Knuten Hand ✊🏽

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9nPVkpWMH9k Informative video on this topic

assume that humans are inherently irrational and can be emotionally incepted/brainwashed, then there’s no point in educating people at all because the empire will always have more resources than us and just pump out funny memes associating that “good feeling” with empire. Even worse, if people can just gobble up stuff based on vibes, why should the working class rule at all?

The answer to this problem is that humans don’t generally believe things because they are bombarded with extreme amounts of high quality propaganda, rather they accept (and seek out) the information that gives them license to feel good about themselves and the situation they are in and ignore facts that don’t fit this narrative. I’d say almost all racist/colonial narratives work by this mechanism. It’s not that people turn racist because the media paints e.g. Africans/Asians as barbarians or whatever, rather people need to justify why the Global South is still impoverished and thinking of them as inferior (a racist trope) solves the contradiction. The truth of imperial plunder leads to dangerous conclusions: “I can’t keep my cheap stuff!”, “We’ll be poor like them!”

Your brain associates the good feeling you have from a funny meme to the message within the meme. If those memes are leftist memes they will associate the left with not being so bad, good even. The same thing happens if the memes are rightoid oriented. They get pulled in the direction of the underlying message of the meme.

I don’t think this paints an accurate picture of how humans work, in fact I think it paints humans as quite irrational, almost “Pavlovian” in nature. Here’s a good article that tries to debunk the “emotional inception” theory Ads Don’t Work That Way.

Why is this distinction important? Well for one, in order for our propaganda to actually be effective, it’s important to know how and why propaganda works in general. Is agitprop just a matter of handing out good vibes or do we need to convince people in a way that resonates with their lived experience? Roderic Day has a good article that argues against “brainwashing” being a thing (which is quite related to how “emotional inception” is supposed to work).

Apart from giving us directions on what method to employ there’s also a kind of problematic view of humans that’s associated with this Pavlovian narrative. I will try to paint a picture: assume that humans are inherently irrational and can be emotionally incepted/brainwashed, then there’s no point in educating people at all because the empire will always have more resources than us and just pump out funny memes associating that “good feeling” with empire. Even worse, if people can just gobble up stuff based on vibes, why should the working class rule at all?

I’m not dissing what you said in general or insinuating that you actually believe people are fundamentally irrational, I just wanted to push back on this particular narrative because even though it seems harmless at first glance, it can do real damage (e.g. Orwell is famous for this, arguing that the working class are stupid sheeple).

In the margins, definitely, spreading memes can give license to people that it is “OK” to have these opinions because they will feel that they are not weird and have company. However I would say that for the vast majority (in the core), if they do not see how they can materially/socially benefit these kinds of memes will just get ignored or even attacked. Think about the reactionary memes that you see in the wild and I’m sure you just scoff at their stupidity or moral depravity. This is probably what the average liberal also thinks when seeing communist memes.

These are my own thoughts but I believe that the right-wing pipeline (on YouTube etc) works by slowly giving you a social context which you are afraid to lose rather than convincing you directly of the facts/opinions. I’m not sure if we should employ this same tactic mainly because it’s a brittle relationship. If someone finds another social context it is quite easy for them to de-radicalize because the main thing deciding is how they appear in front of their peers. For us, I think the answer lies in trying to base our “pipelines” in class. What this entails for the western proletariat (who gives license to empire to do whatever as long as they get some of the spoils) is a bit trickier. But in summary: I believe communist memes might weakly convince those on the margins but never the majority. If, however, their material circumstances or standing in society changes (for the worse) memes can be an effective tool which resonates and educates. The main problem regarding how receptive memes are to the majority is not the quality or quantity of memes (yet), but whether they believe/reason they could gain more from communism than the status quo.