this post was submitted on 16 Sep 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

Version without spoilers

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.



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

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[–] InverseParallax@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Mao killed more.

Fortunately, he only killed Chinese people, and they don't mind, so we're all good.

[–] naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Like personally? I often feel like attributing famines solely to one person is a bit messed up, although there are cases like Bengal where specific government individuals were enthusiastic .

The party later distanced themselves from him somewhat, so presumably they thought his ideas could be improved on but I had thought a lot of china and USSR famines rested on really dumb ideas about industrial agriculture that were popular in many places + officials hiding bad numbers + desperate need to show immediate superiority of alledgedly better numbers + upheavals of massive civil was and ww2.

[–] InverseParallax@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

He was a massive idiot, he personally decided agriculture was being eaten by birds, so he demanded every peasant kill a quota of birds.

They did, and were immediately hit by the largest locust infestation in modern history.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign

He killed 50 million Chinese purely because he was an epic moron with an incredible ego.

[–] naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago

Realistically I'll have to look into this before trusting a random comment and I probably wont because it's half the world away from me and he's dead anyway.

I am sure there is some subtly in personal culpability though because between Mao and peasants killing birds was a whole bureaucracy that evidentally thought it was worth doing (and idk how much is slavish obedience/fear).

Temujin personally killed a lot of people. Like personally ordered the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and his overall campaign was ~10% of human population at the time an estimated 40 million, which seems to be comparable to famine figures even if we personally blame both of them. Dude was a certified maniac and I think that especially given the overall lower population at the time and deliberate murderous intentions stands as histories greatest monster and most murderous person.