied and lived for quite some time with the Guayakis in Paraguay. exiting the so called "Western" thought is always good. we tend to think things are immutable and totalizing everything. terrible.
I don't know about this Abbey guy, but by reading your description he sounds awful. I stand by my recommendations. great sources that were important for my political formation. if you have the time, you should read Pedagogy of the Opressed too. many insightful propositions to a new form of education. great book. Freire does not get enough recognition. he is brazilian, after all. Latin America is a land forgotten by the rest of the world, unfortunately. let us strive to fight oblivion and abjection.
take care. hope you are well in this pandemic.
Here's an attempt at some oneupmanship: "Anarchism is democracy done sincerely."
working at a landlord's office threw me to the far-left, seeing all the blatant disregard of laws, disgust of heir own tenets and the toxic work environment
I think you meant "tenants," but "tenets" also works in this context.
I could say that I had something similar but from the other direction, (I'm an attorney at a non-profit who represents those tenants), but I was on the far left long before then.
Also, want to know why they can get away with blatant disregard for the laws? Because nobody has any interest in enforcing those laws. There are so many cases that I've had that could be dealt with if only the laws were be enforced in any way other then spending too much money on litigation-money that the landlords can afford (while complaining that they can't) and my client's absolutely can't. Getting an actual enforcement agency to force a landlord to make basic repairs takes so long and is so exhausting, most of the time, the tenant just moves out.
My best friend has this bitter laugh as she recounts that her parents stopped buying a local paper after they called her dad a slum lord.
"It's all functioning as intended!"
Astronaut with a gun: Always has been.
I was still in middle school when 9/11 happened, but I do have a later "moment" of when I was radicalized. In 2016 when a certain foot ball player took a knee to protest police brutality, I thought it was the perfect protest. After all the criticism prior to the BLM movement was that they were being destructive, and here we had a peaceful protest that everyone could see. Yet instead of addressing and talking about the actual issues, people changed the subject to disrespecting the flag/troops/etc. That is when it clicked for me, it was never about protesting in "the right way", or about the property damage, etc. It was the simple fact that the protest existed at all.
This is so sobering 😥
You know Kaepernick actually got the idea of kneeling from a servicemember lol?
For the first few games he simply sat out the National Anthem, which people took as ignorant or disrespectful. Someone within the military told him to kneel for whatever reason, I guess it shows respect in some way or another in some kind of military tradition. Can't remember the whole reasoning behind it.
Yeah, if you march peacefully they still get their underpants in a bind...And this is on any issue.
It's considered unpatriotic, somehow, to some people, to express dissent with the way things are?
Which it isn't.
But I am pretty unpatriotic, due to all the horrible things our government has done.
If one doesn't live in ignorance or in denial, one has to come to grips with the fact that our government has done a lot of evil things.
The unfortunate beauty of what occurred in the Capitol is that it exposed that it's not even protest that bothers our government but specifically *progressive* protest. Better not advocate for anything that would improve the life of the proles.
My mom died at 43 years old. I was 18, just out of high school, my sister was 13. What did she die from? Complications from being unable to afford medical treatment for nearly ten years. Denied medicaid over and over. Denied disability. Denied anything that could help her. This was the moment that radicalized me.
My radicalization started with my parents. My dad bought into the whole "lost cause" cult, and taught me and my sister to be "proud of our heritage". That was when we were kids, back when I was 7 and my sister at 12. She knew better and would sit me down and teach me what she knew. It wasn't much, since we were both children, but we grew up with the internet. We would learn about income inequality by the time I was 10, why poor people never seem to escape poverty, things that conservative parents wouldn't tell their kids, or would outright lie about. We would learn about how lgbt people were and are treated, how people of color are systemically disenfranchised, how 9/11 was a tragedy, but the government has warped that sorrow to kill spy and steal from other people, whether foreign or domestic.
When she left to washington at 17, her girlfriend had picked her up. It was about 4am, and I had woken up to say goodbye. Primarily, she was the one who looked after me, but our parents had only gotten worse. They went from misinformed people who fell for a lie about the civil war, to people who called on eugenics, and for stripping people of their rights. When they found out my sister was bi, that she had a girlfriend, they began to physically assault her.
After that, it was quiet through high school. I mourned quietly for each protest under the Obama administration, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, etc. Every time it happened I listened to my parents theorize how secretly evil the corpse on tv was. How they shouldn't have sold those two loose cigs, how the kid shouldn't have had a toy, how james brown shouldn't have been there, and it made me sick. It made me hate that I was related to people who are so willing to hate someone because authority can simply wave a gun or strangle a kid, and get away with it, like they dream of being the authority with abuse privilege.
I witnessed what right wing ideology does, over the course of half my life, how it ruins people, and how it isolates even family, how it makes people bloodthirsty.
I'm 20 now, and I spent a good deal of time learning policy, the differentiation between each wing, how authority is abused, historical context, to sort of piece it together, and so far, yeah, it's working as intended, in the worst way possible. My time at University at age 18 brought me up to speed with what my sister had probably already knew by the time she ran away at 17.
I'm planning to move, similar to how my sister did. Quiet, early, no warning. Neither of us deserved growing up like that, and nobody deserves to live in a society where it's a norm or acceptable to be raised like that.
I am so sorry that you guys have gone through that. I hope your sister and her girlfriend are safe and happy now, and that you get the same soon.
Most relatable thing I’ve ever heard
@@angeladelgado7668 Your sister sounds like an incredible person. All the best👍
I hope you guys are safe I’m sorry you had to grow up with this
How are you doing nowadays, freind? Sounds rough and you have my thoughts. I hope things are better.
What radicalized me was when I was 7 or 8. I was in a summer reading program that awarded kids a free pizza. My sister and I won and we got our certificates. My dad wanted to treat us, so we went to a local Pizza Hut in the next town. For some reason the lady at the register didn't think my dad was being truthful and denied us our pizzas, even though we had the certificates to show her. She called a police officer over that. Some minutes later the cop came in, looking mean at us and told us to leave (even did that authoritarian stance they typically do), over pizzas. I was shocked to see that and never understood why that had happen. I think it made me look at cops as thugs for the state. I was still told to trust them afterwards tho.
What a fucking cunt calling the police over some shit like that lmao Jesus
I applied for a job in another state and got an email back about how "We don't hire immigrants". I was so confused. I'm not an immigrant and nothing in my resume or cover letter suggested I was. I traveled to Japan and back and thought there was some kind of confusion over that part of my resume. It took me a few years before another friend, an actual immigrant, told me it was because my last name is Spanish (my ancestors in Norway and France moved to Spain and changed their name to the Spanish equivalent, then moved to the US shortly afterward, so I don't have any Spanish blood in me whatsoever).
"They can do that?"
"They do it to me all the time."
I've always been socially progressive, but until Trump was elected, I always thought I was center, maybe center-left. Then things got crazy and I studied general politics a bit, coming to the realization that I was never center in the first place.
Ah, welcome to the club, I've been changing my name on my resume since I was 16.
