Lefty Memes
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
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.
- Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:
- Racism
- Sexism
- Queerphobia
- Ableism
- Classism
- Rape or assault
- Genocide/ethnic cleansing or (mass) deportations
- Fascism
- (National) chauvinism
- Orientalism
- Colonialism or Imperialism (and their neo- counterparts)
- Zionism
- Religious fundamentalism of any kind
view the rest of the comments
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!
Not sure why you're bringing up specialization
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.
Again. Irrelevant. Nobody is arguing against specialization
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.
Nonsense
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?
I don't have to argue against assertions without evidence
He literally wrote a paragraph explaining why it's pertinent..