“What inspired us? The revolutionary spirit of the younger generation!”
I’m talking to Adryn Alvarez, a young Instagram user, about why he’s joined a group of memers attempting to unionise. Supporters of the “meme union” are mainly concerned with Instagram’s practice of censoring posts or banning accounts; they believe the platform has displayed a “pattern of undue censorship and regulation that goes beyond what their guidelines set forth”. So they’ve decided to “come together and do some collective bargaining” on the behalf of their community.
The union, which first popped up last month, is unlikely to be formally recognised, but representatives say they plan to partake in something like traditional collective bargaining processes, attempting to “negotiate better working conditions” for content creators by mass-complaining when accounts are unfairly deleted or “shadowbanned” (which means posts don’t come up on the platform’s ‘Explore’ page and can only be seen by followers). They also want a direct line to Instagram – someone within the company who specifically works to support members of their community.
Beyond its specific goals, this attempt at unionisation is just the latest example of meme-makers adopting traditional left-wing language and views. Though political memeing has been seen as primarily the remit of the right – you only have to look at now-fascist frog Pepe to understand how the right has dominated meme culture thus far – a left-wing meme community has started to surge.
Heather Woods, co-author of Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the Alt-Right, has been following this rise with interest. Much of her book focuses on the 2016 presidential election – something the Washington Post described as “the most-memed election in history.” But post-2016, Woods points to more progressive candidates using memes in their favour – New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez being the most obvious example.
Woods highlights a Twitter post in which Ocasio-Cortez responded in kind to a meme posted by Chase Bank. “Chase posted a meme about why people don’t have money – you go out to eat, you use Uber, you don’t make coffee at home. AOC dunked on them, saying that wasn’t right – it’s about inflation rates, structural inequalities, stagnant labour,” she says. “There are people on the left doing significant meme work.”
Left-wing memes have had an impact on the political landscape in the UK, too. If you’ve been to a pub, music festival or football match any time since 2017, you’ll almost certainly have heard the “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” chant. This is an example of an analogue meme (the word “meme” was originally coined by Richard Dawkins to mean a “unit of cultural transmission”, and doesn’t have to be digital). But it also bears a striking resemblance to the vocal, often gloriously rowdy left-wing movement online.
Matt Zarb-Cousin is a former spokesperson for Corbyn; he believes that memes have a vital capacity for movement building. “Where you have a critical mass of politically aligned individuals in one space, the scope for creating memes increases, as does their ability to reach mainstream discourse,” he says. He points to the example of “centrist dad”, a meme that originated on Left Twitter and ended up being reported on BBC News. “The left has become really good at communicating via social media because we’re simply much better at creating funny, engaging content,” he says. “People feel like they want to be a part of our movement as a result”.
Edmund Schluessel, a page admin for the Facebook page Socialist Meme Caucus, also points to memes’ power to build movements. The page shares memes about European and American politics; though it has no specific affiliation, it is, as the name suggests, proudly left wing. “Slogans have always been a part of connecting what people are worried about to the basic idea that capitalism is its cause,” Schluessel says. “When Lenin and the Bolsheviks said ‘Peace, Land and Bread,’ that was a meme. When [Polish socialist] Rosa Luxemburg, about to be murdered by right-wing vigilantes, said ‘I was, I am, I shall be,’ that was a meme.”
An increase in left-wing memeing could also be linked to a wider shift leftwards among young people. A recent Pew Research Centre poll found that, like millennials, Gen Zers (teens and adolescents) in the US adopt more left-leaning beliefs, with many rejecting the social conservatism and American exceptionalism of older generations.
In the UK, too, there’s been a generational shift. Youth turnout at the 2017 election was at a 25-year high, and YouGov found that the likelihood of voting Conservative was nine per cent higher for every ten years older a person was. Labour had a 54 per cent lead over the Conservatives among 18-24-year-olds.
Keir Milburn beileves the gap has emerged because of the “huge divergence in material interests between generations”. The political economy and organisation lecturer from the University of Leicester explores the shift in his new book, Generation Left. A rise in young people holding left-wing views, Milburn says, can also be associated with an attempt to “reclaim meme culture” from the right.
Many political memes rely on irony for their impact, and the wider tone of meme hotbeds such as 4chan, Twitter and Instagram is often deeply ironic. “The battle for irony is the battle to construct who’s naive,” says Milburn. “There’s a double audience in irony – this notional audience, who doesn’t understand the double meaning of what you’re saying, and the audience who both recognises the double meaning and the naive audience’s incomprehension of it. The humour comes from the ironist’s complicity with the knowing audience.” He points to American podcast Chapo Trap House as an example: “Their whole thing is constructing the right as idiots and the centre as naifs who hide behind the idea that Russia did Trump or Brexit to hide the fact that their politics are collapsing.”
He believes that the wider irony “moment” of which memes are a part fits into a broader battle for a “new political common sense”. “Throughout the 90s I was the naive one because I was a leftist – we were the butt of the joke,” he says. Those beliefs are now shifting, Milburn believes.
None of this is to say that left-wing memeing is the direct inverse of the right. Left-skewed memes may be as anarchic, ironic and nihilistic as their counterparts on the right; they might be as dismissive of traditional institutions, as gleeful in their mockery of public figures or of the processes by which politics operates altogether. But right-wing memes carry extra baggage. They often contain violent hate speech – something that is not so commonly observed on the left – and they have been cited in the manifestos of two shooters so far this year; one even referenced PewDiePie during his live-streamed murders. As Adam Serwer writes in The Atlantic, there are different stakes when it comes to right-wing memeing: “every joke, every pithy reference has the same punchline: we are going to kill you”.
Woods suggests that the left could consider using memes as part of an arsenal to combat hate speech. “How to deftly use memes is key,” she says. “Restructuring, reframing key concepts in a way that supports our ideological positions.”
“I see people every day doing really intense, heavy lifting on political issues in the meme format.”
