If you ever feel hopeless, just remember that in the course of time barely longer than a few years things have gone from a situation where being critical of the system and using the term capitalism would get you derision and you'd be marked as some sort of radical communist and people would shut off to your message while hurling red scare bullshit at you.
These days everyone shits on things like capitalism and imperialism.
They even name it directly.
The best part of it is that what used to signify very specific in-group values is now so widespread that it's incredibly common to find average "I hate the system" sentiment that is framed by using terms like capitalism.
Average people do not use the term "rat race" anymore, unless they are boomers. People just call it out directly. People rarely use terms like "the 1%" unless they're turbolibs like AOC who are trying to euphemise their message to garner votes.
Out in the wild, I have trouble identifying who is genuinely based and a comrade these days because everyone is out there openly shitting on capitalism directly on the regular. It's like the irl version of queerbaiting that happens in the media except it's comradebaiting and instead of it having cynical motivations it's really, really encouraging.
This stuff is completely normalised these days. Over the course of a few short decades the mainstream discourse has gone from "Globalisation bad" to "The 1% is bad" to "Actually it's just capitalism and it plain sucks".
This isn't some ephemeral fashion trend either - this is something that has gradually gathered momentum and it's a long-standing undercurrent in society.
If this can happen with a dirty word like capitalism or socialism, where decades upon decades of red scare indoctrination can simply be swept away in a matter of years, then take heart because it means that change is possible and that it's happening in real-time. The same thing is happening with decades of post-9/11 islamaphobia - I know it's part of discourse in places like this one to use terms like inshallah, mashallah, and alhamdulillah but this is not the only pocket of the world where Arab and Muslim cultures are being embraced.
Things are changing very rapidly and there's no sign of this pace letting up.
¡Venceremos! 💪
I think a lot of people who are saying this are radlibs who balk at socialism or anarchism or anything actually real that opposes capitalism. A lot of people call themselves "anticapitalist" when in reality they are social democrats. There's also a lot of "anticapitalist" media that doesn't actually portray any solution or any other system as being good. Like, its very easy to think of a lot of pop-culture that criticises or satirises capitalism from the past couple years - Parasite, Squid Games, Fallout etc - but their conclusion is usually just "this world sucks." They never say "this world sucks and a better world is possible".
But even so, its definitely a good sign. People are moving towards anticapitalism, and the next step is for them to want revolution.
Oh there's a long way to go, for sure.
But it's really promising to go from the mainstream of Randian style messaging, like the original Ghostbusters being arch-conservative messaging, to vague complaints about the greedy boss or industrialist or maybe one corporation (I see you, Final Fantasy 7!) which is the problem and once we tweak at the dials everything will be alright again, to very pointed critique of the system.
Of course there's going to be examples to the contrary in every era and I wouldn't deny that but there's a qualitative shift that has occurred over time and not only does it mean that it's working but our job is now to exhort people to build community and join organisations (while we do some mop-up historicising and systematising of grievances) to get them to start working towards thinking about solutions.
I mean just recently there's a lot of really strong anti-landlord sentiment that has bubbled up into the zeitgeist as well and I'm here for it.
So many people are already at the point where they recognise that the system is completely fucked. That's an immense hurdle for a lot of people to clear but I think that it's pretty common to find people who have done so or who are in the process of doing it.
It's a step. It's the struggle between knowing "this system doesn't work, i see everything around me slowly failing and my own life is getting materially worse as a result of corporate greed" and on the other hand having been propagandized your entire life to see anything that could threaten capitalism as the enemy. They're still looking for solutions within the system, so the left-most options they see are people like Bernie, unaware that the only reason those are allowed to be around is specifically because they don't threaten capitalism. It takes a lot to break free from that.
Bloomer-ass post :)
I was just thinking this actually, the amount of anticapitalist sentiment I hear, from everyone, is huge and surprising and pleasant. I can't even watch
slop on Google Videos anymore without a Final Fantasy guy being like "eh and your boss is stealin yer surplus value!" or some shit, incredible things do seem to be happening. I really want this for islamophobia next, sooooo fucking tired of that shit from everyone here
this streamer I watch, when I wanna turn my brain off and let someone else do the thinking, just called himself a communist without irony. like I suspected for awhile because his politics seemed cool (landlords/cops delende est type stuff) and he tells chat to stfu about China/Russia, but I didn't expect him to just drop am unironic "well yeah, I'm a communist" midstream, and then give his "you all should really know this already" laugh. (his twitch/yt handle is Jorbs, he mostly plays Slay the Spire)
it's getting noticeably easier to find comrades, even in normally reactionary spaces.
Ha, I'm not actually too surprised Jorbs is a communist. He seems super thoughtful and compassionate, and every time I've heard him even gesture towards his own politics, it's seemed like a decent, non-ghoulish take.
It's good to know though! Jorbs is pretty fun to watch, I like his incredibly dry sense of humor. It's so funny to me when someone in chat has a terrible bit of slay the spire advice and Jorbs just absolutely roasts them while never changing his tone even a little bit
yeah I'd suspected for awhile. I just never expected him to /say/ it, because he's not a politics streamer.
Waaaaa jorbs is a comrade? I wish i didnt find him so smug but im still really happy to hear that someone so prevalent in an extremely turbonerd space is a good person
tbf, talking to twitch chat day in and day out will make the best of us sound kinda smug
bookmarking this to re-read on the regular, because this was an inspiring and beautiful thing to read first thing Sunday morning ❤️ thank you!!
Really needed to hear this today, thank you. I fully agree, have some decades of watching the discourse under my belt and the change is faster than I expected. I did see a climate scientist comparing communism to a dirty word today too, but it was a white male boomer and the post had no traction. The kids, they especially are alright.
