Online? No, you’re wasting everyone’s time. IRL? Have a thoughtful conversation with people you care about. Outside that, organise.
‘Debating’ relies on a degree of trust that you don’t really get with random people so you’re kinda just talking to a wall unless you have some existing relationship. Like don’t let things slide (irl) just cause you don’t wanna fight about them, but in order to actually change someone’s mind they need to trust that you actually want what’s best for them.
That’s why you use rhetoric, sophistry, dirty tricks, stage magic, appeals to emotion, and physical violence to win “debates”.
Debating about facts with well sourced information and arguments is a bad way to change people’s minds. Scaring them, bullying them, flattering them, misleading them, tricking them, confusing them? Much more reliable.
Is it actually better though? If you convince someone through those means, they’ll just change their mind for the next person who uses those tactics
I mean, from what I understand, yeah, it is better. Reasoned argument not only doesn’t change people’s minds, it often causes them to re-trench in their exsting beliefs to protect their ego and sense of self.
Whereas a good polemic or some rhetoric side-steps that whole thing. Instead of telling them they’re wrong and explaining why you just try to get them real, real angry about something you’re angry about.
We must never stop explaining. We know that when the people understand, they cannot help but follow us.
As was said by Thomas Sankara.
Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara (French pronunciation: [tɔmɑ izidɔʁ nɔɛl sɑ̃kaʁa]; 21 December 1949 – 15 October 1987) was a Burkinabè military officer, Marxist revolutionary and Pan-Africanist who served as President of Burkina Faso from his coup in 1983 to his assassination in 1987.
Online debates are a spectator sport.
With that in mind, unless you get enjoyment or benefit from arguing with libs, the only real positive impact you can expect to achieve is by swaying the opinions of onlookers or by informing them about things they wouldn’t otherwise be aware of.
This requires a careful consideration about how many people are actually going to see your comment and if you’re capable of effectively informing people or of swaying opinion in your favour.
You may also find that debating with libs online helps you to develop your arguments and to identify the gaps in your knowledge and the errors in your thinking, so that may be some individual benefit that you achieve from this stuff.
My weary heart says no but comrade Sankara says yes
Irl of course
just read combat liberalism. It’s written for members of a revolutionary cadre, not workers, but maybe thats what youre looking for
Do you have a link of the book?
try marxists.org, I cant access their website rn tho
you can find it on prolewiki i think
A solid 80% of people in the imperial core are unreachable at this time so it’s frankly a waste of energy. I’m not saying this to be a doomer but to temper your expectation. Still organize where you can but the reason there isn’t a US Bolshevik Party isn’t your lack of effort or skill, it’s that the working class of the US are still mostly bourgeois proletariats who don’t stand to gain much from socialism right now.
That may change in the near future so be prepared but don’t beat yourself up that you local PSL chapter can barely organize a bake sale. I don’t blame people for being a bit grill pilled right now cuz what else is there to do?
What is a bourgeoisie proletariat?
Engels once called the British working class “bourgeois proletarians” because of their privileged conditions relative to the rest of the working class globally.
It basically means the same thing as labor aristocrat.
No, because we already have so much to do and a very large amount of them have no interest in hearing it, much less learning anything. But if you have the time and energy then it’s a very nice thing to do.
i feel like libs only change their minds when they’re sufficiently embarrassed or pressured out of being liberals. A huge part of that entails they have to be some level of vulnerable though, like facing hardship. Rich liberals with a three story house in the suburbs aren’t changing. Brick walls. also I was never a liberal, so maybe I have no idea. I went straight from confused apolitical teenager to rabid commie the moment the iraq war started.
Confused liberals who are open to stuff like unions might be more amenable. They’re often curious, but because they might only be liberals from typical social osmosis.
People who are stuck in that very difficult wishy-washy social democrat area are the worst. Their biggest hurdle is often nationalism. They’ll want a better world, but can’t get over their view that foreign people have cartoonishly evil societies. With those types of social democrats, or perhaps also the unprincipled poorly read “anarchists”, I genuinely have no clue what to say. They’re at a hurdle they can only overcome themselves or through repeatedly deconstructing their own views. The whole reason they’re in that position in the first place is they want to be a leftist, but can’t commit to being the type of leftist who is ostracized in the west. As in, they can’t commit to saying nice or even neutral things about the west’s enemies. They can’t commit to possibly having views that are typically viewed as frightening or unpleasant.
also I have some hypotheses about this, I also don’t wanna stereotype, but trans people are many orders of magnitude more likely to become leftists from my experience compared to the rest of the population. It’s probably a lot to do with that necessary vulnerability I mentioned earlier. Getting liberals to listen to the experiences of trans people and why that led them to become socialists could be helpful, possibly
Also, changing minds never matters much unless you’re changing people’s minds to actually do something. I should have started with that. I’ll take 5 confused liberals joining my union over 500 socially chauvinist, self-described leftists who do nothing other than post online. (not directing that at anyone here, I mean people like that Haz or Caleb Maupin guy)
Depends on your mental health By best friends both dating each other, met through me one of them was socialist leaning and now they’ve just been completely brainwashed. They don’t see past their double standards on US Imperialist and Colonial hegemony.
Sometimes I don’t have the spoons to argue with someone who’s already convinced anything I say is false or another extreme.
I’ve realized there’s no changing their minds because they refuse to see anything I present. It’s just a waste of time we’re better of playing super smash and smoking and occasionally I’ll bait him into Marxist analysis through means of not mentioning socialist keywords, it’s fascinating and daunting at the same time
