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?
People don’t like to say “I’m wrong” because argument has a battle-like element as well as a truth-seeking element.
Debate on the internet might convince a 3rd person reader even if not the opponent. The audience, not the debater.
It’s also possible that I’ve planted seeds of realisation in the person, and they’ve silently stopped answering, but the process of changing their view was pushed along.
I also believe in the lurkers watching our debates, but I sometimes wonder if they don’t actually exist since they never support my arguments with likes or upvotes. They could still be out there but…
Yeah, but in a forum you’re usually arguing for the lurkers, which is why
has so much censorship. I win over at least one person every day over video chat though. Those websites that pair people off randomly, like Omegle used to. Now there’s a few of them. The webcam feeds use webRTC, so they’re p2p over the Internet between the two people.People are much more amenable than you might think, because they too are also seeing this thing fall apart. Being able to articulate the systems and history that keep the status quo is sometimes all it takes. Get them to libgen with fresh copies of Blackshirts and Reds, Capitalist Realism, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, etc - whatever it takes. Whatever their discontent is, I had a guy raging about the border just yesterday. He must’ve had some familiarity with things because all it took was mentioned how I find it better to think of why there is an apparent wave… The destruction of people and governments in their countries, for business. Then they’re used to divide the domestic working class and keep them from looking at the root causes.
Which video chat sites are you using?
There’s a few now, I stick to one that a Portuguese firm operates the frontend for. Fair warning, you’re going to get flashed a lot. Just like Omegle. There’s a few websites that all connect you to the same pool of chatters. There’s Minichat dot Com, Chatruletka dot Com, Ome dot TV - again all effectively the same.
You need a fake VK or Facebook account, but those are easy to sign up. Just don’t stand up, they run a JavaScript image recognition model in the web browser that checks your chat partner’s webcam feed for things they’d like to ban people for.
There’s some other ones… Emerald, Monkey, Chat Roulette, Chat Random, etc.
someone on r/cth pushed back on my lib takes on Maduro, while I was mostly just lurking and a bernie lib at best, and that made a surprisingly big impact on me, realizing I cant just trust NYT and NATOpedia to be factual, let alone unbiased (I was already past that)
Convincing well meaning questioners is often possible IMO, though they have to take the initiative to ask the dumb questions and research the answers… the people that are socially on the fringes of the community but dont quite “get it” yet. Outsiders who hate everything you stand for? No way
The only success I’ve ever had is showing pictures of the Soviet Union or China where people are walking around doing normal stuff. The average internet anti-comminist thinks those places have permanently grey skies, the only jobs are at the dirt factory, and there are soldiers everywhere with big beating sticks. It’s rare I meet anyone with coherent anti-comminist ideology and they tend to be landlords or run a shitty small business.
I will continue to repost this essay, because everyone should read it:
https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/
The “Marketplace of Ideas” is a fiction; Ideology is a type of survival strategy. You are astronomically unlikely to, through an abstracted and remote medium like bickering on a forum, get someone who is attached to their survival strategy to change horses midstream for a new one. You can try to chip away at it overtime, trying to convince them some other strategy is superior, but it’s unreliable and inefficient to do with someone who you don’t personally know. The best you’ll usually do is persuade an inquisitive person towards pro-sociality, but I don’t think that’s quite what you mean.
Incidentally, since survival strategies are based on one’s environment, the best way to spread survival strategies (besides really getting to know someone’s conditions) is seeking to change the environment. r/cth was so effective for the ways that it not only built relative consensus over time within itself but changed the social norms outside of itself in a self-benefitting way, by attacking reactionaries, supporting progressives, seeking out spaces where the less-entrenched people would be idling around (that last one is how they caught me). Rituals of “debate” online only have very few practical uses, and none of them are getting the other person on your side.
I’ve read that article a few times and it’s stuck with me. What I don’t get, however, is why so much money is spent on “persuasion” messaging if that stuff in theory doesn’t work?
