About Us

Politics

By all of us

We are anarcho-communists (for a description of what this means, see our articles about anarchism). We didn't always identify as such though, so we figured we'd talk about our journey to show how someone can get as radical as us.

Before Politics

We grew up in a not super political Democrat voting household, and as such we never really paid much attention to politics. This was before we even knew really anything about the lgbtqia+ community, or that racism in fact did still exist after 1964, etc. About the only thing we can really give ourselves credit for was an aversion to respecting the government, which we expressed in high school as not standing for the flag and saying the pledge of allegiance in the morning (which in hindsight is admittedly tame, especially considering our main reasoning at the time was the fact that war is essentially pointless for the US, and yet we still send soldiers to die. We couldn't respect anyone who would waste life like that, but embarrassingly we completely missed the real issue that imperialism and modern day colonialism was what was taking place here. Oh well, we know now).

What broke our shell here was a mix of making friends on discord (who were all coincidentally lgbtqia+ and neurodivergent, whoda thunk) in late high school (we didn't have any friends prior :( ), and encountering Johnny Harris on youtube, a youtube "journalist" who made well edited videos talking about current events and history. While that channel is by no means anarchist, or even anti-capitalist, it managed to use our (unfortunate) youtube addiction to show us that politics is something worth thinking about. Naturally, watching videos like this opened up our algorithm to videos of the like, and this is when we encountered the channel Second Thought.

Marxism-Leninism Phase

Second Thought is a channel that makes Marxist Leninist propaganda videos, and we ate that shit up.

"You mean inequality in society is systemic and classist?" Yup.

"Our job is a shitty job not because our boss is shitty, but because capitalism itself is?" Uh huh.

"The solution is a revolution so that we can institute our own ideal society?" Three for three.

"The ideal society in question involves a transitionary period in which a vanguard party implements communism for us?" Uh oh...

Yahhhhhhhhh so Marxism Leninism is kinda baffling in how it continues to exist in the modern day even though it was literally tried multiple times for the past 100 years, and every time it was tried it implemented state capitalism, not communism. Typically, in science, when you get the same result from multiple experiments, you can begin to find a pattern, and confusingly MLs didn't seem to be observing this pattern, even with their self described "dialectical materialism".

While we learned a lot politically in that time, which we don't regret, we were also admittedly kinda cringe. For example, it was our opinion that, and we quote, "The USSR wasn't that bad." Yikes. In the back of our head we noticed the weird jump in logic that "oh we'll overthrow the state so that we can implement a new good state" made, specifically that there was really no guarantee that this new state wouldn't turn out to be a problem on its own, but we unfortunately didn't question it.

This period was overall good for us, because we began to read some theory, went to a couple protests, and had a more open mind. However, it wasn't a good place to stay for long.

Toward the end of this year or so of being an ML, we both realized that Quorra and Maria are trans and got a partner that we still adore to this day~ It was thankfully her and one of her friends who lived in Latvia (and so naturally had family experience with living under the USSR) that convinced us (after an argument) that all this Leninism nonsense was stupid. We're very greatful for that, because if we hadn't been grounded there, we might've pushed what few friends we had made away by being so insistant on our ideology.

Anarchism

For a few months there we were more or less generally "socialist". We knew that capitalism was bad, but we didn't know what the solution was. This was the same case for our partner. Our time as MLs had kinda brainwashed us against the idea of anarchism though.

What broke our brainwashing was a series of encountering youtube channels (We seriously wish we didn't have as big of a reliance on youtube as we do...). First was a channel called SquidTips, who makes content about motorcycles, anti-authoritarianism, and lgbtqia+ rights (the latter of which being what we latched on to initially, especially considering they're just an ally). After a bit we found out they're anarchist. We decided to investigate, because it occured to us that it was probably the leninism side of ML that we had gotten the idea that anarchism is bad from, and we wanted to take in a broad range of leftist ideas to hone in on our personal political leaning.

It was then that we found an interview between SquidTips and the channel Re-Education, and looking into Re-Education we found they were a channel that explained beginner level anarchist ideas, which did a similarly convincing job at explaining anarchist concepts to the layman as did Second Thought with ML. This channel is what hooked us on the idea, and after some more searching we encountered the channel Anark which gave higher-level anarchist theory. Everything made sense, there weren't any weird hanging unanswered questions, and here we are today. Even our partner was convinced, although for both of us it was more about finding a name and theory behind our political beliefs than anything.

We still have a long way to go before we can call ourselves even remotely knowledgable, but we're fairly certain now that we're on the right track.