askchapo

If posting wasn't praxis, Re**it wouldn't have nuked Chapo.

It boosts morale

Who knows? It probably doesn't hurt, and propaganda works; Folks will see this shit, get pissed off about it, go read about what happened so they can epicly own a commie, and end up picking up The Jakarta Method or something.

yes

It's been ages since I read about this, so all the names have been forgotten. Sadly this turns a true tale into a moralising myth, but please listen anyway.
In the 90's a neo-nazi movement robbed a bunch of banks in the us. The movement used this money to fund other movements and minor terrorist actions. Before the group got busted, one of its members donated 10.000$ to some rotten little alt-right rat we all know of today. The purpose of this donation? To set up a solid internet connection, give them a good computer, and make them go online and spread right-wing agitprop.
Thru the years the operation has expanded, gotten more complex and - some would say - effective. Right wing memes and terminology have become the norm.
No other group noticed the potential of the internet to spread propaganda peer-to-peer as early as the Nazis did, and that can be felt.

Is that little endowment the reason for racism online? Of course not! Did it have a meaningful impact? Maybe. At that question we are moreso discussing wether agitprop works at all.
I believe it does.
Was that 10.000$ donation the best use of that money? I believe that at the the time, it was a very good investment. Though I doubt I would think so if that was all they'd donated to.

Memes are, in some sick sense of the word, culture. Culture shapes the way we perceive and interact with the world, and so making culture can help push people in one direction or another (24Hours got quoted by lawmakers to justify torture for a quick example).
However it is not the artists of the world that are currently fighting the IOF. It is not artists making shells, smuggling arms and aid into Gaza. It is not artists that turned a desert into a forest in China. It is not artists that developed Cubas Healthcare or taught kids to read.
So to answer your question: Yes they do help, but how helpful they are depends on the time and the place, and if you ask me, these days there's much more directly helpful stuff able to be done by most. We should not give up discourse to the right, so that they can shape the story how they want, but much more importantly we should not give up the real world

Yes.

Memes are how ideas are normalised now, like it or not. Communities like /r/historymemes have done more to damage communists than anything else in the last 30 years. But by the same token, r/cth and subsequent spaces that became its children like genzedong and hexbear have created tens of thousands of new communists.

Everyone here says only material conditions convert someone to communism but the truth is that material conditions only create the material basis for someone to be receptive to communism. Something still has to reach them.

The online space has significantly more capability to reach and educate people than any other space. Converting people from the online space into offline contributions is a step the movement hasn't mastered yet, but it will get better at it.

I thought we all became communists thanks to memes. I did

I think in the technical sense it actually does, in that it provides a low-stakes entry point for radicalization.

However, I think making and sharing memes and content also has the insidious effect of feeling like productive work and can give people a false sense of satisfaction that they're part of a left movement when in fact they've never left their house.

I think that's why so many people here gave a knee-jerk response to answer "no", despite many being radicalized by people sharing this same content. It is technically true that it matters, but if that's all you do then you're doing so little as to round out down to zero.

Yes. If someone can make you laugh over theoretically sacred subjects (9/11, Hillary getting rekt by Trump, Jan 6, etc,etc), then memes might trigger introspection. 8-10 years ago (maybe more?) I knew I was done with Western-styled, imperialistic politics but I pretty much chuckled my way into seeing things from an ML perspective, which forced me to read theory and rethink nearly everything.

Posting is praxis.

Frankly, if it keeps more proletarians from dying deaths of despair, it's worthwhile for that alone. Before we can win the world, we must stay alive another day.

Can you build a car without a chassis? No. But if you have a chassis and nothing else, all you have is a piece of useless metal.

Memes, social media, forums, podcasts, videos… this is how you reach a lot of people (but not everyone) in 2023. It’s an important part of building a movement. But it’s just one part that’s useless unless combined with the other parts - organizing, understanding theory, applying both those to local conditions, etc etc.

We need to occupy online spaces, because otherwise all that other people will see are lib and reactionary memes. It might sound ridiculous, but we shouldn't dismiss things like that as just silly jokes, think of it as a form of propaganda and of normalizing/spreading leftist ideas to the public consciousness. I think we can all remember how in 2016 memes turned a bunch of teenagers into fascists. Obviously, you should also organize irl, but posting is not entirely useless.

In this essay, I will

Permanently Deleted

A meme brought me to the Chapo subreddit which pushed me left. Odds are I would have turned left from another path, but I think sharing leftist content has some value.

Yes. It normalizes our opinions, which is step one to convincing people to go left.

I would think it helps. The more I've been exposed to ML ideals through instagram and such, the more I've been pulled towards it. Wouldn't it count as agitprop, anyway? May not be the most effective action but wouldn't say it's completely useless.

It’s agitprop, not organizing.

Everybody learns about communism from passionate writers so everyone wants to emulate them. Organizing is hard work and no one learned from it so they don’t wanna do it.

No.

However, that is no excuse to not do it.

Not really.

It radicalizes people but without giving them the tools to understand and resolve the contradictions of capitalism, which is why you see so much pessimism among the online left, or worse, misplaced and blind optimism.

