If it only takes an hour to convince someone of a world-changing idea then we'd have an abundance of revolutions that come and go. I mosly found “success” by directing questions to my interlocutor, so I would be in control more or less of where the discussion is heading while maintaining the other person’s introspective and critical spirit. The goal is for them to leave the discussion with something to think deeply about.

If he didn't let you talk he didn't actually want to learn anything.

People are motivated by material conditions, not theories. He won't change his mind unless his living condition changes.

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.

For most people facts and logic won't change their minds. Its stupid but the way to change someone's opinion is by appealing to their emotions. Facts and logic are what determines where they end up going but the thing that gets them moving is emotion.

I've found that it is better to not talk about AES with liberals until they are starting to move. They have the "unfalsifiable orthodoxy" mindset. Other than people in China nobody really cares if China's life expectancy is almost 3x what it was 100 years ago.

But if their favorite snack gets 50g lighter while the price stays the same? "Fucking billionaires ruin everything! They'll piss off their entire customer base just to squeeze a few pennies out of everyone so they can buy another yacht!"

Westerners can't emotionally relate to the good things happening in China because they have no frame of reference for a government that actually works for the people. Its just a fairy tale to them but they acutely feel the pressures of capitalism every day. If you can build a case that they aren't mad at their boss or traffic, they are mad at capitalism then they will start being open to looking for alternatives.

Once they are moving then you have to hit them with logic and facts or they can fall into the Social Fascist or reformist trap. That's when I start bagging on the so called "nordic model" and start talking anti-imperialism and anti-racism.

death to liberalism

We spent an hour and a half on a discussion about it.

There's some line from Mao about how you can't expect to change people's political beliefs -- which they formed through a lifetime of experience -- in a short conversation or lecture. Persuading people (even limiting this to those who can be perduaded) to radically reshape the way they see the world takes time and patience.

I gave up on trying to persuade anticommunists long ago. You can benefit lurkers by deconstructing anticommunists’ arguments, but your chances of actually getting anticommunists to question their own politics are quite low.

Your time would be better spent assisting strikers, helping the homeless, donating a dollar to a good cause, or simply studying more. You cannot help those who won’t help theirselves. Capitalism’s increasing pressure on lower-class people like us is what is mainly going to drive many into questioning anticommunism, not conversation.

If you still think that attempting to persuade casual anticommunists is worthwhile then you would do well to borrow the classic rabbinic tradition of discouraging an interested party three times. Just don’t actively seek out recruits, especially if they are upper-class or petty bourgeois. There are better things that you could be doing.

You are not going to change his mind with one conversation. At best you can plant seeds and teach him something new or correct some misunderstanding he has of marxism (which sounds like he has alot of)

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.

Don't feel too bad about it. You're essentially arguing against the most well funded and insidious propaganda machine the world has ever known. This is part of why organizing is important because together we have more of a chance of fighting against that than we do as individuals.

I'm facing a similar challenge explaining epistemology to a hostile audience. (A 12 year old with a dry toothbrush)

Changing people's minds on anything is hard, maybe more so if you're firm on being honest rather than, say, a con artist who is trying to swindle them. But there are approaches that are sometimes more effective. For one thing, with something this messy and complicated, sometimes you need to start by working out what the person actually believes to begin with.

Like a small child asking "why" but with more nuance, so you don't just come across as annoying. Ex:

"Marxism has been tried and didn't work."

"Do you believe China is succeeding?"

"Somewhat, but they aren't really socialist."

"What do you believe defines a state as socialist in practice vs. not?"

Or

"No, they are failing and repressive."

"What have you seen or read that makes you believe that?"

You can also rephrase what they stated back to them, both to see if you're understanding correctly and to get them to think more about the words:

"Marxism has been tried and didn't work."

"So you believe Marxism has been thoroughly tried in detail, on an organized level, in the ways that Marxist theorists have laid out as how it should be done? If so, what does that look like to you?" (Here you're also putting it on them to explain what they think the practice of Marxism is in the first place, which may not be clear.)

This is not a shortcut to changing minds, but it can help investigate where someone is coming from and also encourage them to think about what they're saying, without you coming across as condescending and without having to get into long defenses of your views before you even know what they believe about them. It can also take patience and may be kind of annoying to do, depending on the situation, if you more just want to have a back and forth.

Maybe I’m stubborner/more self-directed than average, but no one was going to succeed in converting me but me, and that took years, not hours.