As a black anarchist myself I’m primarily interacting with other black people who cannot stand this political system and I have found that simple things such as bringing up ideas like community control of the black community for example is really easy for other black people to follow and causes more of my people to inquire more about black anarchism itself.
Agreed. I think community control is one of those things that appeals directly to black anarchists. Because our communities tend to feel so completely outside of our control.
Have you watched Andrewism's video on Black Anarchism? I believe that in America, black and queer people will be the first to radicalise and will then spread to Cishet white people.
Yeah I’m a black anarchist as well and most black folks I engage with hate the 2 party system and are tired of politicians, and with the current state of the world looking how it’s looking I’m trying to radicalize and educate as many black folks I can in my community.
@@BlackAnarchistRadicals Amen homie it’s a lot of work and trust and believe more of our own people are listening than I thought to be honest with you.
The way we phrase things is extremely important. I don't say we want to abolish private property. That gives them the wrong idea. I say we want to exchange private property for personal property, therefore you own it... Not the banks, not the landlords, not the government via eminent domain. Your land, your house... It's as much yours as your toothbrush or computer. No one can take it away. That, they grasp.
@@sakmadik69420 True, but as soon as you say we want to abolish private property, most of their minds seem to go to us all being forced to share houses, or the government owning all the land, like the USSR. I've noticed starting off by saying things like that immediately shuts them down. In my experience, it's better to ease them into the nuances and not start off with them. I start with what I said in the OP, then explain how they don't even own their land... It either belongs to a landlord, a bank, and ultimately the government since it can take it for any number of reasons. I tell them if they really think it's theirs, try planting a pot field on it and see what happens. We, on the other hand, want land to belong to those individuals who live there, and no one owns their house but them. So long as they aren't doing things to endanger others, like human trafficking, they can do whatever they want with it. They seem to understand things better if you start off from a concept they've already grasped before taking it to deeper levels.
@@beeinthehive i get it.its better to say "in communism,employees get more money because their bussiness/industry is not owned by a boss who hoards the profits.and normal people can keep their toothbrushes and homes😁
@@sakmadik69420 😂 Basically. We have to dumb it down since their "research" consists of only watching conservative and liberal media. I think the last book some of these people read was Green Eggs and Ham.
Something I've found that works with a lot of people to get them to start engaging with anarchist ideas is getting angry with them about some injustice of society and then slowly introducing anarchist thoughts and solutions for that injustice before eventually revealing that I'm an anarchist. I once even got a small town mayor I happened to meet drinking in a bar to start agreeing with me and critically engaging with a really surprising amount of stuff, by first joining him in complaining about how the central government of our state is incredibly unresponsive to the problems and economic needs of most towns it claims to be responsible for. And then suggesting bottom up consensus democracy with instant recall delegates as a potential solution. He was blown away and fascinated when I casually mentioned I'm an anarchist a bit later, and he enjoyed the whole conversation so much he shook my hand and thanked me for talking to him when closing time ended the discussion. I could tell I totally changed his conception of what anarchism and an anarchist is.
@@Thepissheadman One thing I found useful in my experience was to distance myself from those State Capitalist regimes like the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam and emphasise direct action and control. I don't even mention the words "socialism" or "anarchism" at the begining sometimes. I just emphasise that I want people to rule themselves and that that was the mistake of the USSR and the like. They did not have worker control. They were not socialist. I am not them. I condemn the brutality and mistakes of past authoritarian leftist regimes and distance myself from them without falling for American cold war lies and bullshit. Also,I found sometimes putting things into perspective helps. Be careful not to sound like a whataboutism with this one. Show the endless death and suffering capitalism is directly to blame for: starvation, lack of clean water, poverty, exploitation, disease, war, rape, police brutality. Goldman Sachs for instance, admitted in a report in 2018 that curing chronic illness is bad for profits over continued therapies. At least in the short term.www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html Be careful to not emphasise the bad stuff too much. It may leave them overwhelmed and feeling hopeless and defeated. Emphasise the good stuff and above all, examples of success. Sucessful past and current experiments, Catalonia, Maknhovist Ukraine, Zapatistas, Rojava , what have you. Better yet, show things they know. Things they can see with their own eyes, understand with their own words. I show them how the farming cooperatives where I am are actually more efficient and workers are better payed than typical latifundiums. Or how they can start a union.
