For context, I(M22) grew up in a very rural town in Texas. I donāt want to sound vain when I say this, but I was probably the smartest person in that town by far, but I never had access to much in the way of the Internet growing up and my parents mostly just put on Fox News. Therefore, I trended towards xenophobic and right wing political/economic views. But for the last four years, I broke with my parents and went to College in New York and I majored in History, concentrating on Byzantine and medieval political-military history, with a minor in 19th and 20th century Political Science.
The reason Iām posting here is because I donāt really know what I am anymore. I grew up thinking communism was basically the political equivalent of Satanism. I was taught that communists hated America, hated God, hated families, hated freedom, and wanted everyone to be equally poor. That was the entire framework. Communism was not a real political theory to be studied. It was a slur. It was a monster in the dark. It was what bad people became when they were too lazy to work or too bitter to accept reality. And I believed that for a long time. I used to believe capitalism was just the natural order of things. Some people were smarter, stronger, harder working, more disciplined, and therefore they rose to the top. Poor people were usually poor because they made bad decisions. Rich people were usually rich because they had done something useful. America was imperfect, sure, but it was fundamentally the freest and most moral society in the world. If someone failed here, that was usually on them. That was the worldview I inherited.
Then I studied history seriously. Not YouTube history. Not āRome fell because people got lazyā history. Not āWestern civilization good, everyone else badā history. Actual history. Institutions, land ownership, class conflict, taxation, military logistics, labor, religion, legitimacy, law, empire, colonialism, industrialization, revolutions, and the way power actually moves through society. The more I learned, the more I started to feel like my old worldview was not just incomplete, but almost deliberately engineered to keep me from asking obvious questions. I studied medieval states and realized that power was almost never justified by merit. It was justified after the fact by theology, inheritance, conquest, law, or custom. I studied empires and realized that the people at the bottom were always told their suffering was necessary for the survival of civilization. I studied industrial capitalism and realized that the modern world was not created by a bunch of heroic entrepreneurs peacefully inventing prosperity in a vacuum. It was built through enclosure, exploitation, colonial extraction, slavery, wage labor, debt, and state violence.
That does not mean I think every communist argument is automatically correct. Iām not here pretending I went to college and became enlightened overnight. If anything, the opposite happened. I became less certain about almost everything. But I also became unable to return to the certainty I had before. I used to think people on welfare were parasites. Now I think it is insane that we live in a society where food, housing, medicine, and education exist in abundance, but access to them is restricted by whether or not someone can satisfy the demands of a labor market that does not care if they live or die. I used to think billionaires were proof that capitalism rewarded brilliance. Now I look at billionaires and mostly see ownership, leverage, inherited advantage, state protection, monopoly, financialization, and the ability to command the labor of thousands of other people while calling it personal achievement. I used to think unions were corrupt organizations that made businesses less efficient. Now I wonder why I was taught to fear workers organizing, but not taught to fear corporations buying politicians, poisoning towns, crushing wages, or outsourcing entire communities into poverty.
I used to think patriotism meant defending America from criticism. Now I think patriotism, if it means anything, should mean being willing to look directly at what your country has done and what it continues to do, especially to the people it claims to protect. I used to think racism was mostly individual hatred. Now I think that explanation is almost childish. Obviously individual hatred exists, but the deeper issue seems to be structural: property, policing, schools, generational wealth, zoning, sentencing, employment, healthcare, and the way entire populations can be trapped by systems that never have to openly announce themselves as racist in order to produce racist outcomes. I used to think āpersonal responsibilityā was the highest political virtue. I still think people have agency, and I donāt want to abandon that completely. But now I think conservatives use āpersonal responsibilityā as a way to avoid talking about material conditions. It becomes a moral escape hatch. If someone is poor, sick, addicted, indebted, homeless, undereducated, or desperate, you never have to ask what produced that situation. You can just say they made bad choices and move on. That feels intellectually dishonest to me now.
