Memes are effective at making people feel less alone when they see memes they agree with, they’re also funny and lift spirits, which as a leftist in this world is extremely important, memes definitely also play a part in radicalization, funny=relatable=something I want to be apart of.
I’m not a fan of blanket dismissal of everything online as useless or a waste of time, people spend their entire lives online now, this shit is crucial imo, but it isn’t the same thing as organizing irl
you accidentally dunked a lot of communist parties out there, the brazillian communist party for example shun militants that make youtube channels and have kinda of a conservative view on leninism that printed paper is the only true way.
anedoticly i say that internet propaganda works, if you know how to surf the algorithm and bypass some limitations of private monopolies, i never met personally a communist or seen a printed paper in my life, i got into marxism via internet propagandists
I on purpose dunked on a lot of communists in general, lolol this early 2000s take on the internet and its effects is why the right dominates online discourse which directly relates to politics around the world. We need to get more open and comfortable radicalized on the internet, the right is doing it and succeeding and we are handing out newspapers at events like anyone is remotely interested in that aside from like 5 nerds (I’m one of those nerds, I love newspapers, but let’s be real).
Totally. I’ve been a part of those “newspapers groups” before and it’s cringy as shit. There’s a lot of old blood in these organizations who are dogmatic about doing things the way they were done pre-internet age.
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You can find a lot of people online saying that they were radicalised by socialist meme aggregators.
This is akin to asking if the likes of 4chan or Reddit creates reactionaries. Of course it does. It’s a gateway to ideology.
In all seriousness, like many have already said, I do find memes to be a good “pioneer species” to slowly expose people to new ideas, and an effective way to start conversation and tip someone into the radicalization funnel, much like how mosses and lichens break down rock to pave the way for soil and eventually vegetation. I’ve made some memes on Tumblr, and sure as far as interaction goes 60% is preaching to the choir and 30% is fascists/capitalists telling me to kill myself. But 10% actually start productive conversations where people listen to me speak at length or link them further material. And who is to say for all the silent lurkers, unsure of their opinion, subconscious being tugged this way and that? Considering the state of the Western Left, fighting in the war for hearts and minds online and offline is half of what we even can do right now. And, considering the war on the attention span of the yogurt Western mind, unfortunately, cheap memes is where a lot of people get their information. We are not at liberty right now to define the rules of engagement.
I think that memes do play a role, and the idea of using memes for political propaganda isn’t new either. A lot of the memes Bolsheviks used even look similar to modern day versions. The soyjack being a prime example
In my opinion, the value of memes is that they’re easy to digest and they’re a conversation starter. It’s important to remember that we have to meet people at their current stage of political education development. Memes should be seen as an entry point for people who have little political understanding. Memes are very easy to share, and people are much more likely to look at them than long essays or videos analyzing the subject.
When somebody sees a meme that resonates with how they feel then it creates an emotional response. This acts as a hook to get the person to investigate the issue further. It’s a really good practice to add links to articles providing a deeper analysis of the subject in a meme. If the meme clicks then the person might follow the link and get further educated.
A key to a making a good meme is for it to present a particular problem in a relatable way and frame it in a way that gets people thinking in the right direction.
Although I wasn’t properly radicalised by it, r/presidentialracememes before the admin coup (and the rabbit hole it led me to) helped find the other communist communities in reddit, eventually leading me here. They had the occasional communist meme, but a lot of the content was tangentially related for properly addressing the farce that is the Democratic Party (which is why the admins couped the moderation).
Also r/FULLCOMMUNISM was quarantined so fast that I refuse to believe it wasn’t because it was gaining traction. Just be aware that if you’re using social networks your memes will likely get less shown because it’s “offensive to the NATO ethnicity” or something like that, possibly going the way of the subreddits.
As an introduction and as part of agitation and even education, yes, it can help.
Being smug and dismissive toward people for not being the living incarnation of the “The last time I smiled was 1992, I sleep in a Soviet tank” copypasta is less helpful than that, and besides, that’s still posting even if it’s condescending posting against posting. Leave that hypocritical shit to the liberals, they’re better at it.
