Lefty Memes
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.
Agitprop (I.E. everything that would be more fitting on a poster than a meme) goes here.
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. Please post agitprop here)
0.5 [Provisional Rule] Use alt text or image descriptions to allow greater accessibility
(Please take a look at our wiki page for the guidelines on how to actually write alternative text!)
We require alternative text (from now referred to as "alt text") to be added to all posts/comments containing media, such as images, animated GIFs, videos, audio files, and custom emojis.
EDIT: For files you share in the comments, a simple summary should be enough if they’re too complex.
We are committed to social equity and to reducing barriers of entry, including (digital) communication and culture. It takes each of us only a few moments to make a whole world of content (more) accessible to a bunch of folks.
When alt text is absent, a reminder will be issued. If you don't add the missing alt text within 48 hours, the post will be removed. No hard feelings.
0.5.1 Style tip about abbreviations and short forms
When writing stuff like "lol" and "iirc", it's a good idea to try and replace those with their all caps counterpart
- ofc => OFC
- af = AF
- ok => OK
- lol => LOL
- bc => BC
- bs => BS
- iirc => IIRC
- cia => CIA
- nato => Nato (you don't spell it when talking, right?)
- usa => USA
- prc => PRC
- etc.
Why? Because otherwise (AFAIK), screen readers will try to read them out as actually words instead of spelling them
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 irrationally 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
view the rest of the comments
Sorry if this is a bad question, but can some explain "liberals" to me? Being from the US,I understand it as the opposite of republicans. But I see the word get a tons of hate here and really just want to understand.
Liberalism is the philosophy of capitalism. The people attacking liberals are either socialists who read literally any book in the last two centuries or confused conservatives.
The people who get angry about this are liberals who want to maintain the system of capitalism by buttressing it with welfare and technocratic tweaks as opposed to socialists who want to replace the system with one that serves the workers instead of capital.
Thank you for the explanation, also fucking love that username!
To add onto the other comments, I'd like to point out that there are two distinct things that are called liberalism. If you're in the US, liberalism employed on its own usually refers to social liberalism, ie essentially progressivism. In that regard it is understood as the opposite of conservatism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_liberalism
In France (and elsewhere), when we say "liberalism" we mean economic (or "classic") liberalism, which essentially means : free to entreprise, free from the burden of social contribution (few taxes), free from regulations (small government), etc. which is closer to the economic policies that conservatives (and their equivalents over the world) typically defend.
The word iberal is built from the latin root "liber", meaning free. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/liberal
So in practice, there's a mixup of these terms where for americans/britons liberalism=left, whereas for a lot of other people liberalism=right. Hence the confusion.
For the history side of things, I can't help... but reading the above article should help already.
Cheers,
I'm getting that sentiment. Also jealous of you French fuckers and your ability to protest correctly.
Time to turn that envy towards the malagasy ! and the nepali !
God I fucking wish! But I'm responsible for a couple cats, and my mom when the time comes.
I believe it tends to mean Neo-liberal, which is basically the modern corporate-friendly Democrat party, as opposed to the descriptor for 'not conservative'. So basically, there's liberals, and there's Liberals.
This makes much sense now that I'm thinking about it. To be very clear, fuck all neo liberals! Capitalism ain't the way.
Liberalism is the ideology that says everyone should have equal rights, freedom of speech etc except "bad/troublesome actors".
In practice, bad/troublesome actors can include anyone. This ideology was created in early USA and in britain. And its proponents, on one hand said "equal rights for all" but also had slaves. In britain, liberals supported the subjugation of india because india was "a bunch of barbaric savages who needed to be civilized". Today immigrants or religious minorities are also excluded from these rights under the pretense of national security.
What we have today is neo-liberalism, that extends liberalism to include economic policies such as capitalism, and finance banking etc. (There's probably more to it, but i am a bit rusty in my knowledge about this topic).
Honest question, what should I call myself then?
Probably a progressive. I assume you want things to get better for everyone, and think we have to do something about the current state of things
It's a wide label centered around "what could we do today to fix things"
People here (just lemmy generally) tend to be completely irrational and anal about terms and just want to dunk on the establishment while having no actual plans to achieve their goals.
Basically, most people here (myself included) are progressives, in favour of many socialist elements in the short term and even more in the longer term, and there are some lunatics who somehow want soviet union style socialism (not realizing that that would obviously and inherently immediately lead to the type of corruption we saw there).
They are quite displeased with the democrats in the US who they view as (and I agree) center right neoliberals, which just basically means they're mostly fine with things continuing as is, sans the most obvious horrific things.
They frequently fail to realize that because there is a 2 party system (as its winner takes all/first past the post) that the literal only way to get any progressive momentum is through continued strong support of said democrats (or whatever major party is closest to their views) whilst using primaries, local and state politics (or equivalents for other countries) to shift them towards being progressive, and so they love to make edgy memes about revolutions they will never carry out (because that's easy, fun, and doesn't require real work) rather than the boring, unfun, actionable plans that do work.
Just to be clear, of course my criticisms apply for the people being impractical, and not the practical progressives, protesting, still voting, etc etc.
This is more or less similar in any western nation with winner takes all/first past the post. These systems suck because they make change very difficult and severely shorten the levers people have on the political processes of their countries, but we live in the world we have, not the world we wish we had.
Not down voting you, in case it matters to ya, but largely disagree.