@@Nai-qk4vp Even though I identify as an inner ago communist I am pretty new to this area of thought and due to factors like my age I don’t really know how to find information to support my arguments. Your reply this helped me and I appreciate the depth you went into
@@Nai-qk4vp I’ve never heard of the successful examples so do you think you could summarize those or leave a link for further reading? I’d love to hear more about them
This shit is so hard to do with the people closest to you in my opinion, at least for me. My parents and family just hear anger placed on them regardless of the content or tone. It always seems like a personal attack rather than an ideological/philosophical discussion and I am not sure if I’m just poor at talking about this or if they’re digging in harder after these talks. I feel discussions with strangers is always easier to have that patience, over the long winded convos with family who seem stuck. Anyway love it Anark please keep it up
I can relate so much to this!! I also get frustrated way easier, and find myself arguing poorly, compared to what I'm usually capable of. Maybe it's because I sense that they don't really care in general to learn more about how the world works. Not sure how I can make them care, even though all the facts are there.
Good talk to have but as you point out this discussion is not structured so I feel you miss out on many vital elements. 1. Convincing or persuading people of anarchist theories and perspectives or anarchism in general means that you have to unravel and undo a lot of indoctrination. That depends on the persons cultural matrix. In the US for instance large parts of the population grow up with an anti-government viewpoint. That viewpoint is however also mixed with strong anti-communism and pro-capitalism perspectives. Start the conversation on where you agree (anti-state for instance) but also how your perspective differs and why. 2. The discussion is primarily focused on the micro-level but convincing people also happens on the macro-level. I believe that anarchists in general spend too little time on propaganda in comparison to Marxists who probably spend too much time on that. Propaganda can be done in various ways, through leaflets and through action. 3. Praxis. Thats probably one of the most significant topics missing in this discussion. Convincing people through purely intellectual debate is tedious and usually unfruitful. Through the combination of theory and action (praxis) people not only learn about anarchism but experience it. That is fundamental to persuasion. Of course people have to be somewhat receptive to the ideas but by taking someone who is sitting on the fence to a demonstration, collective or action (Food Not Bombs for instance) anarchism becomes tangible.
Propaganda of the deed. Like you said! Show people what you're about. Don't even necesarilly use the word anarchist to start out. Just organize horizontally and do good with others for others.
This is great advice for talking to people about political philosophy in general. When the subject is "don't line up behind a genocidaire" I have real problems, though. I had thought that everyone from Republicans to communists to Hollywood producers to Social Studies teachers had already agreed on this point. To have to say it again pretty much triggers me every time.
This was a very helpful video. I remember talking with my dad a few days ago about the nature of capitalism and whenever I would bring up the many wrongdoings of this system, he always seemed to subscribe to capitalist realism ("I know that capitalism is responsible for x, y and z, but it's the best we've got.") and proceeded to tell me about the glitz and glam he encountered when he visited Austria after the fall of communism in Romania. Also, he made a couple of retorts towards me along the lines of "yeah, what do you do to help the poor?". Ultimately, I felt like the debate went nowhere and constantly telling myself that this is why you don't discuss politics at the lunch table.
The easiest way to get socialist communist and anarchist ideals in action within communities that are rural, right wing, uneducated, or just really overworked is to not mention the words progressive, socialism, anarchy until that person has already demonstrated, but they would not be a reactionary. It may take people interacting in a communal sense for a very long time before they would be willing to entertain the actual ideas of anarchists. Same thing goes for active resistance against the state.
Ding ding ding! This is what I always do. Never mention words that could have put you out of work during the Red Scare. Anti-communism is still prevelant. I call these confused people closet leftists. The Americans working 2 jobs with no time to read, those in rural communities, the uneducated etc... These people are only a couple of thoughts away to becoming fully radicalized. Now of course, people facing the worst conditions, like peasants in rural imperial China were already radicalized, ie Maoism.
