People feel powerless. Letting them know how fucked up our capitalist hell world is just makes them depressed and mad with you. “there’s no point caring about things you can’t change. All you’re doing is reminding me that everything is shit.”
So what do we do? How do talk about these things with people without destroying their hope? Do you just not talk about it? I don’t feel I’m ever helping anyone by dispelling imperial propaganda, it just makes them sad.
emphasize more how good it feels to go communist and internationalist and really start to give a shit about working people around the world imo (all nationalities, ethnicities, gender expressions, sexual orientations, and so on), not in the fake liberal way but really taking the side of AES and oppressed people
Also, emphasizing “what we can do about it,” (which at the moment that you’re talking to someone, amounts to sharing info and communicating, not really debating but not being afraid to share opinions and facts) in terms of our historical task as proletarians, there’s actually a whole lot we can do about it if we can start to organize and act as a class again. Then emphasizing that pretty much all the good things we have as workers, we owe to communists, socialists, anarchists, and so on that were willing to stick their necks out and take serious risks to try to force things to change.
I try to focus on “wouldn’t it be better if [insert some socialist and or communist frame of thinking around a part of the persons life] were a thing.” I try to dispel the illusions of capitalism/neoliberalism/modernity with benefits of an alternative. That’s my entry point when talking to people. Maybe it’s my evangelical upbringing but I have found it easier to focus on the benefits of the new way of thinking rather than highlighting the negative of the current.
I talk about projects I’m working on and dreams I have. If they respond well, I slip them the little orange book.
I drink with coworkers and talk about work and use work drama as a catalyst
