He has a point. I usually have a lot more luck talking with people IRL and exposing them to new ideas. Online is always much more hostile and defensive, in the real world where you can actually get to know people without doxing them or doxing yourself you can appeal to their specific situation. Or the other end, obviously as socialists we should not waste our time going to car salesmen and executives and talking to them about Marx when we know their class interest lies in the opposite direction. Online, your posts are reaching lots of people, sure, but the internet in 2023 is explicitly designed to distract you with new posts/ideas/products as quickly as your attention span allows so nothing sticks.
Maybe the Hegelian conclusion to this is that the correct approach to organizing in the 21st century is to synthesize online agitprop with real life building of worker power. You can't really organize a union or a strike online, but with a broad enough movement you can make it more likely for IRL organizing to be successful by politicizing the working class.
Well I mostly talk with people who are already pretty disillusioned with the world around us, and I offer them an alternative way to think in terms of class struggle and building worker power to get everyone's needs met. I might use a lot of general arguments about how capitalism requires unemployment to maintain its reserve army of labor, or point out how the system needs to waste a lot of commodities over time to maintain prices at a high level, that sort of thing. But in terms of hard facts I usually just point out to the political and economic situation we live in (small island colony of the US) and give them a way to think about it that makes a lot more sense than "well they create jobs so it's good that Americans are building all their factories in our tax haven, actually".
Of course if you can back it up with more facts and online sources that's a bonus but it can backfire, IDK if this is too anti-intellectual to say but I've always found that if you're talking with laymen it can be more of a hindrance than anything else because for each source you may find that indicates that capitalism is obsolete, there's a billion Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, or some other billionaire/NED funded outlet that says the opposite and it looks just as convincing. So I find it easier to rely on lived experiences. Which is why it never works to talk with people that have had life handed to them with a silver spoon, because those people will always be inclined to conclude that this system works and poverty is just a result of poor choices on the part of the individual.
Idk it's probably just me being really bad at explaining things and talking about complex subjects well but I literally cannot even convince my friends that are on minimum wage/in debt/on food stamps that unions are good, with logical or emotional appeal
I find the response is usually too defeatist and broken
Oh yeah defeatism is a super common response. There is no way to logic them out of the defeatism, this is why revolutionary movements didn't just have theoretical and logical messaging in their propaganda but also other things to keep people from falling into defeatism. It can help to really hammer that message of "a better world is possible" into their heads, or offer the prospect of building worker power as a responsibility that workers in our moment in history have to the generations of the future, so they may live in a better world. Then you just need to convince them that every little bit counts, and unions are the most important part of our current moment in history for establishing political power as workers.
Do you think the average person that you're talking to irl is going to be any better though?
It's the exact same audience
He has a point. I usually have a lot more luck talking with people IRL and exposing them to new ideas. Online is always much more hostile and defensive, in the real world where you can actually get to know people without doxing them or doxing yourself you can appeal to their specific situation. Or the other end, obviously as socialists we should not waste our time going to car salesmen and executives and talking to them about Marx when we know their class interest lies in the opposite direction. Online, your posts are reaching lots of people, sure, but the internet in 2023 is explicitly designed to distract you with new posts/ideas/products as quickly as your attention span allows so nothing sticks.
Maybe the Hegelian conclusion to this is that the correct approach to organizing in the 21st century is to synthesize online agitprop with real life building of worker power. You can't really organize a union or a strike online, but with a broad enough movement you can make it more likely for IRL organizing to be successful by politicizing the working class.
I've come to the same conclusion as you. Online for spreading information and teaching and real life for action
It's even difficult to do stuff like show evidence or sources for your arguments irl too
You use evidence and sources? I just hammer the dialectics over their heads and make appeals to emotion.
Does that work? I've tried both methods and tbh both haven't worked for me lmao
Well I mostly talk with people who are already pretty disillusioned with the world around us, and I offer them an alternative way to think in terms of class struggle and building worker power to get everyone's needs met. I might use a lot of general arguments about how capitalism requires unemployment to maintain its reserve army of labor, or point out how the system needs to waste a lot of commodities over time to maintain prices at a high level, that sort of thing. But in terms of hard facts I usually just point out to the political and economic situation we live in (small island colony of the US) and give them a way to think about it that makes a lot more sense than "well they create jobs so it's good that Americans are building all their factories in our tax haven, actually".
Of course if you can back it up with more facts and online sources that's a bonus but it can backfire, IDK if this is too anti-intellectual to say but I've always found that if you're talking with laymen it can be more of a hindrance than anything else because for each source you may find that indicates that capitalism is obsolete, there's a billion Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, or some other billionaire/NED funded outlet that says the opposite and it looks just as convincing. So I find it easier to rely on lived experiences. Which is why it never works to talk with people that have had life handed to them with a silver spoon, because those people will always be inclined to conclude that this system works and poverty is just a result of poor choices on the part of the individual.
Idk it's probably just me being really bad at explaining things and talking about complex subjects well but I literally cannot even convince my friends that are on minimum wage/in debt/on food stamps that unions are good, with logical or emotional appeal
I find the response is usually too defeatist and broken
Still gonna keep hacking away though of course
Oh yeah defeatism is a super common response. There is no way to logic them out of the defeatism, this is why revolutionary movements didn't just have theoretical and logical messaging in their propaganda but also other things to keep people from falling into defeatism. It can help to really hammer that message of "a better world is possible" into their heads, or offer the prospect of building worker power as a responsibility that workers in our moment in history have to the generations of the future, so they may live in a better world. Then you just need to convince them that every little bit counts, and unions are the most important part of our current moment in history for establishing political power as workers.