@Jhonny Auditore No I think they were looking for a job upon *returning* from Japan
Kudos to Renegade for not keeping his citations behind Patreon. It’s a small touch that shows HUGE thought for viewers.
people do that??? um wtf
Who is doing that? Hiding your sources unless the viewer is paying you suggests your argument is intellectually bankrupt.
I didn't know that was a thing, but you're welcome, I guess. I started putting MLA style bibliographies at the end of my videos around 2014 and then switched to the more convenient and accessible links in the description a couple years ago.
I don’t know what’s worse doing that or giving no sources at all....
@@jo0rd73 no sources, since you can at least form a group to infiltrate the patreon and then distribute the sources to the masses, if there are no source listings anywhere, best you can do is guesswork after a lot of research.
What radicalized me was going from “atheist-tube” to alt right videos thanks to the algorithm and anti SJW videos. I was watching Ben Shapiro and Gavin Mcciness. Thankfully I found Kyle Kulinski, Krystal Ball, and Contrpoints. Far right talking points are so easily debunked, I just hadn’t been around anyone who wasn’t conservative (small town) and had no idea how far left I actually was/am.
Krystal and The Hill are still shills to right wing talking points. They are critical of both GOP and Dem establishment positions but overall paint a more disenfranchising view of leftist ideas. But glad you haven’t been trapped in the algorithm like a lot of my peers are. Stay well
@@yeahsteve7372 agreed. The Hill's rhetoric is just as dangerous and in bad faith.
Dude me too! I found those same channels in the same order as you!
Seriously, far right talking points fucking fold over with the slightest level of critical analysis, it's stunning to me that the anti-sjw cottage industry on youtube gained as much steam as it did. They're so pathetically bad.
Second Thought also has some good videos if you want to expand. They got me out of my "centrist" period
Being Black radicalized me realizing you can’t do anything without be compared to other people in your race having teachers think you cheated on a test when you score higher than the asian kid walking down the street and automatically assumed criminal activity is going to happen going to a job interview and receive the “you know i didn’t expect you to be urban” response
Being a minority, you have to be twice as good to receive half the credit.
I feel this my man, Black people in the U.S. get to deal with the perpetual stress of living in a nation of people who do not view them as entirely human and more of a second class citizen. The state itself feels entirely justified in killing and sending its second class citizens to prison en masse because it can exploit them like it's been exploiting them for this entire damn nations history.
When I was a kid there was a lot of shit said to me that was entirely based on the stereotypes and prejudice you listed, as a kid I knew it wasn't right and as an adult this shit makes me furious.
hell yeah brother
We don't know how to help
We just look stupid
The founding father of my parent’s country-Ghana- was a socialist. So as I went through the education system and saw the discrepancies with how the west views the rest compared to how the rest view the west-things began to click.
Since I went through AP courses there existed a kind of internalized caste system within the school as if this group of test takers was better than others. And my existence largely discredited the claim that black people are inherently below. I then largely applied that concept to nationstates and then watched some Parenti lectures.
Alongside this, being black in the education system puts me in a position of perpetual scrutiny. So I began to realize that a lot of my white friends in these classes took my willingness to talk about the third world as confrontational or obnoxious or would call it favoritism when a teacher would say I wrote a particularly good paper.
What pushed me over the edge completely was when I was playing Minecraft earlier this year and this kid I knew, at the time, said “Idk why illegals are getting upset when their children are taken away. I mean like you’re breaking the law.”
holy shit, the last part really threw me off
i get how that was the tipping point
it really never is like Big and Scary, it's always seeing a Normal Person sometimes who you know personally, say something that just sounds atrocious without even batting an eye
They don't see the people crossing the border as fully human beings, who are often fleeing starvation or death threats. 😭
The fascist white supremacy lie that socialism is an existential threat is true though: it’s a threat to their totalitarian plan because it favors people before profit and democracy before nationalism.
I’m grasping on the last socialist parts of our Western European democracy because Anglo Saxon neoliberalism is turning us into the same fascist third world country as the USA is.
I used to think that America was this great place where I’d want to live but now I see it in the same light as South Africa in the eighties.
Yeah Kwame Nkruma! Africa Must Unite!
Anyone who supports a state that can separate parents from their children without them committing any act of violence, provocation or threat whatsoever other than 'being from a different country' is against the very principles of a free and equal democratic society... that isn't just anti leftist, its anti-liberty, anti-democratic, and certainly in line with fascism and racist ideology.... and when you say that, people call you alarmist... no one ever said a free society should had the right to arbitrarily separate families. Inalienable human rights are inalienable to all humans, if you don't universally apply this to everyone, you inevitably begin to support ideologies of supremacy and dehumanization.
"Maybe I avoided learning the worst things about the world in my youth because my brain knew that my heart couldn't take it."
That line hit me like a kick in the guts. Thank you for this video, and for this channel.
Yeah I was emotional after this video, i feel so helpless. Maybe just me though.
@@NAdorableYoung you're not alone amigo
@@NAdorableYoung if it helps I'm sure I'm going to ball my eyes out and have to sit with animal crossing after it 💖
I know everything is pretty awful rn but take care of your self
Yep. This shit is way yo heavy to carry around all the time.
I was assistant to a CEO. Old money millionaire high school drop out with fancy mansion and high status. Their job was to go on expensive outings (dinners, biplane tours, wine tastings, etc) with clients. They have a lot else they claim as their job description but I did all of it. They worked a few hours a week for fun (they told me they wouldn't be working if it wasn't fun) and I worked 60 hours a week minimum for a shitty salary no benefits and a lot of stress. Then I discovered that's how it is for every CEO and Executive position. I had held on to that illusion of "people who work hard and deserve to reach the top will get there" until it finally clicked that I was there to be used until I broke down and needed replacing.
Sounds about right.
I'm a disabled trans girl who's lived through a decade of Conservative government in the UK.
What _didn't_ radicalise me?
Fuck this shitty country and fuck the tories.
its only been 9 years, you should have worked for the NHS under labour lol, fucking madness.
As a disabled woman of color in the US in the era of Trump in the worst place for black women to live - I feel your pain
As my girlfriend puts it "I'm disabled, queer, and of Romani decent. The Nazis would have killed me thrice. I know exactly where they want to take it."
Sry, living under Trump and two terms of Bush was heartbreaking and thing's are going to get way worse likley.
in art school i befriended a feminist and she told me how the world actually sucks... i was like "no way" and she was like "yes way", then i went down the rabbit hole from there
She sounds cool.
"Anyway I'm an anarchist now"
Possibly the best conceivable ending to this video
@@appleslover Embrace the true eternal science. Forsake Marxist-Leninist-Maoism and embrace your true nature as a leftist.
He didn't say Marxist-Leninist.
@@appleslover why is that? anarchism sounds pretty nice to me. no more government and capitalism to oppress us and instead society based on free association and consensus
@@Sonji_S sounds like the union of egoist
It is literally the only rational stance.
