Leftist memes for normies and liberals

end of dump

Attached: get tread on.png (768x1024 306.55 KB, 158.03K)

Playing the meme game is useless, as memes inherently disavow any issue and are open to endless layers and remixing. The right will always be infinitely better at using memes because they're reactionaries, and therefore can make the most contradictory views seem coherent.

The core of most memes is that of ironic disaffection: any sincere view can be rebuked by a meme with no cost or consequences, and, worst of all, are deployed without any actual thinking by its poster. Deploying a meme makes the very conversation a meme, which is to say it becomes an endless pissing contest of cynicism and irony. This is one of the reasons you can't "reason" with the right: for the discourse is based in shock and quick entertainment, the language game by nature doesn't include sincerity.

We ought to grasp onto sincerity and develop an anti-meme culture where they're called out for what they are: just mindless spectacle. You can see this, honest to God, in the recent youth protests and gen-z Instagram memes, which attempt at sincerity and authentic community. They don't yet realize that the ironic format that's used to convey this wish inherently prevents it.

Didn't expect people to save my post. Figured I'd address somethings in the OP

This is mostly addressed at the "edgy" bit, but I'm not necessarily arguing for more memes, let alone "edgy" ones. Memes are good. Memes can get some otherwise pretty apolitical people on your side. You make someone laugh, you get them used to laughing at the right, you got them on your side.

What I was really trying to get across, is that the left needs to market itself in general. While some pepe memes are beneficial to a candidates' campaign, standard memes in 2019 are going to be pretty difficult in changing someone's mind, and worse yet they can easily become stale or give off this "Hello fellow kids" vibe.

Honestly, the best thing I believe the left can do is this:

You should summarize the finer points of capital in layman's terms. Reduce it to no more than 350 words, but ideally you want something even smaller than that. I'd say 20 words is best. Make it "memetic" in the sense it's easy to remember. Stuff that rhymes, things that are alliterative, these all stick in peoples' heads.

Most importantly KEEP IT SIMPLE. The "It's Okay To Be White" campaign is probably the most successful thing Zig Forums has done in recent memory, and that's entirely because it's so simple. Anyone can print up the format at home and so people all over the world were putting up those posters.

"It's Okay To Be White" worked because it hinged on liberal outrage to a seemingly innocuous statement, that outrage would be highlighted to "normies", they never said anything analytical about the world as it exists. They merely shined a light on a small segment of the population with the implicit message being "See? This is what THEY think about you. They think it ISN'T okay to be white!"

Here's the thing: the left has maybe the easiest job in the world in this regard. People HATE the rich. People HATE their jobs. The general mood of the country is discontent. Getting people angry at Capitalism should be easy, but many leftists fail utterly in (pun intended) capitalizing on this.

Why? Well I think it has to do with a kind of trick of the mind: people hate the rich and their jobs and are mistrustful of the government up until it seems like some foreign entity is trying to impose their will on them. Communism, especially to Americans, tends to be seen as synonymous with Sovietism. This is why…

I know I said that you should keep things simple with little in the way of dialogue, but the problem with abstract phrases is you have a million people trying to draw their own conclusions from a single term.

Say you're "against America", and while you may mean you simply wish to stop the government's imperial ambitions, to many if not most Americans you'll come across as a traitor trying to make life worse for Americans to benefit foreign powers. Say you're for "communism" and the first thing that would come to mind for many is either wanting bureaucrats to control your daily life or some naive youth dressing up in a cringy officer's uniform and stroking their own ego by imagining themselves as serious revolutionaries.

So instead of just memeing an abstract like "Communism", you need to meme ACTUAL POLICY. Thus…

I'm going to say something controversial here: Cockshott is more important than Marx. I know this will anger a few people, but Cockshott, as far as I'm aware, has developed the closest, easiest approximation to what a Socialist Economy would look like. If you just meme "communism" you'll get nowhere because you're asking people to take the time to investigate an ideology fully, or adopt some silly LARP because they really hate the rich.

If you focus on spreading the message of central planning a la cockshott you can get an actual IDEA out there. A policy that people will fundamentally understand as enriching their lives.

Attached: 1535740419317.jpg (1072x1053, 101.14K)

"It's Okay To Be White" worked because there was only one format, it was simple, and it was repeated ad nauseum. The power of memes spreads via their repetition. Sometimes you'll have to be almost absurd with your intent to spread something into popular consciousness. If you have a hundred posters, don't put them on a hundred different streets, just put a hundred of them on one street. If you could find a way to cover an entire bank or government office in a hundred of the same types of posters, to the point that people will try to investigate them themselves, you'll get their attention. The more it stands against the norm, the more people will spread it on social media and the like.

Finally:

Right, if I didn't earn the ire of some people with what I said before, I will now.

In an abstract, hypothetical sense the prospect of violent revolution happening is assumed by Marxists to be a given as the ruling class never gives up its power without a fight. I do not disagree with that assessment.

However this revolution arises out of necessity, not desire. Thus it's less that Marxism works towards violent revolution, but violent revolution will occur as societies work towards Marxism.

Yet many leftists put the cart before the horse. Given the necessity of revolution, it can be assumed that the people will become revolutionary when they see it as necessary. Trying to make people revolutionary FIRST is bound to end in failure. Instead, all effort should be put into making Marxism a "reasonable alternative" to the present system in the eyes of most people, and only then when it becomes clear that in spite of it being blatantly superior to the system we have now, the powers that be will kill people before they submit to Marxism, only THEN will the people become revolutionary.