I love changing my mind, the more I change, the more I’m getting closer to what is true. The more I learn and the more I can debunk my older self, the more I can be sure that I have the right information.
me too, but i m cautious these days...i had been duped and then to get out of getting duped i got 'enlightened' about the prior dupe only to be duped by my enlightener! makes me wary...people power trip like mad in areas like this and religion and the arts...it boggles the mind
@@CatrinaDaimonLee the best way to know the truth is by trying to disprove what you know. If you can’t disprove it, then your probably close to the truth
I like to not use words like Communism or Socialism explaining my philosophy because of the extremely negative connotations those words hold in the United States, I'll explain Socialism and Communism as they are freely divorced from what they've been taught about it without directly calling them what they are. "Anarchism" is a much more immediately appealing word to most Westerners than those. Once they like what they hear, then I'll tell them that that is Socialism, that gets them thinking
I deal with a lot of liberals and various "apolitical" individuals. I've found that the conversation fairs much better if you say anarchist ideas without actually saying the "A" word. Things like "hey what if local backward gardeners pooled their resources and gave their excess to those who are food insecure" or "hey what if the community formed a council to handle our disputes without getting the police involved" work a lot better when you don't say "hey by the way I'm an eco-anarcho-communist and would totally throw a molotov in a factory" ... ya know, meet them where they're at
Hey Anark, I have a question about the algorithm boosting tidbit at the end of the video. You say that clicking on a recommended video and watching it all the way through positively affects how much it is promoted on recommended pages. But does stopping a short way through, or only watching a short section of the video have a negative affect or only a neutral one? For example, if I've already watched a video and later go back to re-watch only a particular section I'm interested in, would that actually hurt the video's performance?
I wonder your thoughts on this - two scenarios: 1. My partner is a higher up at the WGA. Since we’ve been together she has moved from sorta progressive to progressive and then to something between a progressive and a socialist who understands and sympathizes with anarchism. She’s been with me even to some of the spicier antifascist stuff, and also comes along occasionally when we do mutual aid work. I’ve moved her on a lot of topics, ranging from making her at least somewhat sympathetic to police/prison abolition, ending landlordism, the importance of workplace democracy, the importance of antifascist community defense, the primacy of direct action over electoralism, the importance of defending trans and LGBTQ+ rights, etc. I wouldn’t call her an anarchist at this point and I don’t think she’d call herself one either. And I don’t find it necessary to fully convince her. I’m not so much asking how I could push her the rest of the way, so to speak, but rather I recognize that I’ve probably been a bit pushy/preachy in my approach and so I’ve probably aggravated her and made her a bit frustrated with how we have political convos in the first place, and I’d like to find a way to keep myself in check and improve my communication with her more generally and simply find a less toxic approach to this. I’m a cishet white dude and I definitely find myself falling back on some of the same me-as-the-center-of-the-universe approaches to communicating that I was raised to engage in, and I guess I just wanna know what I can do to get out of that practice and build healthier communication in general, but especially when talking politics. 2. On the other end of that spectrum, my parents both watch Fox News every night. My mom seems to move in a positive direction when we talk, but then she spends 10x that amount of time watching Fox News and listening to my (equally forceful in his argumentation) dad and everything I said seems to go out the window. My dad is just a stubborn ass who is set in his ways - conservative, patriarchal, bigoted, etc. Is there an approach that might work with either of them?