I was radicalized by this year. I'm 19 right now. it was going to be my first election. I was sure bernie would win, and he'd make everything so much better.
then he got fucked over on super tuesday.
then a pandemic hit and the government decided to sacrifice people's lives for the sake of the stock market.
and they helped no one when the biggest unemployment spike in history happened.
and the stock market crashed so hard oil prices went negative, so they just created more money, which made me realize that money means absolutely fuck all and we can just say that we have more of it, apparently.
and police started gassing peaceful protesters, and shooting at them.
and I realized I'm neurodivergant in a way that would make wage labor seem like hell on earth, and the thought of being forced to do it every day just to not starve to death makes me start to panic.
and I realized no one in charge gives a shit about whether I'm okay or not, just whether i can make some rich asshole richer.
amd I realized that I would probably never feel truly fulfilled unless I was able to somehow escape this capitalist neoliberal hell.
You are so right!
are you me?
Similar story here, except it was stretched out between 2016 and the present.
Please. Never forget and don’t let the future repeat the past.
I can definitely empathize, hope you manage to build yourself a strong support network that will help you brave these seas!
Living in America and under its capitalism radicalized me. Day after day after day.
This, a slow gradual change as I watched shit not work as they promised, but the mechanisms worked.
Yeah I don't know when exactly it really happened though once it hit a certain tipping point & I started "reading theory" I've been watching myself get more and more radicalized. Originally it was growing up conservative Catholic listening to Rush Limbaugh & shit and realizing Catholicism wasn't true then wanting to figure out what exactly, if my whole previous worldview was wrong, *is* true about the world? Went from calling myself republican to classical liberal to social democrat to libertarian socialist to anarchist to anarcho-communist to now i just say communist/socialist/Marxist depending on who I'm talking to and I'm about to get back to some Mao I've been reading that has been really surprisingly great & fascinating and unexpectedly easy to read.
The over worked, underappreciated, neglectful school system that served as a tutorial on American capitalism radicalized me.
agreed but the pendulum is forever swinging. i feel this way about my corporate job
Yes! learning how hateful my family was and how negatively they affected me.
I was actually a conservative teenager, going to my rich catholic school from k-12. I didn't know the rest of the world, or even the rest of my own country, wasn't like that. Then I went to university and worked at mcdonald's part time. I was not very political at the time, didn't even vote in the first election I could vote in. But then my life took some turns. My long term relationship ended, I dropped out of school and moved away from family. Really did things totally on my own. I ended up going to college after, did really well, until effects of living on my student income(which is mostly still owed to this day in debt) took their toll on my home life. I couldn't afford a car or a nice place, I had room mates in the slums and they kept me up all night, had raving drunk parties, stole my things. I didn't grow up rich, but I grew up around rich people. I was quite sheltered from this kind of thing. I called the police, they said "Call us after they hurt you". Kinda seemed more like they are the punishment and not the prevention. Between semesters I stopped feeling safe in my own home and I could not perform at school, there was also a staff strike at my college that year, so it was convenient to get my tuition refunded. Since then I have worked full time in fast food and the lack of respect and generosity I am shown for going above and beyond on a regular basis honestly disgusted me. To be treated like human refuse by the man that I am generating wealth for. How can he hate me, I am why he's wealthy. I more than made up for part timers that wouldnt work enough to ever really become efficient at the job. And all I got was extra responsibility, expectations and attention from people that had nothing good to say to me. For no extra pay or benefits at all. I was talked down to like a child by corporate staff, appointed through nepotism with no formal education. It was dehumanising. New year's eve my co worker that ran the store with me received a call from corporate. Even though we had been following their demands, cleaning the hard to reach and difficult to clean areas, reducing crew hours(aka more work for the people that stay on), reducing our food waste, etc., she was being transferred out of her store that she had been running for 6 years, 2 of which with me assisting. I put in my 2 weeks a few days later. Working full time as a wage slave radicalised me. I don't see how it hasn't radicalised every single one of us/them.
I watched Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, The Dark Knight Rises Shooting and Sandy Hook before I was 12.
And it just kept happening. That's what radicalized me.
same here, the constant every day school shootings. the every day occurence of another man getting killed or abused by the police. the boot put on the working class. all of this brought me to socailism
I can't even sit in a theater without checking exits and having an escape plan.
When I lost my faith, realized Obama fixed nothing, and saw that someone like Trump could get nominated. Everything since has only served to confirm my convictions.
Yup
Indeed.
Probably in middle school when a lot of people called me a terrorist, while simultaneously accepting the reasons for the US to go to war in the middle east.
@zain mudassir hasn't got much better for them tbh
@zain mudassir not JUST brown people, but, yeah. Mostly them.
Growing up having an Iranian-Canadian best friend definitely got the ol' radicalization ball rolling. While I don't remember any overt racism directed at him, I was aware of the amount of hatred for anybody that looked like him, especially south of the border. I feel like this had a bigger impact than any discrimination I personally experienced.
To those who are from "developing" countries, like me, it's a relief to see there are americans like you, Leon.
I was radicalized when I was in elementary school. We were hiking in Germany and saw a long fence with an open gate. Nothing imposing. It was even too short to keep puppies in a yard. A sign on the gate declared it was the boarder between germany and Czechoslovakia. That was a national boarder... a tiny gate open along a walking path. My sister and I jumped back and forth thru the gate. It was fun until I tried to run along the fence off the trail. By dad grabbed me and gave me a lecture about landmines. I realized national boarders are stupid and people die for invisible lines.
@@dlzimbruceleritate so, you were like the vast majority of people?
Are you still alive, buddy?
(Watch Ace Combat Zero videos to get the reference)
Always depressing to live in a world where wanting the world to be a better place is considered radical even though we so easily have the means to do it.
What radicalized me was visiting a "first world country" for the first time. Despite having a grasp on the intrinsic exploitative nature of capitalism (including neocolonialism and imperialism), I used to have the impression that strong Keynesian policies would be sufficient to significantly improve everyone's lives to the point of no scarcity.
Then I visited one such country and finally realized that no matter how well wealth is actively redistributed by the government and how accessible essential services are, consumption in capitalism is ALWAYS exclusionary. Prices are always set so as to maximize capitalists' profits in detriment of those who cannot afford. This is true of everything, from a pencil to a plane ticket. This means that no matter how well people earn on average, how eagerly the government attempts to redistribute wealth, every product will always be less accessible to a significant part of the population in capitalism. Again, this is true for everything, from food to books, from plane tickets to housing, etc.
Are you Latin American? Because I really feel represented by your comment
@@ksvba96-36 Yes I am, I suppose this is a shared experience, camarada.
Being raised poor, watching my husband's aunt die from lack of health insurance, reading the autobiography of Malcom X, having untreated depression and anxiety, I could go on
Honestly, I feel always a bit upset and angry when an American claims theirs is the greatest democracy or that they are the moral leaders of the world. That being said, I don't hate America or its people and I really wish you get your house in order.
Yeah, as an American... yes, that, what you said. >
I'd like to believe that a lot of people don't think that at all. It's pretty important to be very critical of each and every one of our presidents considering the far-reaching effects of their decisions. Spoilers: most of them have done immoral things.
