this post was submitted on 21 May 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.
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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.
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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.
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We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
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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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“Voting is your right and your freedom!”
votes third party
“Noooo! Not like that!”
I mean you can totally vote for whoever you want, and I'd wish we had some more competition in the party system, but first past the post makes that incredibly hard.
For example, it took a couple decades of the labor party fighting for control with the liberal party in the UK for it to be established as the main left of center party. In the meantime they split their elections.
I don't think we're in the position to do that right now with the republican party being what it is, not to mention that several parties have tried for the past century and gotten nowhere as close as to the presidency as Bernie did in the primary.
The problem is that the whole thing has been hijacked to always be an endless ping pong match between two parties that ultimately benefit from the same things. It’s essentially varying shades of fascism. Bernie was made an example when the rug was pulled out from under him and he had to back Hillary of all people.
Ehhh even with the shit they pulled on Bernie I still think reorienting the party is the right strategy.
The Democratic Party has been pulled from a segregationist position to the champions of civil rights in Congress once before, they've also been pulled away from business interests before.
So I think it's definitely possible to grow a socialist wing inside the Democratic party, I mean we've ready seen better gains in the past decade in Congress than in the past century of third parties trying to gain a foothold.
I don’t know how far anything in the Democratic party is going to fly now that it has bankrolling and supporting a genocide under its belt. Any chance they had to prove they aren’t just corporate warmongers has been shredded. They’re going to be a hard sell for the new generation unless they can do some magic.