Lefty Memes
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of "ML" (read: Dengist) influence. 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, discussion and agitprop/stuff that's better fit for a poster than a meme 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] Try to use alt text or image descriptions to allow for greater accessibility
(Please take a look at our wiki page for the guidelines on how to actually write alternative text!)
We encourage 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" (read: Dengists) (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.
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
- Sexual assault
- Genocide/ethnic cleansing or (mass) deportations
- Fascism
- (National) chauvinism
- Orientalism
- Colonialism or Imperialism (and their neo- counterparts)
- Zionism
- Religious fundamentalism of any kind
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What's a new TSMC fab cost these days? 48 billion dollars?
Leaving aside the whole "money" thing, that 48 billion represents hundreds of thousands of peoples' work across very different industries just to build the thing, before even getting to the production of the chips.
How do you get all of those people to cooperate with you and to follow a common plan under anarchism? Under communism (in the soviet sense) at least you can force them. In capitalism, you can force them by paying them.
Americans: "You need tens of billions of dollars to build high tech equipment competitive on the global market"
Also Americans: "Intel, here's tens of billions of dollars. Build me high tech equipment."
Intel: pocketing the money for shareholders "No."
Also Also Americans: "Hey, what are we even doing with all this high tech equipment, anyway?"
sound of Flock Camera, Data Center, and Predator Drone factories rumbling
I imagine the same way you do it under capitalism. By offering them stack in the work product and a prominent place in society while the construction/manufacturing takes place.
The big hang-up for modern Anarchists is that they don't have a large pool of wealth from which to employ people, secure resources, or host the kind of social events that elevate public status. And - in theory at least - that's what union organizing and worker mobilization is intended to achieve.
The capital is free, folks. You can just seize it. When you all work together, there's very few people left who can stop you.
Under communism (in the Soviet sense) you mobilize a bunch of disgruntled and impoverished WW1 veterans to overthrow the government with the guns and bombs they bought to fight the Germans.
Under capitalism, you force people by not paying them.
In the modern western system, it's definitely an open question as to how you transition. We don't have millions of Bonus Marchers to tap into as a revolutionary militia. And we don't have control of the financial services that would let us lock out corporate raiders and predatory debt-holders.
At some point, what we need is a large and well-organized network of dissidents, ready to strip the wiring out of the defunct state and repurpose it to our own uses. But those lines of communication - nevermind the will to power - don't exist (to my knowledge anyway).
"The common plan" is not synonymous with "the organisational structure" or "the company".
The common goal is to build a chip fabrication plant.
The expertise to do this is plentiful and the desire to do this are common. If tomorrow the technology were fully open and available and not guarded behind trademarks and trade secregts and if the detailed instructions are available to all what else is there to stop people from doing the building?
The people who want to cooperate with the other people to build the plant... can?
If the people do not want to, there is nothing that will force them. Why should they be forced?
The actually difficult bit? Getting hundreds of thousands of people to agree on a common plan where each has a role.
You'd need the people mining the raw materials, the people refining them, the people creating the optics, the people creating the machinery that uses the optics to do lithography, the people operating all the machines...
The stuff that's guarded behind trademarks and trade secrets and whatnot is the easy bit for an anarchist commune to achieve. Like I said in another comment, all you need for that is a few thousand specialized engineers. Things in the physical world require an order of magnitude or 2 more people and that's where things get hard without hierarchy.
It had to be recognised this doesn't happen in a vacuum. The raw materials are already being mined and people are refining them and people already creating optics and so on. All of these people already exist in the world and there thousands of people in hundreds of universities and schools that are eager to do this.
I am expecting that you assume this can happen only in a command and control structure as today rather than the free association of people which is why it would surprise me that after anarchism is achieved that medicine collapses and technology collapses. I hope that people continue what they are doing (in ASML for example) because they love what they do. The hammers are not taken to industry like luddites.
The discussion then is not could this work (because people do this today and people want to continue to do this today and more people want to do this in the future) but instead the allocation of resources and tasks. Our understanding of how to connect and collaborate and create have evolved many since Engel in 1840s manchester factory.
Fab on a mass production level is harder due to cost, but there are smaller scale examples, and there’s tons of software examples. There’s also a handful of worker-owned tech companies in the US, and there’s Mondragon in Basque.
Looking at how absolutely parasitic hardware companies are today (Nvidia, for example), we’re better off with less of them, especially since the only way they can maintain existence is through destroying society and the planet. When that level of wealth is funneled into a singular entity, it becomes a cancer cell.
Agreed, there are literally people fab-ing chips (microfabrication) in their own houses in very small scale. Makerspaces are great for fun stuff like this.
If the cost keeps going higher, I will expect a lot of shops to pop up. More realistically, current companies might be shooting themselves in the foot in the long run as the rest of the world makes more repairable components and electronics. I know we just dismantled a couple of PCs 10+ years old and sold the RAM/Hardrives for profit.
Nvidia is irrelevant anyway when it comes to our ability to have good processors. AMD and Intel also make CPUs and GPUs, as does Apple. All you need is a few thousand highly specialized engineers. Software is even easier, there are many single person projects that accomplish quite a bit and small teams can do even more.
The part that's nearly impossible without hierarchy is the manufacturing side. TSMC, a company with nearly 100,000 employees, can't even do it all themselves, they still need ASML's machines and ASML needs parts from Zeiss, etc. Remember that the cost pretty much represents how many people you need to get to do something, majority of it comes down to wages in one part of the supply chain or another. For all of its failings, there's one thing capital is good at: Getting a bunch of people working on a singular goal (so the capitalist could profit off it of course)
Mondragon is impressive, but it still functions via a profit motive and not a single branch of it is anywhere near as complex as semiconductor manufacturing.
FTFY lol. I don't really know what the ratio is of parasitism and actual work is, and I assume it is almost unknowable currently. Things like securing access to some mind, then making sure through cartels or lobbying to drive up the price of resources to make more profit. Presumably ASML is guarding their secrets very much and massively profiting off of it.
Oh no what would we do if we didn't invent the processor oh no. Blud life was alright in the 90s and we didn't have wifi. Y'all gonna have your brain in a vat and your body sent to the mines and call it progress
This is literally a post about making processors lmao
I was pretty addicted to video games in 1992?