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”
Yes, but I think the point is, we will never get people to embrace socialism by just convincing them about some abstract theory of how society should look like. We will earn their trust after they see meaningful change of their material conditions that they perceive as the result of the work of a socialist party or the general labor movement. So for this, we need to be much better at listening to them than to convince them what they should believe.