I’ve spent years arguing with people online and really have nothing to show for it aside from my own education and amusement. I was radicalized by discovering r/chapotraphouse back in 2018 I think. Nobody argued with me there, I just lurked, loved the memes, thought it was the funniest place online, then started reading theory because so many people there talked about it. Even though liberals are obviously ignorant about communism, their ignorance is willful: they never thank us for educating them, they always get angry and double-down. (In real life, it’s much easier to embarrass them and get them to shut up.) Still, I admit that it’s possible to change someone’s mind in an online debate, I just haven’t seen it happen when it comes to communism (libs on r/changemyview can change their minds about lib shit). Have you ever seen a lib admit that they were wrong about communism?
I can’t seem to search by comment. In terms of like specific scenarios, I know how to talk about nursing on a few levels. Professionally, in terms of labour theory and economics, on current events, and from a feminist and anti-racist angle because it’s work that’s marginalised in those ways. In a subreddit like r/CNA or r/nursing or r/medicine, there are threads where one or all of those things is already being discussed. They all have a naive sense of the issue from some lived experience that I’ve shared. They just treat it with a sense of capitalist realism.
The role of a communist agitator there is me saying some variation of “Jesus that’s fucked up. It’s wild that the admin think they can alienate us like that without there being some consequence. My patient is charged more for their bed than I make in a month, I have 20 patients, and their room is nicer than my apartment. All the while that admin won’t even bother protecting us from harassment or assault, and they coerce us into accepting it through the same tactics that keep people in abusive relationships. Pizza parties are an insult that only masks how much they’re stealing from us, like that ‘boss makes a dollar / I make a dime / that’s why I shit / on company time’ song but somehow more insulting than being given the dime. Only a state with strong unions like California seems to not want to destroy us for a quick profit.”
In that you’re identifying the problem as a specific thing they can explore, validating their experience with it by showing that it’s universal and shared by you, highlighting the dialectical relationship and the ways it abuses us in ways we’ve experienced elsewhere, and showing an achievable solution that’s demonstrably worked. Toss in a cultural reference if it’s catchy or radicalising.
I think the more effective agitation strategy for the internet is dada though. We haven’t yet found the right aesthetic yet but the Hexbear-style absurdist humour is the core of dada.