As an American: Yeah, we fucked up. Bad. Although to be fair, this was always a country run by the elites. And the elites hit a gold-mine for keeping the working class divided with the institution of slavery.
I'm an American. I kinda hate us, and a lot of our people.
It's okay. We've earned it.
I think everyone has the right to hate America and Americans. Many Americans are privileged and willfully ignorant. It's common knowledge that "developing" countries are the source of cheap labor for rich corporations in America. It's just that no one cares. I hate America. I think it's just fine that other people hate us too.
I was Radicalized by learning more and more about Feminism. Learning things in terms of systems open my eyes to view the world in different ways. And most of the Feminists I was listening to, on UA-cam of all places, we're also Socialists, Communists, Marxists, Anarchists, or just Anti-Capitalists of some kind. I combine with my own thoughts and experiences and began being a Socialist. Learning about Anarchist critique about The State through Thought Slime's video on the subject made me an Anarchist. And I have been one ever since.
fahck yeah
Got any channel reccommendations?
feminism is a form of anarchy. they identified an unjust from of hierchy (patriarchy) in society and are succesfully dismantling it. that's what they have in common with other leftists/colective in nature movements.
I don't know why, but my radicalization began around the time of the Christ Church shooting. Something about that event, how people reacted to it, knowing that nothing was really gonna change after it, that it was just gonna be "thoughts and prayers" and that would be the end of it. I realised that this wasn't just blind violence happening in a vacuum, that this was motivated by stochastic terrorism. It wasn't even anything that I already didn't know...
But then, everything else fell into place. It was like something clicked inside my head. Like the cognitive dissonance between my perception of the world and how it really was all came crashing down. I looked back at all the shit that had happened over the last decade. Over the 20 years and it finally made sense. It was capitalism. It was not only the rise of facism but the failures of liberalism to handle it. Things were no longer the product of a cruel world but infact a cruel society that was knowing in its cruelty. All by design.
I didn't know a thing about socialism or anarchism at that time. But what I knew was that there needed to be something. A third option. I knew that we couldn't keep doing this anymore...
If I take something away from this, is this fact:
"The price of a rich nation is a poor nation (or many poor nations)"
Me seeing the thumbnail: oh cool he's gonna talk about how he became socially aware.
Renegade Cut: Throw the whole system away.
That's cause this is a system rotted all the way down to the roots, the only option now is to pull it out and start anew
@@referencetosomething4187 most commentators: Got any rot in that situation?
actual reality: Got any situation in that rot?
I was deeply conservative for most of my life, until my sophomore year of college. I took a philosophy class. The class didn't have a left leaning bent but it did teach me to question my ideas and thoughts and when I did they didn't stand up to scrutiny. So I became a liberal and thought I could make things better by voting. Then 2016 happened and my belief in our institutions was shaken, but not destroyed. Over the last four years I have been slowly opening up to left wing ideas until now I'm an anarchist.
"If something is functioning as intended, then there is nothing to fix. only something to dismantle completely." That hit me really hard.
I was radicalized because my society left me hanging when I needed it.
It sounds like a trivial reason compared to the suffering in other places of the world: I had to quit my first attempt at studying due to health reasons and wanted to retry years later. But my country has no financial support for students with such a broken biography. If you have no money and are not able to work parallel to your classes, then you cannot study.
I found that stupid and unfair, because it held me back from doing what I was good at.
I ended up having to quit my second study again, this time because I ran out of money.
My country could have gotten an engineer in applied sciences, but it got a welfare recipient instead.
I realized that the same callousness and uncaring attitude that shattered my life dreams also was responsible for a lot of other things going wrong. The same old, same old: "There is no money for that." approach to all that could better the lives of people. Everything social is underfunded, understaffed, cancelled or non-existent.
As a person with a very systemic way of thinking it didn't take me long to identify the capitalist system as the culprit. Capitalism may not cause all the problems on the planet, but every single problem is being made worse or becomes unable to solve due to capitalism.
While I had the first stirrings when I was younger through my interactions with the LGBT community, I became fully entrenched when I worked for amazon. The sheer dehumanization of the warehouse as well as the constant output of capitalistic waste combined with my family further falling into poverty, cemented my socialist beliefs and my loss of faith in the system. All around me were people who had done the "right" thing. They kept in line and worked hard. Many had bachelor's degrees. They still received little to none of the American dream that is constantly being promised. It only took the smallest of financial setbacks, (small medical problems, replacing breaks, etc.), for them to fall behind on bills. My own mother, who had a master's and several years work experience, had to work at the warehouse and later became a housekeeper, all due to her age and lack of social mobility.
This system is designed to keep those on the top in power and ocassionally allows a few exceptions through in order to keep us complacent. A carrot on a stick we can strive towards so we don't turn on them and show how many of us their truly are.
Rodney King... when I was 10 years old... My dad told me about the beating, and informed me that that is how people of color are treated in America, our lives aren't as important to police and white society at large. As little black boy I realized that life in the US for people like me are marginal and lucky, but that at any moment, I would become a villain or a thug, just because I have the wrong skin color. It wasn't until much later as a grown man, that I realized why, and how that system links up with capitalism and how even socialism isn't immune to it's ravages.
It is considered radical to be unhappy with the current system we live in.
It is considered radical to want it to change and be willing to protest for it.
It is considered radical by people who the system benefits more consistently, and who use ideologies to make the suffering of other humans needed, and justified.
I think right now we are witnessing a huge number of others having that moment during the worst and most dangerous presidency of our lifetimes.
For me, the system was "broken" when I looked at the "rational actors" and "voluntary arrangements" free market folks love so much just absolutely fell apart in the context of health care. A man telling you to pay him $1000 for life saving medicine was no different than a man telling you to give him $1000 or he'll shoot you.
I realized the system wasn't an accident when, working a shitty low paid warehouse job I was hit with some variation of "work hard because they can just replace you with some one else" line of thought. I don't think it was even a manager, just an older cynical co-worker. I started thinking about supply and demand, and when how you start to look at workers as resources instead of people, poor desperate folks are a very valuable resource to businesses. Well paid workers are simply bad business when you can manage to have poorly paid workers, while despite the talk that "you get what you pay for" in reality a large enough group of desperate workers uses market forces to select for the "best worker who is willing to accept the least pay".
Anyway you asked a question in the first 30 seconds and here's my answer, hopefully it boosts your al gore rhythms.
Greetings from Montenegro!
We finally outvoted the corrupt goverment. There is hope!
While I don't believe in capitalism, this is a breath of fresh air we desperately needed.
After semi dictatorship, democracy is a step in the right direction.
Well of course we could argue that we are all under dictatorship, but I am talking about the direct, transparent, no-limits type.
Well, damn. Thank you for the good news and congratulations! That is an important step.
I go to Montenegro for Vacation from Germany every Year! Budva is a beautiful Place!
