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.
For sure, its definitely good to see that progress is being made