Socialism
Socialism is when the Government does stuff. When the government does everything, it's Communism. It's where we get cool Stalin memes and pictures of workers hitting steel beams with hammers. Socialism also has something vaguely to do with the labor movement and the abolition of present-day society, but I'm not sure what.
Online leftists are a very diverse group, some posting cringe at an astounding rate, with others being very chill. Some of them run this place.
Daddy Marx
Back in the 1840s, a guy named Karl Marx and his sugar daddy Friedrich Engels cooked up this theory that the working class was uniquely positioned to take power and abolish class society entirely. Crazy stuff. They published a manifesto which would eventually become a favored item of edgy middle-schoolers. They'd also go on to write a whole bunch of other stuff that people will link to you on marxists.org to win online arguments.
Marx's greatest work would be Das Kapital (or just Das), a book that he would procrastinate on and never finish. Only three volumes were published, and they're fucking tomes. Communists will sometimes make a bunch of weird linen jokes to indicate to the people around them that they've read halfway through the first chapter of the first volume. Das is subtitled 'a critique of political economy' and I'm not sure quite what that means but I think it means that the book is about economics.
Fun Marxist Phrases
Impress those around you by randomly throwing these words into a conversation!
| Communist Word | Meaning in English |
|---|---|
| Proletariat | Buff guys who wear flat caps. |
| Bourgeoisie | Discord admins. |
| Petite-Bourgeoise | Short discord admins. |
| Means of Production | Resource buildings in an RTS. |
| Surplus Value | Income tax. |
| Rate of Profit | The level of stonks. |
| Commodity Fetishism | A kind of fetish porn about money. |
| Dialectics | Confuse your friends! |
| Dialectical Materialism | Ok now you're just making shit up. |
| State | One of 50 American regions. |
| Proletarian Dictatorship | Oceania from Orwell's 1984. |
The USSR
A couple decades later this guy Lenin would lead a communist revolution in Russia. The communist Bolsheviks would take control and establish the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or USSR. When Lenin croaked, Stalin took power and began manipulating the Soviets into doing what he said using his mustache. He would do battle with the Nazis as chronicled in the game Company of Heroes. After World War Two, the USSR became one of America's worst enemies and you know what I'm not writing a history of the Cold War that's someone else's job.
Since the USSR was located in the same place as the old Russian Empire, Communism is seen as heavily Russian. From slav-squatting Russiaboo teenagers to Ukraine Flag Twitter, a lot of people think that Communism is inherently linked to Russian culture. This leads to a lot of dumb posts but can also be funny. Я о́чень рад, ведь я, наконе́ц, возвраща́юсь домо́й!
The USSR is long gone but lives on in our hearts through bad memes and obscure Marxist-Leninist sects. Its iconography mostly involves overusing the color red, pictures of Stalin, dressing warmly, and putting little pictures of stars and tools on everything. Examples of the USSR's imprint on Reconstruction Era include red army choir music, a couple Communist civ nations including the CSSR and CRS, and the numerous custom emojis which are literally just hammers and sickles. You have to admit that it's a pretty fun aesthetic, although drinking too much of the Soviet coolaid makes you a tankie.
The Bernie Campaign
In 2016 a left-wing candidate Bernie Sanders attempted to secure the presidential nomination for the Democratic party. He ate shit and lost. Then he did the same shit again in 2020. Despite having literally zero effect on actual government, he would end up getting a lot of young leftists into politics. The Democratic Socialists of America, previously a small organization of geriatric liberals, would be flooded by radlib college students who post on left-wing twitter and listen to Chapo Trap House. This new wave of members would go on to start a bunch new factions within the organization, including the DSA Communist Caucus and DSA Libertarian Socialist Caucus. Funnily enough, this makes the DSA more radical than the Communist Party USA, a remnant from the 30s which mostly just endorses Democrats.