@@9UWmember What is even more significant is that the overthrown government was ruling all the way from the 1991. They were the formal successors of the League of Communists of Montenegro, so it's not that easy to pinpoint the formal date of their ascension to rule:) Leading to the elections, more than 8 months of fierce civic protests and intense conflicts between the people and the government prepared the scene for the Belarus scenario, even with major European press calling that nothing has been made to stop the inevitable bloodshed following the elections.
As a citizen of MNE, I was deeply worried also, but the elections turned out to be remarkably peaceful and democratic, with new people in their thirties emerging to the top and signing an agreement that is obliging the 3 winner parties on eradication of deeply rooted corruption, getting the country back on pro-European and pro-western track, securing political power to the minorities and establishing an intermediate technical government that will see experts instead of traditional political figures until the whole mess of the former semi-dictatorship as Mate said it has been eradicated. This indeed was an unexpectedly progressive step, which all other neighbouring Balkan countries yet have to go through.
congrats! remember to never give up and don't stop fighting!
Capitalism is not something to “believe in”. Either is work in xyz way or it doesn’t in xyz way. Capitalism will work for people with capital-and for those who can work for a certain pay and that pay can meet needs. The problem is...Capitalism wants to gain capital and or profit...
I was in high school during the Regan era. I remember constantly being in fear of a nuclear WW III. I remember Nancy saying “Just Say NO” while her husband said nothing while thousands of people were dying from AIDS. Trickle-down economics, the “welfare queen” myth...and then came the Iran Contra Scandal. Before them I didn’t know too much about communism, only that Ronald Regan hated it. That was good enough for me, as I hated him. I began reading Marx and Engels. That was in 1985. I started college that fall. Radicalization had begun
P.S. I ❤️ your channel.
Renegade Cut: Maybe I avoided learning about the worst of the world in my youth because my brain knew that my heart couldn't take it.
Me, who just turned 16: Yeah, it hurts...
Me 16 and already prepared to take down capitalism: aye, aye comrade
Same
I'm 36 and still not able to take it.
But seeing young people drift to the left gives me hope. Here in Germany the majority of people is still not fed up enough to want any change. But the younger generations seem to be much more aware of the dangers in our future if we don't act, than my generation was at this age.
Love this. Wouldn’t say I became an actually lefty until college. Become an activist now if you can. I learned so much during my time at the Occupy protests.
Young people aren't dumb and they aren't stupid. They may not be able to see everything their adult counterparts do, but they see more than said counterparts think they do.
The most naive idea many hold is that the adults around them are doing what they're supposed to be doing and I can't bear to hold that against them
"What happened to us? What happened to the American Dream?"
"The American Dream? It came true! You're looking at it!"
When I first saw that in theaters, it gave me chills.
Eww, weaponizing "my life, my body" like that is sickening.
I've seen right wing people that don't want to wear a mask use that line
And without even a shred of self-awareness, too...
What keeps radicalizing me is the "good boy" stuff I internalized as a kid. Doing good stuff, taking care of others. I cant recall huge moments of realization like you do. Its a constant feeling that gets let down over and over. And every time I see society failing to care for people, one step to the left.
"it was my first election and nobody could tell me what was going on" ive yet to experience a single election where people have
People like to grandstand and act like they know how the election process works, but if you really ask them details, they don't have a clue. That's also by design. They give people a very shallow description of the process while leaving the details blank. No one can know when you cheat if only the cheaters know the rules.
@@angrymoses gosh, there is no better example of this than the last election here in uruguay, the neoliberalist party stated "the first thing we gonna do is mess around with the laws so we can "fix" the problems, but we won't tell you what now, but after the elections", that's it, an empty check, and people still voted for them... because they wanted "change" , what a stupid yet powerful word in politics... and people fell for it every single time.
oh and about the empty check, the usual, police brutality, more power for the military, less restrictions for companies, extreme budgeting of all state services for later privatization, rolling back in all social equality laws....politicians doubled their salary because "they are the best"... fascism is in the air, there are fears of a new dictatorship
yeah, it sucks bad, fuck ignorant people.
@@Badbufon we had the same thing a few years ago. This orangutan looking dude said that on day one he was going to start trying to pass a new health plan. One that was better, cheaper, and would cover everyone. When asked about the plan, he said if he gave details, his opponents would steal the plan.
Fast forward to today. The details have not been forthcoming, and no legislation has been proposed. Go figure.
I think growing up without a stable place to live is what radicalized me. Jumping from apartment to apartment, roommate to roommate, having to leave anyplace we couldn't afford. That's what radicalized me.
My radicalization came when I left Christianity. I applied the same critical thinking that made me give up religion, to other aspects of my world. It took about a decade, but I eventually saw the US for what it is and always has been. The modern Roman Empire.
I agree with the conclusion that the system isn't rigged, the system was designed this way. Poor people are poor by design, criminals are such by design, labor rights are suppressed by design. Clinging to the idea that such a system can be reformed is the last vestige of someone who is out of options, but fears the unknown alternative. Much like a person on a sinking ship, praying to god to save them, but refusing to jump off and begin swimming, not knowing if they'll ever be saved.
perfectly summized. Can i quote you
Funny that you say that, before this year, it occurred to me that as a modern empire that the USA is, it’s downfall is inevitable. All empires fall. I said this before 2020 but man this year seems to be speeding that shit up lol.
I think mine also came after I turned my back on Christianity. When I saw the disparity between the Jesus in the bible and Christians in the real world, I figured out it was a tool of mass control. They insisted on the whole "present your other cheek" and "the last will be first in Heaven" and barely ever touched the parts about caring for each others, living modestly, etc.
I know some even corrupted the words of the bible, ever heard of Republican Jesus? A meme, sure, but he's convinced people that capitalism is good, slaving away is good, laziness is evil and junk like that.
Truth is, religions are man made. What I've described is also by design. There's some good stuff in the bible, but there's some horrendous stuff too. The whole point of blind faith and dogma is to keep good, servile sheep.
(Sorry about my bible quotes, my first language is French and that's the bible I was used to)
Lol, part of what radicalized me was trying to be an actual Christian, given that Jesus was pretty much a communist it was only logical to dig up info on that. Nowadays, I'm not very religious, but I'm still a dirty commie.
Christianity is a faith, not a religion. Christianity was high jacked by the powerful in a successful attempt to control the masses for financial gain & security i.e. Constantine. Jesus was a radical change agent who believed the rich were likely to burn in Hell. Does that sound like tenets of any major religion claiming Christianity today? Of course not. Research Christian Socialists. You'll likely be surprised how much in step real Christian values (not the fake ones bigots & racists claim) & socialist ideals are. I respect your conclusion that this system is wrong, not broken but, I also feel you have been misled on what Christianity is actually about. Which is not your fault. Capitalism seems to seep into everything.
Sources:
www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/practical_christianity.php
christiansocialism.com/christian-socialism-statement/
democraticsocialist.fandom.com/wiki/Christian_Socialism
sojo.net/articles/when-american-christians-were-socialists
Dr. RenegadeCut or: How I Learned to Start Worrying and Love Socialism
It was 2016's elections in both my home country of Australia, as well as in America. Then I found Innuendo Studios, and then HBomberGuy, and then PedanticRomantic, and then Jim Sterling, and then ThoughtSlime, and then you.
