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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.)
I admire your dedication and sources.
Anyone who doesn't realize that they're consuming media from an information silo could stand to be a bit more intelligent. No silo is perfect; at some point, even if they don't independently seek new sources of information, they'll come into contact with one. Fox news watchers know CNN exists, they simply refuse to watch it. To be fair, I don't watch a lot of Fox either, but I do get my news from at least more than one source!
You've said this a few times and I'm beginning to believe we might not be on the same page here. I'm not necessarily advocating for violence (although it would be valid IMO to claim that it would be justified). I'm saying that voting carries with it a moral responsibility. When someone is responsible for an act that negatively effects many people, something should happen, but what that something is varies with the act and the nature of their responsibility. I think a primary method of response in this case could simply be acknowledging that the act was negative and showing the voter how it has hurt people.
Same as above, do you mean we shouldn't harm them or we shouldn't acknowledge how they are harming us?
Voting is action. Voting for someone who has promised to implement a set of policies is voting for those policies (at least, in comparison to all other options). For any policy that you have voted on applying, you bear some responsibility for its effects. In politics, a policy can be basically anything. They can literally kill, save lives, impoverish, enrich, etc. Voting for a policy that you know will kill someone is violence. Any of these effects that can be easily predicted are partially your responsibility to bear.
A fascist that does not vote can be stopped by the force of law. A fascist that does vote decides what the law is. That is far more dangerous.
This describes the issue accurately I think. The solution is still to educate them to break the silo, or at least convince them to be truly isolated and not vote.
100% agreed.
This is also true. Just because someone is currently doing something bad, that doesn't always mean that the beat course of action is punishment. Sometimes you can prevent the most negative outcomes by being less confrontational.
Preemptive political violence is undesirable only because you lose some justification. It is often the theoretically correct move to prevent a fascist takeover, but cannot be implemented because not everyone is convinced that it is justified yet or ever. See eg. Germany, which can dismantle entire political parties if they threaten the democratic order.
Violence after a hostile takeover is not only revenge, but also necessary to retake control. I see no issue with this whatsoever; the revenge is a bonus to the necessity.
I think we're on the same page here in terms of the appropriate response to the rise of fascism and similar ideologies. The difference is that I view it as morally wrong to fall for the grift and/or to vote for bad policies.
The death penalty may not prevent violent crime, but education, assistance, and sanctions are much more effective.
We should not harm people or jail them for their vote. There is nothing wrong with acknowledging their vote is harming people. It is a factually correct statement that their vote is harming people.
A person knowingly voting for the fascist takeover, but doing nothing else is a fascist. In the event of a successful fascist takeover they will be far outnumbered by people who do not realize what they are voting for. So, yes, fascists deciding the law is more dangerous than domestic terrorism. However, my issue is with the people who implement the fascist laws.
The legislatures who write the laws, the police who arrest the out-groups, the courts who sentence them to the camps, assuming people even get a trial, and the executioners at the camp who detain the out-groups and participate in the firing squads. All the people who are implementing fascism and those who are just following orders. If none of these people made the choices that they did, in this hypothetical, then the fascists could vote all they want, but it would get them nothing.
I've brought this up in my argument because the people who know they are voting for the fascist takeover when they vote are the ones who could qualify as doing something morally wrong to me. This is of course subjective. A lot of them would be invisible to scrutiny if all they did was vote. Which in theory, could be a majority of fascists.
While these people have broken the social contract of tolerance, the social contract of tolerance is not a law that carries a death penalty for breaking it. Nor is it worth punishing tens of millions of ignorant people, who did something harmful, but didn't do it knowingly. These tens of millions of people have not broken the social contract of tolerance. Also, I would argue tolerance is an objective measurable binary. Either someone is tolerating a group or they aren't.
Political violence destabilizes democracy, our most effective tool for resisting fascism. It undermines the peaceful transfer of power which is a cornerstone of our democracy. Germany dismantling political parties isn't political violence, although it is a preemptive action, so the peaceful transfer of power is preserved. The dismantled political parties had broken the social contract of tolerance.
I am not arguing this is an issue. I am arguing this is not an example of resisting fascism. This is an example of defeating a fascist dictatorship militarily. I bring up resisting fascism, as in preventing the fascist takeover, because that is what the meme refers to. Acting retroactively by definition does not prevent the fascist takeover.
My point being that these alternative methods are also much more effective at preventing fascism from spreading as well.
When we argue about morality we end up getting into philosophy which is subjective. I'm of the opinion that if a person doesn't know what they are doing then they did nothing morally wrong. There's no math we can use to back up our opinions. They exist purely as subjective views on life. This to me is unproductive discourse because we can argue about this topic in this way endlessly and never be able to draw any actionable conclusions.
Instead I prefer to argue about utility. Utility can be measured and thus we can harness math as part of our arguments. This is useful discourse because we can arrive at the same conclusions about a variety of topics. The disagreements we are left with become a discussion of optimal strategies which we can easily compare and contrast. We can in theory, reach a consensus about what we should do to solve problems.
This meme is about the use of violence in the context of preventing a fascist takeover. This entire comment section is glowier than a platypus under a black light. I think the feds didn't even have to post or comment here, this is the state of left-wing discourse on lemmy. If you're not arguing for violence then say that up front. I think violence based on voting history is actively detrimental to resisting the fascist takeover, so I argue against that. Whether or not violence based on voting history is justified is subjective and does nothing to ascertain its viability as a solution. My opinion is that violence based on voting history is not justified. And yeah, I could have used 'it's' instead of 'violence based on voting history is' two extra times, but I decided it wasn't clear enough, feds.