Attached: 8DITEuC4jPzTfFcTOuSx5LT2PaURFe0UPM4ZyzfHenI.jpg (612x612, 102.74K)

Good post

Everything you’re saying has the implicit assumption that there is a communist movement in America currently capable of taking advantage of such a “marketing campaign” in the first place. Tell me, in a situation where a working class person in America sees a street covered in catchy communist slogans and gets interested, where do they go to “get involved” from there? The microsect cults you mention in OP’s pic? The Democrat Cops of America?

I think you’re putting the cart before the horse. The kind of marketing you’re talking about would just make the truth clearer to everyone who doesn’t already know: there is no current communist movement worth a shit in America rn. We’ve got much more foundational things to deal with before we can seriously have this conversation imo

Have to make this quick before work.

The problem of leftist parties and their cult mentality is entirely based off of recruitment. Many recruit from protests. Protests primarily attract a demographic of people with a lot of free time and looking for free self-publicity/looking to feel like they're doing something "important". Similarly university students have a lot of free time, massive egos, and enough intelligence to maybe come to the left through the theoretical side of things.

The purpose of what I mentioned would be to break the closed cycle of leftist parties/microsects, by reaching the general public. Once enough people in the public are informed and angry enough, functional, serious leftist parties will form organically.

It's the mistake of so many modern businesses to try and ignore mass appeal to focus on structure. E.G. "We can't launch facebook now/appeal to more people, we'd operate at a loss and we have no way to monetize things."

Learn from facebook. Capture an audience first–even if you do it with barebones structure and running at a loss. Focus on structure later.

Attached: 1534630441281.jpg (720x708, 56.78K)

In addition to everything that's been said, I think we ought to start organizing more media in general. I think a lot of us just sit and wait for new Lenins, Fishers, and Zizeks to pop up, or we wait for analyses by others, when, frankly, there are a lot of damn smart people on here who know theory but don't have an outlet to apply or expand it outside of this small community. Commune and Black Socialists are good, the latter even got Chomsky's approval and support recently, but we who know the at right better have to start actively pushing this stuff to others through multimedia. I for one don't think organization and outreach are contradictory nor linear processes, but two parts of the same movement.

I don’t find this convincing at all. As far as I’m aware there’s no historical precedent for this kind of mass outrage “organically” resulting in the creation of leftist institutions. At best (and even this I’m skeptical of) this strategy would result in disorganized forms of mass protest e.g. Occupy/yellow vests. The value of this kind of proletarian mobilization is a toss up for me personally. One thing I can say for sure is nothing like a party has been “organically structured” out of these movements. I said it earlier, but idk how you’re saying this sort of thing “worked” for the right when it very clearly didn’t, The momentum they had going with the “okay to be white” shit is pretty much nowhere to be seen today.

Consumer brands are able to put public image before internal structure because businesses are concerned with short term revenue and not a long term, sustainable base. I’m not at all sure that political movements have the same interests. Again, this strategy has not done the right any serious favors if we look at what’s become of them over the past year and a half.

I'm also skeptical of any organic creation of a revolutionary party, but the point nonetheless stands that there needs to be at least some basis of information and propaganda. I think user is saying that we need to actively create our audience, rather than wait for them to come to us via a vulgar understanding of Dialectics, which I think a lot of people on here subscribe to.

I don’t think anyone itt disagrees that what the left is/has been for the past 2-3 decades is pathetic and that we need to start fresh.

Propaganda and public image are very important things. What I’m trying to draw attention to are the “we” and “our” you mention in your post. Who’s “we?” No one itt or on the American left in general has a meaningful answer to this question. At least a business start up, as that guy above mentioned, has a minimal amount of internal consistency even before its sold a single product. We don’t even have a bare minimum of a foundation currently, just a scattered bunch of cults and activist orgs, none of which agree with each other on basically anything. We have to deal with this first. One of the most promising projects on this I’ve seen has been Marxist Center, it’s not great, but it’s at least an example of a good step forward, imo

Depends how you define organic.

Listen, I understand where you're coming from, but the problem we have today is that all existing leftist parties in the U.S. are incompetent. I hate to say it, and I have nothing against a few of them, but there doesn't exist a single leftist party in the U.S. capable of much.

We're at a point where things are so bad for the left that a not-insignificant portion of people hate leftists for stuff we're not only not responsible for, but in some cases things we're directly opposed to. I remember speaking with a conservative friend not too long ago, and hearing him say "What these socialists don't understand is that it's not all about race. Money is way more important. I guarantee that at the end of the day black people care more about what they're taking home than the color of their skin." What the left is was completely lost on them.

So with the situation so bad, can we afford to create yet another party that will grow to a few thousand people at best and then stagnate? Should we all join the PSL or one of the many parties here in the U.S., attend a ton of meetings, and hope to change a structure that seems so highly bureaucratized?

I personally believe the parties wont change and wont find mass appeal because they're founded by people that are at least removed enough from the conditions of the working class that they can afford to found a leftist party.

Thus, I believe educating enough people about what leftism is while not advertising for any party will both grow these existing parties somewhat organically, and lead to the creation of new ones perhaps more appealing to the masses.