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!
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.
ID: A Sophie Labelle 4 panel comic featuring Stephie in different poses, saying:
Landlords do not provide housing.
They buy and Hold more space than they need for themselves.
Then, they create a false scarcity and profit off of it.
What they're doing is literally the opposite of providing housing.
Oh my god, tell me about it.
Even when you want to rent a place and can afford to do so, landlords make the situation really difficult because many of them put up places supposedly for rent, but make it as difficult as possible for someone to actually qualify to rent it, since they're only doing it to inflate their net worth and having someone living there apparently devalues it. It took me over a year to find a place that actually was willing to let me rent it because most others would cook up bullshit reasons to reject me (my personal favourite being one that got mad at me and put me in their blacklist for... asking too many questions about their property???).
Like... I have money. They are offering a good in exchange for money. I am willing to spend money in exchange for this good. It shouldn't be this hard.
I'm in a similar situation. Add disability (which means at least 80% of properties aren't suitable without serious adaptation) and benefits to the equation, and I'm considered "too big a risk" (even though having me as a tenant means funnelling government money directly in to landlord's pockets). The polite landlords and agents will play along and pretend to take me seriously before they very obviously put my aplication at the bottom of a pile and never call me back, while some feel comfortable enough to openly discriminate against me, because despite the law saying they can't, no one actually enforces it, and they know they can get away with it. The ratio of applicants per property are so obscenely out of whack, they can place as many illegal conditions as they like, and people will continue to flock, borderline beg, to be allowed to spend 75% of their income on a shitty little hellhole.
I realised that I had to limit myself to only applying to places that are at least £100 less a month than I pay now, and even those automatically reject me on grounds of "affordability", meanwhile my landlord just keeps putting my rent up in an attempt to push me out so they can then charge the next person even more, and I keep paying it because I simply can't find anywhere else suitable to go.
To say it's distressing would be the understatement of the century.
That really fucking sucks, I'm so sorry you have to deal with this bullshit. Landlords really are the worst.
I appreciate it, back at you. None of us should be putting up with this bullshit.