Lefty Memes
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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What about differently sized apartments with different amenities? Sounds like this would force standardization and a race to the bottom on minimal amenities.
The issue is that you'll just have an influx of the highest yield housing types. I think the best bet would be requiring a percent of your owned properties in a market, say 20%, to have rent not exceeding a cap tied to minimum wage. That'll ensure at least 20% of the rental homes are at an affordable price for minimum wage earners, and open up the other 80% to be higher cost, better amenities, etc.
This adds additional nuance, and I like the idea. Thank you for taking my question seriously.
No problem! I always enjoy some good theorizing lol
The NL has a points system with its rent caps, so nicer flats have a higher cap. I'm not saying there isn't a housing crisis in the NL though.
Interesting! Do you see more builds being built at the higher cap, thus attributing to the housing crisis? Thank you for taking my question seriously.
@[email protected]'s idea of having a portion be mandated for Minimum Wage rent has some teeth.
To be honest, what I see is that the market is frozen, and while there are a lot of different houses, almost all are occupied. I rent from a corporate landlord in a high-rise, and the law keeps them decent. That said, their occupancy is basically single digit units free out of tens of thousands in the NL. It's bonkers.
I guess what I'm saying is that these measures, like min wage help band-aid over the absolute worst problems, but they don't make the market good. More building, more units, especially if built by the government to alleviate problems, would be good. If I understand correctly however, the previous few governments were all leaning neoliberal, so that did not happen.
We see barely any building ever since the government introduced higher taxes on social housing corporations. And the nitrogen emissions are also very high due to industrialised agriculture, causing new build projects to stall (too many emissions in a certain area =/= no permit to build).
The bare minimum legally allowable is already the blueprint that landlords use. Have you looked at rentals lately?
Have you? In my city there are a wide range of sizes (flats/multi-room) in different areas (near different industry sectors) with different amenities (washer dryer hookups/pool/dog park/none) across different ages (new builds/recent/decades old).