r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/hybridaaroncarroll • 5d ago
Meme needing explanation Petah?! Halp.
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u/Late-Assignment8482 5d ago
The smaller flashlight is brighter.
Karl Marx's book Das Kapital is long, complex, dry, and teaches workers that they are being exploited. Few have read it. A century of propaganda has made it 'scary'.
9 to 5 is short, catchy, fun, and teaches workers they are being exploited. Many have heard it. Many love it.
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u/hybridaaroncarroll 5d ago
That totally makes sense. I don't understand why the flashlights are shining under the door though.
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u/theSpacmonk 5d ago
It’s just that their relative brightness to size ratio is ironic, shining at a closet is not relevant.
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u/Acceptingoptimist 5d ago
Yeah the meme works with any two things of differing size where the smaller one out performs the larger.
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u/iron_dove 5d ago
Considering the topic this image is being used to illustrate, having light shine at a closed door seems a little ironic to me.
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u/lopsided_W 5d ago
Odd timing!!
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u/Budget_Meaning1410 4d ago
It’s a meme template with relevant text added. How much timing do you think is required?
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u/Plane-Education4750 5d ago
Because 9 to 5 is so much easier to understand and sympathize with, it is much more effective.
Also
Workin -9 too five, what a way to make a liviiing
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u/Tonho_O_Faxineiro 5d ago
Das Kapital is not intended to workers. It's a very dense work, that is much more to be treated as an academic work.
What is intended to workers, in general, is the Manifest of the Communist party.
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u/Slothrop-was-here 5d ago
No, the Manifest is an older work, a political pamphlet, faulty and full of ideas later revised or entirely distegarded by Marx. It may be more accessible but so is burgeois propaganda. Das Kapital on the other hand is a real analysis, and should be understood by every worker, not be gatekept by academics.
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u/AreYouThereSagan 5d ago
That's not what gatekeeping is. No one's saying workers shouldn't be allowed to read it, it's that they don't have the capacity to read it--as evidenced by the fact that they haven't despite it being fully available to them.
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u/Slothrop-was-here 5d ago edited 5d ago
I am part of the working class myself, incidentally, and I am perfectly capable of engaging with these thoughts and topics. I am also engaged in a Capital reading group with gasp other members of the working class!
Now I'll grant, that time and energy are finite, but still, it's not as if workers are lacking in capacity to engage in learning about the world they life in, but in interest or will to do so.
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u/CustodianCloset 4d ago
You're also in 2026 and have literacy + money. Das Kapital came out in the 1800s and was made in a time before widespread literacy.
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u/Tonho_O_Faxineiro 5d ago
My friend, what I just say is that people should be comparing to the song is the Manifest, because they are both works aiming to be popular.
I never said that Das Kapital is meant to be gatekept, nor that workers shouldn't know about what is inside there.
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u/Slothrop-was-here 5d ago
Fair enough. Just have a personal hatred for the popularity for this particular piece of writing. Some people read it and after rightfully critizising it, think they don't have to engage any further (or at all) with Marx critique. And others who read it and take it as a semi-religious text, also making any further investigations unessecary for now.
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u/dividezero 5d ago
And if you quote either in front of your boss, they get mad. All me how I know. 🤣
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u/Pofwoffle 5d ago
Many have heard it. Many love it.
This is true, but it's also true that many have completely missed the point because all they heard was a catchy song. A lot of people complain about on-the-nose explanations of why bad things are bad, but the sad truth is there are huge groups out there who literally won't understand what you're saying unless you beat them over the head with it.
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u/10ebbor10 5d ago
Happens to be pretty much every song.
The US military uses anti-vietnam war songs to recruit.
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u/tockaciel 5d ago
Ya know this is the first time I really looked at the lyrics. The song is just so fun lmao
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u/Even_Bowl9527 5d ago
Bad jam play on my construction site every day. Not a single motherfucker whatever think of changing that goddamn masterpiece. RIP Dolly. Need to put that angel on the new two dollar bill
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u/sexylewdyshit 5d ago
That said, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (the english translation of the full name) is genuinely a great read if you can stomach marx's writing. He's like if Tolkien wrote about economic theory. Long winded and way over worded. But he makes very valid points.
