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! 💪
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.
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