Internet Memes

INTERNET MEMES. Since 2011, political and social activists, on the Left as well as the Right, have deployed memes as means of digital communication. Inspired by the Arab Spring, which demonstrated the efficacy of social media in spurring protest, US activists took up Facebook and Twitter to organize their constituencies. Within a short time, memes developed into a popular form of expression.

A meme typically repurposes a familiar image to project new meaning by the overlay of text that renders it satirical, parodic, or simply humorous. The term dates to 1976 when the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene and introduced the concept of “meme” as a “hijacking of the original idea.” He further compared memes to genes, underscoring their ability for replication, imitation, and virality. With the advance of the Internet in the 1990s, memes emerged as a form of expression ripe for mimicry and remixing and spread as a cultural in-joke. Thirty years later, self-defined socialist, communist, and anarchist memes played out on Facebook, Instagram, reddit, Pinterest, TikTok, and Twitter among other internet media sites.

By the second decade of the twenty-first century, no less than several dozen Facebook pages attracted thousands of followers. Among the most popular, with the largest number of “likes” were Sassy Socialist Memes, Leftist Memes for Socialist Dreams, and Socialist Meme Caucus. Of special interest were: Laborwave Politburo of Agitation and Propaganda, which capitalized on nostalgia for the Soviet past mainly by remixing classic poster imagery; and Socialist Memes for Proletarian Teens, which peaked in 2018 with 5,000 followers. Also popular was Trotskyist Memes for Gay Teens. These internet sites offered followers “stashes” for sharing memes with their own “friends.” The Facebook page Bernie Sanders’ Dank Meme Stash, created during his 2016 presidential campaign, generated more than a half-million “likes.”

Some internet sites offered templates for creating memes from stock imagery. Extraordinary popular were cat memes, which originated far earlier than the digital era. In 1906 photographer Harry Whittier Frees began to dress cats, dogs, and piglets in tiny clothes, added funny slogans, and issued his creations as novelty postcards. In the internet era, cats re-emerged as the subject humorous, and lolcat, first registered in 2006, became a wildly favorite meme. Leftists soon adapted the imagery for political purposes. Most popular was the Lenin cat, comprising a photograph of a defiant looking cat alongside an equally defiant looking Lenin, both staring upward to one side and superimposed on five-pointed gold star against a red background. A typical text overlay read: “I do not enjoy the cat communists except for Chairman Meow.” Such memes occupied the Great Socialist Cat Memes page on Facebook, created in 2017 and attracting more than 69,000 followers.

Many of these pages on social media evolved into general political messaging, mixing means with straight-forward news stories angled from the Left. Beginning in a large way in 2010, following the GOP resurgence during the Obama mid-term elections. The take-over of state houses by Republican governors and legislatures, which prompted scores of anti-labor bills and executive actions, sent activists in great numbers to the streets. The Republican stranglehold also inspired a profusion of creative and often humorous protest signs that concurrently appeared on the internet as memes. Wisconsin’s Republican governor, elected in 2010, appeared in countless memes, including a well-circulated depiction of him as a string puppet being worked by Koch Industries. The following year, Occupy Wall Street inspired a profusion of memes depicting capitalist injustice, class division, and police brutality. One of the most circulated images was of UC-Davis Police Lieutenant John Pike nonchalantly pepper-spraying seated Occupy protestors and transformed into hundreds of thematic memes, including Delacroix’s famous “Liberty Leading the People,” with Lt. Pike, cannister in hand, spraying the bare-breasted lady liberty.

In 2015, the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign took over the viral world of memes. However, none was more popular or productive than meme created from a photograph of Sanders sitting alone on a bleacher and crossing his distinctive recycled wooly mitten-clad hands during the inaugural parade of President Joe Biden. The meme raged so fast over the first weekend that Vermonters quickly posted other Sanders merchandise for sale and in five days raised $1.8 million for local charities. Sanders was pleased but added that “even this amount of money is no substitute for action by Congress,” which he promised to lead.

National and world events were so grim as the twenty-first century entered its third decade that Left memes shifted away from humor and became increasingly “dank,” that is, unpleasant, odd, or dystopic. The Facebook page Leftist Dank Meme Stash specialized in grim anti-capitalist and environmental message. For the most part, though, memes offered a combination of humor, political criticism, and do-it-yourself energy. Free for all, many of these memes found additional, non-digits formats, on the more conventional postcards, bumper stickers, posters, and t-shirts. And not a few activists reported that it was the proliferating and often didactic memes that sparked their radicalism and encouraged them to engage in the process by creating their own.

Carter, James Thom. “Why Memes Have Been an Effective Tool for Socialists and Young Leftists.” Insider, May 21, 2020.

Denisova, Anastasia. Internet Memes and Society: Social, Cultural, and Political Contexts. New York: Routledge,2019.

Mina, An Xiao. Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protests and Power. Boston: Beacon Press, 2019.

Rufecki, Zeynep. Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.