this post was submitted on 24 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.

Please don't forget to help keep this community clean by reporting rule violations, upvoting good contributions and downvoting 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.

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:

(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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[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 month ago (3 children)

if more had also done that, we wouldn't be here now

[–] Viking_Hippie 23 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If she had bothered to campaign in the Midwest and had just generally been a much better candidate, more people would have.

It's the job of a politician to earn votes and faithfully represent the priorities of the majority of the voters. People like Hillary, Biden, Schumer and the rest of the Dem leadership seldom do either.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

It’s also the job of the electorate to educate themselves on the consequences of their vote (and non-vote). Don’t act like nobody knew who Trump was, what he had already done, or was listening to what he was saying.

[–] Gigasser 6 points 1 month ago

Not job, DUTY. Otherwise I get your point. I'd like to add that it is also the duty of those more educated to try to educate others in a non-hostile, factual, and rhetorically effective way in order to bolster the numbers of people who can make informed/educated decisions on these things.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I honestly regret not voting for Hillary. I didn't vote for Trump either, I voted third-party because I thought Hillary was going to win, and even if she didn't win, what's the worst Trump could do, huh? So I figured it wouldn't hurt to vote for a third-party with the hope they'd get enough points to be on the debate stage during the next general election.

Granted, my vote probably wouldn't have made a difference. Tbh, considering I live in a state with winner-takes-all voting, I'm not even sure my vote actually matters now; but I'm still going to vote for Biden. It's better than assuming he'll win and risking another Trump victory.


Yes, I know I'm not the main character and I'm only one person. I know that changing my vote alone won't make a difference. However, what might make a difference is if I talk about my reasoning in a public forum. Then, people might stop, read my post, and change their minds. Now, it's not one vote, it's two. They might spread their view as well, and two votes becomes four. Four votes becomes eight; and eight becomes sixteen. As small as that sounds, sixteen votes can make all the difference in an election. There are elections that have come down to one or two votes.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

I did the same thing, in a solidly blue state, with the same thought processes; I voted for Jill Stein. Even after Trump won, I figured he couldn't fuck it up too badly. I even thought he might manage to get one thing right (I'm very solidly pro-2A), but nope, he couldn't even do that.

Biden isn't nearly far enough left for me. But I'll vote for him without even a hint of hesitation, because he's so much better than the only realistic possibility. And I live in a purple state now, so it might end up mattering.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

*in certain states

She won the popular vote, she lost the electoral vote. Where you live MATTERS towards your vote in this country, by design, for situations like this