My experience is that focusing on convincing anarchists of anything is a waste of time. Anarchists are difficult to convince because they’ve already formed strongly held beliefs, and they’re typically actively antagonistic towards communists. Meanwhile, both anarchists and communists combined represent a tiny fraction of the population.
The real focus should be on convincing people in the mainstream who are becoming disillusioned with the capitalist system, but haven’t yet formed strong political opinions. These people are much easier to convince and there are a lot more of them. This is the demographic that the messaging needs to be tailored to.
What Gramsci argues might not be terribly helpful for convincing anarchists, but it is a useful argument to explain why communist approach is the one that can achieve tangible results to people who haven’t yet formed strong opinions of their own.
In my experience, young anarchists in person can be reasoned with, but if you’re a full on adult and still believe in anarchism, you’re probably too far gone.
Sure, that’s an important point as well. It’s always important to recognize where the person you’re talking with at and to tailor the messaging accordingly. I’m mainly just cautioning against spending a lot of time on trying to convince people who don’t want to be convinced. It’s easy to get sucked down the rabbit hole of arguing with them endlessly while that time can be spent better talking to people who are actually receptive to what you’re saying.
I had to learn that the hard way. Some people just like to argue for arguments sake.
This is a very sad picture you are painting. It is like saying that if someone doesn’t know about cars and this is the first time buying you can convince them to buy a Chevy, but if they already know about cars and have had a few they will never buy one. Alternatively if they have a BMW why trade it for a Daewoo?
No, I’d say you have to look at it more like eating habbits. You won’t convince someone who’s in his 50ies and all his life only ever ate fastfood to eat healthy. It’s objectively better for them, deep down they might even know it, but the force of habbit is just to strong.
There is a best choice, but not everyone want’s to hear it. You can’t convince everyone and have to pick your battles.
