FOLLOWING LENIN AND STALIN THROUGH INSTAGRAM: VARIETIES OF DISSIMULATIVE PLAY IN LEFT-REVOLUTIONARY MEMES

Abstract

Politigram (also Theorygram) is a loose subculture of pseudonymous meme accounts on Instagram, focused on debating political ideologies and theories using memes. Politigram’s memes often feature political positions that are either idiosyncratic (e.g. “Feminist-Monarcho-Primitivism”) or outside the so-called Overton window of publicly acceptable political ideologies (such as Leninism or Stalinism). While a growing amount of research addresses how online spaces such as 4chan produce and popularise memes featuring far-right ideology, memes that depict left-revolutionary themes are relatively understudied. Since some authors have begun to view anonymous or pseudonymous online spaces as inherently problematic, understanding the variety of practices and content in online spaces that focus on fringe politics is important. Our analysis follows memes that feature Lenin and Stalin through a large number of Instagram accounts posting memes. We concentrate on Lenin and Stalin because they represent fringe ideologies that remain indirectly relevant in contemporary political discourse. With a visual dataset from 45,000 accounts from 2021, we study the thematic variations, boundary work and political positioning performed by Lenin and Stalin memes. We describe how requirements of theoretical literacy, militancy as a communicative value and parody of conceptions of communism drive the discussion of fringe political positions on Politigram. We conclude by contrasting memetic logics in this context with established accounts of “dissimulative identity play” in anonymous online spaces.