A. Forced memes never work. Stop it, kill yourself
2. Nazis also had armbands. Does this matter? Not really. Is the media going to hype the shit out of this fact? Yes.
4. Armbands are not particularly fun. Politics are un-fun. To be spread on social media like the ice-bucket challenge or the cinnamon challenge, there has to be some element of fun to it. Nobody is going to film themselves just… wearing an armband. It's boring.
C. Class conscious in the social-media consuming first-world is low. I guarantee that unless you live in Seattle, LA, Chicago or Baltimore that you aren't going to see a single armband. If you do live there, you might see like… two. All this would serve to do is show how few commies there actually are in the wild. The "muh capitalism not perfect but it's the best there is!" meme is alive and well. A campaign of education is so much more helpful than a vanity-fad like this.
IV. An education campaign is so much more helpful than a vanity-fad like this. Just talk to some of your friends and co-workers, move them one step to the left. Don't do it awkwardly, just slip it into conversation when it's relevant. Hell, go farther. Start an Org, start a union where you work, educate normies on the economics and not the cultural-marxism (yes it's a thing, stop reeeeing) aspects. Get the people who think that socialism is just about teenage fuckheads yelling about patriarchy to realize that it's really just about keeping the value that you produce instead of giving it away.
Red armbands do literally none of that
1. This is a great way to draw undo attention to how many autistic teenagers with neon hair and snowflake genders fancy themselves "socialist". The two groups who will follow along with this are old local-organization veterans who will get no attention, and obnoxious SJWs who will be a complete shame to the movement.
six: this is a cringy alt-right esque strategy that isn't going to help anything. I keep seeing the left try to beat the alt-right at their own game when that's not going to work at all. Where they make memes and treat their ideology with irreverence and casual behaviour (not knocking it, it's a valid strategy, it's just that they have the market cornered) We should be organizing offline, being more serious, and teaching theory. Where they apologize and work with their worst actors, we should be rejecting them and shaming them. The two issues with modern socialist recruitment strategy are directionlessness (are we a protest movement? A social movement? An economic one? Do we like the SJWs or hate them? Etc) and trying to beat people at their own game (trying to out-meme Holla Forums, trying to be more aloof than the_donald, etc)
Socialism is caught in the past in many ways, I'll admit, but one way I think they should move back is to make real life communication and organization their primary mode of organization. If you want it to be "cool" to attract people, make it sexy and secretive. Make security against cointelpro, even if it's vapid, a part of your organization. Discourage online communication about org issues because of the NSA. Make socialism seem like the underground resistance movement it used to be instead of a university naval-gazing club for middle-class yuppies like it is now.