Memes by themselves, not really. Informative posts, yes. If the memes help people find the informative posts, they’re useful
What about informative memes.
Good memes are majorly important. They are an avenue to bring people into a community. They also help ease people into it. I might not have been radicalized BY memes but I was eventually radicalized BECAUSE of memes. I was just a normal lib years ago and started seeing memes from the Chapotraphouse subreddit. They were funny leftists memes. I enjoyed them. Their shit posters, jokes, and memes made me warm up to and like the community. It introduced me to the thought that “hey these guys are funny and not so bad.” The more I went there the more I was exposed to actual informative posts and comments. Which eventually led me to be radicalized and call myself a communist.
Another important thing with memes is the show you the heart, the true intent of a community. They show you what that community thinks behind all the fluff and “well written” posts. The deeper intent. How those people think. Their senses of humor etc. I personally think the communities memes are one of the most important aspects for this reason.
It’s a good way to keep engaging with the ideas before you are ready for meaningful organizing work. There is also a small propaganda value.
It helps Marxist-Leninists have something to chuckle at on the Internet. That’s about it.
Yes, the memes at r/Genzedong are why I’m a “dengist” today. I didn’t understand them when Reddit first recommended them. I just saw funny memes and people (ironically?) praising certain Asian leaders I didn’t no anything about, so a subbed, and now I’m here rather than a tiny Maoist section of quora or something.
I don’t think it does very much but it’s a goof and it might help introduce the ideas and make us seem more human
It helps morale at the very least
memes are designed to spread an idea. of course they do
It sounds silly but it works sometimes, I would probably just be a patsoc if not for the memes pointing out their hypocrisy
Very little if at all. Anyone radicalized by a meme is extremely unlikely to be someone serious enough to actually be a revolutionary, and that’s even supposing people are radicalized by memes.
You disregard completely the Internet funnels.
First thing, people have to be aware. From those, some people will dig deeper. We need awareness, memes have a chance to help.
We have to occupy all media spaces, including Internet memes. If it gets someone to ask and Google “what did they mean by we only have our shackles to loose”, that’s huge.
Right wing has classic sculptures -> targeted right wing news -> fascism. We need something similar.
I didn’t say that the internet is worthless. This question is about memes, which I think are not very useful at all. The right wing pipeline won’t work for us, because they have the huge weight of the status quo behind them, we both can’t and shouldn’t try to emulate them.
Edit: to expand, right wing memes appeal to biases that people already hold. We have to fight those biases, which is why there’s a meme that leftists memes are walls of text, because we have to do that in order to combat those biases, but that also makes them really bad memes for normies.
People have other biases, etc, to play on. Most people have empathy and an instinct for justice. Most people don’t want to be evicted but know what it’s like. They don’t want to be made redundant but they know what it’s like. They know that the North exploits the South. They don’t like to be sat in rush hour traffic day in, day out. Or living off rushed microwave meals. They know they make money for the boss but don’t know why they can’t persuade the boss for a slightly larger cut. Even those who blame immigrants for everything are starting with real problems, they’re just distracted to hate the wrong people; in part because, as you say, the right head a monopoly on visual spaces.
I know maybe six people IRL, all over 60, who are sceptical about climate change. Everyone else accepts it and wants to do something. They want their gran to be warm in winter but they’re kinda glad that gran is burning less fossil fuel and they feel bad about being glad. Liberalism does not provide answers, only alienation and guilt. And liberal media makes ‘politics’ impenetrable.
There’s a lot of common ground. The problem is that most people are only exposed to liberalism and due to that they do not know there’s an alternative with solutions. The left will lose if it doesn’t use all the tools available to change hearts and minds. Memes are a part of it. When it comes to it, only a few revolutionaries will emerge. The bulk of the population will either be happy that someone is doing something or get in the way. Memes can help to sway people towards agreeing with the revolutionaries. There’s a reason that reactionaries do almost everything they can to shut down all forms of radical media, memes included.
By their nature, they take very little commitment by the audience. Where they might not read a persuasive tract, they might glimpse a funny meme and think, maybe XYZ wasn’t so bad.