I can’t give you much advice for your parents but what I can tell you is get them to question WHY they do the things they do or why they feel the way they feel about things. What this society has best out of us is the ability to be introspective. We’re fed into a social clique, even more so with the internet, so as to keep people in isolated bubbles of information and beliefs with mass amounts of misinformation fed about any out groups. In a sense, we’re given a selection of a handful of different type of people we can be that’s considered socially acceptable, or at least socially common. Your dad was fed into the machine that is this capitalist system as a kid and what the system determined him to be most beneficial to it is what your dad became, and that persona that’s adopted has been solidified into diamond on the outside. The only way to get it to shatter is to get him to begin tearing it all down himself. Escaping toxic masculinity and what was expected of me as a man in this world has certainly been a journey, I started in middle school with Christian fascist beliefs that were fed to me by my church and these bubbles in the internet and slowly unlearned it all bit. Over the past few months even I personally have noticed a few things I do that were taught to me at a young age of what a man is that I’m unlearning as well as transitioned politically from Leninism to Anarcho-Communism after reading some Marx and getting into anarchist theory a little. It’ll take time, but once you can get your dad into the mindset of always asking himself why it’s only a matter of time until there’s major breakthroughs. My fiancées grandma as ultra conservative and definitely still holds onto a few of those beliefs when I first met her a few years ago but because of our conversations with her, as well as her son having conversations with her, she has began not only growing politically but in general as a person and you can see her committing to still trying to keep growing and developing even though she’s getting up there in age now. It’s possible, it just takes patience
Thank you for this response! I really appreciate it. Your comment does remind me of a few things. I didn’t go through the religious indoctrination (my dad isn’t all that religious, and to both of their credit, they’ve always imbued in me a sense that free thought/coming to my own ideas was encouraged, but when I start to disagree with them, they’re very opinionated and express that in very toxic ways), but I was very conservative until a year into college, and like you I notice certain traits imbued in me from them creep in from time to time (toxic masculinity, an inflated sense of self-importance, internalization of certain stereotypes, aspects of the Protestant work ethic/self-sacrifice to this end, etc.). And to your point about getting my dad to think through this stuff and change his perspective little by little on his own, that does seem to be the one thing that moves the needle. For example, I just got a job as a harm reduction specialist (giving clean needles, overdose reversal drugs, fentanyl testing strips, etc., without stigmatizing drug use to encourage them to be safer in their drug use, rather than an abstinence only/treatment towards such approach to drugs) working with unhoused folks, and I was able to have a convo with him on this topic and I found him being more receptive to what I had to say largely 1. because I’m speaking on a topic I have personal experience helping people with, but probably more importantly 2. because I was doing what I could in a non-pushy way to get him to rethink his understanding of the topics of houselessness, drug policy, social services, etc.
Also, I appreciate your emphasis on my dad, seeing as, if I can impact his opinion, it’ll probably have a more profound impact on hers than if I were to talk to her directly.
As a veganarchist, I couldn't help but see almost exact parallels to conversations about veganism. While I agree with the arguments so-called militant vegans make and understand their passion, I have always been reserved to their approach, seeing it as not effective for the cause. Being aggressive and assertive in opposition to someone's presupposed worldview simply actives primal defense mechanisms and will not convince them regardless of the strength of the arguments. Such mechanisms are deeply ingrained through evolutionary psychology. Most people will cling MORE strongly to their prior beliefs if they associate a conversation with negative emotions. And as you said Anark, by extension people will often associate the entire ideology and its holders with those negative emotions: "All anarchists/vegans must be assholes." Why psychology came to be this way is a different matter, but it is just how we humans are and we have to work based off that. Steelmanning, meeting people where they are at, simple questioning, and opting for a planting seeds approach seems to be much more effective. Ultimately people have to come to ideological conclusions themselves, or at the very least we respond better when we think we came to the conclusion ourselves. Thanks for another great video on a difficult topic.
I think the main selling point of anarchism is that if there is no domestic hierarchy, then that compels people to action and acceptance of and to the limitations of that society, it’s as good as the anarchists make it!
I'm young leftist and have been constantly moving across the political spectrum. I think that I have now reached the end of that shift and that generally libertarian socialist ideologies are the "best" ones. However I often times feel like I myself haven't deeply thought about these ideas and can not use them in conversations. I know what socialism, anarchism and all these things are, but sometimes I can't find out how I apply my beliefs to the real world. How do I develop this ideology in my mind and become unlike these people who utilize "vibe-based" politics? Do I need to read certain texts, or is it just about waiting and slowly gathering knowledge?
