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kin wrote

Reply to comment by kano in FRIDAY FREE TALK by kano

What they said about being expose to your environment. I have a similar situation and it's hard to explain why anarchism is anarchism and explain key concepts like self-management

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kano OP wrote

Yea well they were honestly impressed when they came here, this past week was a building week for us, that we planned for the last month and a half or so. So Hella people were visiting to help us to work on the house.

They found everyone super nice, they saw how our organisational meetings kind of work. I think they really appreciated how you can kind of just work on what you find interesting, and that there isn't a pressure to work yourself too hard, that we want to have a healthy way of working together, and not just burn ourselves out.

One of my parents was until a recently a council member of the town I grew up in, and now is in the bureaucracy there so they were asking me about how anarchy should work on a larger scale ( in terms of organising towns and cities) and I was like well the anarchists have really extremely differing views on this from anti civ stuff to like communist anarchists or anarchist syndicalists who think that industrial society can exist under anarchy.

I was able to get them to accept that the USA is a fascist country while they were here which surprised me.

When I told them I was coming here a couple years ago they thought I was joining a cult and were tryna tell me that I was making a very bad decision(my dad at the time called me a insert ableist slur here), but actually they really liked it here. I think they both weren't super cool with eating dumpstered food, and the whole vegan communal meal didn't work for my dad who is one of these people who thinks a meal isn't worth eating if there isn't meat but even he can accept that the while industrial animal product production is fucked up and destroying the environment.

They both consider themselves to be progressive and I guess for the mainstream politics of the USA they are, but they are barely aware of stuff that doesn't affect their white middle class circle I guess, but are open to hearing about it. I think they were very open to new ideas when they came here so I find that really cool.

Yea I tried to explain them problems that I see here like internalised racism, as it's a group of white Germans and then me, and also problems of toxic masculinity and how we try to work on this, or how we fail to do so. So I tried to make it clear that anarchy is a continuous struggle against authority even in our small group of people here. Think it's easier to show people how we self organise then explain it to them.

And when they asked me stuff about the purpose of our project I made it clear that they would probably hear as many different ideas as people who live here if they ask everyone, to make it clear that we can function as a group without necessarily agreeing on everything.

Lmk if that was helpful. I think by just exposing them to that environment people can learn a lot and it's better then trying to explain it by talking about it you get me?

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