Meming Ourselves to Elivate Ourselves

I'm writing this post after reading another post titled "Why so Serious": 8ch.net/leftypol/res/2856663.html

Before reading this thread, I think you should read that one

I've decided to write this reply on its own thread for reasons I'll explain later.

To the OP of the "Why So Serious Thread"
You do have a point.

The fact is that a lot these people who are part of the alt-right are just in it for the funny memes, and to release their vented up anger, edginess, frustrations and existential dread.

The alt-right currently provides the best platform for doing this. And they harness all of these feelings to attack socially and economically disadvantaged minorities, who they attack ruthlessly in an "ironic" manner (most of them do it ironically at first, but then it becomes more serious as they slip down the pipeline).

I'm reminded of this scene from Slavoj Zizek's "The Pervert's Guide to Ideology", where he talks about the heavy metal band Rammstein, and how in some of their music and performances they deliberately appropriate some of the more "sexy" aspects of Fascist and Nazi ideology (such as cheering, marching, grouping together and releasing energy), in a way which allows it to be enjoyed without having to submit to Nazi and Fascist ideology, therefore taking from Fascism and Nazism the exclusivity of the certain aspects which attract people to them.

The equivalent I'm trying to make here is that we can take aspects of the alt-right like their easily recyclable memes, the "liberal destroyed" compilations (our equivalent would be fascist destroyed, class traitor destroyed, porky destroyed, or something along those lines), the charismatic social commentators, and engineer them to work for our causes instead of theirs.
We can allow people to enjoy the edgy, juvenile rush of memeing and shitposting without having to succumb to fascist ideology, which will probably be more appealing to moderates and centrists who want to be edgy but also don't want to violate their moral conscience.

So what will happen is that not only will we be taking the exclusively of edginess away from the alt-right, therefore weakening them, but just like what the alt-right does we will lure moderates closer to us through the use or irony.
People will share our memes and our porky-destroyed compilations ironically, and then they get pulled in very gradually into the more serious ideological areas.

Now this may all sound off-putting for a lot of you.
While we want to actually engage with our ideas properly in a way which is sincere, we can't reach the moderates and the a-political in any other way.
We can only submerge them in memes until they come closer to us. And once they have, then we can actually be sincere with them.

The fact that we all argue with each-other about the best type of socialist system (anarchist vs state socialism) will only help our "meme campaign".
You know how on YouTube you keep coming across this stupid 'YouTube labor-aristocrat A vs YouTube labor-aristocrat B' format?
Team Jake Paul vs Team Logan Paul for example?
What this does is that the anger generated by the two competing teams heightens the attention which both of the teams receive, increasing the view count of both of the YouTubers.
If we can make "team state-socialism vs team anarchist-socialism" a really big meme fulled online war, it would help the far left as a whole.
Even if you don't like anarchist-socialism or state-socialism, either is better than the alt-right's preferred mode of governance. We should form a temporary alliance, push out the alt-right, and then once they're down let dialectics do the work on deciding which of our socialisms is the best.

So, the reason I wanted to write this on a separate thread from the post I linked to was that I want to use this thread in order to discuss how we should implement some of the described methods.
If you have any ideas or any criticisms, please reply.

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Other urls found in this thread:

reddit.com/r/WealthInAction/
youtube.com/watch?v=AsNF7dzy3cs
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

I appreciate the reply, though discussing the strategies could also go in my thread. But okay.

"State vs. Anarchism" could work but it's deep inside the leftist politics already, i.e. not relevant to a bypasser. Tying together the pain points and the oppression they experience day-to-day with leftist solutions should be the first step.

Huge student debt? Shitty job you can't leave because you wouldn't find other? Working yourself to death to support kids? Try socialism! Everybody gets the basics needs to live freely and no exploitation of your labor whatsoever.

It's Marketing 101: show your understanding of their emotions, offer a solution you have, then describe a world where their problems eliminated by implementing your solution.

Also, we should get some ideas ready for the next global crisis. "Tired of being stomped into the floor every decade while rich are getting richer? Introducing Marx!"

I completely agree OP. Also another thing which I don't get is why so many people here are against/bothered by converting people through memes. This is possibly the easiest way to convert people through the internet. If you check out some comments on Batko's or Socialism or Barbarism's vids you'll see a few examples of people saying memes is what lured them to socialism. Seriously, if we can get people from enjoying lefty memes to reading theory, I see no bigger win than that.

