For me, it was a book called ‘The Outsiders’ by S.E Hinton. It is known as a literary classic these days, but it was quite hard hitting when it was released back in the 1960s.
In a nut shell; It is about a group of semi-impoverished greaser friends growing up in 1960s Tulsa, Oklahoma, and all the life challenges they face, and how they react to prejudice against them whilst coping with family issues.
It was the first book that made me realise that some people in society don’t get it easy growing up, and I discovered what it meant to live on the ‘wrong side of town’ and what societal prejudice was. The outsiders was the first novel I read that brought up hard subjects like; domestic violence, alcoholism, street gang violence etc.
It was the first book to shatter my naive way of thinking about the world, at 13 years old! It is still one of my favourite stories to this day, and for all its slightly dark themes, I love the compassionate friendship and brotherhood that is displayed in this book!
For my entire life, I had only heard that communism is wrong, communism goes against human nature, communism instantaneously murdered a trillion people. Only when I started actually reading Marxist texts (like The Communist Manifesto) and Marxist history (like Losurdo’s Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend) did I begin to realize that all the people in my life who had told me that communism was bad had never actually bothered to learn anything about it. (Teachers, in particular, risk losing their jobs by doing anything other than toeing the CIA line on communism.) As it turned out, these people thought that communism is bad because communism means “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”—i.e., no more business owners, landlords, or running dogs of the bourgeoisie.
Except communism is wrong. “From each according to their ability…” is inherently immoral and destroys personal autonomy. Why should anyone be forced to give up the benefits of their “abilities”…
For some reason even though we’ve created societies based on collective action we refuse to care about others humanities and stick in a rat race for the wealthiest benefit.
You’re closer to being homeless on the street than having a vanity rocket program.
Literal word salad.
Literally you probably have no fucking clue what’s going on in the world.
I have multiple relatives who claim to be disabled. They are perfectly capable of working, but they decided they were “disabled”, and they have lived off their parents and other relatives their entire lives. It infuriates me when I think of people who are really disabled, those who can’t walk, and worse, those who can’t see. In a communist system everyone tends to slack off and pretend their ability is way less than it really is.
The only real cure, as I see it, is for capitalism to develop AI and robots that do all the work, which will ultimately lead to communism, where no human does work, it’s the robots that do all the work and we just sit back and live good lives. Then the “from each” will be from robots, never from humans.
Because if we don’t start prioritizing the survival of the human species, our individual selfishness will kill us all. That’s irrelevant though- what is relevant here is that some communist writings gave Sublunari an education she wasn’t getting elsewhere, and it made an impact on her.