I’ve spent years arguing with people online and really have nothing to show for it aside from my own education and amusement. I was radicalized by discovering r/chapotraphouse back in 2018 I think. Nobody argued with me there, I just lurked, loved the memes, thought it was the funniest place online, then started reading theory because so many people there talked about it. Even though liberals are obviously ignorant about communism, their ignorance is willful: they never thank us for educating them, they always get angry and double-down. (In real life, it’s much easier to embarrass them and get them to shut up.) Still, I admit that it’s possible to change someone’s mind in an online debate, I just haven’t seen it happen when it comes to communism (libs on r/changemyview can change their minds about lib shit). Have you ever seen a lib admit that they were wrong about communism?
I don’t know that I could make someone a communist through a conversation. Marxism to me is so broad that it’s how I study the economy, geopolitics, art, history, and soil. It’s an analytical tool and an ontological framework but you can’t cover the full scope of that easily. Where I’ve found success is teaching a dialectical framing for some specific issue, especially in a forum like r/nursing where people are angry and understand the conflict but not the specific words to describe it. I don’t bother debating liberals, I just use the specific words to describe the specific ideas that open up that person’s ability to investigate the problems they already identified. I push them toward the class framework that empowers them and the communist idea of what that thing looks like without alienation.
Doing that gets positive reception. When people feel like a serf, they want to hear the
monologue because it ends with them getting to climb out of the oubliette and eat bodies. If they see it working in one setting they see its potential in others and are already part of the structures achieving it.
Any chance I could see some examples without doxxing you?
I can’t seem to search by comment. In terms of like specific scenarios, I know how to talk about nursing on a few levels. Professionally, in terms of labour theory and economics, on current events, and from a feminist and anti-racist angle because it’s work that’s marginalised in those ways. In a subreddit like r/CNA or r/nursing or r/medicine, there are threads where one or all of those things is already being discussed. They all have a naive sense of the issue from some lived experience that I’ve shared. They just treat it with a sense of capitalist realism.
The role of a communist agitator there is me saying some variation of “Jesus that’s fucked up. It’s wild that the admin think they can alienate us like that without there being some consequence. My patient is charged more for their bed than I make in a month, I have 20 patients, and their room is nicer than my apartment. All the while that admin won’t even bother protecting us from harassment or assault, and they coerce us into accepting it through the same tactics that keep people in abusive relationships. Pizza parties are an insult that only masks how much they’re stealing from us, like that ‘boss makes a dollar / I make a dime / that’s why I shit / on company time’ song but somehow more insulting than being given the dime. Only a state with strong unions like California seems to not want to destroy us for a quick profit.”
In that you’re identifying the problem as a specific thing they can explore, validating their experience with it by showing that it’s universal and shared by you, highlighting the dialectical relationship and the ways it abuses us in ways we’ve experienced elsewhere, and showing an achievable solution that’s demonstrably worked. Toss in a cultural reference if it’s catchy or radicalising.
I think the more effective agitation strategy for the internet is dada though. We haven’t yet found the right aesthetic yet but the Hexbear-style absurdist humour is the core of dada.