You played a role in helping me wake up, and thank you for that.
The first leftuber I bumped into was Shaun. Still grateful to see a bit of light in this tunnel of darkness.
I've always had an interest in anarchy, even as a child. i never trusted the government, i never trusted bosses, or people in power. (not cuz I'm smart, because I'm paranoid and anxious.)
a while after i started researching capitalism, i found a video about how cops are trained to shoot you in your homes. that made me pissed. so i started fantasizing about an anarchist society again.
what pushed me over the edge was Bernie losing and George Floyd's death. I started researching anarchism and comunism.
so now I'm an anarchist lol. acab and trans rights
The killing of Michael Brown radicalized me two days after I turned 18, then I was radicalized even further when Trump won the election two years later. Some of my friends believed that I was too radical in my beliefs until all the events of this year ended up radicalizing them as well.
im so glad someone mentioned the EC. I've seen TOO MANY people criticize "voter apathy" w/o understanding WHY. It's 'cuz the EC needs to be ABOLISHED.
Ironically I'm a Brazilian but was radicalized by american politics, and I started this all by listering podcasts and youtube channels to improve my English :-)
Tamo junto camarada!
I got radicalized for good when I discovered Olavo de Carvalho and Bolsonaro were not outliers and fringe lunatics but had a legion of followers.
When I saw Olavo's book on one of my best friend's house my world turned upside down. Since then we had lots of fights and our friendship is in tatters. And I'm not willing to fix it.
Now he keeps making memes and posts decrying covid measures and making fun of people trying to keep safe. Meanwhile my grandfather-in-law got the virus and is in a respirator while a family friend died of it while pregnant.
And now, even with the disastrous response, unrepentant pandering to the US, nosediving economy, several scandals I have no idea how Bolsonaro's approval dont fall under 30%. That's too much people.
Glad to have you with us, comrade
“It was like a cult, but we couldn’t remember signing up.” This. That’s how I felt, a few years later albeit, but I resonate with that.
I was a righty all the way, thinking that everyone makes their own decisions and everything was up to the individual till a couple of years ago. I was dating this girl, we were watching the news, and shockingly, the police had just killed a man in Texas. She was disgusted, I replied “well let’s see what he did first”, she looked at me like I was an asshole (I was) and simply said “it dosent matter”. She left, we broke up. At first I was just mad, but for some reason, it sparked a little curiosity. so I started watching a video here, reading a book there and slowly but surely I came around. Now I’m all in. I still don’t trust people enough to do the right thing on their own (look around), But I know anarchism and frankly all leftist ideologies needs to be the direction we should be heading in. That girl breaking up with me was the best thing that ever happened to me....... or worst cause now I see how the world works and I’m mad all the time for different reasons hahaha
Paper Mario I used to do that all the time, eventually I figured out, maybe that’s why things never change. Our friends and families we make excuses for, but everyone is doing that to their friends and family. It sucks, but we almost have to be like parents, be firm but correct. In the short term it’ll suck, but man we have been living in the short term for way to long.
It's good that you were willing to challenge your own beliefs and opinions like that. That takes the kind of courage and honesty that a lot of people don't have.
Yo Mr. glad to hear that was an awakening moment for you. Yeah if we are all honest with ourselves we will probably all admit we came from a more close-minded, bigoted, sexist, nasty past (even people of certain colors like me). The whole world is moving toward less of that crap, which means we were all a little more of guilty of in the past. The trick is - as you learned - to evolve into a better person and move on. Right now, there's so much pain in America from people doubling down on stupid inherited bigotries that frankly should have disappeared 100 years ago, or never existed at all. Nobody should be judged for the person they were yesterday, only for the person they are today. I bet if your xgf knew you now she'd be proud.
You should tell her!
lol I've broken up with dudes over vastly different politics a few times and it's always been my hope that it helped radicalize them. good to know it can work lol
Probably not the reaction you were looking for but I almost cried.
You're not alone. We're not alone.
“My brain knew that my heart couldn’t take it: compartmentalisation as self-care.’ Oof, so perfectly put it haunts me.
Scrolled down to see else thought this. That quote is so on point. Opening up to this world has been a painful process. When I see my family's inability to recognize injustice, I can sense the fear of the pain they subconsciously know they will have to get through in order to process it. They probably won't ever get to processing it, and that has taken a long time for me to accept. I want to call them cowards, but I don't think that helps. Instead I now show them how perceptive they actually are about the world and their feelings towards it. I just try to encourage any semblance of insightful thinking. Much like how Zizek debated Peterson.
I'm a Chinese immigrant living in the West. What hasn't radicalized me?
What radicalized me was watching this recent democratic primary unfold, and realizing the DNC would rather have Trump than Bernie
Democrats are right leaning in their economics after all, only culturally progressive to try and get the votes of minorities. It's why certain members excuse... Unsettling aspects of other cultures if they have any significant presence in US soil, while the Republicans demonize anything different to stoke fear. There are no values in the parties, only power. And if power can be secured by dining with your enemy, then they're not that much of an enemy now are they? The parties are the cancer feeding off the body of our nation, spawning so many of it's ills. The best reform we can do is eliminate first past the post voting for something like instant runoff so there is no more strategic voting based on what other people vote for.
Yup, 2016 definitely moved my perspective leftward, and I knew the DNC would rather lose to Trump then let Bernie win this round, but watching the partie's voters turn around because of a few endorsements, against their own self-declared interest (as the vast majority reported in exit polling that they wanted M4A, GND, etc.) but forgo their own critical thinking skills and vote for Biden who to this day 2/3 of them report in polling that they don't even like they are just voting against Trump. Watching that happen made me just want to burn it all down because frankly as a nation we don't deserve better if that's how we operate.
@@KeeperOfTheSevenKeys. I really hate both the Democratic and Republican party, its not just because they have some very bad candidate's (Trump and Biden), its also that they are so similar to eachother that there's basically no difference one side(Republicans) don't care about what the people want, not even their supporters, while on the other side(Democrats) only say they will make a change but as soon as they get elected, they never do it and the thing is Americans think that they are very different, but then I showed them a political chart and told them that today's Republican and Democrat candidate's were all Authoritarian Right, with people like Bernie Sanders being Centrist but being called a Communist.
@@rafaelsantibanez5204 by this election cycles' end the Overton window should have shifted so far right, that the public concept of "leftism/socialism" will be sat entirely to the right-of-center..
disturbing how red can be so green and 2 may even be 3 in this brave new world.
I come from The Netherlands and my political journey towards Anarchism also came from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I remember hearing in school and my surroundings that this war was to catch the guy who did it. But I had the priviledge to grow up in a highly educated and socially aware family on my dad's side. One of my uncles was very outspoken against the war.
