I’ll start first: at the height of reddit going absolutely mad and frothing at the mouth I heard r/genzedong mentioned a lot as this evil evil tankie place, so I checked it out. Was a bit overly china fanboy-ish for my taste back then but alright overall and leagues more civil than people on other subs. So I started lurking over there to preserve my sanity until it basically became my most frequently viewed sub. I’ve kinda warmed up to the whole idea of socialism during my stay. And then it got quarantined. I’ve heard of lemmygrad even before the quarantine, so I switched to this place instead. As of this moment, lemmygrad remains my primary source of news and entertainment where I dont have to risk running into some flavour of wehraboo.
A Marxist politely told why I was wrong about almost everything and told me to read Marx.
It probably helps that I already had the same broad political goals, I just thought they could be achieved through liberalism and voting. They calmly and respectfully highlighted the contradictions in that way of thinking until I said, ‘But how can we achieve any progress, then, if none of it is possible in capitalism?’ 💡
A real lightbulb moment! Now read Marx, young redtea, he has the answers you’re looking for.
So it took a while to get my head in the right space, where I needed to know the Marxist perspective on everything. Then I gorged on Marxist texts until I had re-educated myself.
Funny enough, people rag on the whole “x won’t work lib, read Lenin!” tactic on Reddit during the Bernie and early Trump years as antagonistic but that actually worked on me. I was like “…Fine!” (Reads) “see wtf these people are talking abo–oh!” 🤩 “…I get it now…man I really was wrong”. I know that doesn’t work on some or perhaps most and I’m pretty open to learning but I just want to say in their defense it does work occasionally 😁
You’re spot on. There’s a challenge in not coming off as confrontational or dismissive, but the tactic does work. In fact, one thing I really appreciated when I was trying to make sense of Marxism were the quotes from Marxist texts that were copied as answers to questions on Reddit threads, like r/communism and r/communism101.
I have a feeling that some of the people saying ‘don’t just tell people to read Lenin, it won’t work’ are people who don’t want others to read Lenin because they know it’ll work.
Others may have tried this tactic with bots, feds, trolls, etc, under the impression that they’re talking in good faith and could possibly change the other person’s mind. This will surely make someone skeptical.
Then there are those who have spoken to people who have read Marx, etc, but with a closed mind, which won’t let them fully accept the message. The same thing can happen with people who experience too much cognitive dissonance when reading Marx (actually, this was me when I’d read the Communist Manifesto years before meeting any Marxists).
Could be. I always assumed it was because they themselves wouldn’t have listened if someone told them to read theory but you make a good point.
That’s always a possibility, too!