I used to be a Communist. I got tired of being the only one of my comrades with any real skills (I am an engineer) and the only one actually willing to work. I also got tired of being told that my views were too conservative; no, seriously, I was told I was an "Orthodox Marxist," and that's not a compliment. The modern left doesn't give a shit about the proletariat, they instead want to create a minoritarian aristocracy, which struck me as bourgeois nonsense when I first encountered it back in 2012. I have since learned why Marxist philosophy allows for such a bizarre evolution of leftist thought.