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] 26 points 1 month ago (2 children)

A group holds a vote to either cross a bridge to side A or stay on side B. Staying on side A means you won't have much food. Going to side B means you still won't have much food, but also most of the food is poisonous.

Part of the group says "I don't want to starve, I refuse to vote in a way that accepts malnourishment as a solution!" Group C also opposes eating poisonous food. This partial group votes to try and find a better source of food (option C).

48% of people vote A. 49% of people vote B. 3% of people vote C.

Surprise, surprise, Group C had 0 impact on the starving situation AND helped facilitate the eating of poisonous food.

Fuck Biden, and FUCK Trump. But if you think voting for a leftist party or abstaining from voting will change anything in a system entirely designed around having only two candidates, you are just as okay with Trump as you are with Biden. At the very least, you are saying that they are equally as bad, showing that you clearly don't understand the dynamic.

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

Then there are those of us in Group D, who said 30 years ago that this exact thing would happen if we didn't do the hard work of developing an agricultural system. Now Group A blames us instead of Group B, and it's really too late anyway, the food will run out on either side of the bridge.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago

I wasn't able to speak 30 years ago. 10 years ago, I was warning people about how AI was going to pose a problem unless we restructured society so automation benefited everyone. Almost 20 years ago I realized private insurance was a scam. Guess what? None of that shit matters. Playing the blame game won't help anyone fix it, but voting can buy us time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] Lumisal 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Well you are in a shitty situation.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

Thank you, I wanted to say this earlier but I was busy. It's a shitty parable to fit a shitty and broken system. If it were any nicer of a parable, I would have less to complain about concerning the electoral system.