Personally, I grew up on a single parent home, where I saw my mom get destroyed by her office work. The lack of unions, no external help and general misoginy, made her get super depressed, and became an alcoholic. In my teenage years I was almost lured by the manosphere communities, but got helped by a group of close friends that were left leaning. Most of them were anarchist, so I started with that. Slowly but surely, I started to understand how sick this system is, and it made me furious, but I never found a way to show my ideas. No political party represented my ideas, and I fell deeper in the anarchist rabbit hole. Yes, I was a hardcore anarkiddie, but I bite me back. When I needed them the most, they turned their backs on me, and fell into deep depression. And in seeking psychological help, my counselor recommended me going back to my roots. So I went back to videogames, japanese culture and most importantly, read again after years The Communist Manifesto. I still don’t know how to position myself in the left, but I know that I’m a Marxist, and that I want change. Stay safe, comrades.
For socialism, it was crazy homeless people. I’m what’s usually considered “crazy” and I’m a person, so we’re only different in that one temporary and easily revoked material condition. Taking Christianity literally also helped out a lot to question our modern “Christian” society.
But for communism it only took reading history in more depth and trying to form my own opinions. Even ancient Rome already has a ton of bad-faith or poorly researched shit being parroted around, so it’d take a lot of naïveté to trust the pop history narratives of things that actually matter within living memory.
Have you read Micheal Parenti’s Assassination of Julius Ceaser? It didn’t interest me that much, but when I read it it seemed like a pretty good telling of Roman history.
I recently got it and only stopped halfway through due to life circumstances, but it was a fantastic book as far as I got and echoed a lot of my own criticisms for traditional Roman historiography.
I have no idea how one can read a single line by Cicero and somehow sympathise with that one instead of all the populares, urban Romans or the provincial non-citizens. “The Storm before the Storm” is also a neat deconstruction of the Social War that addresses the inequality in Rome.