this post was submitted on 14 Dec 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
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).
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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.
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If non-violence is always the better answer, then why is it universally accepted that violence is the best answer when the government has a boogie man to catch?
Bin Laden, Hitler, Saddam…you’d think that with all the money and alliances that governments have at their disposal, they could have helped the countries that harbored these people and ensured they were brought to justice and judged by a jury of their countrymen. But that isn’t what happened. They used violence because violence is effective in creating drastic change quickly.
Non-violence hopes for change slowly, but often is just a tool that gets manipulated to preserve the status quo—just look at the “approved protest areas” that happened with Occupy Wallstreet. They were more than happy to tell those people exactly how to be nonviolent so the impact was meaningless.
Meanwhile, Luigi’s bullet had plenty of impact and plenty of meaning, as evidenced by the outcry of support from common people of both parties. This may be one of the only issues that the far left and the far right actually agree on.
Two things:
The constituents of populist wings of both left (such as it exists in the US) and right have generally the same concerns but radically different views on what to do about them and how to do it. So executing a health insurance CEO from a company known specifically for denying care at a much higher rate than other insurance gets approval all around even if one side wants to solve the problem by nationalizing healthcare and assuming the government will fix it and the other by deregulating it and assuming the market will fix it.
This is the best kind of political violence - the sort where it's clear and obvious what the issue is, what message is being sent and there's a clear line between the problem and the violence that goes right through the message. As opposed to say burning down a pawn shop with someone inside in the name of mistreatment of black people by law enforcement (Montez Terriel Lee, during the second night of BLM 2020 protests in Minneapolis).