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Once upon a time, saying anything critical about the system and using the term "capitalism" would mark you as a radical

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! 💪

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  • 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:

      • Respond to the question by asking them if they know of any other red & black flags

      • 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.

    • 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.

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