Just before we sent our troops, a guy briefly entered the public stage. His name is Maarten van Rossem. He condemned our support to America as an overly emotional gut-reaction. He got shoved under the rug by status quo officials as a "9/11 relativist". Looking back at this footage it's painful how spot-on his conscerns were, and how correct he is about other issues that plague our country today. He is framed as a spectacle, as a historian that is way too cynical and low-energy. But I despise how the media frames him, because he has been spot on in his analysis from day one he entered the public stage.
Later in life I got an internship at a multi-media company that literally exploited interns as slaves. This might sound as dramatic retoric, but judge for yourselves: He had a company with 4 employees. Every single one of them was an intern. We did not get a pay, not a single dime, and we worked from 9 to 5, 5 days a week. He did not have any knowledge about graphic design and could not guide us in our endeavours. He frequently cruised on his motor cycle while he left us at the company to work for his shitty projects. He frequently had people come over for business deals. We were forbidden to say we were interns, while he scammed them by asking way too much money for the projects. We had several conflicts of people walking off angry after he scammed them, like a painter who painted his entire house in exchange for some shitty stickers. One day, he asked me to photoshop scratches on his car to scam an insurance company. I refused to do this and stood up for myself and the other interns. He punished me by barely giving me a passable grade at the end of my internship. I was there every day, I worked my ass off, I did everything that was asked of me - except for that one thing. The only reason he let me pass was because others were watching and he knew all other interns had resentment. I was 16 and taken advantage of by our school system, government and companies without pay. It was exploitation, plain and simple.
Now I live in a society where I cannot buy a house, where we have ever growing alienation and mental health issues, that is on the brink of climate collapse, is ruled by far-right demagogues, has a crumbling democracy and rapidly growing inequality. And I refuse. Radical ideas are my only option left. I started reading Socialist and Anarchist literature, joined our socialist party and Marxist forum (a thinktank). And I now firmly believe we should dismantle each and every unjust hierarchical structure in our society. Neoliberalism must go.
For me it was growing up poor and often being homeless and reading a lot of history. Then the 2016 elections. Then it was my family and their friends radicalizing to the right or at the very least being too cowardly to challenge them. Then it was the rise of fascist terror. Then I started watching more and more actively left wing content and learning about a bunch of different systems. Then I started reading theory. These things radicalized me. Then I started working and overhearing my liberal boss telling a story about him calling the cops on a homeless person. Which radicalized me some more. Then the events of this year radicalized me even more.
Seeing the horrible way that my paraplegic mother was treated in various rehabilitation centers radicalized me. I had, at first, blamed individual nurses that neglected to give her enough water, or who failed to turn her over properly to avoid giving her bedsores. At one point, my grandmother and I had waited in her room for someone to come in and clean her sores out, which were at stage 4, and infected to the bone. The last available RN said that someone would be coming in, but we didn't believe them, so we waited for a half-hour until one appeared with a cart and began actively cleaning her.
It was then that I started noticing how few nurses were around, and how the ones that were around were rushing between rooms that had called for them. How they had to put her in a second-floor room during one of her many transfers that only had a bed frame, a mattress, and a window. There was no AC in that room, and it was in the middle of the Texan summer. These aren't individual issues. This is the result of capitalism siphoning money from the places that most need it only to line the pockets of the impossibly wealthy.
Oh, and I was radicalized when I heard some of my family members defend Pinochet. I was probably 19.
Loved this! BTW, I’m 74, a boomer and an anarchist.
Could you be my grandma/grandpa
Hell yeah, you sound like a cool-as-fuck grandparent. Hope to be like you at 74
Nothing more based than a older anarchist.
we love you - 16yo gen z
RC: "Anyway, I'm an anarchist now"
Me: *looks back at previous videos*
Me: "So what were you before?"
By "now" I don't mean that as of this video I'm an anarchist. I've just been saying it out loud this year as opposed to implying it over the past couple years.
@@renegadecut9875 You're one of the people who made me realize I'm an anarchist. You and Chomsky and Thought Slime.
@@mitchclark1532 Beau of the Fifth Column helped me in addition to the ones you named.
"I used to be an anarchist. I used to be, but I still am, too." -mitch hedberg, probably
bwills4k I have to credit Re-education in addition to the other names. Anarchist solidarity.
"This is functioning as intended."
Ouch.
the real question is... at this point... why aren't more people radicalized against capitalism?
Mostly because the media is strongly dictated by the interests of capitalists.
Check Tom Nicholas' upcoming video. If you like Renegade Cut, you won't be disappointed.
"Temporarily embarrassed millionaires", thanks to US cultural hegemony, is not just an American delusion these days
Devils advocate here. You have to be somewhat a member of the fortunate ruling class of capitalism to have the resources available for you to live on, to be able to be against capitalism in the first place. Being poor and "fighting against" capitalism is just starving to death. Being middle class and being against capitalism is a "fun hobby" for plenty of people.
The thing is when it comes to systems of power, they do everything to continue existing (through propoganda and force). The people with the most wealth want to keep the machine churning no matter how many bodies they have to feed it.
Personally, I think it's the hope and belief of becoming rich that keeps people supporting capitalism.
The US specifically keeps alive this idea that anyone can go "from rags to riches", so instead of fighting that system, it keeps people believing that you can be "at the top" of it, eventually if you work hard enough...
An Irish anarchist, a Turkish socialist, and an old Jewish man radicalized me in January.
@@arrowitgraystun bernie?
Are you guys talking about vaush and hasan?
Fat Ian is actually American
My moment of no return is when I fell in love with someone who'se extended family is Ruling Class and learning just how unhealthy the system is *even for the rulers*. Nobody wins, some just lose less. It's Toxic Turtles all the way down.
This! Its just fucking crazy and nonsense
How so?
@@nobodyspecial2053 paranoia
Well, the Trump family seems startlingly unhealthy and unhappy. We all joke about it, but seriously, it seems like a nightmarish family environment, full of mistrust, and even suicide. It's definitely changed how I view the rich- not that 'they're the real victims' crap. I think it's similar to how toxic masculinity ultimately hurts men, too. I don't think being a 1% is emotionally healthy for the wealthy. Maybe when you're raised on exploiting others your relationships are corrupted into another human resource to consume?
We’re the same age and I think I went through many of the same beats as you did in response to the Bush then trump eras.
I started out a very neoliberal white feminist. Moving to Seattle in 2014 and the large activist population opened my mind to a lot of social justice discourse. I think Sanders May have been my gateway to socialism and now in 2020 I’m full on Conquest of Bread.
In the UK some people are wondering why younger voters, especially younger minority voters are not becoming more conservative as they age.
The reason, we have nothing left to conserve. (Unless you count desperately trying to conserve what is left of the environment)
We are the same age and you saying you've lived half your life in a pre-9/11 world and half in a post-9/11 world gave me chills.
me: Bush's War on Terror (while growing up Muslim in America), anti-war candidate Obama doing nothing about it, and finally, reading Lenin's "Imperialism: Highest Stage of Capitalism" to make sense of why our foreign policy is the way it is **and** the politics to counter it.
So the line between absolute poverty from poverty is 1 cent? I am so disgusted.
I was 15 for the 2k election, I felt like Al Gore during the debate clipped in this video. The man was clearly unintelligent and vastly underqualified, and therefore should never have even made it as the nominee.
