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A moment of silence... 🪦
(lemmy.zip)
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this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2025
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Lefty Memes
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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.
Agitprop (I.E. everything that would be more fitting on a poster than a meme) goes here.
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!
Rules
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. Please post agitprop here)
0.5 [Provisional Rule] Use alt text or image descriptions to allow greater accessibility
(Please take a look at our wiki page for the guidelines on how to actually write alternative text!)
We require alternative text (from now referred to as "alt text") to be added to all posts/comments containing media, such as images, animated GIFs, videos, audio files, and custom emojis.
EDIT: For files you share in the comments, a simple summary should be enough if they’re too complex.
We are committed to social equity and to reducing barriers of entry, including (digital) communication and culture. It takes each of us only a few moments to make a whole world of content (more) accessible to a bunch of folks.
When alt text is absent, a reminder will be issued. If you don't add the missing alt text within 48 hours, the post will be removed. No hard feelings.
0.5.1 Style tip about abbreviations and short forms
When writing stuff like "lol" and "iirc", it's a good idea to try and replace those with their all caps counterpart
- ofc => OFC
- af = AF
- ok => OK
- lol => LOL
- bc => BC
- bs => BS
- iirc => IIRC
- cia => CIA
- nato => Nato (you don't spell it when talking, right?)
- usa => USA
- prc => PRC
- etc.
Why? Because otherwise (AFAIK), screen readers will try to read them out as actually words instead of spelling them
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 irrationally 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.
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- Genocide/ethnic cleansing or (mass) deportations
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- Orientalism
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- Zionism
- Religious fundamentalism of any kind
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Stalin’s purge included the murder a lot of the original bolshevik revolutionaries.
I’m ofc assuming Stalin doesn’t count as a communist… Hopefully.
It's unfortunate, but I think it was mostly capitalists and nazis.
Edit to add: fuck nazis
Yeah, the guy that lead the most successful iteration of communism isnt a real communist. Only people debating on the internet are true communists.
Your criteria for communism is essentially “if they did bad things, then it wasn’t real communism”. Leftists can learn a lot from The Soviet Union, mistakes and all. Dismissing entire nations that actually tried communism because you’re scared you’ll have to justify everything they did is silly.
Nah. I think Lenin was a communist. A reactionary asshole, a traitor to the revolution, but genuinely a communist, thought he was doing the right thing, and a hell of an administrator.
I think Castro was a communist. Not as big on democracy as he could've been, fucked up on queer issues until right near the endÂą, but genuinely into the communism.
Stalin was a gangster in disposition. An opportunist. What Stalin believed in was power, terror, and himself. He was as much a communist as napoleon Bonaparte or al Capone.
Âąand credit where due, turned hard, got basically all of it right. Later than id like, but ahead of like every other state.
Why would you assume that's their criteria? Communism is a stateless, classless society. USSR had both of those things.
Can a nation be considered to have achieved communism when it still has a hierarchy?
The Soviet Union didn't even claim to have achieved socialism. Their ideology was that they were supposedly constantly working towards that.
While killing everyone who tried to move or experiment towards it.
TIL the Soviet Union only existed from 1924 to 1953. Wow, thanks, I didn't know this at all!
You're right. We shoukd pay more half to the other half of the time it existed, where it did exactly none of this.
State capitalists usually say that so they keep control of power.
Communists are not people that practice communism (not possible yet), they are people trying to achieve communism as an end goal.
And shitty communists go around purging other communists in kangaroo courts and show trials.
Shitty communists impose cults of personality and destroy workers democracy.
Shitty communists also refuse to learn from a century of shitty communism and still cling to old categories as if they have any meaning today. I mean you can stan Robespierre all you like but in the end of the day, the 1871 Commune was never going to be run by 1789 Jacobins much less fucking bonapartists.
The way you communicate is insufferable lol.
Pretty telling that this is how you chose to reply to this. Just ignore everything they said I guess, huh?
Dont be an insufferable weirdo if you wanna have a discussion. Speaking to people this way doesn’t work in real life and I’d like to extend that courtesy to online spaces too.
This is an insufferable way to talk. You're insufferable, ajd therefore I can ignore everything you have to say (but keep reading it all).
Insufferable insufferable insufferable.
I see nothing off putting whatsoever about their comment.
Not my problem
It seems, quite literally, to be your problem and yours alone.
Well, your toothbrush is gross and your toes smell like canola oil.
Which requires social progress and experimentation; things Stalin didn't allow much of.
The final goal of communism is a worldwide, stateless, classless, moneyless society.
This has obviously never been achieved, but the socialist and communist factions that use Marxism Leninism to work toward this goal are still nonetheless communist.
Communism in the Marxist sense isn't about abolishing hierarchies. When they say they want a stateless society, there will still be oppression but executed by workers which is much besser. Source: read Das Kapital or something. I'm not a Marxist, what do I know
you actually have this backwards. communism in a marxist sense is hierarchiless as described in das kapital. however the bosheviks broke from the larger communist movement because the mensheviks (the larger of the two factions of russian communists) advocated for building a larger and larger coalition that could create durable anti-authoritarian change in russia. lenin believed in vanguard party politics, that it would be better to do the overthrow of the capital class first, and then slowly cede power to the workers. unfortunately in the first elections under bolshevik control the workers didn't vote how lenin had assumed they would and he ceased democratic elections in soviet russia. following a series of strokes, power was not slowly ceded to the workers, rather, stalin manipulated petty beurocratic power in order to consolidate, rather than disperse, power. ultimately, much like the french revolution, what happened was the typical revolution cycle:
in france, the result was a totalitarian authoritarian regime "liberating" europe. in russia it was a totalitarian authoritarian regime "liberating" the workers.
to get an idea of who the bolsheviks really were look at how quickly they abandoned leftist unity to purge the anarchocommunists from eastern europe. these were people they, allegedly, shared ideals with and had been fighting to free the serfs alongside up until the moment they could purge the anarchocommunists in order to consolidate personal power at the top of the hierarchy.
tl;dr marxism is without hierarchy, marxist-leninism is very much with hierarchy