this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2025
117 points (99.2% liked)
Chapotraphouse
14116 readers
988 users here now
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Slop posts go in c/slop. Don't post low-hanging fruit here.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
@people who are bothered by the framing here, i think we all are, but its also important to recognize your average person doesnt know what socialism is and in that framing this in great critique and an easy way to point out a problem. is it based on a false definition? sure. the premise is correct tho and thats what most people seeing this are understanding and what’s important. those people can learn what socialism is after they learn what the US military actually is.
It's an easy way to point out a problem, but it's also an easy way to feed anti-socialist brainworms.
its not antisocialist tho, its pro socialist. its just not sure what socialism is lol.
its saying people are offered “socialism” (painted as good things like housing and healthcare) to go abroad and defend capitalism
That's not the only way to interpret it. It can also be interpreted to say benefits should be taken away from them.
☠i mean anything is possible i guess
It's basically what right-libertarians believe? In their minds, government doing stuff = socialism = bad
I think it's also important to use the clues and context from the material like with literally any other piece of literature, media or literally anything else you would ever consume. Obviously, I'm not a right-libertarian.
Unironically, it is a part of it. It’s capable of showing what a worker-controlled governance could do for it’s people if it was a socialist model. There is a scientific definition of socialism and one that could be used to refer to a welfare/public service part of governance to the average American. I think this would reach them better from personal experience than a 4-page theory block condensed into a meme.
Once you are close with, are talking to, etc with a person, feel free to drop the 4-1000s of pages of theory on a governance controlled by the working class.
This reminds me of my friend when I posted a quote from a Soviet sniper saying that a "Good nazi is a dead nazi" and my friend starts going off on me about "how that's the same kinda thing fascists say". Literally use the context.
If you expect normies to use context clues to sus out the true meaning of your memes you aren't going to reach them, they're just going to interpret it through the dominant ideology and reach right-wing conclusions. They'll conclude that it's unfair that veterans get to have benefits and think we should take those benefits away from them or that everyone should be forced to serve in the military so that they can all get healthcare. They aren't going to make a leftist critique and jump to the idea that everyone could have healthcare, they're just going to feed their brainworms and metabolize this meme from the right.
That doesn't mean we need our memes to be 4-page commie blocks of text, we just need to be careful is all I'm saying.
That isn't really what has happened on the page though. Instead people look at the meme, invest further or get curious on the page and learn more about what the meaning actually is. People don't take one look at this meme and start metabolizing Starship Troopers or neoliberal austerity as their ideology. It's appealing to nostalgia.
Can you explain what you mean by "the page" actually? Is that whatever leftistgamermemes is? I'm just speculating based on pessimism and vibes, maybe this performs better in the real world than I expect.
It's leftistgamermemes on both fedbook and fedgram. Not sure if they are on other platforms but I mentioned it in the description.
Yeah, I guess if this is posted to a lefty meme page it's going to have the intended reception.
I'll just say I do not think this would work the same if it was posted outside of an explicitly left space.
sure, to you, because it's not playing on your nostalgia. Works just fine on their own however.
Unironically, it is a part of it. It’s capable of showing what a worker-controlled governance could do for it’s people if it was a socialist model. There is a scientific definition of socialism and one that could be used to refer to a welfare/public service part of governance to the average American.
They'd be more receptive to this message than me sitting there and explaining 50 pages of theory on a 4-page meme. There is a reason the channel/page that makes these is popular.
giving more people a wrong definition of socialism is definitely not helpful
they already have the wrong definition of socialism. they just learned a new perspective about capitalism tho. you didn't always know the correct definition of socialism. seeing a meme on the internet doesn't grant an eternal curse on you that disallows you from ever learning what the correct definition of socialism is
But why would you take your extremely limited audience with a passing viewer as a chance to reinforce a nonsense definition when it's genuinely one of the core difficulties socialism faces that people are systematically misinformed on its basic nature? Why assume that they'll have the inclination to unlearn this false definition that we are contributing to for the sake of this useless "anti-capitalist" gesture? Have we not seen the ideological capture of places like antiwork that failed to have any sort of positive alternative and end up just becoming, to be generous, socdem liberalism?
The very first thing that a socialist should do is try to explain, even in the most glancing terms, what socialism is, and that will on average get more interest and more productive engagement than another "capitalism bad :P" post to go on the pile of decades of liberals nebulously complaining about capitalism.
What part of the meme that I didn't create that is a screenshot of an old video-game that already misquotes the games themselves do I push the entire copied text of Grundrisse?
Then it would finally be an acceptable leftist meme. There's a minimum word count to these things you know!
I think the original framing and context is that soldiers are offered the benefits that would be offered to all the workers under a socialist governance but instead are offered those "socialist" benefits in exchange for service to enforcing the will of capital.
That isn't wrong, it isn't "incorrect" to say that it is "socialism" even if it isn't scientifically accurate to the word or our niche/specific political definitions. This would matter more on say, my home-instance Lemmygrad then a left-unity board especially when a lot of newer folks are on here. Words can have multiple meanings and those inflections can shift based on the context they're being used. More importantly, I think people hand-wringing and griping about it have more of an issue with puritanism with a bit of a lack of comprehension of context speaking that it's quite easy to just click on a user's profile and take a bit of a deeper dive. In fairness, I've done it myself with being too hasty. Some things I learned while here, I suppose.
In another meme made by the same creator, it's clear what they meant. Not "socialism is when government does stuff" but clearly capitalists and the ones they choose from political will enjoy the benefits we all would under socialist economy. Pretty clear.