Gotcha, might give that one a read! Thanks!

Yep, plan on picking up Losurdo's Stalin for sure, at some point. The future releases of Lenin's collected works and the illustrated Communist Manifesto also look really good! The quality and pure aesthetics look top-notch, and there are a lot of authors I'm unfamilar with, so that's what has me curious.

Yep, I've seen people increasingly falling for loaded articles against the PRC. It's easier to see through when it isn't related to anything immediately moral, ie "China is going to collapse!" narratives that China Watchers push, but when it's tied to potential failings of the PRC with regard to genuine struggles, like Palestinian Liberation, people tend to read the media less critically.

I can't say I blame people for wishing China did more, after all, many of us live in countries actively contributing to the genocide, so we often push our agency onto AES countries. This is, of course, wrong, we need to push to what we can actually do to stop the genocide ourselves, but from an emotional perspective I can see why doomerism can manifest into anti-AES stances, which needs to be thoroughly understood so that it doesn't take root. Imperialists weilding the left against the left is an old weapon in the armory, we need to be vigilant.

Happy birthday!

That's good to hear.

I think this is the best approach. I'm still wary, but this is the viewpoint I've been coming to understand.

Since you have a programming background, think of it like recursion. A function that runs, then calls itself has fundamentally changed inputs. Dialectics proceeds as spirals, this recursive loop is a cycle that always progresses quantitatively until the character qualitatively changes.

In practical example, as Capitalism decays, conditions quantitatively weaken for workers, which will eventually result in a qualitative shift in perspective and openness to new ideas.

100%. The good news is that this process seems to ease over time as conditions change.

You're pretty close to what Roderic Day asserts in Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of "Brainwashing." People believe what they license themselves to, and reject that which shakes that frame due to the absolute cacophany of information available on the internet. Everyone says everything, so it's easy to find information pointing to whatever you want it to, so this charade keeps going.

I think over time terms like "Socialism" and "Communism" are less scary in the West, but what those words mean is what's at stake, as Socialism gets taken over by the Social Democrats and other apologists for Imperialism. Agitation should be tied to real experiences of the working class and speak to simple logical truths about why we should collectively plan the economy, rather than leaving it up to a decreasing number of powerful individuals. Combatting the overwhelming negativity of the modern era with revolutionary optimism seems quite potent.

It's largely no use trying to convince those who aren't willing to be, so focus your efforts on those who are. More comrades is a good thing, you don't have to pick the hardest fights to get more comrades, you can pick the easy ones and social pressures and material conditions changing will make the more against easier to convert in the future. Trust that the dialectic is always in motion, they may not be open now, but might in the future as conditions change.

This work in particular was a large influence on how I should act as a Communist, and how that should guide my interactions with others. Glad to see it being read and studied more! Very happy that a comrade recommended it to me.