https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN-GGeNPQEg
I want to write more on the topic because social change does happen. Apartheid ended. Gay everything is becoming normalized. However, patriarchy and capitalism endure. Normalization is partly a process of coopting radical dissent, partly a process of rationalization of capitalist production, of making the system (capitalist patriarchy) more efficient.
Capitalism endures because most people are greedy and selfish and are even willing to kill for money: i speak here of the majority. They may well be stupid, but they are absolutely selfish, greedy, wiling even to kill for money.
Patriarchy endures because people are lazy and beaten down and coopted into it. They are beaten down because of capitalism, they are lazy because capitalism benefits them, and then even radicals get coopted into a nice car a nice house
Capitalism provides goodies and is better than feudalism or agrarian slavery.
I don’t think Leninism or Maoism are the way to go. Conspiratorial vanguard elites tend to keep power to themselves and install a permanent dictatorship, which inevitably becomes corrupted and collapses. Maoism is a bit better than Leninism but it should not escape you that Mao was as bad at economics as he was good at generalship.
Marx, too, is no angel. His advocacy of “free love” was simply the normalization of early capitalist decadence.
Marx believed that the scientific progress capitalism unleashed would inevitably result in a world awash in so much wealth as to make property and the state irrelevant: that the state would inevitably wither, but that it’s process of withering would be marked out by class conflict.
All that was 175 years ago. In other words Marx is probably not so relevant or accurate as we would like. He writes badly.
Probably Foucault is the best strategist we can look at but even he would admit he is fascist influenced.
I think the best answer is to carve out one’s own alternative, point it out to society, and hope society catches up.
But when it does, it will still be rationalization and cooptation. Ugh.
I don’t mean ignore it and hope it goes away: I mean, ignore it, live a good life, and kick it in the balls whenever possible at no risk to yourself, or at the level of risk you are personally willing to tolerate.
There is btw still beauty in life. That too is a radical alternative strategy, to simply fall in love with beauty, and regard the rest as error and illusion.
You are all beautiful.