askchapo

Amorphous and useless

Making atmospheric changes always seem that way until one day when the atmosphere has changed. You're terraforming the social environment

I know someone who... 2016 she was an utterly worthless centrist. 2020 my estimation of her rose to "out of her depth liberal trying not to be completely useless". Honestly, I was shocked when she was able to call Trump a fascist and mean it in the last few years. The bar was in fucking hell with her. Now? I've got her calling ICE the Gestapo and she usually says "the only good fascist is a dead fascist" before I have to say it. I don't think she'd join a Bolshevik Party, but I think she'd have gone to that February anti war protest, y'know? And I don't think she'd have fought for the Whites either, FWIW. She's always called politicians "lying liars who lie", but she says it a lot more in recent years. Not just about the US ones, either!

I don't think I've done a lot to radicalize her, I mostly just listen while she calls a spade a spade and encourage her to call the fascists every insulting name she can come up with and sometimes make a pretty obvious comparison of my own to the Nazis, I think what's brought her from "I don't do politics" to "Fuck the fascists" is just... watching it all unfold so close to us in a country that used to be respected. (Also, she got a job in the school system after I'd already been pretty sure of my political read of her, and so she has a lot stronger Opinions on education policy now, which bleeds into every area of political and economic policy because she's way better at this Political Economy stuff than most disinterested centrists. She says she doesn't do politics, but get her started on education policymaking or budgeting and listen to her go.) Talking to her is when I feel the strongest flashes of "Is how I feel now, how European communists all felt in the 30s every morning when the newspaper arrived?" Because she really isn't like me. She's not a leftist of any description. She's just a mama bear who opposes anyone who hurts kids. She hates the fascists because they're hurting kids and breaking up families. And as soon as the stories of serious harm to children stop coming, she'll stop caring. She follows the individual stories, not the broad problem itself. And she comes to me to scream about individual atrocities in the news, not the general worsening of the atmosphere.

But I still feel proud of myself for letting this happen and encouraging it and giving her someone she can say those things to and get enthusiastic agreement and more nasty names for the Gestapo, not pushback on whether fascism is inherently wrong, like she gets from her husband and son.

No need to put yourself or your efforts down! This is a piece of agitation and education, and its always good to hear a comrade not leaving their politics at the door because its socially problematic or inconvenient. In some of my own relationships I've struggled with towing the revolutionary line (its a work in progress as always), but I do always try to push back on liberal and fascist narratives + educate and agitate when folks I know bring them up. Are you involved in any orgs?

FWIW most of my agitation time is spent with a local org where we use a variety of tactics to attempt to educate, agitate, and organize, and that feels (in a purely vibes based way) much more effective since we can reach a much larger audience and community members we've never met before. We do struggle with organizing actions to try getting folks on the ground and organized not feeling effective at times (or being somewhat liberal in nature, even if the rhetoric is revolutionary), and I would love to hear from other orgs on how they have successfully turned well meaning libs into thoughtful communists consistently.