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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.
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)
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,
as well as 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.
7. Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:
- Racism
- Sexism
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- Ableism
- Classism
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- Genocide/ethnic cleansing or (mass) deportations
- Fascism
- (National) chauvinism
- Orientalism
- Colonialism or Imperialism (and their neo- counterparts)
- Zionism
- Religious fundamentalism of any kind
(This is not a definitive list, the spirit of the other rules still counts! Eventual duplicates with other rules are for emphasis.)
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I would love to see regulations define "fair profit."
Material costs + labor costs + fair profit = retail price.
Fair profit cannot be more than X% of retail price.
I'd say that fair profit is a ratio of materials+labor costs. Basically a supply chain merchant's VAT. Find a rate at which a well run shop is able to turn a profit allowing it to hire more workers and expand if successful enough, and cap the "fair profit" at whatever that is as a ratio to labor and material costs.
Really the worst hit industries will be ones that are particularly prone to brand taxing, and it actually disincentivizes offshoring since cheaping out on labor and regulatory costs correspondingly limits your upper profit margins.
Companies just need to be kept small, if they can afford to expand then it means they are making too much money
I kinda agree but not too much. National scale industrial companies are a necessity for modern complex products. Keeping companies from going international (or at least beyond multinational bloc scale for places like the EU or Mercosur) is more than fair in my mind.
You can have an international product without international stores but Windows for example can be an OS but be banned from expanding into software or a cloud company for example. Google can be search engine but not an ad platform. Etc
I guess that too, I was imagining more for the prevention of shady tax dodging shiz
Fast food cartels seem to work ok. Maccas, KFC, Hungry Jacks, Subway, Red Rooster, Chicken Treat, Nandos, Grill'd etc (and I use these examples because the americans will recognize some, but not others which are Australian or Western Australian only) can all coexist while also being statewide, national and/or international franchise chains. None of them can really squash out the others because the customer demands choice, and no one store can reliably deliver all the possible options that consumers seem to want. Sure, they have plenty of other ethical concerns attached, but so far, monopoly seems not to be one of them.
In the medical device and pharmaceutical industries, this more or less already exists in countries with socialized medicine. It's not as explicit as my formula, but the price of medications and devices are regulated. Industry needs to demonstrate the actual benefit of a new product over a prior product for the system to pay for it, and the price of the product is then set on the basis of the health economic value it brings.
Some say it stifles innovation, but honestly, it eliminates the bullshit minor changes that are only made to continue justifying high prices and exclusivity.
Anyway, I think the "Exodus of industry" argument is an empty threat the shareholder class makes when they feel threatened. A market is a market, and if they want to continue to sell in it, they have to follow the rules, even when they change.
It's always externalized exploitation because they're all multinational corporations.
It's true that many of the big players are based in the US, e.g. Pfizer, J&J, Merck, AbbVie, Abbott, EliLily, etc.
But there are plenty that aren't:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_biomedical_companies_by_revenue
It's important to note that much of the R&D pharma relies on is publicly funded via academic grants in research carried out at universities. It's not to say that pharma doesn't also carry out clinical research, which of course does carry a cost, but a lot of the development dollars for a given drug are spent well before they make it into pharma's hands.
Can't have corporations when suddenly everyone has freedom to choose what they do for work.
Co-ops already exist.
You need competition. The milk surplus, you want that. Companies should compete and only demand what they need to keep going.
But if you do that, there is no real owning class. So you need other ways to finance innovation.
Which means only people with other motives own companies. That could be a good thing.
Studies have shown that, at least in the states, inflation is basically independent of wage growth.
Not to mention how being the guy who doesn't jack up prices will automatically hand you a significant market advantage. In non cartel organized markets every competitor has a prisoner's dilemma incentivizing them to betray the others if an unspoken price increasing agreement is put into effect.