this post was submitted on 30 Jul 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

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).

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.

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

(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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[–] Draegur@lemm.ee 15 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Cool how that works in a simulated gaming environment where you don't have to worry about shit like humans who actually have free will and stuff.

We unfortunately already have observable microcosms of centralized planning: boardrooms. They fucking suck.

I prefer the even further left position where the workers producing the goods democratically make the managerial decisions...

What I'd really love to see though is attempting a hypothetical as yet untried option where the population democratically influences production decisions of firms, something that only became possible with electronic communications technologies.

[–] dogsoahC@lemm.ee 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I agree. All the power to the workers. My idea of a planned economy is probably not too far off from what you describe in that last paragraph. But I'm no economist, so please don't ask me to put forward a coherent policy proposal. xD

[–] Draegur@lemm.ee 2 points 3 months ago

Ok that's a great deal more based of you than how centrally planned economies are discussed and explained in formal economic education! Actually kind of a relief to hear XD

Historically, centrally planned economies refer to a system where a (usually arbitrarily appointed / unelected / unaccountable) committee makes all the decisions about what is produced, how, and for whom. Typically, this tended to result in the members of a centralized planning committee becoming corrupted by greed and making economic decisions that personally benefited themselves.

Replacing the committee with the consensus of the population would likely be better described as decentralized / distributed / democratized rather than centralized planning.