this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
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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.
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as well as condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavor.
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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.
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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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That's a decent write-up, but has some issues like:
"[China, Cuba, North Korea, Laos and Vietnam] can be classified as communist because in all of them, the central government controls all aspects of the economic and political system. "
Uh... in every country the central government controls all aspects of the economic and political system. In a standard western democracy like say the UK, the government passes laws which regulate the economic and political system. They may choose to be hands-off when it comes to certain things, but ultimately they're in control. At any point a law can be change, or a court decision can be changed so that what was once hands-off is now regulated.
What would it even look like for a country to not fully control all aspects of the economic and political system? IMO that only happens in a failed state when the government simply lacks the power to enforce laws. The difference between China and the USA is just a matter of degree. In China there are more regulations in general, and there are more state-owned enterprises.
Also, Social Democracy describes the US. It's again a matter of degree. Yes in the Nordic countries there are more state-owned things, and more public benefits. But, in the US, even though ambulances are mostly private and for-profit, fire trucks are not. Privately owned toll roads exist, but they're rare. The government pays for and runs schools. Potholes are filled by government employees. Mass transit is almost always city-owned. And, instead of the Pinkertons, cities use police forces where everyone's a government employee. There are a lot of things that could be privatized in the US, but almost nobody actually wants everything to be a privately-owned for profit capitalist enterprise.