this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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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.

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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)


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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29626672

On May 5th, 1818, Karl Marx, hero of the international proletatiat, was born. His revolution of Socialist theory reverberates throughout the world carries on to this day, in increasing magnitude. Every passing day, he is vindicated. His analysis of Capitalism, development of the theory of Scientific Socialism, and advancements on dialectics to become Dialectical Materialism, have all played a key role in the past century, and have remained ever-more relevant throughout.

He didn't always rock his famous beard, when he was younger he was clean shaven!

Some significant works:

Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

The Civil War in France

Wage Labor & Capital

Wages, Price, and Profit

Critique of the Gotha Programme

Manifesto of the Communist Party (along with Engels)

The Poverty of Philosophy

And, of course, Capital Vol I-III

Interested in Marxism-Leninism, but don't know where to start? Check out my "Read Theory, Darn it!" introductory reading list!

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[–] LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 18 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (9 children)

Any social relation that exists is natural. The term natural is practically meaningless and is built on a fallacious idea that there is one true way humans were meant to live.

Also, natural does not mean better or worse than any other way.

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[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 points 3 days ago (47 children)

inb4 "capitalism is just markets and those existed for 5 billions years. Checkmate"

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Ha! frontrun that tried argument by 1 minute

[–] kittenzrulz123@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Wrong, capitalism when government doesn't do stuff. Naturally socialism is when government does stuff, and when government does a lot of stuff its communism.

/s

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 10 points 3 days ago

There are quite a few of those over on the Lemmy.ml version of this post.

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[–] atro_city@fedia.io 21 points 3 days ago (8 children)

How is capitalism only 400 years old? Maybe the term, but you can't seriously think feudalism isn't an extreme form of capitalism:

  • private property: the land and even the people on it were owned by the elite
  • profit motive: they had currency and it was hoarded by the royals and their kin
  • capital accumulation: see above
  • wage labor: slave labor

The same thing existed in roman times, ancient greece, and even ancient Egypt which had empires and kingdoms spanning 5 thousand years where grain and other things were a currency.

Humans have been horrible to each other for their own private benefit, greed, and just pure cruelty for thousands of years.

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 34 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Capitalism and Feudalism are both examples of class societies, but are not the same. Both have had working and owning classes, but the nature of relation to production is different, thus the class mechanisms at play are different. Engels sums it up succinctly in questions 7-10 of Principles of Communism, but I'll only copy 7 and 8, as they are more relevant here:

Question 7 : In what way does the proletarian differ from the slave?

Answer : The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, the property of a single master, is already assured an existence, however wretched it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, the property, as it were, of the whole bourgeois class, which buys his labour only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the proletarian class as a whole. The slave is outside competition, the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries. The slave counts as a thing, not as a member of civil society; the proletarian is recognized as a person, as a member of civil society. Thus, the slave can have a better existence than the proletarian, but the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of social development and himself stands on a higher level than the slave. The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian himself; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.

Question 8 : In what way does the proletarian differ from the serf?

Answer : The serf enjoys the possession and use of an instrument of production, a piece of land, in exchange for which he hands over a part of his product or performs labour. The proletarian works with the instruments of production of another for the account of this other, in exchange for a part of the product. The serf gives up, the proletarian receives. The serf has an assured existence, the proletarian has not. The serf is outside competition, the proletarian is in it. The serf frees himself either by running away to the town and there becoming a handicraftsman or by giving his landlord money instead of labour and products, thereby becoming a free tenant; or by driving his feudal lord away and himself becoming a proprietor, in short, by entering in one way or another into the owning class and into competition. The proletarian frees himself by abolishing competition, private property and all class differences.

[–] Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Hey Cowbee, just wanted to say I really appreciated your contributions to the comments which were super informative. 👍

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 day ago

No problem, thanks for the crosspost! 🫡

[–] njm1314@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago

This is just an absurdly broad definition of capitalism. I mean it's so broad as to be meaningless.

[–] jwiggler@sh.itjust.works 11 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (8 children)

You should check out mutual aid by pyotr kropotkin. Sure, we have several thousand years of history of the carnage of states and individuals. Thing is, humans have existed for over 100,000 years -- there is a lot missing about what our "natural" state is. Archaeological and anthropological evidence show that human societies exist on a wide spectrum of peaceful --> violent, stateless --> hierarchical.

Your implication that humans are inherently bad, cruel, competing for resources, etc. is a vestige of theory from Thomas Hobbes, connected to social darwinism, that completely ignores the observed behavior of a vast amount of animal and insect species, wherein individuals aid one another out of no apparent immediate benefit to themselves.

A somewhat famous passage from kropotkin to illustrate:

[...] to reduce animal sociability to love and sympathy means to reduce its generality and its importance, just as human ethics based upon love and personal sympathy only have contributed to narrow the comprehension of the moral feeling as a whole. It is not love to my neighbour — whom I often do not know at all — which induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his house when I see it on fire; it is a far wider, even though more vague feeling or instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me. So it is also with animals. It is not love, and not even sympathy (understood in its proper sense) which induces a herd of ruminants or of horses to form a ring in order to resist an attack of wolves; not love which induces wolves to form a pack for hunting; not love which induces kittens or lambs to play, or a dozen of species of young birds to spend their days together in the autumn; and it is neither love nor personal sympathy which induces many thousand fallow-deer scattered over a territory as large as France to form into a score of separate herds, all marching towards a given spot, in order to cross there a river. It is a feeling infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy — an instinct that has been slowly developed among animals and men in the course of an extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and men alike the force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and the joys they can find in social life.

This isn't to endorse primitivism, or Rousseau's state of nature. I'm not sure I would even say "humans are innately good," necessarily. Clearly, we have the potential for evil. But the idea that capitalist competition, social darwinism, humans reveling in their own private benefit, greed, and cruelty, is natural, is both played out and nonsensical.

edit: Source https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution

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[–] kameecoding@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Because that's not how feudalism worked, your land was yours as long you supported your ruler, who actually owned everything.

The definition of capitalism is that you have private ownership of the means of production, feudalism was more like a big Pyramid scheme or MLM, King owns everything, but kinda lends some lands to nobility those manage it and people on it and then goes down all the way to the peasants who also get some small land in exchange for working on their rulers land

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[–] Smorty@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Alles Gute lieber Herr Marx!! <3

(ger.: best wishes to u dear mistr marx!! <3)

[–] RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Before that it was called feudalism.

[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 days ago

Capitalism was supposed to solve the issue of generational wealth so that the amount of money you have directly represents the number of hours you worked regardless of profession or how much money your parents had

But people in power/people with wealth aren’t going to give it up so no matter what system you try, they are going to modify it

Communism remedies this by having no one in power. Unfortunately that is still subject to the above so we have many examples of countries that failed to become communist

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