User:Saula Wenger/My political development

I am a Marxist–Leninist–Maoist, principally Maoist. I uphold Marx, Engels Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Gonzalo as the foundational theorists of my tendency who contributed to what would become an excellent body of theory to which the modern proletariat uses as its weapon in class struggle.

I first began my political development from overhearing the conversations of my parents and eventually with their indoctrination of me into their conservatism. For many years of my childhood, I was an adherent of their reactionary ideology which endorsed the Republican Party and the neo-fascist Donald Trump.

Around 2020, my 13 year old self began to deviate from my parents' conservatism and to more left-wing tendencies. This was motivated by the large-scale unrest caused by the racist murder of George Floyd that same year. The unrest made me question the system at a fundamental level and want change.

I initially looked towards right-wing libertarianism as they held perhaps the largest third party in the United States political system, but found their anti-proletarian and petite bourgeois rhetoric repulsive and so looked towards anarchism. It was when I discovered anarcho-communism that I became seriously open to the notion of me being a communist, and I started thinking of myself in that way.

Shortly after, I started to study what Marxism truly was. Eventually, I became a Marxist–Leninist–Maoist. For a brief period between 2022–2024, I abandoned Maoism and adopted Hoxhaism as my tendency. The extent of this Hoxhaism varied from upholding Enver Hoxha as a "fifth classic" and aligned with the Comintern (SH) to being a member of an organization which rejected him (I kept my opinions out of the organization's public view).

After studying the works of Mao Zedong again in mid-2025, I reorientated myself around Maoism. It was reading his work On the People's Democratic Dictatorship that made me realize that my positions on Mao were not shaped by actually reading his works, but by solely hearing what his rabid critics had to say about him. In this work, Hoxha's notion that Mao sought a "peasant-led revolution" is refuted with Mao strongly advocating for a dictatorship of the proletariat and speaking about the proletariat's decisive role in the overthrow of capitalism and building of socialism.

I must stress that I became truly committed to communism and Maoism in particular after personally being a victim of the excesses of the capitalist system starting in 2023. I was subjected to discrimination based upon my mental disability and lack of familial wealth in the public education system and elsewhere and I later had to experience the full ineffectiveness of the United States healthcare system when I started to develop schizophrenia in early 2025. This, in addition to conducting multiple interviews and generally getting out to reach the masses helped me understand why capitalism is a destructive system that must be overthrown in socialist revolution.