this post was submitted on 16 Sep 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

Version without spoilers

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

That means 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.

  1. Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:

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Dictatorship isn't Left (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Are we including the effects of Global Capitalism? On top of mortality from global poverty, it's hard to tally all the deaths from capitalist Imperialism, Colonialism, and Neo-colonialism.

If one starts from the assumption that extreme poverty is the natural state of humanity, then it may appear as good news that only a fraction of the global population lives in extreme poverty today. However, if extreme poverty is a sign of severe social dislocation, relatively rare under normal conditions, then it should concern us that - despite many instances of progress since the middle of the 20th century - such dislocation remains so prevalent under contemporary capitalism. Depending on the subsistence basket one uses to measure poverty, as of 2008, between 200 million and 1.21 billion people live in extreme poverty (Moatsos, 2017, Moatsos, 2021; see also our discussion in Appendix VI).18 While direct comparisons with the wage data are difficult because of the variety of baskets used, this suggests that under contemporary capitalism hundreds of millions of people currently live in conditions comparable to Europe during the Black Death (Figure 4, Figure 5), the catastrophes induced by the American genocides (Figure 7) and the slave trade (Figure 9), or famine-ravaged British India (Figure 11). To the extent there has been progress against extreme poverty in recent decades, it has generally been slow and shallow.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Old testament god

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

In all of human history? Well, before the invention of money, I don’t know. But after the invention of money? Other humans.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago

Rupert Murdoch.

That monster's contribution to climate denial borders on apocalyptic - throw in extras like eroding democracy, stoking racial hatred, and contributions to class warfare like fighting off affordable access to to healthcare make him a tough one to beat.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Father Time, unparalleled.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Authoritarian left political positions are very real. What is this?

[–] [email protected] -3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

Authoritarian left... What is this?

It's an oxymoron. Authoritarianism is right-wing regardless of how the "authority" brands itself.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

The right claim that authoritarianism is a left-wing thing. I had an argument with someone who claimed that anarchocommunists could not possibly exist. You're bnoth wrong, authoritarianism is an orthogonal axis

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Left and right are generally agreed to be on the economic spectrum. Authoritarianism is not on this spectrum.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

And thus the political compass came to be, deciding that one axis on a sliding scale wasn't enough to capture the nuances of political ideologies, but two axes was plenty!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

No, but it;s better than one axis

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Source

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago

Thomas Midgley Jr.?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

temujin? who claims he's leftist?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Mao killed more.

Fortunately, he only killed Chinese people, and they don't mind, so we're all good.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Like personally? I often feel like attributing famines solely to one person is a bit messed up, although there are cases like Bengal where specific government individuals were enthusiastic .

The party later distanced themselves from him somewhat, so presumably they thought his ideas could be improved on but I had thought a lot of china and USSR famines rested on really dumb ideas about industrial agriculture that were popular in many places + officials hiding bad numbers + desperate need to show immediate superiority of alledgedly better numbers + upheavals of massive civil was and ww2.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

He was a massive idiot, he personally decided agriculture was being eaten by birds, so he demanded every peasant kill a quota of birds.

They did, and were immediately hit by the largest locust infestation in modern history.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign

He killed 50 million Chinese purely because he was an epic moron with an incredible ego.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Realistically I'll have to look into this before trusting a random comment and I probably wont because it's half the world away from me and he's dead anyway.

I am sure there is some subtly in personal culpability though because between Mao and peasants killing birds was a whole bureaucracy that evidentally thought it was worth doing (and idk how much is slavish obedience/fear).

Temujin personally killed a lot of people. Like personally ordered the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and his overall campaign was ~10% of human population at the time an estimated 40 million, which seems to be comparable to famine figures even if we personally blame both of them. Dude was a certified maniac and I think that especially given the overall lower population at the time and deliberate murderous intentions stands as histories greatest monster and most murderous person.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 months ago

Mosquitoes, I know this one!

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I knew it, it's the cat.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

That cat is Ultra-Hitler. He is 100 times more evil than regular Hitler.

You thought the total death toll of the Holocaust was bad? That evil kitty kills 10 million people each day. No dictator can even come to the fraction of his power.