Meme: Amphibian creature labelled "Spotify" emerging from a body of water, but being pushed back. Captions read: "Stop them! Don't let a single company rule them all. If you see a Horrid Beast monopolizing, push it back in."
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!
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.
OP you should make the same meme about Steam right? Never mind that they massively reduced piracy and get creators paid
monopolies are the same as dictators, generally really bad, but a great dictator can get so much shit done and change things for the better much faster than great democracy could (i'm not dictator-apologising here, i'll take democracy any day, just stating a fact here)
This is where I'm conflicted.
I don't use Spotify because I don't believe in ads or paying money for things that are relatively easy to get. Im also not into music, which means my NEED to get anything is pretty low.
Where gaming, Steam is a platform. One could argue the ads are in the store page or all the sales. But there's still a huge pirate community. There's still GoG. All the other drm platforms are miniscule so not going to talk about them.
Where Steam is different is that shit just works on Steam. I can download a game from 2005, install, and I'm at the title screen. If I pirate, I have to do a handful of things to get to the title screen. Same with GoG. My Steamdeck is amazing! I've been actually rethinking building PCs in favor of just getting new Steam Decks.
Well for me the same is with Spotify, I could just download stuff and put it on my plex server, but I just don't feel like bothering with it, we have a shared plan, so it comes out to like 2,75 euros a month to have ad free music, with the very good discover weekly and other auto generated playlists that are mostly a hit for me, if I spend more than 6 minutes a month having to fuck around with my own music setup I am already losing money compared to just working those minutes