Since the 1980s, the pattern has been:

* Marketisation, competition and individual success replace solidarity and collective provision.

* Institutional capture, grassroots movements are professionalized, defanged and absorbed into #NGO processes.

* Conformity as the price of influence, alternatives must become respectable, fundable and manageable before the mainstream will listen.

* The closing of alternatives, radical projects are blocked, marginalized or stripped of their political purpose.

* Manufactured common sense, this whole process is presented as realism - as if there is no alternative to the system producing the mess.