Mass meme Astroturfing?

Every street corner the prole drives on, should be painted with enraging imagery against porky

I think it's mostly just the fact that a lot of people take this board much too seriously, which ironically results in people being turned off by a more self-righteous board culture. When I started coming on here in 2015 Zig Forums was much more lighthearted and energetic, an attitude that helped me hear out some of the views on this board.

Exactly

More than promising to solve people’s problems, you also have to direct their anger.

Former Zig Forumslack here, what gave the board its power was that it could easily attract lonely young socially alienated young men, give them an easy answer to their loneliness, wrap that answer up in passionate and “rational” rhetoric, and then keep people angry with a steady stream of examples to justify their rage.

Every so often we get a thread like this, but what should we actually be doing to achieve this end? How do we make the easily digestible memes and where do we share them? How do we popularize our culture like Zig Forums did?

When I find some good memes, I just post them as my whatsapp status.

An example: people would flow into Zig Forums through anti-SJW pipelines like TumblrInAction and the comment section of some videos on YouTube. SJWs are easy to hate, they’re annoying and hypocritical. You use some examples of that, then you create an image of a single person. The liberal that believes Islam is a religion of peace and the west is a rape culture, as an example.

This homogenization of the “enemy” is possible in part to the overlap of academic rhetoric. A wealthy activist whining about white people and a professor talking about “destroying whiteness” might have two different ideals, but what matters is painting them with the same brush.

Finally, you speak to their fears. The most stupid hot take on bigotry is just saying “they’re so and so phobic”, yeah the bigots are afraid, but to insist they are afraid of the group they hate does nothing but make you sound stupid to them, and ignores the problem in they’re rhetoric and the real source of fear in their thoughts.

People fundamentally want not that much other than to feel okay. This fundamental truth is at the core of all marketing: they want to have piece of mind and stability, fascists understand that they can make people radical only when it appears they can’t achieve peace under the current system.

Hence the anuddah shoah theory: the alienation these people fill is materialized in the image of the foreigner, the “alien”, the fear of changing faces is the fear of the alienation they already have being made manifest.

The nation in turn becomes them and they it. Many of these people were not hyper nationalists before, and likely got on board with the “fuck Bush” anti-patriotism of the late 90s and early 2000s, yet they begin to see the alien as the source of their alienation and the nation as themselves.

Thus, most fascists become viciously violent towards “traitors”, more than even the supposed source of their hate even! The enemy is the enemy, but the traitor is something worse: their self doubts and fear made manifest into another person. Hence the fear of cuckolding, the hatred of white leftists, the odd alliances across racial lines, the traitor is the image of their self-doubt and moral weakness, the decadence that let the “foreign” and “bad” into the body. When they hate the adulterous , the “traitorous” feminine, they hate the weaker, feminine aspect of their personality that they feel dominates their life and leaves them sterile.

That is how the far-rights whole system works in a nutshell. Learn from it.

picrelated

Overall, very insightful reply, screencap'd, thank you.

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Just got home, thank you.


Anyways for some more useful advice, your best bet to successfully meme isn't to just copy Zig Forums memes and put a red filter over them, it isn't to make rambling memes about society, use the best marketing tool at your disposal: class hatred.

People *hate* the rich, which is why I'm all the more surprised the left doesn't focus on class hatred more. You have so many good examples to capitalize on, but you never seem to follow up on them. Think about how cringey "Life of A Billionaire's Son" was! Yet the people that seemed to discuss it the most were people that generally fall into the cyber right.

Think about this, why are SJWs so annoying, so easy to hate, that they can actually make even liberal people sympathetic to racist narratives? The answer is because they personally insult people.

More than all their traits resulting in a smug, out of touch, condescending asshole, they personally insult large swathes of people. When they chant "destroy whiteness" or groan that a place is "insufferably white", they do so knowing that they will piss people off, and get their kicks from pissing them off.

Look, I'm a white guy, I hear someone say a place has "too many white people" or that it's "insufferably white" or smugly talk about "white male privilege" while I'm trying to pay the bills, I get pissed off. Now imagine a bunch of lonely, socially alienated White guys hearing day in and day out how "white people suck" or how they have "life on easy mode" or something, and these people will hate these SJWs even more.