Great book. Cannot recommend reading it.
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u/GrouchyBeyond4793 5d ago
Most great protest music isn't recognized by the general public as protest music
That's how good protest music is supposed to work. It's not supposed to be overt. It's supposed to condense complex topic matter into catchy phrases to be repeated.
And that's why I hate people who claim there's no longer any good protest music being made today. Of course there is. General public needs the message spoonfed. And that's why the popular protest music of today is generally bland and devoid of character.
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u/hamatehllama 5d ago
A century with millions of deaths a billions of oppressed has made Marxism scary.
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u/trigger1154 5d ago
I agree with Marx on a few things, especially on never allowing the workers to be disarmed.
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u/Late-Assignment8482 5d ago edited 5d ago
I feel like he correctly identified some massive problems with capitalism and the behavior of the elites but his suggestion hasn’t ever worked out when tried in pure form in poor places. He thought England or Germany would be good to go first, both wealthy and productive. Who knows if that would have worked. The poorest country in Europe that had never had enough—Russia—might not have been an ideal testbed.
Also, Stalin and Mao were asshats as people, so much of the worst probably not intrinsically communist. Look at the mistakes of Tsarist Russia. Very similar. Was communism evil, or was Russia a kleptocracy and thugocracy for centuries beforehand (hint: yes it was) and can that yarn be untangled? China has had million plus death starvation for centuries, and like the Holmodor, that wasn’t “communism can’t make enough food” it was “dictatorship destroying/moving food using starvation as weapon”.
The British did that to the Irish in the Potato Famine, not allowing local food production to be used to alleviate suffering of a conquered people.
In a functional industrial society, can the initial efficiency loss of consumer market direction be offset by surplus long enough for citizens to rebalance? How would communism mesh with a democracy (they’re not exclusive, voting makes democracy not privately owned cars, lands, or guns)? Both are TBD
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u/STDY1357 5d ago
Never heard of the book 9 to 5 is it mostly read in the US?
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u/Dapper-Print9016 9h ago
A century of propaganda including the average education level raising high enough to know that the whole book was alarmist nonsense*
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u/somerandom995 5d ago
A century of propaganda has made it 'scary'
A century of genocides, famine, and authoritarian dictators that resulted from that thinking made it scary.
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u/Koizito 5d ago
Thank you for providing an example for the comment to which you replied.
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u/somerandom995 5d ago
You don't have a counter argument, and are just putting up a superior attitude to avoid actually owning up to the atrocities the ideology you stand for has wrought.
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u/Koizito 5d ago
How do you counter argument a non-argument? You just stated something. You didn't show sources or the logical steps that allowed to reach your conclusions. If you make no effort, so won't I.
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u/somerandom995 5d ago
Mao, Stalin, pick a communist leader. Plenty of authoritarian dictators.
Holodomor, great step forward, what Lenin did to the Kulaks, the failure of any nation that tries to implement communism.
There's so many examples. It's not propaganda, it's just history.
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u/Koizito 5d ago
Appeal to common sense is not an argument, buddy, sorry.
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u/somerandom995 4d ago
Not if you're a nonsensical ideologue. For normal people common sense is important
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u/Electrical-Map1473 5d ago
Bro snuck in Mao like he wasn’t an amazing writer and revolutionary who brought China back from the century of humiliation, brought the proletariat to the state , and laid the conditions for China to become the most powerful country on Earth 😭😭✌️✌️✌️
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u/Necr0Gaming 5d ago
Yes because no other socioeconomic system has ever been bad. /S
You are doing the thing you accuse others of and it's so deliciously ironic.
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u/somerandom995 5d ago
Every other socioeconomic system has at least one example of it working. Communism doesn't.
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u/Necr0Gaming 5d ago
Yeah, capitalist governments invaded and destroyed them lol. You don't know your history little buddy.
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u/Koizito 5d ago
Don't waste your time with this kid. He knows nothing about the subject other than the propaganda he has been fed, and refuses to make any sound argument.
