Instead of guesswork related to your own personal experiences you could, you know, ask the people who self-describe as socialists. I’ll tell you my story of radicalization:

I’m a Spaniard who was enamored with the Podemos leftist party back when it spawned last decade. Then I saw the state apparatus (the police in particular) manufacture false evidence of funding of said party by Venezuela and Iran, and “leak” it to media. Then I saw state and capitalist media collude to air 1h every day of anti-podemos lawfare bullshit followed by 1h of news about Venezuela and inflation, and with this they scared the population into not voting for them, and in 2026 this party is essentially dead. Audios of the journalists and media owners conspiring, aware of the evidence being false, have surfaced. Police chiefs like Villarejo have come out in trial and in Congress declaring as much. Nobody has gone to jail.

Then I looked at Greece, where they elected an actual leftist party in the 2010s (Syriza) on the premise of abandoning austerity policy and investing in the welfare state. And I saw how the country got threatened out of the Euro and the EU by the EU authorities and the Troika, and how they weren’t allowed to enact the democratic will of the people of carrying out a debt restructuring and progressive fiscal and monetary policy.

Then I looked at France, where LFI gained majority vote last elections and all other parties conspired to keep them out of gocwenment.

I looked at Chile, where Allende won a democratic vote to enact a socialist government, and he was couped by the USA. I looked at Iran, where Mosaddeq was elected democratically to carry out socialist secular policy, and he was couped by the USA and the UK.

I realized that social democracy does not allow leftism in institutions. So I started to look for alternatives outside social democracy seeing the looming threat of fascism in the horizon.

I looked at my own country, Spain: who had fought the fascists in our civil war? The anarchists Damn, we lost. I looked to other alternatives, the ones who actually defeated fascism.

That’s when I learnt about the USSR, initially extremely skeptical, and increasingly seeing how all I knew about it had been wrong! THEY defeated Nazism and not the US. They had universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, guaranteed employment and guaranteed housing!!! Sure, it was an imperfect system, but it was one which challenged capitalism, tsarism and Nazism, and for the biggest part of the last century against all odds, defeated them.

So I’m a communist: I support the system that FEEDS THE CHILDREN AND KILLS THE NAZIS.