Don't just meme the immorality of the rich, don't even count on people to be affected by morality, instead meme their insufferability. Find any and every example of some smug rich asshole talking shit about, say, retail workers or Fast Food Employees, and just blow it up. Share it with as many people as possible. I'm talking real insufferable shit, especially if they start calling workers "poors" or other kinds of derisive terminology.

Maybe even make a subreddit, "wealthinaction" or something, entirely devoted to depicting the rich as a class of insufferable cunts who sneer at the average working man.

Twitter and the like are great for this. You don't want an impersonal kind of insufferability, you want something personal and very harsh. You ideally want a rich person at their most sneering and condescending, lines like "Sorry, no change for worthless bums XD" or "If you don't own a home by 30, how does it feel being a total failure?" are great.

It doesn't matter if you have to make the accounts to post this shit, Zig Forums does it all the time with fake "SJW" accounts. Learn from Zig Forums, realize that they never put their ideology first, they rarely try to "sell" nazism to people initially, but rather stoke their hatred of minorities/fears of being displaced, then offer nazism as the supposed solution.

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Sounds like a nice idea. I've wanted such a subreddit for a while : reddit.com/r/WealthInAction/

I'll mod whoever wants to mod just dm me. Have fun

I was posting about this in the other thread, but I suppose my question is how do you go from memes to socialism? It seems like a reactive art form that functions like a commodity in a sense that it's mass produced, endlessly duplicated, and has this kind of mystic power in which "social relations between men themselves assume… the fantastic form of a relation between things," yada yada.


Another point that Woodley makes is that fascists often do not act according to their own ideological agenda. The fascist support for Donald Trump during the 2016 election and the proliferation of memes supporting him from fascists is a case in point of this. But they can't really think or act critically, which is what makes them fascists, and is why they're so "good" at meme culture in a sense.

You don't, memes are just a bait to get people read more serious stuff. Even good ideas have to get attention with "clickbait" in a world where one is constantly distracted by ads, phone notifications, urges to check Instagram feed for the 15th time today, etc.

Anyone that says that you can't meme socialism needs a lesson in Capitalism.

I got a degree in marketing, the sad truth is that everything can be sold to anyone, if you just user the right terms. Fascists understand this implicitly, leftists struggle with it, though I would imagine that's in part due to the kind of people the left attracts. Many of us, even many radical liberals, they hate this consumerism, they hate this idea that everything has a price, the dollar is this almighty idol, they hate hate hate it.

The idea that even Socialism can sell, then, is horrifying to them because leftist politics were this kind of retreat from a mass consumerism. If you want your ideology to "sell", think like a marketer.

Now, you come into my office, you say you have this great advertising campaign: it's more than a paragraph of text. I ignore it, I move on.


You come in, and you say you want the ad campaign to point people to read more serious stuff. You were close, but no cigar.


The especially awful, eldritch madness tier truth about Capitalism, is that most people don't have any clue what the hell they're buying. Let me give another example: I have a PC, I built it myself, my dad has a Macintosh. A part in my PC breaks down and I have to shell out a couple hundred for a new one. My dad's macbook breaks, and he buys another for the low low price of $4000.

And what can a macbook do? Run video games? Nope. Does it have Microsoft Office, these really useful business tools? Nada. So what good is it? By all accounts, from my perspective, it's just a useless PC.

But everytime that macbook breaks, he goes to buy a new one. He keeps coming back to it, and while he'll feed me some sales line about how "It has less viruses than Windows!" the truth is that's not why he's buying it.

Do you think any peasant in the Russian Revolution actually read Marx? Hell, do you think they were even informed about Marxism? Kerensky once remarked that when he was fleeing Moscow, he saw some graffiti on the wall that said "Down with the Jew Kerensky, long live Trotsky!"

The fact is that the "fanboys", the people who read the owner's manual, the people that obsess about the lore, they're a tiny fraction of every mass movement and would probably end up as Priests or Monks if they'd gotten into religion.

The goal isn't to get them to read more, the goal isn't even to get them to know what it is they're fighting for, the goal is to just get them to fight. Of course you'd need a party apparatus to get them fighting the right people.

