this post was submitted on 15 May 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, 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.

(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] 23 points 4 months ago (4 children)

I don't care what system you implement, staying alive is going to require labour. We're nowhere near utopian sci-fi style post scarcity yet.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Labor is required, having a Working Class and an Owning Class is not. Workers can share ownership.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

You can start your own worker's collective. I'm sure many liked minded people would like to join a company were risk and reward are shared equally.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I think that would be nice, but individual microcosms of a better system are woefully insufficient.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago

I do wonder what fraction of .ml actually tries to unionize their workplace or start a cooperative. Probably higher than most groups, but I'd wager it's still embarrassingly low.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

human labour is a matter of nature until and if post-scarcity is achieved, although I would argue it doesn't have to be "work". It can just be fun.

Wage slavery on the other hand, isn't. It's a human construct enforced through incredible violence.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

that's not the problem at all.
the problem is that you must do labor for a particular group of people who own all of the money, and you must do something that they want you to do.
so you end up selling bullshit that destroys the planet, made with slave labor, to abusive assholes.... also, no sitting allowed, no expressing your personality, no unusual tattoos or hairstyles or then you're only allowed to do the really shitty work.

btw, we've fenced off all the land and you're not allowed to sleep anywhere or gather any food without money... so which, again, is almost entirely owned by a very small group of slave masters.

nice how you're pretending like the argument is about working vs not working at all...

and btw, we do live in a post scarcity society and universal basic income works just fine and is a huge benefit to society.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You must have learned a different definition for "utopian" and are very much stretching the definition of "post scarcity". We ain't there yet, and aren't going to be for the foreseeable future.

As for the first paragraph, the vast majority of western society doesn't work that way. There are a few major examples in the US that do (Amazon comes to mind) that are rightfully criticized for it (although I wish the criticism came with a side of actual consequences).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

i didn't say anything about "utopian"

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, but I did. You can't just ignore individual words and respond to something I didn't even say.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

i responded to some things you said, not everything...

you can't just ignore everything i said and pretend like i was responding to something else i wasn't

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

I think there is an important distinction between what is required of a human to exist and what a capitalist society refers to as labor lol

We get closer to post scarcity everyday. Just depends on if society collapses or rather we get passed this great filter.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I mean, it turns out that if we all specialize in one type of labor or another we each become significantly more productive than if we all tried to provide for ourselves as individuals or even small collectives. If we use money as a rough way of storing the value of our labor, we can use that layer of abstraction to trade labor with each other at impersonal scales, benefitting even further from specialization and organization.

I, for one, am glad someone else has gotten super good at growing food and building shelter so that I can concentrate on other things as I desire. I could even become a farmer, if I wanted!

[–] [email protected] -5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Not sure why you're bringing up specialization

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Without specialization the effectiveness of trading labor doesn't go much beyond just doing favors for each other. I don't get much value out of having you do a task for me if I can do it comparably as well as you can. I have to weigh the benefit of having someone else work for me and building mutual trust against the cost of being indebted to someone else and the risk of them doing differently to how I would have wanted. If we each specialize, now other people can offer labor that I can't perform myself, and when they get good enough at their specialty it really starts to outweigh the negative sides of having someone else do the work for you.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Again. Irrelevant. Nobody is arguing against specialization

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

Money is necessary if you have specialization. You can't keep track of who has done what favor to whom or how much that favor is really worth. Money is the thing that makes extreme specialization possible.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Another enlightening comment where you sidestep the conversation to laude over others from your imaginary horse.

Care to explain why it's nonsense or should we just trust you bro?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago

I don't have to argue against assertions without evidence

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

He literally wrote a paragraph explaining why it's pertinent..

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I mean, it would be an order of magnitude more work to grow all the food and build the (subpar in comparison) amenities I need to survive. But I guess then I would just be a slave to nature. You can't escape.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

Separation of duties does not imply capitalist wage slavery