I was radical before I saw any Marxist memes. But mine was the Marxism that’s palatable in the West: seen as interesting but outdated, leaning towards Trotskyism, and other ‘Western Marxism’ traits. ML memes encouraged me to question Trotsky/ists and Zizek, et al, and to look into Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Furr, Losurdo, etc. Memes were my inroad to the ML community. They helped me to gain an initial foothold on the key themes, ideas, and arguments.
I’ve also used memes with friends/group chats to broach certain topics that are otherwise hard to bring up. Memes make it easier to keep those topics current. And they provide an easy way for Marxists to remind people that Marxism exists and that you’re a Marxist – without being preachy.
I think memes are one of the “spaces” of the Internet. There’s context for consuming a huge gradient of text and video lengths.
Memes are the immediate, 3 seconds long attention span. And, as we mention, we are horrible at it. For the reasons you recognise. I agree! But we must fight for that’s attention space, because that’s where most people is.
As usual, the fight is harder for us. Doesn’t mean we give up on fighting.
Of course the funnel is different. We have to strategise around it. Different people, media and content for different sections of the funnel. But we need the top of the funnel too, because that’s where real people are.
What about Stalin’s big spoon? It’s nonsense and confusing, but puts Stalin front and center. What else is there?
They got troll face, Chad, polandball, the frog, and the list goes on. Who’s us, on the memeland? In south America we got care bears and the URSAL.
There must be more! We can do fun too, for fucks sake!
With love. :)
Yeonmi Park
She’s a meme about what kind of stories Yanks believe about North Korea.
However, IF the time comes for a revolution those that like leftist memes won’t stop the mobilized leftists and might contribute in some minor way, but not huge.
Power is the ability to get people to labor in a particular direction. so a portion of people that don’t work that much towards the revolution can still helpful a little.
That said, yea we should not encourage complacency or reward that kind of behavior.
“Anyone radicalized by a propaganda poster left up in public is extremely unlikely to be someone serious enough to or later join the communist party or become a revolutionary” - Some fool in 1912 Russia shitting on efforts to spread awareness by postering.
What are memes? Propaganda. They’re digital versions of posters plastered in public places, in this case the digital commons. Is someone who sees a communist poster and agrees with guaranteed to join the party or even inquire further? Of course not. But some percentage will, for some percentage of people seeing these things lights something up in their heads, they realize for the first time there might be people who can put into words and explanation things they’ve felt all or most of their life. They realize they’re not alone. That alone is powerful.
It is not an end unto itself but it is far from useless. Memes spread ideas. In an age and place where the mass media is controlled by the bourgeoisie, where art is funded by the CIA, the ability for anyone to spread an image with an idea is dangerous to the bourgeoisie.
It displeases me extremely to see such an awfully incorrect, dangerously incorrect take. Like really, this is extremely, extremely wrong. This is the lazy take of someone who sees online as laziness and therefore bad.
People are more likely to see and meaningfully engage in this age with memes than street posters. If Lenin were alive today he would be sure the Bolsheviks had good memes. To reject these facts, this proven experience of successful past communists is irresponsible.
Like no shit memes won’t cause or win a revolution but neither did postering and yet that was done, as was printing newspapers, pontificating online in posts also won’t do that yet we do so, we must. It’s all part of a process, it’s all parts of the same machinery. To say it is irrelevant or meaningless is to say the street sweeper is worthless as a human because they don’t do as much as the central planner or surgeon. It’s frankly ignorance.
It all helps. It all helps spread the message. Sure some people aren’t affected but that’s because they’re disinclined to be by material interests anyways. Saying that your communist meme debunking American atrocities was ignored and downvoted without rebuttal by liberals and didn’t instantly create a dozen new communists is not a knock of the meme but of the larger situation. Yet we must keep trying. We must keep spreading class consciousness, we must keep inveighing against empire and this is the way we do it. Some small amount see them, some small amount begin to question. Some small amount who were questioning question further and realize for the first time there is another perspective.
We don’t own mass communication, television, radio stations, major news sites. But we do have this.
