chat

1. You can join an org and do actual material activism to make the world a better place. You will make new friends, and there is no reason why this would cause you to lose your old friends. This is the way

2. Argue with them. I've made it a point to do this recently. Don't let shit slide when they say it. They have the status quo on their side and most people buckle when they get even a little pushback. There's only a few outcomes from this: you'll convince them, they'll stop bringing it up, or they'll cut you off. I've kept all my friendships despite me correcting their crap. They have mostly chosen option 2.

Buy guns, join your local shooting org. Go out and help a food not bombs.

Have only very superficial relationships with these people. Just fucking nod when they talk about their coin.

look, your friends suck. but letting them slide has almost no political effect. This is not a "combat liberalism" situation: these are not party members. We are not going to achieve socialism by convincing people one at a time to have the right ideas. You should investigate whatever leftist orgs are around you. There may be local chapters of

• PSL
• SAlt
• DSA
• Behind Enemy Lines
• Food Not Bombs
• etc etc

You should go investigate for yourself. See what's out there, talk to them, join whatever seems good. Joining an org does not mean you become a Marxist robot and alienate all your friends. Everyone has a job and a life outside of activism; after all we are the working class. It's like a four hour a week commitment and you'll feel better if you're engaging in meaningful political struggle. You'll also get better at talking to people about socialism, if that's something you want to do with your friends. To address your title question:

How do I make myself be a principled person who actually acts to fight injustice instead of sticking to my comfortable position of privilege where I materially benefit from others' suffering?

You can be a principled person who actually acts to fight injustice if you act to fight injustice. Baby steps, nobody is born a good communist. You are probably going to continue materially benefiting from others' suffering - you can't opt out of capitalism - but there is a "silver lining" in that you can use these advantages for communism. E.g. labor aristocrats are less likely to be drawn to the left, but once you're already here you have more time/money/energy for the cause.

Regularly making jokes about "indians", e.g. "Bruh sickass gun, bruh imagine if you were using that gun to fight indians".

wow. i've heard some toxic ass waste before and your bullet list is choice, but this is a new one on me.

anyway, i'm not sure i have relevant life experience enough to give advice. in my late 20s i left my home town to go join a friend in a shitty-pay job doing conservation type work. i moved further and further away to places where i knew no one, to chase seasonal outdoor work. i would make and leave friends through my own moving or through the transient nature of seasonal, low pay work. the benefit was that pretty much everybody gave a shit about the environment, the effort/value of physical work, and nobody was really caught up in consumerism. the point being, it was easy to meet people with shared values and shared social availability just by working.

i bumbled my way back to school around 30 for something related and it turned into a career in my 40s where i was able to put down roots and now exist in a completely different social context than the one where i grew up. i certainly don't live in some socialist utopia. the regional political machines here are all center-right or worse, but i have my people and my work to make things better.

i quit FB and all of that years ago, but by all accounts my original high school cohort is almost entirely reactionary assholes. where i grew up is a laboratory for developing reactionary politics. i barely keep in touch with any of my old "friends". the last time i visited family and made an effort to appear at some function i had expected to be chill, talking to some of them was like talking to an alien that learned how to speak by listening to talk radio. some are absolutely disgusting people. i pushed back a lot more than i would have if i still lived there, recommended some literature, and haven't been back for probably 6 years.

i don't really recommend trying to track down seasonal conservation work, because it can and generally is highly exploitative. it also has a well above average chance to result in injury and there are no medical benefits. but what i would say, is look for ways to make your professional/working situation incorporate some of your values. we tend to spend half of our waking life at "work", so if you can make that time be spent in relative service to your values, it can be an avenue to a new social environment. if you combine that with moving to a new community/place/area, it can be a whole new world.

1. Stop playing into their reactionary statements. At least be neutral if you're not ready to call them out.
2. Make yourself comfortable with cutting them out of your life.
3. If you want to give them the opportunity to behave better around you, you can directly disagree with them by sharing your true opinion when something like this comes up. Those who don't suck will agree with you. Those who value your friendship over their own reactionary positions will at least try to respect you and stop saying things like that around you. If you get dogpiled, I'd ghost them.

If losing this group of people would seriously harm you, like severe psychological trauma, then of course do it at your own pace and maybe with another group of people lined up first. But otherwise you should plan on removing several them from your life because they're saying Nazi shit and you shouldn't support fash.

