this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
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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
- Queerphobia
- Ableism
- Classism
- Rape or assault
- 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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Environmental destruction because of greed: inexcusable.
Environmental destruction because you don't like those bastards over there: totally acceptable.
Since leftists tend to also condemn those things, as well, what the hell are you on about?
Leftists LOVE to defend big government, particularly if it's communist.
Meanwhile, communist governments are responsible for some of the worst man-made natural disasters in history.
https://thediplomat.com/2014/10/how-the-soviet-union-created-central-asias-worst-environmental-disaster/
https://www.cnsjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/The-Environmental-Record-of-the-Soviet-Union.pdf
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/27/chinese-communist-party-environment-co2/
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/romanias-unsolved-communist-ecological-disaster/
There's never been an actual communist government. As much as those countries like to say they're communist, that doesn't make it true. They're authoritarian, and you're buying their propaganda if you think they're actually communist.
They are buying propaganda, but in this thread they are selling it. They're a bad faith actor, disinfo bot, or standard issue moron. The only hard part is knowing which one.
If every "communist" government ever turned out to be authoritarian, you might want to ask yourself if there is some fundamental flaw in communism that makes it so it always turns out that way.
Also, Marx literally called for a "dictatorship of the proletariat". If that isn't authoritarian, then IDK what is.
You gotta be fucking dumb to think that there is only capitalism on the right and communism on the left.
They are both extreme and should be treated as such.
I assume you are from the US because your communism trigger is the fastest in the west.
There isn't even an iota of leftism in the US political system and you call your left communist.
A bunch of Marxist-Leninist governments turned out to be authoritarian, as well as fermenting cult-like behavior in smaller ML groups. That's a reason to drop that whole branch. Has nothing to do with leftism in the broad view.
The Lemmy devs are explicitly Marxist-Leninist, but you know that, right?
They weren't communist, they were state capitalists, if you ask any serious person that knows anything about economic systems they will agree, that's the common consensus. Want another example of a state capitalist country? That's us. The US is a state capitalist country. Why? Well.. when a business fails, and the government props them up. That's state capitalism.
Meanwhile England created a man-made famine in Ireland and oversaw 15 of them in India, while the US straight up did the worst genocide the world has ever seen and is driving the climate catastrophy which might end up killing most of the humans on earth. Not defending socialist states, but there's not even a comparison here.
You're missing the point. This isn't about which form of government is better, it's about the fact that governments themselves are liable to produce far worse catastrophes than the businesses they're supposed to be regulating, and every time you vote for giving the government more power to punish those you hate, you are also giving it more power to punish yourself.
The Romania link is kinda misleading. That isn't a big government problem: that's a profit crushing laypeople problem. Both the communist Romanian government and the capitalist government that followed wanted to profit from many different mines even though it would destroy nearby villages.
Rosia Montana is still very controversial today. A different mine, but the same core reasoning and issues.
Everyone left of Mitch McConnell is a COMMUNIST!!!
Yeah, I don't know man, you sound like a coconut.
Nobody said that. You can't just make shit up and act like it's what the person you're arguing with is thinking.
Also people talk about this shit like we bombed today's Japan. Japan was a horrendous empire. They were doing the same shit the Nazis were doing but in asia. Do you condem the Dresden Fire bombing this fervently? Or do you just defend the stuff that's buzz worthy?
Not nuking Japan would have allowed the USSR to invade Japan before they surrendered. Meaning another East/West Berlin/German situation. Can you honestly say that would have had a lower death toll?
Stop hopping on this contextless internet hills for dying on and learn your history.
Like I said...
And yes, I do condemn the Dresden Fire Bombing. Sure the Nazis were bad but wiping out thousands of innocent civilian lives like that was a war crime, nothing else.
.?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crime
It's literally the first part of the definition.