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felipeforte@lemmygrad.ml

I suck at converting liberals (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 2 weeks ago by SovietReporter@lemmygrad.ml to c/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml

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I was talking to a friend yesterday who is also a coder. His parents are Chinese from the region where Hong Kong is, but he was raised in America. And he kept saying that capitalism is not perfect, but is the best that we got and that there is not real freedom on socialism because you cannot vote the poliburo out and that Marxism has been tried and didn’t work out but that capitalism adapts to the real world with trial and error and blah blah.

No matter what I said, he wouldn’t yield. We spent an hour and a half on a discussion about it. It ended up with him saying “We are not going to convince each other so let’s stop”. Mind you that he was the one who kept asking me question but barely let me speak.

He was like “I read about Marxism, and I just realized that it doesn’t apply to the real world”

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[–] Cowbee@hexbear.net 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

You're pretty close to what Roderic Day asserts in Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of "Brainwashing." People believe what they license themselves to, and reject that which shakes that frame due to the absolute cacophany of information available on the internet. Everyone says everything, so it's easy to find information pointing to whatever you want it to, so this charade keeps going.

I think over time terms like "Socialism" and "Communism" are less scary in the West, but what those words mean is what's at stake, as Socialism gets taken over by the Social Democrats and other apologists for Imperialism. Agitation should be tied to real experiences of the working class and speak to simple logical truths about why we should collectively plan the economy, rather than leaving it up to a decreasing number of powerful individuals. Combatting the overwhelming negativity of the modern era with revolutionary optimism seems quite potent.

[–] yogthos@lemmygrad.ml 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

That was a great essay, and I very much agree it's the specific meaning for the terms we use that matters. We don't want people to just learn empty slogans, we want them to understand the mechanics of the system.

[–] Cowbee@hexbear.net 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

100%. The good news is that this process seems to ease over time as conditions change.

[–] yogthos@lemmygrad.ml 9 points 2 weeks ago

Exactly, you don't have to work hard to convince people when the things you're saying match their lived experience.