this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
781 points (83.8% liked)
Lefty Memes
4514 readers
41 users here now
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
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.
- Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:
- Racism
- Sexism
- Queerphobia
- Ableism
- Classism
- Rape or assault
- Genocide/ethnic cleansing or (mass) deportations
- Fascism
- (National) chauvinism
- Orientalism
- Colonialism or Imperialism (and their neo- counterparts)
- Zionism
- Religious fundamentalism of any kind
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Why do you conflate two different things --both bad-- but cant distinguish the definitions for each? There's a reason we have separate words for Imperialism and fascism? There's a weird fetish for this word here and you are very intent on applying it for some reason.
I can distinguish the definition for each, which is why I'm applying the label. I'm just using a different definition than you.
To perpetuate supremacy and keep an in group and out group amongst all it's colonies and populations, something that they found necessary in order to be able to extract colonial goods and maintain property, they had to build a hierarchy. That hierarchy was partially based on race. The US was a colonial state and actively engaged in the genocide of the native americans, both before and after, so much so that hitler took notice and said, gimme a slice of that. This happened with basically every colony that England took, even their first ones, like ireland, where now a very slim population actually speaks irish. I don't really feel bad in calling that kind of behavior to be like, prototypically fascist.
Maybe if you were to define fascism as integrally privatizing other public goods, like mussolini and hitler did, then that might swing things a little bit, but america and england both went and did that later on and historically have had no problem with doing that. There's really not a good definition of fascism that I've ever heard that doesn't apply to america or england, other than "oh, well, those countries were super authoritarian", and then somehow they don't recognize, say, that america has 1% of the world's prison population and a massive police state, and the level at which we propagate authoritarian governments globally in order to further our own interests. The semantic argument that people try to hash out over definitions of fascism, it's not the real crux of the issue there, it's just a kind of obfuscation of the real talking point, which is that people aren't realizing the massive amount of bullshit the imperial core has been engaging in on a near constant basis for like the past couple hundred years, and precisely how bad it really is.
Why are we creating our own definitions for words? Fascism is a term used to describe a very specific form of governance characterized by elements not included in your description. Chief among them is ruling by a dictatorship and exclusive single party.
The things you described are indeed bad things, some which have been adopted and implemented by fascist regimes as well. But just because two people engage occasionally in the same practices it doesn't make them twinsies by definition. Sometimes me and my buddy wear the same shirt, but he's a communist and I'm a liberal. Just because we wear the same shirt sometimes it doesn't suddenly make him liberal or me communist.
Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement,[1][2][3] characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race
There is a strange fetishization of this word online and it has since lost any meaning it used to originally have because now every bad thing has become a fash. It's meaningless.