Category Archives: 1-on-1 Political Conversations

A white tern with a black top of its head is pictured flying left-to-right, with its wings stretched out in front and its head tilted slightly down, as if scanning the ground below.

The Question for an Organizer Is What the Wing Is for a Bird

[This post is part of a series on 1-on-1 organizing conversations.]

“You can get all your ideas across just by asking questions, and at the same time you help people to grow and not form a dependency on you. To me it’s just a more successful way of getting ideas across.” – Myles Horton in conversation with Paolo Freire in the book We Make the Road by Walking.

Myles Horton co-founded the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in 1932 and developed a model of popular education that played an important role in stimulating the bottom-up leadership of both the 1930s labor movement and the 1960s civil rights movement. Horton paid close attention to crafting and wielding questions as an essential tool of grassroots organizing.

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Talking to Your Coworkers about Socialism

[This post is part of a series on 1-on-1 organizing conversations.]

As socialists we spend most of our time talking about socialism with other socialists, whether in our radical book groups or with our activist friends. When it comes time to talk to non-socialists about socialism, we often stumble as we apply our activist-talk to our neighbors and coworkers who aren’t part of the radical scene. Rather, we should adapt our conversational strategies to the needs of the current context and moment.

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Tools for Political Conversations in Organizing

[This post is part of a series on 1-on-1 organizing conversations.]

Political conversations are often the most difficult kind of conversations and those least likely to succeed. We naturally want other people to see things our way, but there’s no easy way to do this and trying really hard to make people see things our way usually has the opposite effect.

In a companion blog post I sketch out some important contextual considerations for thinking about political conversations, but here I aim to simply sketch out some observations on best practices and a general method of political dialogue. These ideas are best applied when people are in a position of relative equality, a relation of mutual respect, and a setting in which both people have the emotional energy to engage across lines of political disagreement. Some adaptation may be required to apply these principles across individual communication styles and different cultural patterns of communication, but I believe the same basic principles admit to wide application.

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How Social Conditions and Personal Experience Shape Political Conversation

[This post is part of a series on 1-on-1 organizing conversations.]

There’s a hard pill to swallow for people who first get interested in radical politics: No one cares what you think. “Oh, so you don’t like white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy?” For the most part, nobody cares.

I’ve seen countless instances of someone expressing a radical belief to others with the hope of being agreed with or at least sparking an engaging discussion. But most commonly we are met with blank stares and utter disinterest, and we falsely take this as evidence that nobody cares about social issues or that there’s nothing we can do to change people’s minds.

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