In terms of your title question, you should educate yourself and join a half-decent org. Given your current situation, I recommend being careful about what org you pick, as you don't want your first org to also be your primary friend group that you have to leave behind again, as you may politically develop in another direction and then be back in this same position but with the Western Leftist version, e.g. DSA Russophobes/Sinophobes or certain categories of ultras. Feel free to focus on your own education before joining an org, just remember that this is the trajectory!

You shouldn't beat yourself up and just get involved in an org, if anything.

You don't know it, but you suffer from capitalism and don't own the means of production or have economic democracy.

Even India, people benefit off the suffering of others but they get involved.

The bourgeois class is benefiting off of you right now.

Don't just get involved for moralistic reasons; you have a self-interest to get involved.

How to lose friends and alienate people, eh?

I would reconcile yourself to the fact that you're going to crack a few eggs in the process of making this omelette.

Although — better fewer but better, as a wise man once said.

I would pick your battles, given that you are in a position to do you. You might be surprised at how far you can shift individual's perspectives if you take a gradual approach; it's very easy to denounce someone and cut them out of your life but, unless it's because you find their behaviour reprehensible, that generally only makes people more entrenched in their position. Sometimes allyship means being behind enemy lines and doing the hard work that the groups who you are an ally to are unable to, whether due to the fact that they aren't welcomed into the Old Boy's Club or due to the fact that they have to prioritise their own family/community/mental health.

In these situations I find that I am constantly engaging in a degree of calculus: how much goodwill and trust I have with this person, how much goodwill will be eroded by challenging them, how high a priority any particular issue is to push back on... basically it's weighing up how much far I am able to stretch the relationship without it snapping and how important it is to leverage the relationship for driving critical consciousness.

What that means is that I do not swing at every ball. Sometimes I let smaller shit slide in order to tackle the bigger issues. It sucks to have to compromise but this is the nature of doing hard work in the community and agitating for change. Sometimes I don't tackle that bigger issue head-on but I choose to voice dissent or to point out a pointed semi-rhetorical question before moving the conversation on.

[CW for mostly abstract discussions of everything awful - queerphobia, murder, SA jokes, the like - and stuff like suicide from here on]

Some of the tactics I include are:

• Humanising the victims (e.g. "I feel for their family though - nobody deserves their kid to die like that" as a small aside for someone's queerphobic quip about a trans person who has recently died an early death due to suicide or murder.)

• Refusal to engage

This can be not laughing at the rape joke, excusing yourself from a discussion when it gets gross, opting not to engage in a discussion about what "should" happen to an oppressed group or not to respond to a question etc.

• Bringing in the historical context of the issue at hand

• Just voicing dissent (e.g. "I don't agree" without dragging the discussion down into a debate)

• Asking them to explain the joke or the argument (e.g. getting them to explain how the joke they made was yet-another example of The One Joke™ and being like "Eh, that one's a bit played out")

This one works well for when people are putting out snide insults that target you because it kills all the fun and they get deprived of their desired reaction from you.

• Going Pavlovian on them

Idk how this works for other people but there are certain topics where I am like a dog with a bone. It's probably on account of being autistic. But whatever the case, I have 5 mins+ diatribes that people around me can trigger. Metaphorically, I will cling to the mic for dear life and I will talk my diatribe through until it's over. If you try to interrupt I'm either going to relate that directly back to what I was saying or I'm just going to continue on with what I was saying. This is a softer sort of redline for me in a social setting - basically I'm just draining all of the fun out of a situation and, after that same diatribe has been unloaded on a person multiple times, they develop an aversion to raising that topic around me again. Works for me. No doubt some people think I'm insufferable for it but idc much because if your opinions are insufferable then I'm just levelling the playing field.

• Reframing the discussion

e.g. instead of going in on the discussion about George Floyd and the "need to maintain law and order", I'd shift the discussion to talking about police abuse of power as this is a much more serious problem and a much greater personal threat than whatever George Floyd did/may have done

• Making it personal

e.g. asking them if they'd agree with that statement if it was their child etc.

I'm sure there are other tactics that I engage in too. But that's some of how I deal with it and what my strategy is as a person who is white and who more or less passes as cis, straight, a man, hetero etc.

Start by donating to good causes if you have money. Use the resources you have to make a difference. Then join an org if one of those resources is also time, but join (or fuck it start one) an org that actually does things to help people struggling, you dont sound like you need a book club. You can always move to a new city if youre fianancially stable

Also, you're literally a communist; you have to hide your identity so I don't care what you say as long as it's not broadcasted to multiple people to persuade them otherwise.