The post 9/11 super patriotism was icky. Watching Repubs sink so low as to rename french fries was emblematic of the ignorance and idiocy running rampant through the ranks.
Then seeing Fox News' script flip from Bush's "we must support the president" to Obama's "it's our duty as Americans to question all actions by the president" pushed me permanently away from right wing media sources.
Working retail during the great recession and listening to customers remark at how happy I must be that my corporate overlord's main competitor was going under was the final wake up. To think that I would be happy about all the now unemployed workers was sickening. Tie in the fact that competition is good for consumers and fewer unemployed increases the bargaining power of those seeking employment and I genuinely could not comprehend how anybody could possibly think I would be happy about the company, that underpaid everyone, gaining a near monopoly.
"If something is functioning as intended there is nothing to fix, only something to dismantle completely" - Nuff said!
Absolutely excellent video. For me, it was much less gradual. I considered myself an “enlightened centrist” until I was sitting at work on a slow night, watching the live streams of the Ferguson protests as they were happening. And then Gamergate happened a few weeks later, shortly after I’d learned a webcomic artist I’d followed for YEARS was actually a serial sex abuser and had abused other artists I’d admired for years. It was like a slap in the face that sobered me up real damn quickly.
I keep coming back to this video every month. Again and again. Each time I watch, I am overwhelmed and I cry. I get sad, I get angry, and something just clenches in my throat and hurts. Again and again.
I am working towards converting this emotion into action. But it seems such an uphill and lonely march. Thank you for this incredible video.
I completely agree with you. I was radicalized by learning and studying American history.
I'm 38 like Renegade, American History, Kansas History(yeah I'm a Kansan), and US Govt. Classes in High school along with good teachers showed me the key. The Internet developing as I was developing I also think had a big effect on me. Learning about Phreaking, Hacking, and the counter cultures of Punk, Goth, and Rap also gave me a good radicalization.
I reassure my family by saying, "Don't worry, I'm not going to start the Revolution... but I do know what side I'll be on when someone else does."
For me, I think it started with having a group of gay friends in middle school then learning that I too was gay and then being more and more involved in LGBT rights and feminism discourse. Then it grew as I truly accepted the fact that I was black (I'm mixed and was raised by my caucasian single mother) and all of the truly horrific things black people were and still are subjected to that I was sheltered from. Then it kept growing as I learned more and more about the United States through socialist circles as well as from college.
Me too, friend, but I was raised by a black mother in a black majority country, so was treated like a white person for having light skin. When I moved to the UK, I was just like, why do people hate me, now? Even with the racism I started facing, I was lucky enough to _teach_ myself racism, instead of having it shape my early life.
When I was young and told that it was rude to put my elbows on the table, and when I asked why I didn't get an answer that made sense.
I was radicalized after interning for the State Department, watching breadtube, reading theory, and then working for a big international humanitarian aid NGO that's financed by mega corporations who benefited from (if not outright created) the conditions that made the refugees that we were trying to help.
Gonna get personal, and this comment might not make a whole lot of sense, but here goes... I've been leaning farther and farther left ever since I got to college and away from my very conservative immediate family for the first time. Talking to more people, watching more content like this channel, paying more attention to what's going on in the world and not just taking my parents' word for it--all of that helped me. I started seeing my country for what it is, and I started getting really pissed off about it. So I started speaking up whenever I could, giving donations and signing petitions, supporting protesting friends and their causes, doing small things, whatever I could do to help.
And yet... I still don't feel like it's enough. Five years later, I'm working a dead-end job that pays very little, living in a house that isn't even finished, and my mental health is the worst it's been in a very long time. Meanwhile people are dying en masse, either from police violence or the pandemic, and there's still a megalomaniac in the Oval Office. Trump has been the first president of my adult life, and that terrifies me still. The world is on fire, and most days I can't get out of bed, let alone take to the streets to protest. I know it's a stupid and selfish thing to think, but I get scared when I hear people talking about burning it all down and stoking a revolution because people tend to die in revolutions. I've only recently managed to get out of a spiral of suicidal ideation... I don't want to die. But I'm afraid that might be the only worthwhile contribution I can make. Will it do any good for me to vote? Will anything change if I do? How much good am I to the world if everything scares me? Am I just a coward, or am I just used to this unbelievably shitty system?
I don't know the answer to any of these... I just needed to get this off my chest because it's something I've been struggling with for a while. This video made me feel a lot of things, mostly fear (no surprise, considering). And I think it's good to feel that way right now--I just don't know how to make my fear productive. I wish I had your confidence, I really do. I could do with some of it.
We are exactly the same age so all of this deeply resonates.
1982 represent!
Hell, Cut and I have so much in common that we might be clones. Same age, same basic paradigm shifts growing up, we even had the same jobs (I did teaching in Japan and am still a teacher, just not there). Only difference was that I went into the military instead of college and that is where my radicalization really took root.
Word
I’m only two years older I was thinking the same thing. Remembering how I voted for Nader in that first election, and someone I looked up to told me - YOURE the reason Bush is the president right now. I was heartbroken.
Idk what radicalized me. But I think the start was realizing hearing about how my family might have to be a little more careful with money due to medical bills. It showed me that you had to pay to even exist, & I refused to accept that it couldn't be changed. Then I just learned more & more.
COVID & George Floyd was my light-switch moment. (The dissent was always there, tho)
Seeing Bernie lose twice, hearing about people being put in unmarked cars by police,news that families are being separated on the US southern border , Trump and his cult of personality, I could go on.
@@edge1247 Not just hearing about people being snatched up, but watching people cheer it on
Warning: suicide mention
My parents had inherited money and were big into faith healing (essentially we were privileged enough to distrust "modern medicine"). Despite their reluctance to get me medical treatment for a suicide attempt at age 11, I was taken to a group home and diagnosed with depression and anxiety and took it to heart that I was mentally ill. My parents and I took a trip to San Francisco, later the next year I think, with my wealthy uncle. We ate duck outside of a street full of people, many of them mentally ill themselves, actively starving to death. I went outside to cry and met an apparently homeless woman who told me to smile. At that time it would be another decade before I was radicalized, but that moment was my first turning point I think.
Being born in Chile radicalized me
la wea cierta :,c
I will try and punch a Pinochet apologist for you.
Also, if I ever meet him, Paulo Guedes, our current minister of Economy for Boslonaro, whose sole qualification for the job was "helped fuck up the Chilean economy and now profits over the horribly inhumane pension system of the country".
Reading Dark Money by Jane Mayer and learning about the supreme court decision of Citizens United really put the nail on the coffin for me.
"Anyway, I'm an anarchist now." Girl, same.
It was quite a surprise to hear someone with such quality essays mention Montenegro. I'm sorry you didn't have a better experience (as the place does have it's charms if you look really hard) and hope you continue making awesome content. And should you ever decide to visit the country again, beer is on me.
Cheers!
The despair I sometimes feel when I remember that as long as I have been alive, we have never not been in a war, is indescribable