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! 💪
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.
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Sure, but you can only have such a movement if millions of people who aren’t currently leftists become leftists. So the questions become:
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.