solarpunk memes

I mean Stalin Lenin and Mao aren't exactly that much better

I mean… does South Park have bad socioeconomics? Like it’s not something to base your understanding on but I don’t see it as inherently right wing.

I don't think you should be taking socio-economic understanding from the guy whose mismanagement caused/exacerbated this. And, you know, created an authoritarian state out of a revolution; that was bad too.

I definitely didn't get my understanding of socioeconomics from Mao or militaristic dictators in general. Marx? Sure. Engels? Sure. Lenin? I mean, as an example of how to use workers' rights as a veil for the promotion of authoritarianism I guess. Reading the State and Revolution is an exercise in seeing how someone can take a good idea and use it to justify terrible shit.

Personally, I take a view of Marx and Engels as descriptivists. Reading works like the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, my takeaway is that these are describing a natural process whereby hoarding of wealth and influence inevitably leads to an overthrowing of power in a cycle that culminates in capitalism and the eventual seizing of the means of production in response by workers. When I read Lenin I see an accelerationist who wants to jump start this process and doesn't care how many people suffer and die in the interem.

To me, that's a form of interference that slows progress in the long run. If you start burning rocket fuel as soon as possible before acquiring enough to reach escape velocity, all you do is cause your rocket to crash back down to Earth if it gets moving at all. Do it hard enough or enough times without a controlled landing, hitting cities full of people with the wreckage, and you're just going to make people skeptical of rocketry.

That's not to say no one should do anything to bolster workers' rights, we absolutely should. It's a natural part of the process for people to be informed by theory and try to advance things. But that's far different from purging large portions of the population in order to shift the system in the span of a single generation before there's widespread support. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is, to me, about the most anti-proletarian measure you can take. It slows things down and harms a lot of people with poor results. For evidence, literally look at Russia today. Look at the reputation communism has in Eastern Europe. Lenin and Stalin forestalled any possibility of a worker's uprising by at least a couple of generations. The same can be said of Mao.

And the reactions this post is going to get? I'm guessing many will be much more in line with the knee-jerk thoughtless mockery of South Park and Rick Sanchez than the considered and careful words of Marx and Engels. That also functions as a sort of steam valve letting off the required pressure to achieve meaningful results in favor of mindless posturing, which is why I often question its motivation. It serves the bourgeoisie, not the people.

To be even fairer, how many leftists or progressives reading this can name anybody in the photo collage besides Marx, Lenin, Mao, Castro, Malcolm X, and maybe Angela Davis, without doing an image search? And I say this as a guy who has voted progressive all my life. Too many people nowadays seem to get their "understanding" from memes.

Many Americans received their entire political discourse up until about 2016 from about an hour of programming on Comedy Central: Daily Show, Colbert Report, and South Park.

Me, meanwhile, hanging out on solarpunk memes. . .

i definitely got my understanding from a word cloud that part is spot on.

The right also has some prominent socio-economic writers such as Thomas Sowell and other writers adjacent to Austrian school thought, so it's not just media slop but also book slop.

It's just a bit unfortunate that the right doesn't read any theory, even ones that agree with their worldview, they just like talking about the authors because book = smart. Same with the left - there's lots of people who proclaim themselves to have some theoretically heavy position (e.g. communism or anarchism) then proceed to say the most stupid shit.

Lots of people in the comments saying south park shouldnt be here. i think it should be family guy. the show frequently bashes the right, and they dedicated 2 episodes to Trump entirely, not to mention its a work of Seth McFarlane and if you've seen the Orville you know he is definitely not a MAGAt.

The Right has captured a good portion of the American lumpenproletariat (excluding me).

At least that is what I think that these media choices were chosen to communicate.

And that's the reason the Right is in power. The Left needs to endeavor to be more culturally relevant. Liberals cuck us pretty hard there and then the Right threatens us for it. Gotta keep trying though.

....this isn't funny...