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!
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.
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.
Good thing we (the US) lost the war, or this lady would probably have her own team of lobbyists running their country.
I'm against the death penalty in general, but I also acknowledge that in terms of tangible damage to humanity, any billionaire walking the Earth makes any serial killer who has ever walked the Earth seem positively quaint by scale.
I also recognize that we are living under class occupation. The owner class handily won the class war by convincing most of the developed world not to fight it half a century ago.
The peasants don't have the luxury of taking prisoners. We are the losers of a war, in spite of the fact that many have come to worship their occupying oppressors.
Keeping the most destructive humans locked away and well fed until they die of natural causes is a peacetime luxury for those in charge, and unless you're holding a reprehensible amount of capital, that isn't us. You might believe we are in peacetime, but if we refuse to stop them, and it looks that way, they will force our shared, communal habitat to stop us all through their insatiable, sociopathic avarice.
We love to think we're not, but we're still subjects wholly dependant on this world, even the owners activily attacking us and it simultaneously.
well fucking said.
The French revolution shows that the guilotines don't necessarily stop when the aristocrats are all dead. I'm not enthusiastic about mob justice
Yeah, I know a lot of Republicans that claim the left is only on their "high horse" when it suits them. I still don't believe that, but this thread really helps me understand where they got this notion of duplicity. Not a good look. SMH
I 100 % oppose the existence of Billionaires but not murdering people for being rich. History is littered with the monstrous actions of mobs thinking they were slaying a beast. We should always be wary of simplistic, violent final solutions
I mean, why not? POWs have their own self-evident advantages, as we've seen taking place in palestine right now. Hostages are a pretty good thing to have if you want to create a long term negotiating strategy with other people.
But also, if you get rid of the billioinaire's billions, then you get rid of the billionaire. Now you just have a 'naire. Maybe a thousandaire, or something. Like, all the rich people that fled from cuba to florida didn't really end up doing a whole lot with their lives except being mad and super bitter about the fact that they weren't able to keep participating in a fascist government that oppressed the people. Most of them were petite bourgeois anyways. It's the ones that refused to leave that you end up murdering by way of this being the only thing that can force them to leave.
None of that is really similar to this situation at all, even, this is just an independent government killing someone that realistically could have no recourse if they were just completely stripped of their money and sent off to go fuck around in some other country. It's also, to me, kind of an illustration of the divide that you conceive of prison as a "way to keep the most destructive humans locked away and well fed until they die of natural causes". There's, ideally, a greater purpose to prison beyond that. You're justifying this by conceiving of this as like, a "war", an extreme war, a life or death war, oooh it's a war, wartime wartime wartime, but then, the police do the same thing when they justify shooting some guy on the street.
I dunno, this strikes me as a lot of nice sounding guilt-assuaging talk, as good rhetoric, but you haven't really given me any logical argumentation to chew on here, as to why this would be good or why this had to be done, really.
Because with the apparent exception of Vietnam, billionaires run the show in the society they live in. They use their capital, which is just an expression of power, to change laws, buy courts, shift responsibility to their corporate entities that receive a cute lil meaningless fine that costs less than the profit of the crime instead of prison time, and here in the US they even literally OWN and PROFIT off many of our prisons. That's the primary reason billionaires shouldn't exist, because it's close to impossible to put a check on such insane levels of power, which again, at those quantities, is what capital becomes, raw power. You can't have a functioning representative democracy where people can grow so wealthy that their power over society extends beyond their single vote.
Most of the peasants in the world are subject to their respective judicial systems and prison systems largely configured to protect PROPERTY rights over human rights by design of those they work for, and guess who that is?
There are beautiful exceptions, the Nordic nations come to mind, but sadly my country, the US, has been spreading its greed disease for decades. We toppled south American rigimes daring to make something better to keep their markets open for our capitalists to rape using our military industrial complex, and we've been converting Europe with our greed disease a little at a time(YOU can live larger than you've ever dreamed, foreign legislator, just betray your countrymen for our profit!), the UK has fallen to it, the French are fighting it but losing, etc.