I started watching the most recent BoyBoy video on the whistle blower and I don't know what brought me here, I was feeling extremely doomer.
But I feel the same, I really needed some good news in this sea of hopelessness.
This is part of why it's frustrating to see comments here along the lines of "this lib who agrees that capitalism is bad, and who likes these politicians on the left wing of the Democratic Party, is basically a fascist because they don't hold all my perfect, True Leftist positions."
That lib is where many of us were a few years ago. In a few years they've probably drifted significantly left of wherever they started. But instead of seeing that this type of person could be moved much farther left with a bit of effort, we sometimes direct more scorn at them than at chuds who will never be on our side in a million years. It's the martyrdom complex of western leftists: we care more about feeling superior than we do about patiently bringing enough people around to win.
I can't say I disagree.
I'm all warmth and love and encouragement for a lib who is clearly in transit leftwards, regardless of where they are moving from.
When there's a person who is very progressive but they've staked their position then I see them as an obstruction and I'm pretty ruthless with those types, especially the ones who condescend to tell us what we must do or they assume that we need them or their approval.
If anyone aside from the agent assigned to me kept track, I'm sure that it would appear like I have no logic to how I treat libs because I can be super gentle and nice with even a reasonably conservative liberal and then next thing I'll be rabidly denouncing a SocDem and I won't pull a single punch.
One example here is that I recently encountered a Ukrainian nationalist who had an ancom flag. I knew it was ancom but a tryzub with a red-on-black flag sounds alarm bells for me and, not to cause a struggle session inadvertently, but Ukrainian anarchists have a bad rap for being very... flimsy in their anarchism. So I tested them by asking them what's the deal with the UPA colours.
They didn't like that question and got really angry at me. This is a pattern I've seen on other occasions - Ukrainian nationalist with red & black getting real fucking defensive when you mention the UPA.
As far as I see it you have a couple of decent responses:
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Respond to the question by asking them if they know of any other red & black flags
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Tell them straight-up that they're wrong and proclaim you're an ancom (and maybe that the other person is an idiot idc)
But they didn't do that. So more alarm bells.
They lay into me with all sorts of insults and they tell me that I don't know a thing about Ukraine. How someone who knows the name of the tryzub and the UPA colours is ignorant of Ukrainian matters is beyond me.
Anyway I press them on it and they take like a dozen replies before they actually state that the colours are ancom. Sketchy.
I do a little bit of digging on them and I turn up a name and a workplace and so on. They're on Facebook in their city of birth on the Svoboda Party mayor's page liking multiple posts, so I call them on it.
They claim they've pushed dozens of people left and rescued people from nationalism, they defend their support for the Svoboda mayor as being about being purely pragmatic, and they also claim not to know what I'm talking about re: likes on an FB page.
At this point I'm utterly done with them. They might have convinced themselves that they're ancom and, look, if they have to pretend to support their Svoboda mayor or they're in that fray just to fish people out of nationalism to throw them leftwards I'd respect it but there's a difference between doing that and just hanging out on a Svoboda page liking all their posts, y'know?
So this dude is about as anarchist as Vaush is and it's pretty fucking obvious, so I tell him that he's convinced himself that he's a Makhno when in reality he's a Grigoriev. He tells me that he doesn't know who Grigoriev is lol (so much for me being ignorant about Ukraine, right?) Everything he's said and done up to this point supports this position and I drag him mercilessly over it.
But now I'm sitting on this information and I'm not really sure what to do with it exactly - I don't have any contacts in Ukraine but he's a very clear hazard to the left. It's a matter of time before he changes allegiances and goes full-blown Ukrainian nationalist and drops any pretense of having radical politics.
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You are making the mistake in thinking that just because you were one of the minority of libs who became radicalized and turned left, it would also mean that every lib could have the same experience and trajectory as yours.
History has proven again and again that this is false. The vast majority of German liberals allowed Nazism to take hold of the country in silence. They were probably disgusted by the brutality of the fascists, and maybe even reacted emphatically with how many communists, socialists and social democrats were killed, but at the end of the day, getting rid of communist ideology and preventing it from taking root in their country were far more preferable for the liberals.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how many people are anti-capitalists in the country or how many people had been radicalized by the recent events. The only way to prevail is through having strong organized left wing movements, without which all of these protests energy will be channeled down the drain, and fascist violence will once again save the day for the capitalist ruling class.
Without an organized left in the country, the movement is certainly doomed to fail.
The only way to prevail is through having strong organized left wing movements
Sure, but you can only have such a movement if millions of people who aren't currently leftists become leftists. So the questions become:
- Who are these people who aren't there yet, but will get there?
- How do we get those people to come around to our side?
Every time we have a "how did you become a leftist?" thread we find that a bunch of people had a lib phase before finding their way left. Tons of people also cite libs like Bernie as a major factor in their journey. There's a real pipeline there, and if we're saying that's not enough, then where else are we getting the people we need?
As a side note, we place way too much weight on the predictive value of Germany in the 20s and 30s. There are similarities and lessons to be learned, but the differences between that situation and the imperial core of today are almost too many to mention.
unless they're turbolibs like AOC who are trying to euphemise their message to garner votes.
I read that as 'gamer votes' and somehow it still made sense
Seriously though, this is a very inspiring post that brings my hopes up a lot, and I have also noticed it happening increasingly as the years go by and capitalism shows its teeth even to those who haven't seen them before. Especially in my country, the never ending attack on the working class, the disasters caused by capitalists regarding safety as costs, cops breaking into disabled people's homes to kick them out, imperialist war looming ever closer, are just a few of the factors that are radicalizing the working class and especially the emerging young working class. Things will get worse before they get better, but I really hope that we will survive to see the other side together with all the peoples of the world and build a society that has never existed before.