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Zig Forums sells, because Zig Forums knows its audience.

What do lonely young men, new age quacks, terrorists, and flat earthers have in common? Well they're all desperately trying to fill an existential void. It's unlikely any of that new age crap actually *works*, and its unlikely that the people who buy healing crystals don't realize in the back of their mind, that it's all bullshit, but they buy it regardless because it makes them feel special. Because it is an outlet for conversation and group sentiment. Because it makes them feel like they're good at something.

I have a buddy, really right wing guy. He's told me another time–as we're both Catholic–that we "need another crusade", he never says against who or what, he never makes any allusions to it, just abstractions that he wants to "die for something" or fight for some cause. He doesn't know the first thing about who they'd be fighting, killing, and dying against, he doesn't know why we need one, he just "knows" we "need" one.

In truth, *he* needs one, because his life is boring and safe and routine: work, hang out with friends and family at his house, play video games.

Islamaphobes like to bring up that many of these terrorists are not "poor" in any sense of the world, they don't have this storybook backstory that they were driven to terrorism because of the injustices of the world stacked against them, it's because these young men, like Zig Forums, were lonely and socially alienated and bored.

So Zig Forums has the benefit of appealing to the usual things society tells us would make men happy: a house, being free of debt, having a wife and two kids, that pristine 60's sitcom family. They want to be at a healthy weight, they want to meet new people, make friends, and they want to feel like their life has meaning, that they're useful, that they're good at something, that they're really living. All these normal human desires can be twisted in anyone and make them come out as a murderous freak.

You got to realize this, and then use it as your avenue of attack, use it to sell your idea: that socialism will make you feel safe and content. Don't do this by trying to dissuade them of their culturally inherited notions, don't even bother with that, instead, talk about free time.

Think about a shift that lasts only four hours per day, you still have all your needs met, at the drop of a hat you could go to any place on earth and simply travel. You could pursue any hobby you want, and the best part is that those rich cunts that are making you feel miserable would be gone.

Sounds nice, right?

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Why is every post in here a wall of text with Reddit spacing?

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First, you need to learn how to meme.

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Not a real thing. Here's a wall of text with Reddit spacing since you enjoy that sort of thing. We understand you better than you understand us because many of us used to be like you.

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That's not Reddit spacing, that's just paragraphs and splitting specific lines.

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We don't follow Marxism based on literally any of that or base our worldview stupid petty moralisms. This sounds like a bunch of retarded shit someone who thought he used to be "far-left" because he was a liberal with hair dye wrote.

Given I used to be a Zig Forumslack, I'd say I understand you better than you think I do.

Truth be told you were, as others here say, likely never far left. Maybe you read the manifesto once, and sure, maybe you joined up with some social democrats or at most, Antifa when you were younger, but when it comes to actually grasping political ideas and concepts laid out in Marxism, it's fairly clear you haven't the slightest clue what it is. I once even spoke to a "former Marxist" who claimed he studied Marx "for years" but couldn't remember a single part of Capital.

So you posted a bunch of gunk there about phobia and nonsense, and it seems like you ignored most of my post just to whine about the term I used and try the ol' "I used to be like you" tactic, but truth be told I only used the term because it's an easy way to describe the collective of people casting Islam in society as a threat.

The truth is, my friend, is that you're most likely just a person that's been robbed of love and friendship for most of your life, you likely spend most of your waking hours online, and your own personal trepidation towards appearing weak, for one reason or another, prompts you to lash out at a supposed collective weakness in our society.

Seriously, get some help for yourself.

It's that same line of reasoning, just like real communism has never actually occurred, or that it falls every time because of outside pressure (even though susceptibility to outside force is precisely one its flaws).

Your solipsism is showing. There's a problem on much of the left where people seem to have difficulty understanding political viewpoints that differ too greatly from their own. They can't understand how a reasonable person could reach a conclusion that's contrary to their own. Obviously the person with the opposing viewpoint is either unreasonable or misinformed. It couldn't possibly be anything else.


I thought the lines had blurred together. You must be of a younger crowd. At my age, most of the far left were either assimilated into the woke Borg or fled the scene entirely. The classical Marxists being the ones who generally fled, with the people you described becoming assimilated into that authoritarian cancer. A classical Marxist is going to have a difficult time accepting the revisionism of the neo-Marxist's intersectionality, and eventually they'll hear terms like class reductionist and brocialist enough to drive them to be anti-whatever the fuck those people stand for.

