The Facebook page of a left-wing student group from my uni has posted a boring, generic vid with the usual "can you believe there's so many shit out there and so much poverty at the same time?" line which is weak but whatever, and a group of right-wing libertarians decided to raid them and they've been debating on the comments section for like two days now.
The left-wing guys are taking a fucking beating. There are some major cliches like "well capitalism built everything you know!" being thrown around and the left-wing people are absolutely unable to fight back.
Now, I'm not going to post it here because 1. it's in portuguese and 2. I can see nothing good coming out of it, but that particular page is not the point. The point is the act of debating and arguing in favor of socialism and against capitalism.
What I want to is to ask you guys about your experiences with that stuff. It seems that every time I see a socialist and a capitalists debating, the socialist is getting his ass handed to him. It has become really frustrating, to the point where I'm wondering if we shouldn't have some ad hoc alterations in our praxis aimed precisely at remedying this problem. It's almost like we all know the problem intuitively but we cannot verbalize it. Even Holla Forums often has some really shit comebacks at those Holla Forums threads that wouldn't convince anyone who isn't already a convert.
But I was wondering if it's just me and I'm maybe too obsessed.
Dunno about you, I rarely lose arguments against reactionaries
Josiah Russell
most people have never learned to critique capitalism as a whole, and have only heard arguments against liberal capitalism and in favor of social democratic capitalism most people have never heard arguments against property for example and just take it as a given
Austin Taylor
Well if you want to debate honestly, you have to be as well-read as possible. Whatever argument you intend to say has no doubt been said before and better.
Or you can be a cunt and study rhetoric. Why bother being right when you can just convince others that you're right?
Caleb Sanchez
Yui mercked a couple of reactionaries in a debate tbh
Hudson Rogers
You need to think of how much experience debating over here brings you, though. There's a gap between that and the average leftist.
Definitive sophism. If they start to do this recommend that they pick up some the later Platonic dialogues (ca. 360 BC) like, "the Eleatic Stranger"; it's a great work of diaresis that shows just how close Plato comes to being σοφός himself. He's the gift that keeps on becoming.
Nathan Stewart
Yes, it works so much better when you reward people with negative amounts of leisure, only, for working harder. Mudge more ebbishient :DDD. Ukraine only starbed because of reagdunary sbies DD:!
Aaron Morgan
Most people suck at articulating their views, this isn't unique to leftists.
Reactionaries though have the advantage however in that they can make facile arguments like "everything you know was created by capitalism!" and "communism never works!" that appear convincing to the uninitiated because most people in our society swallowed the Cold War capitalist propaganda about the """evils""" of communism.
Dominic Collins
Since you didn't say """communism""" do we finally have a leftist on record admitting that the Soviet Union was communist :DDD?
Jayden Morales
Is this why porkies are constantly giving to the arts? To get in front of the kind of criticism in the pic.
Cooper Cooper
You can't win arguments against reactionairies. Even if you explain things with factual information, the will just fall back to "USSR, KMHER ROUGE, NORTH KOREA, FREE MARKET REEEEEEEEEEEEEE".
Elijah Butler
Ukraine starved because of wheat rust and The battle over collectivization that destroyed so much food and equipment
Alexander Jenkins
Not even the Soviet Union said they achieved communism what the fuck are you talking about?
Blake Reed
I've never seen capitalists argue, they just repeat whatever they've read in their books without addressing what you said. Of course it's the same thing that people hear every day from the media and "experts" so they tend to believe the soundbites instead of actually thinking about the arguments presented.
Jack Bennett
bump
Carson Russell
IMO it's because since neoliberalism started and the USSR collapsed the left has always been on the defensive. Instead of arguing why services should be nationalized or why the minimum wage should be increased, we are left arguing that some things should not be privatized or that the minimum wage is still somehow useful and so on, but the underlying assumption in that is that nationalization is at least in part a failure while privatization is at least in part a success, which is why you need to prove that a service should not be privatized (because it's obvious that unless there are any special reasons for it, of course everything should be private). It basically admits that the other side has the right of it, and so the debate becomes only about the degree to which the other side is right. It's especially true if academic economics comes into the field, because then the leftists always give up in a few moments and just assume the other side knows more about economics then they do (even if neither side is formally trained in economics). Just look at what happened around the B████ campaign, you had all those right-wingers with zero econ training posting "econ 101 lolz" memes at B████ supporters as if it's so obvious their side has the intellectual authority. Both right-wingers and leftists just assume it's the right-wing who "knows economics", so of course the leftists will be losing economics arguments.
