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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).
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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.
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(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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Yeah, even though governments have sometimes stepped in and prevented free market to do its own thing to keep prices somewhat low or in disasters (for instance, here in my country farmers are subsidized to keep food prices low, and various governments during covid didn't wait for free market to step in to deal with the pandemic and funded the relief effort by themselves), capitalism has been critiqued endlessly, its contradictions pointed out over 200 years and due to what the post refers to and countless other reasons, capitalism should definitely be replaced.
The issue is that the left hasn't really organized themselves and provided an alternative and by that I mean something akin to a step by step solution. What happens now when the left gets into power in a country is some random small tweaks such as making healthcare and worker lives a bit better, adding taxes on cars - nothing that tackles the core problem which is capitalism.
Those are centrist talking points, not sure if you're aware. Any step that dismantles capitalism is met with "too extreme" or "unfeasible". The Overton window is too far to the right.
What happens now when communists take over is a clique of insane people do wild shit, supposedly for the proletariat at the expense of the bourgeoisie. And then they wonder why their insane, clumsy, ignorant and naive new policies didn't work, they blame their people for not being good enough as they are being uncooperative assholes ergo not true proletariat because the proøetariat would be very cooperative with dear leader, and then they start shooting.