this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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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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Open for Posting! (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hello everyone,

the recent behavior of Reddit as a company has finally prompted me to give up the platform. While looking for alternatives, I saw the problems of leftist communities on Reddit reflected in those as well. Since you are here I don't have to talk about the r/GenZedong crowd gathering in lemmygrad. Other communities on Lemmy have not really fit my taste in terms of actual socialist orientation either. I know that there is Hexbear.net and that it is a bit better in that regard. But it still seems to tolerate such reactionaries and is not federated with the rest of lemmy.

As such, I wanted to try setting up an alternative batch of communities created in the same spirit (including this one):

c/Socialism

For discussion between socialists

c/Communism

For discussion between communists

c/Socialism101

For the discussion and explanation of socialist principles

c/Communism101

For the discussion and explanation of communist principles

c/Commie Memes

For sharing communist Memes between communists

c/Anarchism vs. Marxism

For the constructive and good-faith discussion of the merits, differences and similarities between Anarchism and Marxism

Please feel free to discuss suggestions and your general opinion/attitude on this below.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The revolutionary struggle is the very antithesis of the parliamentary[-only] struggle. In Germany, for four decades we had nothing but parliamentary “victories.” We practically walked from victory to victory. And when faced with the great historical test of August 4, 1914, the result was the devastating political and moral defeat, an outrageous debacle and rot without parallel. To date, revolutions have given us nothing but defeats. Yet these unavoidable defeats pile up guarantee upon guarantee of the future final victory.

-Rosa Luxemburg

So-called democratic socialism is a form of reformist liberal revisionism. The answer of reform vs revolution has been answered for more than a century, with the revolutionary side being proven right and right again by history and current societal developments. Bourgeois democracies are designed in a way that makes systemic change - especially of the economic base of society - virtually impossible (at least in the imperial core of western/northern nations) and even if a movement manages to bring relevant change through the ballot, it is either instantly reversed or faced out over the years by following legislatures but more often than not results in a (fascist) coup instigated by capitalist-imperialist powers, with the leaders getting the award which most decent folk get in the aftermath of such a situation: a bullet in the head

If you want more information on this, I suggest you look up the following:

  • The history of Salvador Allende and the Chilean Coup of 1973

  • What happened/is happening to the implementation of the nordic model of social democracy (spoiler: it has been largely dismantled thanks to developments starting in the 90s)

  • What all the huge leftist parties of the 2nd Internationale in Europe did in prelude to WW1 (spoiler: they gave up any principles they might have had and replaced them with national chauvinism and support for their respective national bourgeoisie)

  • The history and development - or rather degeneration - of all major western but mostly european communist parties (most notably the PCI (CP of Italy) and the PCF (CP of France))

If you want, you can also check out [email protected] for learning more about actual socialism (though it's still under construction)