I'll give an example of something I've seen. I saw once a social democrat debating with a libertarian about pretty broad issues, like if there should even be a welfare state and so on. And the libertarian kept bringing up arguments like 'welfare traps people in poverty', 'labor regulations cause unemployment', 'all public-owned services are inefficient', those kinds of positive claims. And the social democrat only said "okay, true, but still I think welfare is important on its own" etc. He basically just retreated and agreed with the lib's arguments, until he finally concluded with "okay, it's true that welfare is inefficient public-owned services are better-run if privatized, but I still think the state should assume the role of guaranteeing welfare even if it's inefficient at doing it and so on," which is a very weak argument. So he just assumed the libertarian knew what he was talking about and went on debating while keeping in mind that. Of course he came up with a really weak argument and at the end lost the debate.
What leftists should do is stand their ground, take the initiative, and not just assume that right-wingers are more knowledgeable in economics or in whatever else.
its so easy in england, like marxist undergrads simply cite CLEMENT ATTLEE and his achievements for rookies, and that is excellent for starters. as for Portugal: capitalism did not build shit, i have never seen anyone from the Espirito Santo family building anything. the workers built it for them. if they can build for themselves, society works, if not, it goes to the shitter, like Europe, mostly
Angel Murphy
...
Sebastian Evans
Cuz they're university students who'll most likely to leave the movement after they graduate
Jacob Morris
There can be no debating with right-wingers and reactionaries, only bullets will solve the problem.
Lucas Stewart
this tbh
Adam Price
never change
Brody Stewart
Because too many people call themselves socialists out of good feels rather than because it's simply a better system by the same cultural standards we hold capitalism to. In a debate, poor arguments are still better than none, and god knows they have an infinite supply of thought terminating cliches.
Colton Cox
why are particular attributes of a given regime attributed to an entire ideology again?
Thomas Campbell
Because it's convenient.
But don't worry, you can do it too.
Caleb Davis
I think you're right but I don't think a change in attitude will fix it. The case still is that if a right-wing person needs a quick economic backup for his arguments he can always look up at the current academic consensus or the libertarian pseudo-academia like Mises Institute. The Left doesn't produce economic thinkers like that because there's no material reward in it, it's a terrible career path, so we're left quoting the same individuals, books and studies for decades, and using moralistic arguments (like the one you said about welfare) to fill the void left by new advancements in liberal economics that we couldn't match. So the confidence will be on their side because most new literature and individuals will be on their side.
I agree with you, we need to quit the defensive. We keep defending small welfare states or the one or two economists who go rogue instead of asking the obvious, which is if their system is so good and scientific how come it's not working for the general population, not producing the growth or innovation they always speak of, not being able to finance the right institutions, etc. But we need to match that attitude with education, we need to develop an ethics where being economically illiterate would be seen as just as bad as being clueless about race or Palestine, because that's what will generate the thinkers and researchers we need.
David Howard
what i noticed and did not saw addressed in this thread yet is that those raids are usually just sheer trolling.
lefties seem to have the delusion that everyone is actually interested in having a legitimate honest discussion, they seem to be completely incapable of recognizing when some group of people just wants to fuck the place up.
this is how a discussion should go: capitalist: argument commie: counter-argument capitalist: counter-counter-argument or new argument …
this is how discussions actually go: capitalist: argument commie: counter-argument capitalist: argument commie: counter-argument capitalist: argument commie: counter-argument capitalist: argument commie: counter-argument capitalist: argument commie: counter-argument other commie: dude he/they is/are trolling you, ignore or ban him commie: OMG YOU WANT TO CENSOR HIS FREE SPEECH
idk if those capitalists are shills using the persona management software that fascist agencies use on social media or if they are actual fascists, but if they just keep repeating their original claims and ignore any counter-arguments then this is obviously not a discussion and it has nothing to do with free speech to stop this attack. imho.
