Is agitprop even worth it? I got 3 dislikes and a comment saying “I FOUND ONE” as if I’m some pokemon in under 5 minutes. What could have been done better to persuade more and spark genuine discussion? I’m new to agitprop, so any advice helps especially if it’s coming from experience.
Frankly, it’s easier to convince them to see Hexbear and lemmygrad for themselves, that way they are willingly choosing to look at it and may see some decent points that were fully hidden away thanks to defed and the slander against it
I personally joined because I wanted to see oh-so-evil Hexbear in action and realised that it wasn’t oh-so-evil
You gotta shrug off the bullshit like a tank shrugs off bullets. If you look at the communist stuff that gets posted by a few power posters to ml’s meme channel for example, almost all of it is at least 50% downvoted, yet in aggregate it dominates the comm. Quantity is a quality of it’s own.
you gotta love the dummy.world, honestly the best unintentional comedy instance around
You pretty much lost the minute you said the USSR was illegally & undemocratically dissolved.
It’s true of course, but that doesn’t matter in this context.
First it wasn’t really relevant to the discussion and thus comes across as preaching rather than informing.
Second apologia for the USSR has been deliberately tied to pro-Russian sentiment which libs have been taught to disregard without second thought.
Third it reveals your illiberal perspective, which for liberals is a signal to ignore whatever you say going forward.
Any hope of discussion pretty much ended after that first paragraph. There are specific things that liberals have been conditioned to subconsciously reject regardless of evidence presented or argumentation used and you have to avoid using that charged language if you want to get through to them.
Remember: liberals are taught that the USSR was a Russian chauvinist dictatorship whose evil rivaled the Nazis. If you want to rehabilitate that image you have to work around that preconception slowly & analytically; don’t just charge through like it’s a brick wall and you’re the Kool-Aid man.
Lemmy.world is a reddit foothold run by
liberalsfascists. You aren’t going to get much out of them. It’s a cesspool of liberal egotism. “Found one” is just another version of “ok tankie” etc, type responses they use to dismiss any real discussion. It’s the kind of response that 13 year olds think is funny and cool because their brains haven’t fully formed. Most lib brained redditors never matured past that age and federal interns that control the narrative there knows it. Hats off to you for trying. Maybe one of the two up voters you got will actually seek out more knowledge, but they are probably one of the few leftists also caught up in than pit of mental filth that calls itself a forums.Agitprop on Lemmy.world is very difficult, it’s much easier on Lemmy.ml. My view is that you should focus on the radicalized liberals first, as they are the easiest to turn into comrades, and you should do so in spaces where you aren’t going to be dogpiled on.
If you insist on doing agitprop on Lemmy.world, try to keep it short, small, clear, and on non-controversial topics. As an example, touching Russia/Ukraine on Lemmy.world is already a lost cause, but you can demystify socialism and advocate for it there. Other users may come to more correct positions on Russia/Ukraine by getting more into socialism, and you don’t paint a massive target on your back. As a rule of thumb, you should be ratioing those who you’re talking with, or else you might end up backfiring.
I also recommend reading False Witnesses, “Brainwashing”, and Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of “Brainwashing” in order to better understand how people think. Identifying what lines you can push in what audiences is 90% of the effort, the last 10% is remaining calm and trying to use your own words rather than endless Marx quotes or whatnot.
Good luck!
Exactly, you can’t convince people with strongly held beliefs just by arguing with them, no matter how solid your evidence or how strong your argument is. People with strong views already have their own arguments and justifications.
I like to look at it from thermodynamics perspective. Ideas are part of a complex web of concepts that form our mental model of the world. Challenging a core idea requires rethinking all the other concepts tied to it. Doing so takes a lot of mental energy, and it’s much easier to simply reject the new idea that doesn’t fit. People will remain hostile to outside ideas as long as they don’t see a need to rethink their worldview.
Hence, as you noted, it’s more effective to focus on those who are already questioning their beliefs. These individuals are starting to recognize that their current model doesn’t align with their observations of the world. They’re already searching for alternative explanations, and if you can present a new idea that helps them make better sense of the world, they are much more likely to be receptive. They’ll be willing to put in the effort to restructure their mental model to integrate new ideas that resonate with them.