That's what I have always found almost anywhere, and Lemmy is the first place online where I've run into the opposite - sincere, informed, motivated individuals who not only have a plan, but actively work towards it IRL. Sure, there's plenty of do-nothing know-it-all types, I've almost certainly been one myself here more than once - but if you're seeing that as the primary Lemmy thing, sounds like you just need to curate your Lemmy feed. Get away from the folks wanting to recreate Reddit, ya know? Pretty sure that's where a lotta the "I know everything, but have done and will do nothing" personalities came from anyway.
I don't find this to be true. There are real activist groups that meet and have actual plans to support parties, policies etc with door to door campaigning and more. You have none of that on Lemmy. Just people making guillotine memes.
I have not seen a singular person who that description fits my entire time being on Lemmy.
This seems really dismissive without any actionable examples.
I actually disagree tremendously, because something that has actually bothered me was seeing that reddit has more communities with people who actually plan protests, campaigns, user action, etc.
I imagine part of that is due to the much smaller lemmy user numbers, but I haven't seen any actual events result from lemmy.
Interesting!
We really have very different experiences it seems. And honestly, I think that's for the best! A big strength of federation-style tech.
Some responses:
I intentionally stopped short of pointing you toward the parts of Lemmy I was talking about. I don't know you - if you're curious, you'll find em; but I don't know you and they aren't "my" spaces, I'm not going to inflict you on them just to make a point, know what I mean?
if you're willing (feel free to tell me to fuck myself lol, given my statement above), where are you finding these "real activist groups"? I can't say I've ever once seen the like online. To be fair, I tuned out of "social media" (the big platforms) more than 10 years ago and spent a considerable amount of that time jaded and uninvolved on that level.
I really can't understand any defence of modern Reddit whatsoever (assuming you're defending modern Reddit, you didn't indicate otherwise). For a long time now it's been hilariously controlled, are you talking about subreddits that have managed to fly under the radar or something?
completely agree that we got a whoooole lotta thoughtless meme'ing here. Pretty much comes with the territory though...
Oh, edit to add - I also haven't seen IRL events organized on Lemmy, agree with you there. That's not at all what I was saying, my bad - I meant that I run into folks who do IRL organizing, and happen to chime in about things online. The opposite of "online -> IRL" you're describing.
Very cool of you with the measured response.
Thanks! It's going great lol
That seems weirdly hostile
Groups looking to take action should be trying to be seen, not acting like a secret society. This alone means they're almost certainly failing in their duties, if they exist at all.
Reddit often has location specific subreddits. Often times a cities subreddit for instance might organize a protest, rally, transport for voting, etc.
What a crazy logical leap this whole bit is. "You didn't say something completely unrelated so therefore you must have opinion I made up".
There is obviously a lot wrong with modern reddit, but that's about management and ownership of the site, and therefore the enshitification and control.
What I was discussing is the people using said site. Two obviously separate concepts.
Not every bit of positive action is so brazen and offensive that it would violate TOS.
The signal to noise ratio is veeeery low here though. There are also a shit ton of weirdly pro russia/pro CCP noise with people who seem to trying to be impossible to talk to on purpose for some reason. Like they aren't trying to actually effectively convince anyone of anything, just circle jerk in a weird cult like atmosphere where they just vaguely bust out stalinisms.
You don't seem to really even be trying to read my comments charitably, a courtesy I've been extending to you. That's not a discussion, it's just trying to score points on someone.
You do you, but I'm all done.
What a weird bout of projection. Your weaponized civility was not well camoflauged at all. It was right out there in the open, especially given you started with "I’m not going to inflict you on them"
You baited out a comment with effort just to put out a comment with no effort accusing me of what you're doing when literally all of your queries were answered. Troll behaviour.
You couldn't be more wrong dude. I was sincerely interested in what you had to say. My "not going to inflict you on them" was entirely couched in an explanation most people would consider reasonable, and phrased in a way that I tried to make clear wasn't an attack - it was only unfamiliarity. What I said is I don't know you, not that I dislike you. And ya know what? Turns out I was right lol, you're impossible to talk to!
You're doing the thing right now. You've made up your mind completely about who I am and what I'm up to, and anything I say, you interpret through that lens.
I can't help you with that. And sheesh, even speaking politely is interpreted by you as a trolling tactic? Get a fucking grip, you sound like an asshole and a moron. Why would anyone who disagrees with you bother to go through this? Besides which, you're just wrong. You don't have to go far through my comment history to find an instance of me strongly disagreeing with someone (re: recent comments by Obama). At the end of it, I realized they were right, I was the one misreading, and I apologized. But hey, maybe that's another one of my sophisticated troll techniques!
I don't hate you, I'm not mad at you, I don't wish you ill will. I just don't want to talk to you, and wish I hadn't bothered.
Go ahead and spin this comment into whatever weird shit, too, should be entertaining.
Ah look, another big toxic comment not even passive aggressively hurling insults.
Not even worth the time to read it all. Apparently your "You do you, but I’m all done." was indeed an obvious lie. (Double downvoting me with an alt is hillarious shit too)
🤡
Thank you for the explanation. Sorry it means you're catching strays. But I do appreciate the well thought out response.
Thanks, and no worries. I'm used to that here. I just wish there was more sane and productive conversation about how to actually get the goals people who in theory agree with me politically accomplished.
Fuck this hits my soul. You got me shedding a literal tear.
It's a weird wedge that is appearing in the US political scene. Certain segments of the scene are intent on never seeing a government left-of-Trump ever again, so they are accusing "liberals" of being just as bad as conservatives.
Sorry you're catching strays too. But I will always vote against trumpettes, regardless of this site downvoting me for it!