this post was submitted on 17 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.
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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).
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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.
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(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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The community enforces rules?
Ok, but scale that up and try to account for bad actors. Human nature isn't going to change, and so the are guaranteed to be people working to abuse the system. "The community will enforce" is just handwaving away the problem without actually dealing with it, just as much as bullshit like "the free market will solve x problem" is.
And how is the problem solved currently in your mind?
The difference between what we have today and what we want to see isn’t some magical world where things work perfectly, it’s one where people can make the changes directly without a ruling class deciding for us.
I try to think of systems that are stable and can scale up to cover everyone (this is also a pipe dream, since people aren't purely rational). The idea of no one in charge, and the community deciding and enforcing everything can work up to a small town level, but a national or global level, it falls apart.
Some things, like major infrastructure for example, are necessary to have, but impossible to fund through voluntary means. No individual or small community has the money to build it on their own, and getting everyone to agree on what exactly should be done for any given project is damn near impossible. There needs to be a central planning authority of some sort, and they need to have the funding to execute these types of projects. Now what scale and format that planning authority has is the heart of every debate on which political system is best.
The community is in charge. It’s democracy without a class of rulers. Its people working together because it brings them mutual benefit instead of a system built on exploiting others for personal gain.
You can have a “central planning authority”, it would just be voluntarily made up of those small town level groups.
I know that's the goal, but what are the specifics on how it's implemented? How does it handle the smooth talker who wants to warp the system into something else for his personal gain? By the time you build in mechanics to handle these edge cases (without just handwaving it away with "the community will enforce it"), you converge back towards something similar to one of the various political systems we have today.
Maybe I'm just too pessimistic to get behind the anarchist thing. My day job is industrial automation and people not doing what was expected or what is best is what causes 90% of my headaches. Relying on people to behave rationally and do what's best just isn't in my nature anymore.
In other words, you're here shitting all over a centuries old ideology you have barely a vague understanding of, wasting the time of people who clearly know significantly more about it than you do, because you have no intention of actually learning, only arguing to be "right" (you're not).
Here's a tip: try actually investing some effort in to understanding a topic before barging in all confidently incorrect as you are, you might actually learn something (again, not that I believe you want to).
Don't be making assumptions now. I've tried looking into it in the past, but I keep just getting sources like those; long on concept and short on specifics. Of course, anarchism being what it is, the answers you do sometimes get on the specifics varies wildly, depending on which brand of anarchist you are talking to.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but you could have central planning, but they wouldn't have any authority...
They would have the authority of the groups they represent.
Think of the UN, they don’t have power to enforce things yet they get shit done all over the world.
Is it perfect? No
Is anything perfect? No
Is it better than authoritarianism? Yes.
I'd be careful with this example. One of the key issues people take with the UN that they indeed can't enforce things, like in Gaza. Security council approved a ceasefire, but the fighting goes on. Russia doing genocide in Ukraine, UN tells RU that they need to stop being bad.
For the record they of course do stuff, but if you'd like to advocate for anarchism I'd use a more effective example. If even the UN can't stand up to fascism, what shot does an anarchy have, ya know?
The only group enforcing things in Gaza is Israel. UN or no UN, nothing changes there so any idiot complaining about the UN for not fixing it is misguided.
The UN is not an example of anarchism, it's a collection of authoritarian states with a lot of hierarchy. It's an example of voluntary mutual framework where force does not have to be used to create progress.
That's what I mean. That's a very weird example for you to use in this case, pick a different organization if you wanna talk about how great anarchism is. The UN ain't it.
Isn't that what we have right now
No? At best we have 'representatives', who barely represent a quarter of what any one voter wants.
Right, but it's voluntarily elected by smaller groups. The fact that the representatives don't align with most voter's interests in every topic is a fundamental problem of agreement, not a problem specific to the method of organization.
As long as the apps at the top of the app stores and songs on the top of the charts are the ones that corporations most advertised, and as long as people will listen to conspiracy theories from Q Anon and demand freedom of speech from Twitter, I genuinely do not trust people to have direct access to decision making. Ask middle class Americans think the biggest political issue right now is the tik tok ban
So instead you prefer the decision making to be in the hands of a small group of people all paid for and owned by the corporations, and who pander to the conspiracy nuts?
I wonder what you think politicians are, and whose interests they're acting on (hint: it isn't yours, and depending on how much ~~"lobbying" money~~ bribes they've gotten, it might not even be their own, see those who serve the oil lobby for example)
The people who taught you what "human nature" is, have a vested interest specifically in you thinking that humans are naturally greedy cut throat creatures, because that serves their systems of exploitation and oppression which they need you to continue to participle[ate in not because it's fact.
Beyond that, your argument is 100% appeal to tradition, and you not being able to imagine existence outside of the social constructs that have been around in some cases for a mere couple of hundred, in other cases for, at most, 4-5 thousand years, doesn't mean it isn't possible, only that you've been indoctrinated well enough in to believing that is the case.
You've completely misunderstood what I mean when I say "human nature isn't going to change". I'm not saying that all humans are greedy, or going to abuse the system. The "human nature" I'm talking about is the variability of peoples' personalities. This guarantees that at some point, no matter how idyllic the society you've created is, someone is going to come along to break it. And they may not even be acting out of malice. It might simply be that they think they can do it even better. Any system you set up needs to have mechanisms to deal with that.
Oh no, I never considered human nature! My whole worldview is ruined!
What's to stop the community from getting it horrendously wrong, as human communities have done so many times in the past?
What stops it currently?
Laws (at least somewhat) and the state's monopoly on violence
Oh states don’t get anything horrendously wrong?
Huh, didn’t know that.
No, they definitely do. It's just a wider cast net of more people so the error margin is lower. Think of getting 1 vs 10 vs 1000 people to guess how many jellybeans in a jar.
"The community" usually doesn't. The most likely result is the bystander effect.
So you’re saying for nearly 200,000 years people sat around feeling zero sense of responsibility for their group and never acted?
How much of the bystander effect is in part because we are disenfranchised from managing ourselves and our communities? “Oh that’s not my job, I’ll sit here being useless because the cops/&tc will come along and manage it for me”.
For 200,000 years, the world was an extremely violent place, where slavery, genocide, etc were the norm. The idea is usually to try to move away from that.
Of course, there are not more people in slavery today than at any other time in the past, nor does genocide go on especially not in industrial scales.
Scale those thoughts to the human populations at the time. To give an extreme example, if Genghis Khan caused the same scale of death today, that would be 800,000,000 dead.
The world today is far better than it was, but nobody said it is was anywhere near perfect.
Uhhh.... yes, for any community large enough that they didn't know everyone in it.
Which has been debunked, as is mentioned further down the link you yourself posted