ID: photo of Martin Luther King Jr. waving at the crowd during the March on Washington, on it is his quote: "He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it."
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
Serious posts, news, and discussion go in c/Socialism.
If you are new to socialism, you can ask questions and find resources over on c/Socialism101.
Please don't forget to help keep this community clean by reporting rule violations, updooting good contributions and downdooting those of low-quality!
0. Only post socialist memes
That refers to funny image macros and means that generally videos and screenshots are not allowed. Exceptions include explicitly humorous and short videos, as well as (social media) screenshots depicting a funny situation, joke, or joke picture relating to socialist movements, theory, societal issues, or political opponents. Examples would be the classic case of humorous Tumblr or Twitter posts/threads. (and no, agitprop text does not count as a meme)
1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith interactions is enforced here
Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism.
2. Anti-Imperialism means recognizing capitalist states like Russia and China as such
That means condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavor.
3. No liberalism, (right-wing) revisionism or reactionaries.
That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" seen on lemmygrad and more specifically GenZedong (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).
4. No Bigotry.
The only dangerous minority is the rich.
5. Don't demonize previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
(if you are reading the rules to apply for modding this community, mention "Mantic Minotaur" when answering question 2)
6. Don't idolize/glorify previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
What do you mean votes couldn't prevent this? You really think if Kamala had won by the electoral college that Trump would have won anyways??
I'm saying that this is the end goal the right wing, particularly the general Republican party and the Christian right in particular have been working towards since Nixon. The southern strategy, combined with the oligarchs dominating the party.
Democrats have never had a good plan to oppose that, and still don't.
Even if Kamala had won, which was never likely, it would have been someone, at some point in the next fifty years because the first Trump term stacked the supreme court, and the party pushed hard to put decisive cases up.
There's no way the halfassed efforts that democrats have been using my entire lifetime would have prevented an eventual lock on Congress and the presidency.
Mind you, I'm fairly convinced that had kamala won, there was a plan in the works for an outright attack. Not a genuine right wing revolution scale attack, but a disruptive series of attacks on the power grid and infrastructure to sow chaos and strengthen the militarization of the police even more, get people used to marshal law, etc. But that's impossible to prove, and unsourceable.
In a roundabout way, any democrat winning would have had exactly as much effect on their long term plans. They've been working at this, laying multiple options down so that as soon as opportunity rose, they could strike in one way or another.
Voting can't fix that. Voting democrat can't fix that for sure. There is no viable alternative party to oppose it, and there's no time to build one, despite the feeble bullshit being tried to rebuild the democrat establishment. You can't take a party that gives lip service to the populace, but works to maintain the status quo of corporate interests on average, and turn it into a serious engine of change.
We're past the point of waiting four years and hoping. We were past that when Biden eked out a win. But nobody took that respite to even try and shift things.