We’re going into a estimated 2 BILLION dollar Presidential election where obscene piles of money are going to be tossed at mainly TV ads, but also every bit of online ad space, YouTube ads, billboards, and tons of climate-killing yard signs…
and without doxxing myself let’s just say the political industry believes this stuff works. They have studies about certain messages and tactics and measure them in terms of percentage point increases in voter turnout. But then I look at these ads and I just see the same mushy garbage that’s always been there. What gives?
I’ve read that article a few times and it’s stuck with me. What I don’t get, however, is why so much money is spent on “persuasion” messaging if that stuff in theory doesn’t work?
The essay discusses this, but so do I:
Incidentally, since survival strategies are based on one’s environment, the best way to spread survival strategies (besides really getting to know someone’s conditions) is seeking to change the environment.
The cool thing about being tremendously rich and holding sway in media companies is that you can change the environment of tens of millions of people nearly at will by not merely giving them an input but a saturation of inputs, which crowd out what most of the tiny voices are able to accomplish. Between this and the fact that the overwhelming bulk of the ideology behind those ads is in bipartisan agreement, this seems pretty understandable.
Only few people are really swayed to a new position by some stupid ad, but you can impact their enthusiasm, you can change what they are used to and what they see as normal, there is quite a lot that you can do to a population when you embrace more indirect types of influence. The man on the TV can’t dictate to you what to think, good arguments or no, but he is like a common “friend” to you and everyone you know who is happy to influence each of you individually just like your other friends do, not to do what they say but to think in terms more like theirs.
It’s an overwhelming reason that personal advocacy is such an uphill struggle that it’s competing with the superstructure of ideology that is bankrolled by the millions like this from public schools to political campaigns to every park and monument and song and TV show and commercial. You can’t yell louder than a thousand of those voices and all you’ll do is fuck up your relationships and isolate yourself if you try. You wouldn’t even need to raise your voice if you just had a billion dollar microphone, though.
(though also those campaigns are just stuffed with money-laundering, but that’s beside the point)
Thanks for the depression! J/k I appreciate the convo.
I’m trying to find solutions out of this in the imperial core. I want my life to be useful and not just be forgotten like 99.9999% of humans that have come before me. I believe everyone has the same essential drive to matter.
So for me that means a) finding a way to reprogram the masses, and b) figuring out why I didn’t get programmed. Why didn’t the propaganda stick?
I’m a mostly well off white dude living in a suburbs aka the lib breeding grounds. I have enough income to be comfortable, cops leave me alone, and I’m not worried about any physical threats in my little corner or burgerland. And yet I am radicalized to the point I dream of
.Compare to the people in this linked Reddit thread:
https://hexbear.net/post/1931625
All the classics are there: iPhone, making fun of “true communism has never been tried”, comparing us to nazis, we’re all lazy college students, etc. None of these people have anything new or unique to say. I am surrounded by people like this all day every day. These aren’t free thinking individuals but lemmings. Basically language regurgitation machines… but why am I not one of these people?
I also grew up in a very red area. I was inundated with this propaganda. Where I live I can’t go a mile in any direction without hitting 3 churches. Right-wing and lib indoctrination is like air here.
The only thing I can think of is that I am not totally straight, and that once I was poor enough to apply for food stamps. OK, but if my temporary brush with poverty was enough to turn left then why aren’t the millions of people living that experience and worse joining me? We all know a few poor or struggling people that hold onto lib and reactionary views…
I am starting to think the biggest hurdle to organizing is that the masses are, in fact, programmed by media. I agree with your point that it is overbearing due to the sheer scope of the messaging. But I can’t accept that we just wait for material conditions to get bad enough for people to turn left. It’s more likely they will turn to full Fascism. After all, the Fascists have all the money to buy propaganda.
So maybe the right way is to push harder against the basic propaganda that China is totalitarian, that Stalin was a terrible person who personally started Ukraine, that people in Cuba eat “mayonnaise sandwiches” as one conservative posted. We need more targeted messaging showing how much better everyday life in these countries is compared to the US. Show how nice Vietnam is after they won their war. Show how beautiful Pyongyang is to walk around. Show what a city looks like when every square inch of space isn’t covered in ads. Get the Victims of Capitalism Memorial Foundation going.
