this post was submitted on 31 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, upvoting good contributions and downvoting 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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[–] StoneyDcrew@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago (5 children)

I would love to see a policy where there is a variable tax rate on companies based on employees satisfaction.

If a company has a largely unhappy workforce they would be taxed most of their profits.

If a company has a extremely happy workforce then it can reduce the taxation rate below the standard rate. And employees can still vote on this 2 years after termination.

It incentivises companies to invest more in the employees wellbeing, and punishes companies that take practice in unsustainable hiring and mass layoffs later.

If it is unavoidable that a company needs to downsize, they would be incentivised to help employees find new employment.

I'm sure there is a large issue I'm not seeing with this but I'm pretty fond of the idea.

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[–] gandalf_der_12te@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 1 month ago (6 children)

It surprises me so that any functioning democracy isn't automatically socialist.

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

That's the central question of Reform or Revolution, and why the majority of Leftists believe Reform to be too unlikely to outright impossible, and therefore Revolution the correct path. Rosa Luxemburg wrote about it in Reform or Revolution.

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[–] XipArchivedXenia@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago

i thought the crying guy was Hatsune Miku at first LOL

[–] azrv@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 month ago (3 children)

So it's all nice in theory, but I have questions...

the workers own their workplace

Based on previous discussions, I understand the commonly proposed model here would be a workers' collective of some sort. People involved in the collective's production share the proceeds - we made N number of tractors and took them to market and received X value units; we spent Y value units in the production process, so we can distribute (X - Y) value units among the members of the collective. The workers own the equipment and infrastructure used by the collective and share responsibility for production. If a worker moves from workplace A to workplace B for whatever reason, they cease to share in the proceeds and responsibility of workplace A's collective and take on the responsibilities of workplace B's collective and share in its proceeds.

(Aside: What if X is smaller than Y? Should members then add back the difference for the next production cycle, so production materials can be procured?)

Let's look at the (X - Y) part a bit more closely. This defines the benefit that members of the collective derive from the enterprise, so they are collectively incentivised to make the difference as big as possible - to benefit themselves rather than a capital owner. Let's assume that all collectives can procure production materials equally with no supply and demand market forces (unlikely). Let's further assume that the market value for the goods produced is fixed (questionable, but OK). So anyone involved in producing tractors pay the same number of value units for raw materials and components and can only ever sell tractors for the same number of value units as everyone else. This means that an individual collective is heavily incentivised to reduce the raw materials needed per tractor (production efficiency), make better tractors than other collectives (market attractiveness), or increase the number of tractors they take to market in a given time period (increased production). Each collective, and ultimately its members, thus stand to benefit from having the most skilled tractor builders, innovative tractor designers, and an all-round hardworking membership. A more successful collective would draw more workers with such beneficial traits and become even more successful in the process. It would also be in the interest of the collective to either push out members that do not contribute according to their full ability, or reduce their share of the proceeds. The former would result in some workers not being accepted into any collective after a while and thus not contributing to any production, the latter in performance-based remuneration that creates societal inequality.

Congratulations! You just created market forces in the labour market that will have winners and losers.

a.k.a the means of production

Can someone explain to me what this means in today's world, beyond factories making physical goods (such as tractors) using physical machines and manual human labour?

production is then planned by elected committees

There are some details missing here. Who elects these committees - workers, or society in general? What are the requirements for being electable for such a role? How are these committees held accountable for failures? Do they plan production at a society-wide level, each in a specific industry, or down to regions or specific production facilities? Do they serve only a planning role, or are they also responsible for execution?

What checks would be in place to prevent professional popularity contest participants (those we call politicians at the moment) from adopting a facade of ideological purity and getting elected on popularity rather than merit? How would they be insulated from outside influence by those affected by their decision making? Do we really need more tractors, or do they still have friends in Worker's Collective 631 that makes tractors?

Congratulations! You just created a managerial class (at best) or just the usual corrupt cabal that run things to their own benefit.

increases productivity as workers are more happy and committed

That's a big assumption. Anyone have any data from wide sampling across multiple industries to support this as a long-term sustained effect?

work to better ourselves and humanity

If you replace "humanity" with "our close community" this might be realistic. I don't think the "and humanity" has ever happened at a macro level.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

Congratulations! You just created market forces in the labour market that will have winners and losers.

Yes. Market Socialism (which would have supply and demand and competing worker-owned firms) doesn't solve everything. I advocate for it because I think it's a good, achievable medium-term goal that would be a vast improvement over what we have now. Something we could see in my lifetime. Once we get things there, workers are in a better position to advocate for further changes, like dumping money altogether.

However, there's plenty of people who think we should jump right past that and into the Anarco-Communist end goal.

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