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.

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.

No.

However, that is no excuse to not do it.

No

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.

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.

It’s not everything, but I had a softspot for those Communist playlists on youtube in my SuccDem days. Let’s not forget that the IWW was making memes and songs back in the day. That Sabo Tabby is remembered to this 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.

not really but it’s fun and can do a little to spread the message

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.

Yes. Do not disempower yourselves!

Beyond the physical reality accessible to sense-data (3-space, +time, which I will not expand upon tonight), there are also etheric, astral, and higher mental planes… your thoughts matter, and your posts matter.

Your emotions (the astral) matter a great deal, and will influence people around you, or even on the other side of the world. Especially if you’re posting them: the transmitted products of your higher creative faculties, in your art, music, poetry, and memes, can be more effective than other forms of protest.

A really good post can touch the entire world, like the spark that lit the prairie, and start a sort of emotional chain reaction; truly, there are posts that change history, even in niche corners of the internet like Hexbear.

We’re still materialists, but thanks to modern mathematics, and a global communications networks deeply integrated with consciousness, the Marxist philosophical frontier has synthesized an expansive, non-Euclidean, hylic-pluralist materialism and generated new forms of praxis… Ψ is on the table, if Marxist-Leninists are willing to pick up the master’s tools, and start painting.

“at all” is low bar to clear

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.

No