The goal isn’t to “win” an argument, but to build a bridge. By framing things in a way that resonates, you can find common ground and open a space for a more meaningful conversation where new ideas can be introduced more gently. It’s about planting a seed of an idea and letting it grow, rather than trying to force a full-grown tree into a hostile environment.
Great way to put it, exactly! Spend the effort where it’s most effective and you’ll win in the long run.
Very good advice.
Yes, we spend to much time battling it out with liberals on controversial historical and current event topics and not nearly enough explaining Marxist economics and philosophy, even though the latter is arguably more important. Especially at a time where liberal dominance of media and education have largely snuffed out debates about communist theory and made sure that virtually any and all discussions of communism would revolve around the liberal interpretation of what communists allegedly did or didn’t do in far away countries a long time ago.
Thanks! And you hit the nail on the head, the controversial and harder to tackle concepts come after the basics, which are easier to grasp and more capable of being taught. We often let past generations and their nuance dominate the present, when all it really takes to get liberals to begin to see our frame of view is starting with basic principles.
Even among ourselves, from our memes to our effort posts, we talk a lot more about history and current events than about theory. Recently I’ve been wishing we’d discuss more about theory, not only because we don’t talk about it enough even tough we really don’t, but also because I like talking about economics and philosophy more than about history.
We need more memes about dialectical materialism, falling rates of profits and alienation.I agree! Would be a fun way to try to sharpen our skills.
Really good advice. Thanks.
No problem, comrade!
Sometimes you can’t reach people who insist on remaining ignorant. Your comment was very nuanced and would be very educational for someone who was actually open to being educated.
If i could add one correction however: you should not say that Ukraine “gave up it’s nuclear arsenal” because that’s not true. Ukraine never had nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union did. They were Soviet nuclear weapons that were merely stationed in Ukraine.
That makes a big difference. It would be like saying that Turkey has nuclear weapons just because the US has stationed nuclear weapons on their territory as part of NATO.
Ukraine did not inherit the military infrastructure for actually using those weapons, the codes for them, etc. The only inheritor of the Soviet nuclear arsenal is the Russian Federation because the control infrastructure for them was always centered around Moscow.
This is a commonly brought up talking point by supporters of Ukraine, that allegedly “Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons for security guarantees” but it is a myth, and it risks perpetuating dangerous misinformation. Not only were they not Ukraine’s to give up, but the “security guarantees” were contingent on non outside interference in Ukraine and Ukraine remaining a neutral state. But that’s a topic for another day…
i haven’t thought about that to be honest. Reading the articles, it was just as if the nukes were somehow magically developed when Ukraine became “independent”. Good point. Another thing I wanted to say, but couldn’t as it would trigger a defense mechanism making them even more ignorant than they already are, is that Ukraine, Russia, and 13 other were never even states to begin with. Reading sources, almost every single one had the narrative of x gaining independence from the USSR as if before the USSR there were multiple states. Another aspect of this is when non-marxist people and scholars discuss a region in the USSR, they talk about it as if its some kind of occupied entity not as if it’s a region of the USSR like for example Beijing is city in The PRC, which is the actual case.
Yeah, the USSR pretty much created Ukraine as a nation, same with Belarus. But this is even more extreme in the case of the central Asian republics where the Soviets had to do a lot of nation building just to create the nationalities that they packaged into the various Soviet Republics there. Before the Soviets these regions had little to no concept of a shared national identity and were just a lot disparate tribes. The borders there are quite artificial as a result of this and still cause problems today, just as the borders of Ukraine caused problems, just as the borders in the Caucasus caused problems (Abkhazia, Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh). They only made sense as internal administrative divisions of a larger whole.
The government is telling democrats, trans, Venezuelan fishermen, and antifa are terrorists. Now what?
History is moskal pseudo-science, comrade.
Can’t answer that question, sorry, but I wanna say thank you for that comment. It actually helped me myself getting familiar on the actual nuances of contemporary global (and especially NATO-EU aligned) geopolitics, being a resident of both (hooray for joining NATO without any kind of real voting or polling), and also you taught me a new word (agitprop) the meaning of which I also now know. All in all wouldn’t really bother with the agitprop necessarily myself, but 5/5 for the effort.
Haha, thanks. Really appreciate that. I was aiming to actually teach something, so I’m glad I did even though it wasn’t necessarily as planned .
