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
view the rest of the comments
There's a reason anecdotal evidence generally isn't worth much. Talking about your experience is great but using it to extrapolate to the sweeping remarks this person is making is dangerous and generally should be avoided.
I'd argue that lived experience (material reality) is the only thing that actually matters, and that theory can be confabulated by anyone. edit: again assuming that this person is a real person, not saying that their history is the only one that matters, just that real world lived experience is more important than theory
Here's another anecdote then. My polish family got saved from the Nazis by the russian army taking Poland, got a university education, the women got to be independent and have their own housing and material security.
Their religion was suppressed and they were unhappy about that but Polish Catholicism was extremely misogynistic and repressive.
Oh they also got vaccines and healthcare and shit.
It was no utopia but they were treated well enough that they regretted moving away for a long time.
This is difficult to respond to, but I'm going to try anyway.
I don't think your family's limited prosperity was worth the extermination of the other guy's family. Killing the Nazis is a very low bar for goodness. Americans also killed Nazis, and now look what's happening in the US.
If you have a bad situation, seeing someone else in a bad situation doesn't make your bad situation better, it just means that there are now two bad situations.
It wasn't just my family though, women were massively liberated in the USSR relative to basically everywhere in Eurasia at the time. Loads of people die in prison, maybe their family was Nazi collaborators, maybe mine was KGB agents, maybe we're both lying.
We should stick to verifiable facts when discussing history.
I don't think exterminating 50 families is worth it even if 50 other unrelated families get uplifted. At least, I don't think you can call it good or better. And I don't think any one specific theory or ideology is necessary for women's liberation. Women have historically liberated themselves using a myraid of different ideologies.
I don't think you can count theory alone as a "verifiable fact." The verifiable facts are the historically accurate first-person accounts of history which have been measured against corroborating witnesses and physical evidence. Marx wrote a book about his own thoughts and predictions. Some of these thoughts can be measured against reality and some of them cannot. Anybody can write down their thoughts, and the more intelligent you are, the more you can twist your words to make them sound good. Material reality and the lived experiences of real people matter more to me than what an intelligent person can make up or predict.
I find it hard to believe that every single person who died in a gulag was a Nazi collaborator, because not all of them were. Although we can't do it on Lemmy, it is possible to verify familial histories and first-person accounts. You're right about the fact that a lot of people lie on the internet so this whole discussion is kind of silly.
Feel free to believe that but social sciences are a science and there's a reason anecdotal evidence is not valued highly.
Should we discard all of quantum mechanics because of your lived experience with gravity? Obviously not.
This is a wildly false comparison, social science theories can't be compared to physics. Now you're just being very silly on purpose.
I cannot have a lived experience with gravity which is contrary to the existence of gravity. It is literally impossible. Why am I wasting my time explaining this? You know how silly this is.
They definitely can social science is just as much a science as "hard" sciences and extrapolating anecdotes to make general statements is equally garbage in both fields.
How much do you know about quantum mechanics and how gravity works differently at that scale and thus the need for an entire new field called quantum gravity?
Your lived experience of gravity as an attractive force of on earth roughly 9.8m/s^2 would be in direct opposition to quantum gravity
I'm sorry, this is too silly. Have a nice day.
It's silly to hold evidentiary standards?