Just to clarify, Im talking about my face to face interactions with people. I know social democracy is imperialist, unworkable, and doomed to fail. But I have trouble articulating why socialism is the only way forward. I can point out all the problems with capitalism, though.
There’s too much baggage associated with the S word; people immediately point to 100 billion dead vuvuzela. If I had to think of the biggest stumbling block to convincing people, it’s the controversial history associated with socialism. And I just don’t know enough about each individual “atrocity” and “failure” that happened in order to debunk it all. I feel like in order to convince anyone, you have to know basically the entire history of every socialist country by memory. And if I cared enough I could probably learn, but then I give into my pessimism and think “what’s the point? The people are too propagandized to convert.”
Probably the wrong comm to post in, but I give up trying to think of the right one to mark this as.
How do I tell them it’s not inherent to socialism though? Sure capitalism has killed tons of people, but those deaths are spread out over a longer period and most of the people who are killed are exploited people in the imperial periphery who aren’t seen nor heard.
If you admittedly don't know much about the history of USSR or China, it's best not to focus on it. I'd recommend learning about Cuba, I think that's the easiest wedge to argue over. It's a small country, it was a US backed dictatorship before Communism, the Socialist government quickly raised the quality of life and education rate, and it's development has been directly harmed by the US embargo.
Still the difference between deaths in socialism vs capitalism is intent. In a socialist or communist system, the goal is to feed and house people. Whereas the intent of a capitalist system is to encourage scarcity. In capitalism, people cannot give away free food or land because that will eat into profits. Profit inherently comes from poor people being denied their needs. When capitalist systems are put in place, they lead to poor people losing land, healthcare, and food access while wealthy people get richer. That's the system working as intended.
This is a dense article about capitalist development in Africa via the World Bank and IMF that explains in detail how capitalism kills. Mass starvation is not a by-product of capitalism, it is the intent.
Now the person you're talking to might have too much brainworms to accept that the intent of a socialist government is to feed and house people, and those are mostly lost causes. But the people who say "communism only works on paper" you can drive a wedge into by showing how capitalism "on paper" is designed to make poor people poorer and rich people richer.