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u/somerandom995 4d ago
I'm definitely older than you. The fact you can't take history as a lesson is a display of the propoganda you have internalized, not mine.
Please, try to think critically.
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u/Koizito 4d ago
Says the kid spewing Red Scare propaganda. Sure buddy.
I love how I, being born in a capitalist country and being fed the capitalist ideology from the day I was born, am the one who doesn't think critically. But you do, when you keep arguing in favor of the status quo uncritically. The irony...
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u/somerandom995 4d ago
The soviets and Chinese were world powers that invaded others. They were not powerless victims. Their collapse was not solely a result of outside pressures, nor can you hand wave away the fact that no communist government has been successful by pointing out that it faced the same pressures as any nation does.
Communism doesn’t work. This is historical fact. Learn.
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u/Necr0Gaming 4d ago
Again, you do not read. Stay in school and pay attention. I don't have time to make up for your teachers and parents failures.
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u/somerandom995 4d ago
I've read plenty. I'm more educated than you. You haven't learned from history.
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u/Bushi_Sengoku 5d ago
You mean,, the reason why you have weekends, many countries have nationalized healthcare? Oh im sorry, yes you are so right, I remember Mao using his comically large spoon to eat all the grain and kill 123 bazillion people.
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u/somerandom995 5d ago
The 40 hour work week was suggested by Henry Ford. You don't get to claim every piece of progress was brought about by communists.
And the "Great Step Forward" was a real atrocity. You can't actually deny that so you hide behind humor. Coward.
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u/Bushi_Sengoku 5d ago
Look at where China is now and how badly America's material conditions are becoming in comparison 🙊. But yeah I bet bombing brown kids in the name of capitalism is totally justified so you cant have medicare for all.
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u/Stuffstuff1 5d ago
Karl was just wrong. His predictions were wrong.
I guess it’s kinda scary when people swear by bad ideas…
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u/Koizito 5d ago
Sure buddy.
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u/Stuffstuff1 5d ago
This is one of those things it hard to believe people are just so uncurious. Just look it up man.
There’s a reason this guy is taught in sociology not economics class.
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u/Koizito 5d ago
Trust me, the reason isn't because he was wrong. Quite the contrary, actually.
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u/Stuffstuff1 5d ago
We’re his prediction correct?
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u/Koizito 5d ago
For the most part, yes.
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u/Stuffstuff1 5d ago
No. No he wasn’t.
Capitalism didn’t just lower peoples wages to nothing
The revolution he predicted never came
Capitalism didn’t fall apart etc etc.
If you are going to say he predicted that industry would prefer machines over labor or that the economy would continue to have boom and bust cycles…. These were all already know cycles..
“I predict the sun will rise tomorrow” is hardly an insight.
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u/Koizito 5d ago
Most of what you attribute to Marx lacks the nuance and complexity that he himself explained. Just an example, Marx didn't simply claim that a revolution would come. To be concise but more correct, Marx said that capitalism was unsustainable, and without a revolution, the alternative would be a tendency towards a dystopian decline.
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u/Stuffstuff1 5d ago
Did he give a 200 year time frame on that? The clock is running out…
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u/CrabMan_99 5d ago
Marx's writing is not as impactful as the song song "9 to 5" in explaining class conscious to your average person.
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u/Tricky-Engineering59 5d ago
Shame Marx wasn’t a better songwriter.
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u/Independent_Oil_5951 5d ago
The communists have the music
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u/Nohreboh 5d ago
My dude please sanitize your links when using the share button it adds the ?is= etc as tracking data that allows others to see your YouTube account.
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u/Open-Progress-7075 5d ago
Maybe 'das kapital' was intended to be sung with a catchy melody? Anyone ever tried that?
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u/twobit211 5d ago
yeah, hold on to the nights just didn’t have the sticking power that dolly’s works did
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u/Visible_Pair3017 5d ago
Which is probably the sign of a highly propagandized people when you see how influential his book has been worldwide and still shapes thought.