I'm sorry you don't understand quite how or why someone would abandon Marxism, but it's truly liberating once you do.

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The more and more I go through my "redpill" folder, the more I realize that these are just "give-the-villain-a-speech" scenes from comic books that treat an entire spectrum of ideologies as a uniform monolith.

Bonus points for these type of screencaps if they have a "scary face" or "face of ULTIMATE despair"

I was honestly just being too lazy to type out an argument for why -phobia words and the like are nothing but political buzzwords to undermine critical opinions by placing them in a false light.

The use of -phobia words is just as intellectually lazy as posting a screencap of a Zig Forums-style comic book villain monologue.

I agree but It takes too long to say "people who hold critical opinions regarding x".

Fuck off with your thread derailment, I’ve been using imageboards since 2007 and always write with this spacing because I love clear formatting.

Right, reminds me of “Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people” by comrade Chaplin.

There are two types of liberty: going freely after your emotions and desires (libertarianism as an absolute of this) or not being a slave to your “want’s” and instead doing what’s right for a greater good of everybody. The first is childish, immature type of freedom that is rooted in greed – it brings only more problems to the world because you need to push others to get what you want. Capitalism is an economic manifestation of this type of behavior.

So do I. That was what is called a joke. Peasant.

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This is fucking retarded. Everyone could become the most annoying woke-tier Twitter socialist tomorrow, and it still wouldn't stop me from being a communist. All that matters to me is total singleness of purpose in regards to fufilling the revolutionary cause of communism. That's all that matters and ever will matter.

I have a few lib friends who like leftypol jokes such as gulags and Marx

Superman is a powerful alien with boundless compassion.

General Zod is equally powerful with military training and no scruples.

In a match pitting these two enemies, Zod wins. He doesn't care who he hurts or what tactics are off limits; while Superman fights by Marquess of Queensberry Rules. Superman tries not to injure innocent bystanders. General Zod joyfully destroys all in his path.
Chaos destroys order.

The Left is too political correct to joke about anything offensive to a marginalized group. The Right proudly proclaims their contempt for PC speech.
Jokes are greatly reduced when you must remove the topics of race, gender, religion, ableism, weightism, socioeconomics, and fill-in-the-blank group identities. Not too many safe topics left.

One subject definitely on the table is Trump. He is Hitler. That's the tiresome punchline, lament and wish. Watch late night comedy and count the references to Trump being a bigoted misogynist. The jokes are less and less funny. The audience may dutifully clap with appreciation. But the choir is a small fraction of the congregation.

I don't see an end to the PC culture that is killing humor. Hate speech, safe spaces and Rated PG Parental Guidances are designed to curtail dialogue. If you can't talk your way out of a confrontation, you may have to fight. And that's usually not funny.

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We should use porky memes tbh.

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It would be quite great if we could create a new Pepe-like figure, not just some edit of an existing meme but something new (an appropriated old cartoon character might also work) that would instantly be recognisable like Pepe and would be easily editable for different purposes

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But this is a rightwing lie.
The right just has its own version of political correctness. You can't joke about anything offensive to Christians, whites, men, straights, cops, troops, patriots, ect. If I make a joke about cops beating their wives or about fragile masculinity or about white people smelling like spoiled milk, for example, the right gets triggered. What you perceive as them having no scruples is actually just them having different sacred cows.

You may have a point on Christianity. But those other topics would get laughs just for the attempt.

How many heterosexuals does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Two.
Only two.
And only in missionary style.

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Hopefully "rich" starts at least above a few millions of dollars, otherwise top programmers and doctors in the US will hug the neoliberal world order even stronger.

Psst. Doctors in US are shareholders in the hospitals they work in, and are petite-bourgeois.

youtube.com/watch?v=AsNF7dzy3cs

At first, but once the novelty wears off the knives come out. Any comic that dedicates their routine to making fun of any of the right's sacred cows will eventually find themselves the target of a hate-following of rightwingers who are extremely offended by their jokes and try to get them shut down. There's a ton of examples of it.

this shit is embarrassing though

here's the american conservative version

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🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧rent-seekers🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧

the best worddfilter on here by far