I’m in kind of a similar position as you, and one thing I’ve been trying to do is connect the big-picture "ideologies" to stuff I observe in my everyday life. I try to recognize examples of anarchist "tendencies" in the people around me, and I’m noticing how common and natural it is for people to want to be autonomous and self-organized. For example, my neighbors giving us leftover food from their church dinner, or volunteer groups that pick up trash in local parks. I’ve joined some volunteer orgs that aren’t labelling themselves in any way but just naturally seem horizontal. It then also stands out when I notice hierarchical tendencies and notice they are usually rooted in a sinister form of dehumanization, often a result of indoctrination and disempowerment. So I think just being able to recognize the "vibes" and mentally name concrete examples that you see can maybe help. One things that helps me make these connections is anthropology, David Graeber’s work focuses on historical and multicultural examples of anarchist tendencies from an anthropological lens if you’re interested. It helped me from my opinion that these tendencies are really intrinsic to human identity and survival, and hierarchy and oppression feel clunky and wrong because it goes against common sense and basic intuition. Additionally I think the modern revolutionary movement is still growing and forming, so there are not as many concrete examples of praxis that help make things feel more real. Anark has been doing a lot to shine a light on modern day revolutionary strategies and praxis on this channel
@@mollyx9120 thank you for your answer. I've been doing similar things and i definitely feel like i am learning, even though it's still a slow process.
I have come to try to basically put myself in their shoes and try to help guide them in the direction I think will allow them to see certain things that will bring them closer to my views. When I don't really have any time with someone I usually just try to plant a single seed that they cannot rationalize and that usually makes them shee on it for a minute. For instance work is where I meet and talk to 99% of people so seeds I will try to plant are things like if minimum wage kept up with inflation it'd be over $24/hr or how they want you to do 3+ jobs but don't even pay you to do 1.
i m watching, im watching, im watching...wondering, 'who does this guy remind me of...?hmmm...? who...?' and i finally got it and just had to stop the video and type: Seth Rogen. U remind me of seth rogen, but not the voice. ok back to the video...
I disagree. Good grief a lively conversation is required to get new information such as a way to organize society so it can server all the people, on the table! I'm not sure how to talk to Americans without kickin up some dust. I am not afraid to dispute old bs, as an old fart, such as the complete failure of representative government to meet any needs at all. Maybe age gives me superpowers but the young will inherent the system of oppression and have a lot to loose if they hedge on the passion needed when making these very important changes that will bring better options in the future. That future can be near or far far away. Insist on change, it is best. Its not as important to have friends as it is to make your point! They will talk about "that guy" after you leave and your goal to be heard is achieved anyway so I say go for it, no to kit gloves for Americans they need a 2x4 upside the head to even get the attention off the tv show they would rather watch. I enjoy the show, always food for thought. PEACE!
I don't think most people are arguing against being passionate about the cause. The vast majority of people will not be convinced on the spot of anything that challenges their worldview, regardless of the strength of the opposing arguments. In fact, I believe there are have been multiple studies done that conclude that most people will cling MORE strongly to their prior beliefs if a conversation with an advocate for an opposing belief became heated or made them upset, again independently of how well the strong the arguments were. Human psychological defense mechanisms are very primal and not based on reason. We have to work with what we are given, and we are given is human evolutionary psychology.
Thats conflating religion with ideology. Thats exactly what religious fundamentalists and neoliberal centrists always do. The former see ideology simply as competition for hearts and minds and the latter deny the existence of other ideologies and the hegemony of their own. Where theoretical and political analysis and world-view based on rational perspectives are faultily compared to irrational superstition.
I: Convincing tactics are mostly the same regardless of the ends they are used for, since they are rooted in psychology first and foremost What is different from the organized religion example is _what ends_ these means (these tactics) are used for
The best thing about getting proselytized by Christians is when they have a complete understanding of atheism and can use logical reasoning to make me question atheism. /s
