this post was submitted on 31 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.
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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 means condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavor.
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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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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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Socialism probably won't be moneyless. Communism is moneyless but that's a long ways away and there are no shortcuts. In any case, the value form is a nightmare, and has to be overcome. Ever heard of alienation, like from a Marxist perspective? The idea is that the extrinsic social relation we call "value," has become so internalized that we can't tell the difference between ourselves and commodities. On some level, we are always comparing things to other things, a new vacuum cleaner holds more value than a used pencil for an extreme example. Everything is reduced to what it is worth money-wise, which is a development that is unique to capitalism. And we even do it to ourselves and each other, comparing ourselves based on how much money we make, or how much cool stuff we have. So much so that Marx simplified this whole complex social clusterfuck called alienation as, "material relations between people, social relations between things." And this is all tied to the value form, which is not a social necessity, but under our current system it is. Capitalism steals our humanity and turns it into value which is a measurement taken in dollars. And I don't know about you, but I'm not too keen on having my time, labor and humanity robbed from me, but more importantly I'll never get it back unless we take it back, all of the workers together demanding only what we already own, and what was taken from us.