I was talking to a friend yesterday who is also a coder. His parents are Chinese from the region where Hong Kong is, but he was raised in America. And he kept saying that capitalism is not perfect, but is the best that we got and that there is not real freedom on socialism because you cannot vote the poliburo out and that Marxism has been tried and didn’t work out but that capitalism adapts to the real world with trial and error and blah blah.
No matter what I said, he wouldn’t yield. We spent an hour and a half on a discussion about it. It ended up with him saying “We are not going to convince each other so let’s stop”. Mind you that he was the one who kept asking me question but barely let me speak.
He was like “I read about Marxism, and I just realized that it doesn’t apply to the real world”
He also probably thought that he would convince you that capitalism is the better system. So if you weren’t convinced, then I’d say that you were even.
It’s very hard to convince someone by trying to win an argument. What you need to do instead is planting the seed of doubt. You need to find first what you have in common with them. Are you both workers? Do they hate taxes? Let’s zero out all taxes, workers shouldn’t pay any taxes. Do they hate the government? Down with the government then, especially down with some bureaucrats with a lot of power, police and repressive forces of the state. Arm your own workers and let them create their own judicial and security bodies instead. Do they like or hate bankers? Do they like or hate real estate oligarchs? Shouldn’t we remove both of them? Do your friend think they should have a bigger income or they should earn less in order for their boss to have more money to invest in his own business? Do they like the market? Why not democratically owned enterprises instead of one guy owning everything and you having to work for them? If you go down the rabbit role, on specifics of their every day life, every worker is a socialist.
Scientific socialism, is before all, the act of the workers, in a capitalist society, to be the agents of change, and become the new dominant class. The specifics of how society should run needs to be determined by the workers themselves. They don’t need necessarily to accept a pre-determined model.