And most importantly, figure out the common thread between me and other leftists coming out of the “middle class” and find out how to replicate it.
Another point I should mention about my turn left is that I used to be a big Democratic party supporter. Like donated to candidates, held some roles in the party, even (ugh) worked on the Hillary campaign in a low level role (in the general, voted for Bernie in the Primary). It was the constant disappointments coupled with Democrats voting against what I wanted over and over again, then running the same shitty campaigns, that got me looking elsewhere. And the biggest “trigger” for me is seeing Democrats talk about how “democracy is on the ballot” and “Republicans are the worst” on one hand, and then leadership saying literally “we need a strong Republican Party” and “work across the aisle” BS on the other. It’s like they want their party to be weak! So, thanks Nancy Pelosi for helping go full commie?
Well I’ve never admitted it anywhere but I was convinced in part by you people that I need to research communism properly and read theory instead of repeating everything I read from some Reddit meme somewhere.
Debunking one lie after another it became very clear to me that my former
brain was in large part not formed by facts but by the subtle and not so subtle ways that every person in a capitalist society gets molded to think that capitalism is the only way forward and that communism is a failed experiment.The mix of “eat your landlord” meme dessert and theorypost veggies is a potent combo and it’s why reddit had to get rid of us
Unfortunately, it’s really hard to convince people to support a system that entails having no iPhone… 😢
posted from my iphone 
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.
The vast majority of forum users are lurkers, not posters, and you’re much more likely to change your opinion when you’re just reading along instead of entrenching yourself in your existing beliefs (as arguments tend to do).
I do think arguments have some positive effect on some participants, it just takes longer for them to come around.
Most actual communists I know came to it on their own in their own time by personally seeking out more information to educate themselves about the world, not by getting into verbal dick measuring contests with randos on the internet. You’ve not ever gonna have much success “converting” people if they’re not in the right place to be converted. I honestly think propaganda is only really effective when the people hearing already kinda agree with it, it just makes them agree even more. You can talk a baby leftist into being a grown up leftist but if someone is a diehard CHUD or Lib that ain’t gonna change until something in their life makes it change.
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.
I don’t know. It’s probably unknowable.
Posts changed my mind, though, slowly but surely, over the course of years. They might have been your posts.
There’s this woman I met on a stupid Discord server. We only even spoke because she jumped out of the bushes and into a channel to say some weird transphobic bullshit, which I replied to about as reasonably as I could. It seemed like she might actually want to learn things though and just be ignorant, so after embarrassing her publically I reached out with a message.
For the last five months I’ve been screeching in her dm’s, alternatingly about trans-specific queer liberation topics and general communism stuff. She was(is?) basically a lib with “muh small gubmint! da politicians are stealin da money!!!1!” as her whole political analysis. So close to understanding… It seemed to actually hit when I illustrated for her the functions of police violence and how cops exist to uphold corrupt power structures, but I’m not really sure she sees me as an actual person. It’s like I’m speaking The Language of the Gods sometimes when I get a bit too left, and her reaction is usually just silent nodding or whatever when I go into a massive screed about inflation or something. Seems to be listening, says she’s gonna look into things, but not real reactive. It’s like being trans makes me a different life form in her eyes, lol lmao. So I guess not?
I did turn my already-pretty-left wife who I met onlinr into a based leftist though, so victory there
You you and people like you helped change my mind.
😢
Mine
I managed at least once. This was when I was more in the anarchist direction, though, which obviously makes it easier since anarchism has broadly more accept among western liberals than ML has anyway. I don’t know whether that guy would later on get into more theory and go in the ML direction, but in any case I was satisfied.
And naturally as for myself, arguing with others played as big a role as simple “climate” and things like my own pet interest in the USSR did, in making me who I am politically today.
More details please.
