this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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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

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.

(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.

7. Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:

(This is not a definitive list, the spirit of the other rules still counts! Eventual duplicates with other rules are for emphasis.)

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[–] [email protected] 63 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Make sense. In its inception, capitalism was putting work as the source of value creation. Rental is about asking money while nothing is produced.

The message is all confusing today because the people talking about the value of hard work are actually the ones who want to get huge returns from investment while paying as little as possible for the work done. Their end goal is to avoid working themeselves. Smith would despise them just the same.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 6 months ago

Capitalism is based on the theoretical right of ownership in an era where only feudal aristocrats could own anything, in the present day and age many people in a capitalist society own their home and primary mode of transport and there isn't a law per-se that restricts anyone from even being allowed to own a home or car or horse or whatever other than being under aged.

The next step is the degree to which that right should be that you can in theory own a home, vs the right to own a home in fact. IE, the equality of opportunity vs the equality of outcomes. This is another dimension in which class struggle is in fact intersectional with identity politics, as that same equality of opportunity vs equality of outcomes struggle is what defines a lot of modern race and gender relation conflicts in the present day, or at least what did before the right decided to drag us all kicking and screaming back to the 50s, the 1850s.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

Capitalism is feudalism with a marketing team.

Land/capital shouldn't be more important than people. Economies are supposed to be lowly tool of a society to maximize the equitable and efficient distribution of goods and services within a society for the benefit of the citizens of said society, not a few thousand sociopath families at most of society's expense as it is.

Our society (the US in my case, but increasingly the entire west) literally lives in perpetual servitude to one of its broken tools. A catastrophe should have leaders coming out saying they'll take every measure to protect their people and society, not their fucking economy and it's quarterly private profit expectations.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (1 children)

The innovation of capitalism is that the right to own land or other capital assets isn't an exclusive right of the aristocracy. There is no law in letter which says you cannot ever own a home, and that is a new thing in the west. The next capitalist innovation was that you don't have to own something to have the rights of people who do own things, which was unheard of prior to the liberal capitalist revolutions of the 1700s and 1800s.

It's important to understand that things we take for granted in the present day did not always exist, nor are they necessarily guaranteed to keep existing unless specific effort is made to prevent them from being destroyed by the forces that want to go back, in today's day and age, that being the emerging class of inheritance billionaires who through various means are acquiring more and more outsized political power as well as more and more outsized ownership of resources, creating an in fact reversal of the liberal reforms of the feudal system which even Marx hailed as a huge and essential step in the right direction for the era it happened in.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

You are not permanently tied to your landlord, nor is your landlord your judge and president. You don't usually work for your landlord, either.

Capitalism is different. It still sucks and exists because of the squeezing out of surplus value. It isn't feudalism.

As for economies being lowly tools, they're not. They're quite literally the most important part of society. They're how we eat, drink, and survive. Unfortunately we live in a class society, and have done so ever since a couple of dudes during the dawn of agriculture started racketeering. As a result, "a few thousand sociopath families" have distributed resources in their own favour for a very long time, and will continue to do so until class society and the state are abolished.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago (1 children)

That's what's wild- Adam Smith has been totally whitewashed by modern capitalists. They want to believe he is the exact opposite of Karl Marx, but their boy actually has many similarities with Karl that they choose to ignore. Kinda like how they ignore the parts of Jesus's teachings that don't vibe with their free markets and guns for all.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

Yep. He had a lot to say about social welfare, how horrible poverty was, how shitty monopolies are etc.

I don't really want to rehab Adam Smith or crapitalism but when even the poster boy for the scholarly justifications for this system would be like "excuse me, what the fuck?" maybe alarm bells should be ringing?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

The rest of that fucking chapter is informative but smith does not seem to think landlords are a bad thing.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

He is not against the concept in its entirety but throughout the wealth of nations he's quite critical of large and absentee landholders. In another chapter he points out how Tennant made improvements drives up rents which in turns discourages improvements for example.

He thinks of land rents as a monopoly and that monopolies are bad but I believe he imagines lots of small land holders competing to improve their land for their tennants and thus strengthening the nation by increasing how productive land can be.

This uh... did not happen, as I'm sure I don't have to point out to a comrade :p

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

It seems to be a mix, really. Houses for rent or resale get improved all the time specifically to increase the value. Apartments not so much.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

“Capitalism has this HUGE THING in common with COMMUNISM! Your MAGAt hat (made in Jina!) will Never Be The Same!”

/checkmate

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

horseshoe theory deniers in shambles.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Georgism ❤️

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Well for Adam landlords immediately demonstrated the concept of capitalists being bad at capitalism.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

It's less that Capitalists are bad at Capitalism, and more that Capitalism contains within it contradictions that lead to its own demise.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

All systems will be morphed by the powerful to secure their power

To eliminate the problem you must eliminate greed which hasn’t seemed to work out considering it’s a sin