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this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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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.
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.
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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.
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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).
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The only dangerous minority is the rich.
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We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
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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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Dumping product is losing money, the only way it makes profitability sense in Democratic Capitalism would be if the increase of profit from dumping 1 unit is greater than the marginal cost of producing that unit.
And even if that was the case industry wide, without collective action from government or cartel persuasion (or there being a monopoly which is the result of a LACK of government action), it wouldn't make sense to do for any individual because you make more being a free rider.
The issue of misaligned incentives does exist, we have enough food to feed everyone and we aren't doing it, but the pandemic milk dumping was because of the pandemic, not Capitalism. Farmers did donate some food to food banks but it's a once-in-a-lifetime disruption nobody was prepared for so the food banks couldn't take all that was available.
Meanwhile most of dumped milk was dumped in US
Yes, I think of this as a messaging problem. Uncontrolled capitalism is essentially anarchy. It creates perverse incentives, which can result in behavior like dumping or limiting product at very high cost when it would be cheaper and more profitable in the short term to sell it (see OPEC, DeBeers). I don't know of a successful capitalist state with a government that doesn't regulate capitalism.
In this case, though, yeah, a pandemic disrupted supply chains, changed consumption patterns, created labor shortages. We all understand the toilet paper shortage wasn't engineered because we could see the cause. When a root cause invisible to us, it's a common reaction to assume bad intent.