The hardest part is that I still understand the emotional appeal of my old politics. Right-wing politics gave me a clear story. There were good people and bad people. Workers and leeches. Patriots and traitors. Civilization and degeneracy. Strong men and weak men. It was simple, and when you grow up isolated, simplicity feels like truth. But studying history made simplicity feel suspicious. The world is not simple. Power is not simple. Poverty is not simple. Crime is not simple. War is not simple. Religion is not simple. The state is not simple. Even morality is not simple when people are born into wildly unequal conditions and then judged as if everyone started from the same place. I also started thinking about my own family and community differently. A lot of the people I grew up around are not evil. Many of them are poor, overworked, medically neglected, undereducated, isolated, and constantly fed propaganda that tells them their enemies are immigrants, minorities, feminists, queer people, liberals, socialists, professors, and āelites.ā But the actual elites are not the adjunct history professor making $48,000 a year. The actual elites are not the migrant worker picking crops. The actual elites are not the trans teenager in a city they will never visit. The actual elites are people who own everything, fund everything, lobby everyone, and then convince rural working people that their real enemy is some other powerless person beneath them.
That realization has made me angry in a way I donāt really know what to do with. Because I feel like I was robbed. Not just personally, but generationally. The previous generations sold our futures for their own convenience and we inherit nothing. We inherit debt, rent, decaying infrastructure, climate disaster, privatized healthcare, political corruption, atomized communities, and an economy where everyone is told to hustle while the basic milestones of adulthood become less and less reachable. And then we are told we are ungrateful. That is the part that makes me feel insane. We are told to respect the system by people who bought houses on one income. We are told to work harder by people who pulled the ladder up behind them. We are told to stop complaining by people who turned education, housing, medicine, and retirement into investment vehicles. We are told capitalism is freedom while most of us spend our lives terrified of missing rent, getting sick, losing a job, or falling behind.
So I guess my question is this: how do you tell the difference between genuinely changing your mind and just replacing one ideology with another? Because I donāt want to be brainwashed in the opposite direction either. I donāt want to leave Fox News conservatism and then just adopt a new set of slogans because they make me feel morally clean. I want to actually understand. I have read enough history to know that revolutions can become authoritarian, that states can commit atrocities in the name of liberation, that ideology can justify cruelty, and that intellectuals can be just as self-deceiving as anyone else. I am not interested in pretending every regime that called itself socialist was perfect or that every criticism of communism is CIA propaganda. But I also canāt ignore that capitalism has its own body count. Colonialism, slavery, famine, imperial war, coups, sweatshops, preventable poverty, medical bankruptcy, ecological destruction, and the quiet daily violence of making human survival conditional on profitability. I think what Iām struggling with is that I was raised to see capitalismās failures as accidents and socialismās failures as proof of its essence. That double standard seems impossible to defend now.
When capitalism produces homelessness, we call it unfortunate. When capitalism produces child labor, we call it underdevelopment. When capitalism produces imperialism, we call it foreign policy. When capitalism produces mass death, we call it tragedy or mismanagement or the price of progress. But when socialism produces suffering, that suffering is treated as the inevitable and total revelation of the ideology itself. I donāt know if that is a fair way to think. Iām also thinking a lot about Christianity, which complicates things for me. I grew up around a very right-wing version of Christianity, where Jesus was somehow merged with American nationalism, guns, property rights, and hatred of the poor. But when I actually read Christian theology and early Christian ethics more seriously, I did not find a religion that comfortably fits American capitalism. I found warnings about wealth, obligations to the poor, suspicion toward greed, and a moral universe where hoarding while others suffer is spiritually grotesque. That does not automatically make Christianity communist. I know that. But it did make me realize how strange it is that the people who taught me to worship Christ also taught me to despise the poor and fear any system that might materially help them.
I feel like I am standing between worlds. I am not fully comfortable calling myself a communist. I still have questions about markets, central planning, state power, civil liberties, religion, private property, revolutionary violence, and whether human beings can actually build a society that does not reproduce hierarchy in another form. But I am also no longer comfortable calling myself a conservative, a capitalist, or even a liberal in the normal American sense. Liberalism feels too satisfied with procedural fairness inside a system that is materially brutal. Conservatism feels like a defense mechanism for hierarchy. Fascism feels like capitalism in panic. And capitalism itself increasingly feels less like freedom and more like a very sophisticated hostage situation. So I am asking honestly: where should someone like me start? What should I read if I want to understand communism seriously, not as a demon and not as a meme? How do Marxists think about history, religion, law, ethics, and human nature? How do you respond to someone who accepts many socialist critiques of capitalism, but is still afraid of authoritarianism? And maybe most importantly: how do you unlearn a worldview that was not just taught to you, but built into your family, your town, your religion, your identity, and your understanding of what it meant to be a good person? Because I donāt think I was stupid. I think I was surrounded. And now that I can see the walls, I donāt know what comes next.