It prioritizes attachment to aesthetics over giving political education to the masses who needed them, which is why you see so many people from the online left regurgitating words they’ve heard of but only a shallow grasp, if not a distorted understanding, of the core principles of Marxism.

For example, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard people say “revolutionary defeatism” only to find out that they apply it to the current events in the most shallow manner possible. They don’t understand why Lenin deemed it necessary in 1915, not understanding the context of World War I and its particular role in resolving the contradictions during Lenin’s time. If you do not have a clear understanding of why and how something actually works, then it becomes difficult to apply it to a scenario that is very different from when it was initially conceptualized/applied.

Don’t get me wrong, propaganda and agitation are important to the communist movement, but they operate alongside and as part of a robust political education program delivered to the masses.

This is evident in the current state of the Western left today, which is reduced to memes like “Communism will win!” but they don’t have any strategy to achieve that. You have an entire generation of young leftists that are radicalized from online memes, but they never learned the proper tools and knowledge to form their analyses and formulate a path forward.

Yes but not as much as you might be inclined to think.

Creating positive sentiment towards communism via jokes and pictures is probably the least impactful and the most oriented towards propagandising the base.

Memes have a wider reach than articles but they vary depending on the message and virality etc. It's an old format but doing the "Did you know that an aerospace engineer changed the face of modern surgery using applied aerospace technology? Google 'Operation Aerodynamic'" style of meme drives a significant amount of awareness and engagement with the content, as an example here.

Sharing articles is more impactful because it helps develop awareness and knowledge but it tends to have less reach and much less virality.

Ultimately my position is that the internet is where praxis goes to die. There can be good groundwork to lay the foundations for the development of positive sentiment towards communism and ideological development but there's no substitute for reading actual theory and irl organising.

Idk if it helps the movement but I do use spaces like this to physically help trans people IRL because we tend to gravitate to spaces like this. To the point that I feel like the site is a bit useless for every other purpose

"at all" is low bar to clear

I don't think it does, but I guess if you don't have much scope to engage in any action irl, it's far from the worst thing that you can do with your time. That's what I tell myself anyway

Yes, up to a point of saturation. Building class consciousness can help redirect potential right-wingers away from thinking their woes come from Jews and women, but that's largely where the effectiveness of agitprop ends in the absence of organizing. What little I've read suggests that mass political education is inseparable from building dual power, and can only meaningfully advance when paired with material gains for the people who, by and large, have more immediate concerns than studying philosophy

I think it is a needed step towards people getting rid of brainworms and starting on a path of real organizing, theory and the material part. I can only speak about this anecdotally, but in my immediate circle in a society that is very hostile to communism I have witnessed several people go down the rabbit hole of deprogramming and it has started from these memes and articles every time. And eventually leads to real organizing. Not for everyone, but for some. In general it makes the attitude towards communist ideas less hostile again, or I think it can do at least that.

The Internet as a new tool of information sharing is powerful and I also think this explains the widespread moral panic about mis-/disinformation in Western media and states and also the capitalist drive to use of LLMs to fill the internet with actual bs to disarm this information in our current time. In a way capitalism has created the tool of its own demise by going down the road of globalism. This is why they want to shut it down and put us back in the national/Western bubbles.

Looking at my information space in the 80s, 90s and even 00s it was so wildly different that it's hard to put into words now. Finding the kind of content and agitprop I can easily find now would have been very hard unless I would be connected to someone who is already there. In a place like this, that would have been very unlikely to ever happen. Communism here has for decades been existing on the very edges of society with small paper magazines that have a circulation of 100 people. Without these memes I likely would not be here nor would I be looking to join a communist party in my country.

The road from starting to ask questions to being actually organizing in the world can take years, everyone goes over a kind of process of deprogramming that does not happen over night. It can start from a good meme when conditions are right and looking at the world it seems like people are pretty ready for a counterstory. This space can also be filled with reactionary and populist ideas and it already has, so we better fill it with ideas of communism instead. Saying none of this matters is like saying what the mainstream media says doesn't matter, yet we see how much it does control the masses every day of our lives.

I am personally assessing how far folks are on this spectrum on their current takes on things like China, the USSR and Ukraine for example. I for one think that if the curiosity and content is there, this will have material consequences in the world in the long run. It can also mainstream communism which to me matters.

I could not imagine a channel like Second Thought existing even five years ago with the kind of views it gets. And being that "ok" to talk about in so called mainstream spaces. This does make the right kind of people think about their position and what they "know" about history and the world. If nobody voices the counterstories, how can they manifest into anything? And it needs to be voiced to enough people, online spaces are great for that.

Sharing this stuff internally on hexbear can be cathartic.

Yes of course, if not for them I'd have never joined the party.

However certainly there are probably better things you could do, but if you're gonna be online anyway....

Articles yes, everything else probably not

Spreading propaganda is always good. Idk how much good information you can convey with memes though

No

I don't know that you should be conflating articles with the rest of that. I am in favor of sharing all kind of communist content, and sharing a meme can if nothing else help someone on a personal level by making them feel seen, but sharing articles (if they're decent ones) means trying to get people to engage with longer form text that goes into a certain level of depth about a specific issue. That is for sure helpful, regardless of where you stand on memes, pictures and jokes.

It doesnt not help

No