this post was submitted on 09 Dec 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.
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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).
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The only dangerous minority is the rich.
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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.
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What do liberals like?
I'm only told what they dislike. I even know what conservatives like, that's an easy answer. Liberals, I haven't a clue.
Given their recent electoral strategies, they mostly expect to be elected for not being Trump/conservative.
It's an effective strategy, up to a point. "Vote for me because I'm not the guy you hate" is one of the oldest political strategies around. And Democrats have even openly said that they've been funding the most extremist right-wing candidates on the ballot for years to set up easy wins when people think their opponent is a nutjob. There was a lady who even wrote a book about how she won an election doing this. And then she lost to that same extremist in the very next election. Because what they've actually done is push the Overton Window further and further into extremism.
Ah, the leftist strategy, very bold.
They like progress that happened in the past, and they like stories about that progress where an individual, not a movement, fought for what was right and the individuals in charge of the system, now aware that it was hurting people, changed voluntarily without political struggle or mass organizing.
They like voting in parliamentary representative elections, even if every step of that election is rigged to benefit the rich capitalist class, in fact this is the only kind of democracy they like.
They like the feeling that words like freedom, justice, liberty bring. They like ideals, in fact they are total idealists who dont understand that progress should be based on more than ideas. Change does begin with an idea, but so does reaction.
They like to believe that there is no such thing as class.
They like experts and repeating the opinions of experts, and they like to not think about from what institutions and incentives exist to bestow expertise.
At a Systemic level hey're big fans of the only true Power being Money whilst the Vote is nothing more than a bit of loud Theatre & Clown Show that doesn't actually control the managing of a country - or in other words, of Oligarchy rather than Democracy.
At a personal level they're big fans of personal upside maximization with no legal, ethical or moral limits, aka Greed Is Good, or in other words, for sociopathy to be totally legal, socially aceptable and even celebrated.
Liberals like good government.
Both conservatives and leftists believe the government is fundamentally flawed. People keep electing conservatives who sabotage the government to prove it's flawed (but not in a way that would negatively effect them and their friends). Young people support leftism at protests (which are really just social get togethers) until they grow out of it and vote for conservatives because they continue to believe the government is flawed. Or maybe refuse to participate in a system because it's not perfect.
If a liberal admits there's flaws to the system which they want to fix, they are blamed for it because they failed to provide good government. The fact that liberals aren't in power long enough to make the government better doesn't matter. They're considered failures if conservatives prevent them from providing good government.
So people vote for the conservatives to run the government because they succeed in preventing liberals from making the government good.
You know the craziest part about all this is that I've been given about three contradictory definitions on what a liberal is, and not one person has claimed to be one.
I'd consider that "Lemmy 101" if the subject was conservatives. They'd never know to come here to begin with, but liberals?
Shouldn't this thread be full of infighting and opinions?
...where are they? Is this something no one wants to be?
I mean this is a leftist meme community, so I'd expect mostly leftists to be the ones responding. Just like if on a conservative meme platform you asked what leftists are, you'd mostly get conservatives answering.
But I feel like the replies to your question don't really contradict each other. One was describing them as the Democrats in the US, which is basically accurate. It's gotten turned into a word meaning leftist by the Republicans, but it's basically just people who think the current system is pretty much good, and only needs small tweaks.
This amounts to effectively a support of capitalism and the free market, with some regulations being added on top of what we have now. Communism is bad though, and at most we should have some more safety nets. The civil rights movement is good now, but go back to then and liberals were the "white moderates" MLK talked about. Stuff like that disrupts the status quo too much. Since what constitutes the current system changes over time, what liberals support also will, just like any ideology evolves.
Obviously everyone here (me included) will probably be a bit biased against liberals, but also a lot of anarchists or communists or other left wing folk will have probably identified as a liberal at some point in time, and statistically still know and/or be family with a lot of them.
Performative actions that give them the illusion of being enlightened.
Whatever conservatives like, but less of it.