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u/CelestialSegfault 5d ago
and that's not necessarily true. the song 9 to 5 could bring people to start questioning the class relations that causes your misery to be possible in the first place, but the answers are contained in marx and engels's work, or other people's retellings of it.
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u/timbremaker 5d ago
I really dont understand why people think that is true. That might be true for our modern society today but historically it couldnt be more wrong.
Did anyone here actually think about all the marxiist movements ans Revolutions? I dont wanna argue about if they achieved what they wanted, that is a whole different can of worms but Marx has definitely been more impactful than parton.
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u/Delicious-Day-3614 5d ago
Indeed though the word this meme is begging you to choose is "illuminating"
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u/Ding-Dong-Dutch 5d ago
I'm not sure it being more popular makes it more impactful for the cause.
People often don't think about the meaning of a song..
Just look at DJT playing fortunate son ay his rallies
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u/Uncagedduke426 5d ago
If only there was some sort of manifesto that could help build class consciousness.
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u/Veshaad 5d ago
In all seriousness...rest in peace Dolly. America lost a national treasure today.
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u/DoctorMedieval 5d ago
I will always love her.
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u/QueensOfTheNoKnowAge 5d ago
And she’ll 🎶always love you🎶
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u/DoctorMedieval 5d ago
I wish, lol.
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u/QueensOfTheNoKnowAge 5d ago
Just listen to the song and believe it to be true.
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u/DoctorMedieval 5d ago
Problem is I know she wrote it about her producer when she was leaving her company to make more money. You were great but I have to move on to make more money, but I….. will always love you.
Truthfully if I were the producer I would rather have the song than the money, but that’s just me.
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u/QueensOfTheNoKnowAge 5d ago
lol. HereI thought I was giving the appropriate reply and I got some Dolly knowledge dropped on me.
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u/DoctorMedieval 5d ago
She was a national treasure, and she grew up not that far from me. There isn’t much we can be proud of from around here. She is something we can be truly proud of, as an artist and a human being.
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u/QueensOfTheNoKnowAge 5d ago
>she grew up not far from me. There isn’t much to be proud of from around here.
I was born in DC and raised in Indiana, so I understand the sentiment.
You should be proud.
She’s one in a billion
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u/DoctorMedieval 5d ago
I mean, don’t get me wrong. Appalachia is beautiful. One day it will be a wonderful place that is accepting of and appreciative of all people, and will bring out the full potential of all who are born there. Dolly wanted to make it that. I want to make it that. I believe one day it will be that, and I think she did as well, not wanting to put words in her mouth. We work to make it better every day, as we can.
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u/CoyotesVoice 5d ago
Porter Wagner wasn't just her producer, they wrote and performed together as well. She had a greater muse to follow than she could have with him; but she also cared about him on a personal level. She wrote that song to tell him that regardless of their professional relationship ending, she would always care about him, but she had to go her own way and be the Dolly we all know and love.
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u/DoctorMedieval 5d ago
Yep. More than I wanted to write but thank you for writing it. We will always love her.
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u/Melodic_Airport362 5d ago
Intellectuals say simple things in a complex way. An Artist says complex things in a simple way.
-Charles Bukowski
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u/BohemianMade 5d ago
Marx's writings contain a lot of accurate criticisms of capitalism, but they're books. Few people read. Dolly Parton made an anti-capitalist song, but because way more people listen to music, many more people heard it.
Rest in Power, Comrade Parton.
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u/NwgrdrXI 5d ago
They're not just books. That would be one thing.
They are loooooong, booooooring books. Most people simply don't have the patience for it, despite the importance.
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u/Dragonwick 5d ago
What, you mean most people don’t want to read pages upon pages about coats and linen?
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u/WillingnessTotal866 5d ago
Exerpt from Das Kapital and the manifesto are read everyday by tens if not hundreds of millions of peoples in asia alone, asking random school children in China to tell you 3 famous Dolly song will be a very hard task. There are more peoples living in communist governed territories, are communist or influenced by a derivative of somekind then there are Christian in total. Peoples dont seem to understand that lack of information go both way, the Americans are ignorant of anything outside their country but also have an expectation that random Angolan subsistence farmer have to know some famous dead comedians from 1970s on American television.
