We’ve reached the second iteration. There isn’t a lot separating us from the third iteration. And the material conditions were bad enough, at the latest, sometime between the first and the second iterations.
People know socialism exists. People are experiencing sufficiently bad material conditions that they want change.
People have picked up neoliberal ideas from living in a neoliberal society. These ideas give people a framework to process their material conditions so that they do not rise up in sufficient numbers. People need to learn that these ideas are part of an ideology designed to enrich the owner class at the expense of the worker class. Things will continue to get worse unless people understand that everyone needs to own their work.
This education is work that still needs to be done after hypothetically defeating the current fascist dictatorships and is probably part of what will be needed to defeat them.
I keep having this conversation with people and seeing the accelerationist line of reasoning, so I wanted to address it with a visual.
The problem with knowing what socialism means is that it’s a linguistic battleground of sorts, where the word has multiple meanings depending on who uses it. For instance:
A liberal and conservative would likely think that it’s when “government does stuff” like you described - higher taxes, more public services etc.
ML’s believe that the ‘socialism’ described above is just liberalism and actual socialism is when means of production are nationalized, private capital is abolished but the state becomes state capitalist and develops that way.
Marxists believe that both ‘socialisms’ above are just liberalism and actual socialism is when the capitalist mode of production is abolished, so commodity production is replaced with production for use and people pay for goods using something like their labor time with vouchers. This is Marx’s definition in Critique of Gotha Programme.
Some anarchist/marxist sects believe that the ‘socialisms’ above are just liberalism, that this kind of ‘wage’ system is a needless concession and yap yap yap you get the idea.
It’s often genuinely difficult to know what the writer means when they use the word “socialism”