Political Memes

We’ve never tried a pure and proper capitalistic movement either.

Genuinely confused what you even mean there - because, yes, we did. Like, to the extent "proper" makes sense - "pure" is nonsense that only makes sense for ideologies, not materialist movements. I assume there is some intentional snark to it? I may be missing some signalling there, AuDHD and all, but I think it is worthwhile to explore that idea, regardless:

What do you think the long and arduous, sometimes brutal, sometimes liberatory, stuff was, that happened in the early modern era? Where property relations and the mode of production changed from Feudalism to global (back then at first colonial) markets and industrial capitalist wage labour? That is also precisely, why I think a material analysis of the Eastern Bloc is so damning: They had wage labour, they traded on the international market, they even had hire- and fire at factory gates at times, with a more decentralised economy than more consolidated western economies at times (managers competing against each others for state resources) - even though their ideals said that that should not happen. Not for lack of their purity or ideological drive, simply because the material and historical conditions panned out like that for those entities.

That is what I am getting at: "Pure" does not make any sense, it's ideological nonsense, IMO. And "proper" only means - being a material, real political force. If you go on general strike, the effects of that at first don't care for ideology at all, they are immediate. (further organisational capabilities are still important, though)

I think that's something we sort of lost in ideology, especially since the 80s - thinking not from the perspective of "ideal -> reality", plopping an ideal on top of reality (and failing, and getting more brutal in failure) - but instead "reality <-> contradictions within reality", where there are developments stemming from the way we produce, we distribute, power manifests and we, more broadly, interact with the world, and then resulting from that, failures and contradictions building up, leading to eventual, revolutionary change over several key, historical events. (That often fail repeatedly at first. See how republics and democracy faired in the 19th century after the French Revolution, where the common consensus for a long time was basically: "That can only result in new mass terror and a new Napoleon - or, if at all, maybe work for a low population, rural settler state like the US")

As an aside: That does not mean, vision is completely unimportant, or anything, just that vision is itself is not useful as an ideal to strife for, but just a tool for changing along what is necessary and possible materially, and organising for that.