this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2024
223 points (92.4% liked)
Lefty Memes
4546 readers
850 users here now
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
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Planned economies don’t have a great track record. Why not suggest something new instead of the same tired old ideas?
Market socialism with an emphasis on genuine co-ops. It's not hard, it works, and you don't necessarily build an immutable heirarchy.
Exactly. Capitalism isn't bad because of free markets, free markets are great and arguably way better than planned economies in most applications (minus things like healthcare, if you can't reasonably choose not to buy a product then prices will inflate out of control).
The problem with Capitalism is the concentration of capital which inevitably leads to oligarchy. Put profits in the hands of workers instead of investors and watch the problems melt away. Hell, I can see the merits of totally replacing wages with proportional stake in the company. When everyone gets a percentage of the profits, they're way more motivated to work efficiently with less waste and higher productivity.
I'd argue that the emergence of capitalists and capitalist ideology, and the amassing of currency is just a natural tendency of currency itself. Currency itself is a tool of transactional thought, and I'd argue that if we could move away from transactional trade and focused more on mutual wellbeing, we could do without currency entirely.
That requires a basically unanimous raising of class consciousness. I just don't see that happening anytime soon. We're just not wired that way on a scale above small communities. Even without currency, hoarders gonna hoard. Before we had currency, we had people hoarding resources directly. It works in Star Trek because they're post-scarcity.
Until we're post-scarcity, we need a way to exchange goods and services on a scale larger than a neighborhood.
We are post scarcity, on basic needs.
Don't think that's gonna be enough.