this post was submitted on 15 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
(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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(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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Xia is failing to realize that the original post isn't about self owned businesses, so their point doesn't make sense in this context. Based on their other comments, they either don't understand how discussions, debates, or arguments work, or they're a troll, or they're overly saturated on capitalist propoganda.
If those are the only options then it is probably the last one, as I'm often not even sure what to call the unfamiliar positions I see others taking here, but it could be a bit of "can't debate" too as I find a tendency in myself to address the secondary or tertiary consequences of peoples arguments (assuming they are aware of [and already accept] the obvious primary consequences) which can be quite jarring and read like a string of non-sequitors, or like people arguing past each other.
I agree and do understand that the original post was not about self owned businesses, so I agree that it is a bit off topic here. I was only trying to point out the absurdity of the statement that "taxes are a drop in the ocean compared to [labor value theft]". As if that were true (or even a less-hyperbolic ratio of 1-to-99), then it would logically follow that freelance work would produce staggeringly higher yields, and we see that is not the case. The intent was an informal proof by contradiction, but that was not made clear.
I think it could also be shown by induction (as the more people/layers/intermediaries you add the more loss/expense is incurred) if you accept a profit motive and a steady state, but large businesses can and do temporarily sell products at a loss to kill competition in the short-term, so that would probably be less convincing.
Taxation doesn't take into account the fact that wages are stagnant, but corporations have posted record profits. Small businesses are impacted as well, due to the nature of supply chains, most people cannot create something from nothing.
I'd like to address something you said that is unrelated to economics. You said you address secondary or tertiary consequences of arguements. That doesn't seem like a non-sequitor or people arguing past eachother like some kind of verbal 4-D chess match, typed in this case. It seems to me that you're saying you assume what the other person might say, then you reply to that assumtion. Can you clarify?