this post was submitted on 28 Oct 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).
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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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- 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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Workers uniting to violently accomplish something looks like an army to me.
History has taught us that formal armies are not effective in doing much besides killing civilians and ruing the environment.
However independent groups of self reliant people all working towards the same goal can resist the strongest most depraved military in the history of humanity.
Workers of the world, if we unite around the common goal of a new tomorrow without owners, would not ever be controlled, all without the need for a formal military.
A $100 drone and home made explosive can elimate the most advanced 50 million dollar tank, and a single 5.56 round in the right place at the right time can take out the most advanced stealth fighter. Resistance is not only possible, it's fiscally responsible and has never been more realistic of an idea.
Like drug cartels!
And "terror" cells, and resistance fighters across the world. The US managed to kill at least a million Afghan civilians, drop tens of millions of tonnes of ordinance, spend more than ten thousand years of Afghanistans GDP on military operations, violate more children and commit more generalized war crimes than nearly any other empire while causing tens of thousands of vets who participated to kill themselves... All to take the taliban out of power and put them right back in power with even more public support than they had before the invasion.
Independent groups all working in commicationless tandem towards a single ideological goal is far more effective than even the best example of a formal military with unlimited funding and absolutely no morals.
That is more about an insurgency being difficult, since the oppression radicalizes more and more people the longer it drags on.
It isn't like city states or other small groups were less violent than more recent wars, the scale is different. Hell, the KKK and other hate groups are independent groups that work towards a single idealogical goal. The structure isn't what has a better or worse outcomes, there are different challenges and benefits to centralized and decentralized systems but the root issue with all of them is human behavior.
Human behavior is objectively to work together for a common goal. It is exceedingly few people in society that cannot do this. Basing your view of humanity's behavior on the outliers is asinine.
I highly recommend you and other misanthropes take a human evolutionary psychology course or two. Standford has one for free on their YouTube page.
If human behavior is objectively to work together, then why would scaling that up be a bad thing?
It's not, but that's not what government is. Government is the removal of responsibility away from the people; the positive reason proffered being that this frees up time for people to focus on other things, but in reality the only actual reason is misanthropy. You don't trust people, so you want a source you can trust to do things. The problem with that is humans have an evolutionary adaptation wherein some, exceedingly few, humans are born without the key ability of empathy that all normal (meant in the most offensive way possible) people are born with. These few individuals colloquially known as psychopaths exclusively take advantage of this distrust and place themselves in positions of power despite the fact they are solely the reason the distrust exists.
The line about how power corrupts is false, power attracts the corrupted and allows them to be free. Therefore we can never have any person ever have more power than any other.