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Also, I should add, the loop I'm referring to is that no matter how bad it gets this acceleration principle always states things need to get worse. This is not the neoliberal to fascist pipeline. edit: although things getting worse is what's pushing people to choose between fascism and socialism

And when a neoliberal becomes a fascist, they are adopting fascist ideas. However, those neoliberal ideas aren't rejected. The neoliberal ideas are what lead the person to reject socialist and progressive ideas in favor of fascist ideas. It's not that we failed to channel the dissatisfaction, but failed to challenge the underlying framework for internalizing their dissatisfaction. Instead of blaming the system people are blaming the people living in that system, like immigrants and trans people.

If a fascist rejects those fascist ideas the neoliberal ideas will be what they fall back on. For example, if a person believes systemic change is unnecessary, then rejecting the fascist alternative, removing people, doesn't mean they will question the underlying assumption that systemic change is unnecessary. The fact we need systemic change still needs to be learned.

It's not a path. People do not need to go through neoliberism. People are, usually anyway, not purely a fascist or purely a neoliberal. It's that people have a collection of ideas in their heads. In the case of our modern society, there are a lot of neoliberal ideas and increasingly fascist ideas in people's heads. All of these neoliberal and fascist ideas need to be addressed one at a time before a person can start accepting the progressive and socialist alternatives to those ideas. edit: typo

I'm afraid some ideas really are just easier to accept. In every field I've studied or worked in, people very rarely accept unfortunate truths, instead believing that which is easier to stomach.

For example, you believe that leftists just aren't "trying hard enough," when the reality is that leftism doesn't have access to the same tools that its opposition has. Fascists, tankies, or liberals can use the powerful forces of group identity and hierarchy to win. At the end of the day, they all function as similar machines that seek to gain the most amount of power and control for themselves as possible. They inevitably entangle with national identities, bureaucracy, religion and cultural values in whatever way they need to.

Social media is not the problem; you're just blaming technology because it's easier than thinking leftism is uniquely unsuited to take control in this ecosystem. It has the "authenticity" every system markets, but it can't just allow itself to become a competitive machine without just becoming Marxist-Leninism. It can free people from the machine, but the machines compete better with each other by mechanizing us.

It's not about morals holding leftism back, but morals being incompatible with welding power over your opposition. It's the will to power of societal constructs making everyone's lives hallow and miserable. Our happiness is instrumental in forces larger than ourselves and always has been. Our freedom isn't at war with other people's freedom, but the success of things that aren't individuals.

I haven't met a lot of socialists into accelerationism, but then I stay away from tankies

It could be better yes, but most right wing parties are doing rather well because of old (read dying) people, while young people are overwhelmingly leftist.

the left has no idea how to use the Internet for anything other than arguing amongst themselves

I disagree heavily with this. That's mostly a thing pushed by tankies, the ones we argue with. But then arguing with tankies isn't productive either, it is a distraction at best.

It is genuinely depressing, and threads like these show zero self-awareness and very little self-criticism

What exactly do you propose if not outreach? You seem to criticize the idea of spreading awareness in general. Did you read the parts where I also said the same stuff about what you call information gatekeepers? I should note I am also heavily in favor of direct action and unionization, but doing those things also requires outreach. I think really the best thing to do is irl word of mouth, irl political participation, and establishing good leftist spaces online (without tankies).

It's mostly a critique of the accelerationist streak I see in other socialists. So it's supposed to anti-accelerationist. When people talk about median-voter syndrome I think the ideas that most of those people have in common are neoliberal ideas. Of course that's not to say it's exclusively neoliberal ideas, just that it's probably the most common. So neoliberals are probably the largest pool of people to recruit from.

As socialists we should be working to figure out the propaganda that will help to get people to reject neoliberalism en masse. That's what I wanted to start working on with future memes, but it felt like it was important to explain why. I was hoping this would be a useful starting place to point people to if they ask me why I'm trying to make anti-neoliberal memes in the future.

But yeah, this my main critique of the arguments I encounter from socialists on lemmy. I think it benefits us to really examine this assumption, because the material conditions are really bad, but people are still saying they need to get worse.