What Made You Change Politically?

[Murica!]

Well first I was a Christian Liberal with family values but was insanely anti-war(that didn't change.) Then I started getting into science at school so I lost the Christian edge and became more Liberal(pretty much a Progressive.) I then had a short period of time as a slightly more liberal Stalinist. Then I read some books and things of the type and became a Democratic Socialist, And now I'm an Anarcho-syndicalist after reading Kroptkin ,Bakunin, and Nestor Makhno(and not to mention life as a prime factor for my leftism.)

[Murica!]

I used to be an Indie(still am) since I am not a registered Republican but I vote mostly Republican. I think when ObamaCare passed that changed me. I didn't want the bill. Don't get me wrong I got sick of Bush W toward the end of his presidency because of the recession but I don't like Obama either. Republicans just make more sense to me than the Dems do. The Dems just think government can do everything but it can't. I just feel closer to the Republicans economically. I wish they will get out of I will get primaried if I vote for this and this or I will piss off The Deep South States(the base states of the party) if I say this or I vote for this. I am A Moderate and have no apologies about it. Just call me a Rockefeller Republican!

I support a number of Dems social policies: same sex marriage, gun control, and protecting social Security. To me they have gone so far on talking about race, abortion, and same sex marriage its hard to listen to that all the time over the past few years. I just find it polarizing.

Shouldn't you be a (right)libertarian?

[Murica!]

I used to be an Indie(still am) since I am not a registered Republican but I vote mostly Republican. I think when ObamaCare passed that changed me. I didn't want the bill. Don't get me wrong I got sick of Bush W toward the end of his presidency because of the recession but I don't like Obama either. Republicans just make more sense to me than the Dems do. The Dems just think government can do everything but it can't. I just feel closer to the Republicans economically. I wish they will get out of I will get primaried if I vote for this and this or I will piss off The Deep South States(the base states of the party) if I say this or I vote for this. I am A Moderate and have no apologies about it. Just call me a Rockefeller Republican!

I support a number of Dems social policies: same sex marriage, gun control, and protecting social Security. To me they have gone so far on talking about race, abortion, and same sex marriage its hard to listen to that all the time over the past few years. I just find it polarizing.

Shouldn't you be a (right)libertarian?

Yeah I think so. I find myself leaning to the right on economic issues but centrist maybe even leaning a little bit to the left on social issues. Leaning to the right on economic issues is why I vote Republican mostly.

Well the American Libertarian Party is center to far left on social issues and center to far right on economic issues.

[Murica!]

I used to be an Indie(still am) since I am not a registered Republican but I vote mostly Republican. I think when ObamaCare passed that changed me. I didn't want the bill. Don't get me wrong I got sick of Bush W toward the end of his presidency because of the recession but I don't like Obama either. Republicans just make more sense to me than the Dems do. The Dems just think government can do everything but it can't. I just feel closer to the Republicans economically. I wish they will get out of I will get primaried if I vote for this and this or I will piss off The Deep South States(the base states of the party) if I say this or I vote for this. I am A Moderate and have no apologies about it. Just call me a Rockefeller Republican!

I support a number of Dems social policies: same sex marriage, gun control, and protecting social Security. To me they have gone so far on talking about race, abortion, and same sex marriage its hard to listen to that all the time over the past few years. I just find it polarizing.

Shouldn't you be a (right)libertarian?

Yeah I think so. I find myself leaning to the right on economic issues but centrist maybe even leaning a little bit to the left on social issues. Leaning to the right on economic issues is why I vote Republican mostly.

Well the American Libertarian Party is center to far left on social issues and center to far right on economic issues.

But like Libertarians in practice, he's a Republican. Left on social issues doesn't matter if you're totally willing to vote for people who falling off a cliff to the right on social issues.

True.

[Murica!]

From the point at which I decided I was a socialist, I wasn't really sure on what kind of socialist I was and where I really fit in in the grand scheme of things. At first, I thought I might be a democratic socialist, but that's a fairly hard position to maintain when you understand that the state is set up to protect the property and rule of the capitalists, and as such, you really have no shot of reforming it from within. That put me on a revolutionary track, and the first stop was some vague amalgamation of 'libertarian' socialism (i.e. anarchism), left-libertarianism, and Left Communism.

I stayed in that area for a little while, read the important texts of the council communists, all that jazz. But it became increasingly clear to me that 'Left Communism' offered no real solutions. It was, as Lenin aptly described it, an 'infantile disorder', with no hope of ever achieving much of anything. And that's how I found my way into Trotskyism. In all honesty, I still consider myself both a 'libertarian' socialist and a 'democratic' socialist in that I support a socialism which is both open and democratic, and one in which working class democracy forms the basis for the entirety of society. I don't think either of these labels conflicts with the vision that Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Trotsky laid out, and as such I also don't categorically reject the critiques or viewpoints of either. I still often read a lot of anarchist and reformist literature, which I think helps me sharpen my viewpoint while also helping me to fully understand why prefigurative or reformist approaches are wholly inadequate.

At this point, I suppose you might describe my politics as 'Trotskyism with libertarian (in the traditional sense, not the American sense) characteristics.' I don't categorically reject defending the deformed workers' states on account of the world that they developed in, nor do I feel that the Soviet Union was in anyway 'state capitalist' after the rise of Stalinism, so I pretty much wholly reject Tony Cliff's line of thinking when it comes to the Soviet Union and its adjoined states itself. Likewise, I reject the petty bourgeois anarchism of people like Noam Chomsky, who don't understand in the least what Leninism is, falsely attributing it to the horrors of the Russian Civil War and subsequent Stalinist counterrevolution, without laying any of blame, of course, on the multinational invading force destroying the Russian proletariat, industrial capacity, and then subjecting Russia to an economic and political embargo.

Wait how is anarchism "infantile disorder"?

[Murica!]

Because anarchism is idealist.

Durruti and Makhno. Nuff said.

[Murica!]

Because anarchism is idealist.

Durruti and Makhno. Nuff said.

Exceptions to the rule, not the rule. Durruti and Makhno alike adopted a vanguardist position in the midst of their respective civil wars in spite of the fact that doing so ran counter to anarchist principles, not because of it.

Vanguardism is not against anarchist principles, only forms of vanguardism(such as Leninism.)