I gave my self a brain aneurism reading the comment section of a COD video on YouTube. I came very close to replying to a bunch of people, but it just felt futile. You would have to unpack so much propaganda, cover so much history, explain dialectical materialism etc. to even get them to consider that maybe communism or the USSR weren't pure evil.
Maybe it would set one or two people down the road to questioning things, but it's just not worth that kind of effort. Starting to feel like the only way to convince people in a way that matters and is effective is to have socialist organizations in their lives that are positive and then the receptiveness of explaining those types of things to them will be much greater than just one comment on an internet thread.
Absolutely. I don’t think exclusively “convincing” people through argument is quite that productive. Meeting them where their problems are and reorienting them into solutions that highlight the true nature of the problem is what can reveal the necessity of class struggle to them, in a practical way. But it is a hard problem, always dynamic and highly contingent on real circumstances that have to be analyzed. And even then, it is entirely possible that your position is so vulnerable to various angles of subversion that whatever organizational form you’ve helped cook up is 99% doomed to being co-opted, de-fanged, exposed to such vulnerability that it is destined for collapse.
But most normal people will not adopt in any committed fashion some kind of -ism that suggests everything they know should be upended yesterday. But they are open to what they perceive as practical solutions, and once you’ve committed them to some project they think is reasonable if it were to come under attack by private and state interests then you’ve helped set the ground for a realization on the part of the members to the project, who suddenly have an avenue to directly experience who their enemies are.