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Lefty Memes
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:
- 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
(This is not a definitive list, the spirit of the other rules still counts! Eventual duplicates with other rules are for emphasis.)
Anti-anarchist pretty much think
This is heavily promoted by mainstream media and language
Many people seem unable to comprehend how a community might defend itself without a standing military and so assume we must be unwilling to defend ourselves.
Because most of us have grown up within strict hierarchies coerced to do things we don't want, we have trouble imagining any other way.
This is probably projection in most cases
How do you keep an Anarchic Utopia then? What stops Dickie McDickerson and his thugs from establishing a state on top of you?
Good luck with that. You may need to substitute all humans with robots.
It's a dream. Capitalism would be great and completely valid without some greedy fuckers trying to get everything for themselves. Communism would work without some greedy fuckers trying to get everything for themselves. Anarchism would work without... You get the jist.
Our problem is not politics, it's the human nature. No matter how many loving hippies there are, there are always going to be some people who try to exploit everything for their own good
I'm cynical (or old) enough to agree with this sentiment to a point, but capitalism has greed built in, it's a feature not a flaw.
It inherently incentivizes greed, it's not built in per se. As are all traits of the dark triad. This is what makes capitalism the worst choice and really sad. It brings out the worst in us. And those who are better have no chance.
You are 100% correct.
Capitalism is greed. Acquire and accumulate at all costs. Hoarding is not just acceptable, but praiseworthy.
They'd be out-competed by those who used their wealth to screw over the competition and drive small businesses under.
Greed came long before capitalism. Capitalism is the current way to organize greed.
Wealth disparity has always existed as a result of greed, not capitalism. There have always been extra wealthy and poor. There has always been nobles and serfs. Patricians and plebians. Bourgeoisie and proletariat.
Any system of economic equality cannot exist unless there is a very tight framework around it and people designated to enforce that framework, which, ipso facto, eliminates equality, as that then puts a monopoly on a legal use of force. With a legal use of force, corruption is only a matter of time.
Greedy fuckers are going to be making anything worse, but that only means that a complete utopia is impossible, not that all systems are going to be equally bad. Would you argue that the average absolute monarchy would have just as much abuse as your average liberal democracy?
The problem is the human condition of greedy tuckers, so let's keep political systems which give a few people who want all the power all the power, rather than work towards anarchism where no one gets the power?
you're wrong my comrade
Interestingly enough, that's literally the solution for The Culture.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series
Worrying about sealions on Lemmy in particular is just vanity since one really has the option to move on and ignore, or even block, at will. There is no way to force an answer, but it is perfectly okay to ask politely for one on a forum-like platform.
I'm not asking for sources, it's a simple logic experiment with a look at history. A decentralized pacifist state is a power vacuum to certain people. We need at least the basic sketch of a larger state and acceptance of organized violence as a method to defend it.
The same that stops them from taking over a democracy. Sometimes.
If a society became anarchist enough to abolish state structures, there obviously had to exist a reason - there had to exist popular support.
Thus, someone attempting to recreate a state would face questions and opposition. People would try to persuade them of their error. If they declared a state, anarchists would not recognize it. If it claimed sovereignity above a territory, anarchists might not recognize that either.
The new state might encounter problems - unwilling residents would leave and be accepted in anarchy, annoyed anarchists would organize trade boycotts and sanctions, ultimately it could go badly and armed confrontation could follow. In some scenarios, the state might remain and attract people who want to live there. In some scenarios, war would follow - and if the majority really was anarchist, the state would lose and disappear.
Oh no, you misunderstand. They're not giving you a choice. They aren't proponents of democracy or any kind of representative government. You have to go from an Anarchic state to resisting an organized group while they are grabbing community leaders in the middle of the night and taking young men and women to work camps.
To resist an organized group, you communicate the problem (in an anarchist society, communicating the problem of a nascent state seems like the easy part), present evidence of the nature and severity of the problem, and ask people and existing organizations to mobilize.
Whether the next step is obstructing the state peacefully or mass production of munitions, would already depend on how bad the state has got.
Well you're already adding violence back in, but honestly that's fine. I didn't buy that pacifism would work anyways. It's good to practice in regards to starting stuff, but you'd have to be ready to end stuff.
And honestly I hope what you're saying would work but now you've got 3 more problems to solve. You're starting from standing and they're already going. So they're going to have a head start in every way. You're asking for volunteers and you have to deal with the bystander effect. They're coercing people to fight for them. And third, you've now created an army and at least some infrastructure to support it. There's more than a few times through history that the defending army just decided it was in charge now.
And just so you know where I'm coming from I've always thought you need at least some of the state institutions we have for a leftist state to work. Like education, enough military to make invading too costly, enough police to tackle organized crime, a tax system to provide help in disasters and keep infrastructure working, and a civil government to manage that infrastructure. Having it all in place negates the Dicky McDickerson problem from the outset. What we really need is to scale back a lot of what we have and to classify much of what people do to get rich as organized crime.
For the US specifically we'll also need a plan to deal with Christian Conservatives who will attempt to institute a theocracy pretty much right away.
Will there be downsides?