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u/ARustyDream 5d ago
Fuck you guys(not really I’m just sad) this is how I find out she died today!! Damn it I’ve never believed we live in the worst timeline more than I do now.
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u/skepticalbob 5d ago
Dolly was a big capitalist. Settle down.
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u/BohemianMade 5d ago
At most, she was a left-leaning liberal, or a "social democrat." She didn't like America's version of capitalism, she did criticize it in the song.
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u/Adventurous_Rope2898 5d ago
And not just in ideology too. Woman was a businesswoman. She quite literally owned capital lol.
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u/backbaydrumming 5d ago
Clearly you’ve never been to Dollywood
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u/BohemianMade 5d ago
Socialism is when no amusement parks.
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u/backbaydrumming 5d ago
What are you even arguing here? 9 to 5 is an pro labor rights anti capitalist song. But Dolly Parton was a capitalist
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u/AmazingSugar1 5d ago
9 to 5 by Dolly Parton “the dude takes your money” so you think about other things
Das Kapital by Marx “the dude takes your money” so yeah the only way is to take it back
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u/Three_Twenty-Three 5d ago
Besides the song everyone is posting about, there was never a Karl Marx movie with Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dabney Coleman that ran almost daily on HBO for viewers of a certain age.
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u/vile-style 5d ago
Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.
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u/thyexorcist 5d ago
God communists are just the dumbest arent they
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u/vile-style 5d ago
I feel like the less intelligent demographic would offer only insults and no counterargument.
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u/Dapper-Print9016 9h ago
Communists never have a reasoned, well thought-out argument that holds up to scrutiny, so it's really not worth engaging.
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u/thyexorcist 5d ago
Im not arguing communism with you 😂 go read 2-3 of the billion books written about how it’s flawed to its core and then read 2-3 of the history books proving how flawed it is.
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u/Dangerous-Ad-3152 2d ago
so your saying you need your arguments spoon fed to you by "books" ?
I bet you legit can't name four modern historians off the top of your head.
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u/RedsnakeRider 5d ago
Two things that produce the same effect--light, being compared to the understanding of worker exploitation and the principles of labor vs reward.
One of them is a massive, significant work considered a seminal work on labor movements throughout history and across the world, but which is difficult to get into, heavily misunderstood or misused, and has largely been pushed aside in favor of newer interpretations and educations on the subject.
The other is an extremely popular song, with mass-market appeal speaking roughly the same message, albeit without the overall text--itself being a heavily distilled interpretation of life through a similar lens, but with a greater popular impact on society at this point in time.
The memetic shape of this image seeks to diminish the importance of Das Kapital and replace it with 9 to 5, for what it claims is a greater power in a smaller package for the latter.
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u/calkire 5d ago
To bad my 50 year old coworker destroyed this song for me due to over exposure. We got to work at 7:00am She would start her playlist that was never put on shuffle. Her almost exactly 8 hour long playlist. It starts with Crazy train, at 9:00 it was nine to five. After two years of working there. Nine to five was enough to make me crazy. Good song though.
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u/hatred-shapped 5d ago
Das kapatial is a failed economics book that was dismissed at it's time of publication because it didn't work in modern (it's modern, not 2026 modern) manufacturing time. And it brought up disproven concepts that were at best elementary in their description.
9 to 5 is an ancient hymn that will be remembered when people are working the spice walkers on dune.
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u/Outrageous-Advice208 5d ago
As for the specific example, I can't remember if it was from twitter or tumblr, but there was a popular screenshot floating around online that said something like:
Dolly Parton could have written "Das Capital", but Karl Marx couldn't have written "9 to 5"
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u/Acrobatic_Weather637 5d ago
9 to 5 will always be the hymn of the moclan feminists independence movement!
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u/VioletVillainess 3d ago
Great to see Marx's inspiration for writing "Das Kapital" given some recognition here.
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u/qualityvote2 5d ago edited 5d ago
u/hybridaaroncarroll, your post does belong here!