I was radicalized because the memes were good. Back in the days of the Chapotraphouse subreddit. That site led me the yellow Parenti, GenZedong sub, etc, and then eventually here. All because I was a dummy on Reddit just laughing at funny anti-capitalist memes.

People have the internal feelings of dislike for the system. Memes give an outlet and can point people in a direction. 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.

Furthermore, humans are curious animals by nature. When we see something we want to understand it’s origins. If we see a meme that funny but don’t quite understand it, many are driven to learn more about it. Take for instance, memes about yellow Parenti, or Michael Parenti in general. If it’s a good, funny meme, but the viewer hasn’t actually seen anything by Parenti, they might end up looking him up and watching some videos.

They are also a way to make sharing ideas and theory entertaining. Let’s be honest, reading theory is boring. It’s a slog, but if you can get a general idea, or the basics acrossed to them, then that’s usually enough. If the people want to know more then they can look into it further.

It shows people that communists aren’t overly-serious academics with a stick up their ass. Joking about stuff is how people communicate with one another. Communists need to communicate their ideas to people in ways people will understand and accept. People are going to actually consider the ideas of a group that they can joke along with rather than a group of stuffy, overly serious people allergic to humor.

Additionally, the far right has had this figured out for quite a while now, and they try to present “the left” as utterly humourless, because they know that this is one of the best ways to get people to never want to learn about a group. Socialism is a human-centric philosophy, we need to show people our humanity.