Currently on hiatus because "you are participating in genocide!" Doesn't seem to get through to the no matter how i phrase it and i keep having panic attacks from realizing that.

I guess I don't, or rather I used to, and then our conversations became so consistently exhausting for both of us that without really trying to we just stopped having them. Like a call would start out with some fun chit chat but then inevitably we would get to talking about colonialism or whatever and I would realize they were a horrific racist (aka normie liberal). Thankfully politics are an easy base on which to build adult friendships, since past age 30 they become good proxies for your worldview and values in general. So going to irl political events and then continuing to hang with people I get along with has been a surprising well of friendship as I age.

Also well-off white people past age 30 are basically a lost cause. Every single material incentive pushes them to have right wing views.

I generally don't use a frontal approach instead trying to get them to partake in radical media. Anything by Boots Riley( The Coup, Sorry to Bother You, I'm a Virgo), Damnation (which is no longer on netflix), and a bunch of other stuff. It often lays the groundwork for Yellow Parenti, and other docs. It's a long process.

Start from class.

The first question to ask yourself is who here struggles the most. Who has it in their interests the most to align leftwards? That person is going to find more in what you have to say than the others provided you're tailoring your message around what actually personally affects them and make sure you challenge them to consider what will actually tangibly improve their life.

The second question to ask yourself is who here is the the most moralist. Moralisation is not as strong as class but for a few people it will work or at least produce sympathisers.

Other than these I would suggest not wasting your time trying to change the political positions of people whose class interests don't align with the left. It becomes an exercise in futility and your time is better spent elsewhere. Instead, simply try to make them be kinder.

Something interesting happened when I returned, though. The topic that started this isn't relevant, but it prompted the Center Dem friend to ask me where I get my views from. I sat on that question for an evening and then just wrote out a summary of the Marxist-Leninists view on capitalism and imperialism, without ever using "capitalism" or "imperialism", without referencing Marx or Lenin.

It was long, but, his response was, basically, "Ok, that makes a lot of sense, actually." I then told him that Marx and Lenin would be happy to know you agree because that's their analysis in my own words, as I understand it.

Usually after bringing up someone like Marx, I'll get dunked on with a barrage of anticommunist brainrot, but that didn't happen this time.

This is a teaching reaction. A positive reaction from people that actually like to learn new things. You can work with this.

1. Teach what capitalism is
2. Give examples of capital
3. Teach class to people
4. Explain the relationship between bourgeoisie and proletariat using example. I like workplace followed by landlords.

This equips people to understand our world and system and is the necessary springboard into considering alternatives.

One thing I'm trying to figure out is, how do I talk about "libs" without using the word "lib"? In this setting, it is the pejorative "lib" in the classical American Political Conservative sense, and sometimes "Liberal" in the American Political Progressive sense. Using Neoliberal, I feel would fly over their heads.

Usually I just do similar to what you do, I analyze using Marxism but don't specifically label anything.

In a similar vein, I find going back to the root of “where does profit come from?” is useful. Once you establish that workers create value and profit only exists because workers don’t receive the full value of that, it becomes much easier to get them to see that owners have an interest in keeping wages as low as possible. Everything else fits neatly in that framework: bourgeois democracy, regulatory capture, exploitation of the “underdeveloped” world, convergence of traditional hierarchies and capitalism, etc.

no friends lmao

Biggest thing I find, biggest difference early on, biggest headache preventer: Emphasize early on that there's nothing personal about it, that this isn't an attack on them, only an examination of their ideas. If you're talking to them about this, it's probably because you've decided that their heart is in the right place, so let that be the pleasant bedrock of the conversation. If you can keep the vibe collaborative, ask engaging questions and avoid triggering any defenses they'll often do a lot of the work for you- just gotta not make them feel morally judged. You can still morally judge them, just don't let it show. Socratic method works best as long as you're not super obvious about it. Question, listen, discuss, break tension with a joke, flow into next question.

If they start voicing leftist thoughts, validate them of course. If they ask something like "Hey, did we (the US) coup (insert country here)?" Don't say yeah they did weve known since 1972, say "You know, I've long suspected it myself. Let's look it up right now." The dopamine of considering the possibility of a real conspiracy and then being immediately proven right will be a powerful reward that they'll remember. I mean shit, the ease with which materialist thinking allows you to sniff things out; mystical phantasms of omnipotent Russian hackers and shadowy transgender cabals just cannot compete.

I also do something I suspect a lot of people here do, I call it "unpausing time". Ours is the only political/economic worldview "in play" right now that accounts for the future instead of just trying to claw back the past, and when you put dialectical materialist ideas alongside say, libertarian ones in a live test, the comparison always favors us. Compare China to Argentina and you can easily say, politely even: "Well, these ideas may sound good on paper (you may have to lie about this), but as we can clearly now see, they just don't work in practice." I'm being kind of snarky but seriously, any time they point to some ideological mind palace shit you can just point to the scoreboard.

Our ideas and methods stand the acid test of reality at a rate that the various liberalisms have never, ever been able to match.

Actually since most anticommunist arguments are capitalist projection, you can have a lot of fun making them make sense. My favorite is "eventually you run out of other people's money."

all i know is, i'm so sick & tired of having to compromise. i keep thinking about the bs my brother spouts, but like, there's just literally nothing i can say / do to magically snap him out of it, if he's in that deep already.

fortunately, am moving out of the country v soon.

e : worth noting that i already left my core friend group of 15 years cuz of increasing "anti-woke" rhetoric.

So it got me thinking about the title of this post. How do you talk to your lib friends about their distorted world view?

mine belittle it; so i've stopped talking to them.

My close friends that I see in person often were already open minded about criticizing capitalism (to an extent) but not open to the idea of alternative til a few months after I began opening up to them political and developing my own views. I wouldn't call either of them communist but I would call both of them anticapitalists atleast. For them it just took open non-hostile discussion, some light reading, and occasionally one of my rants over the course of a few months to get them where they are.

My online friends who I play DND with however (more reflective of your experience) I have no idea. There is one of them I have been able to have genuinely good discussions bc he actually follows and understands (mostly) world events as they happen but he is not even left. His father is petit bourgeois and while he sees the flaws of the system he genuinely believes that he can work within it to provide for his family. I think it will take him eventually getting fucked by bigger capitalists to actually consider an alternative. I won't change him with words.

What I am getting at here is primarily that for a lot of people there isn't much you can do. Put your views out there and make them known. Be vocal about your positions and why you have them but don't EXPECT change.

I only have leftist friends

I've been struggling with this shit too. I'm in a group chat with 3 trumpanzees, a Blue MAGA lib who thinks fascism is perfectly fine as long as the demonrats are doing it, and someone who subscribes to some vague lolbertarianism (all cishet crackermen, myself included). There was one who seems to be an actual leftist (I didn't ask him about specifics), but he dipped from the chat a day or two ago when my friends were getting into an argument about the upcoming presidential election. I'm starting to think that was the right move.

If it weren't for the fact that I had been close to these people for most of my life and they genuinely care about me, I am bad at meeting new people, and their lib/chudness is limited to garbage takes without acting on it, I'd have cut them out of my life a long time ago.