I think most people who go from capitalist to anti-capitalist go through a “humane capitalism” phase, and I think there’s every reason to believe this will progress further given (a) the state of the world and (b) the fact that they’re already comfortable calling themselves anti-capitalist even if that’s not entirely true.
Individual people can progress further. It’s our job to make that happen at a high rate. But the reality is that any high visibility anticapitalist messaging will be recuperated unless it’s radical enough that the powers that be would rather demonize it.
imo the number one most important thing (in terms of rhetoric, obviously material considerations come first) is to rebuild the class identity destroyed by liberalism. We need people to identify explicitly as working-class again, and to identify capital owners as a distinct class separate from the broad concept of “rich people” or “the 1%”-- those terms make it sound like society is just divided into a spectrum from “low income” to “high income” and that misconception is a big part of the reason why people are willing to accept liberal capitalism.
People called Bernie a communist even though he just wanted to fix capitalism and make it more humane. Though he’s not a communist, he sure helped kick me down the socdem to Marxist pipeline.
Radicalization will still happen for a lot of people over time, but I wish we could get it going faster.
