this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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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.
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)
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 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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Memes like this, at least to me, mostly accomplish two things:
We don’t know when small actions added up will make a difference or perhaps even lead to bigger actions. But I just don’t think, as a general rule, we should sit at our computers mocking those who spend their time doing something productive or at least attempting to make things a tiny bit better.
So in this case: help get Pikachu a firehouse. Or go find a squirtle to help. Perhaps you have a better solution on hand and you two can work together. Either way, pointing at him and mocking his attempts to be helpful, even if they maybe won’t solve the issue, just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.
That would imply that (liberal) reforms are a good way to solve our issues, but that is not the case. Of course posting memes is not praxis. But to say that reforms, especially liberal reforms who even fail to see capitalism as the root problem, are good because someone is at least doing something is just as wrong. This is not a new debate and none that needs to be had for the hundredth time. All this reform vs revolution talk has been plentifully discussed over a 100 years ago. Rosa Luxemburgs “Reform or revolution” makes the biggest points perfectly clear. Reforms can be a way to temporarily make things better (if done right, which is not the case with most liberal reforms), but we should not be kidding ourselfs by thinking that we can solve this systemic issue by making new laws. The powerful won’t just sit there and watch their power be handed over.
That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying do the work or put the effort into help sell people on and direct them to better action. Critique is easy, solutions are not, and this post doesn’t really propose solutions. It feels like red meat for people who want to go “liberal reforms are nonsense amirite?” - notice how most comments are functionally just nodding along or just giving this post the same dismissal in kind. Ridiculing well-intentioned people with a pikachu joke and then walking away is worse than inaction, frankly. If your goal is buy-in, I’m seeing quite the opposite, which is unfortunately a kind of post that is generally rewarded online. Yet I imagine we both want to see meaningful change!
Let me ask you this: why was this posted? What was the goal?
someone posted a photo of you earlier
come on now, that's not good conduct!
Please refrain from ad hominem/personal insults in the future, I would like for this community to be in the image of rule 1
Lol, so they get to sealion and gish gallop, but pointing out that what they are doing isn't productive is somehow the problem? ok...
(E: also it's not an ad hominem, I didn't attack anything about them, but the point they were literally making)
that is not what I said. If you want to constructively point out flaws in other peoples' argumentation, feel free to do so. Friendly discourse in the comments is more than welcome!
It's the insulting/ad hominem or using/painting caricatures that I cannot abide
reacting to the edit: Maybe using caricatures to point things out isn't best practice
If this is the path we are going down then I'm not really in the mood to continue this conversation. Have a good one man.
the picture is ofc just a meme. In reality (if we stick to the methaphor) there is a whole barrage of Hypnos' (media conglomerates) behind Pikachu, telling everyone this is the best we can do to solve this situation, while a bunch of Machamps' are tasked with blocking the path for the fire trucks (bourgeois democracies being designed in a way to prevent meaningful change) and beating up anyone who dares to try turn off the gas to the exploded pipeline (police and military protecting the exploitative economic base that accellerates all and is the cause for many of our problems)
So no, supporting or even accepting the machinery behind Pikachu is not making things better "little by little" but actually enabling things to stay as they are at the core.
I get what you’re driving at and don’t entirely disagree but you’re also sort of implying most people trying solutions you don’t think will work (or know won’t work sometimes I imagine!) have no agency and are just mindless sheeple/puppets. I imagine this isn’t actually how you feel about other people who don’t fully align with you!
And we both know it’s never “just” a meme. Memes influence opinions, they often are a culture driver/reflection of culture and attitudes. It was posted to make a statement, so we should assess it critically.
First of all, thank you for reading in good faith and staying constructive (unfortunately that's not a given -_-). Regarding the "just a meme": I was getting at memes being limited in their expression of opinion, thus often lacking a lot of nuance. I agree that statements and positions should always be assessed with constructive criticism in case of inter-socialist discourse (so thank you for doing that).
Back to the subject: I don't think that most progressively-inclined liberals are mindless drones. But that, thanks to capitalist (sur)realism (post-modernism being the most prevalent example) and manufactured consent, the actions of the majority remain limited and inside the scope that is deemed as "safe" by the exploiting elites (like "tax the rich" being a slogan that has lost any meaning of it's original radicality). Ofc it makes a difference whether liberals or outright reactionaries are in power; my point, however, is that regardless of the paint job, the mask underneath remains the same. The reason why the constant critique of liberalism is so important imo, is that the energy/motivation of the progressive inclined populus going to waste there prevents (or at least hinders) the potential polarization/radicalization of those groups. Meaning that disillusioning the populus (instead of working together with the leaders of liberal movements) should be one of the primary goals for socialists of all stripes.
Tell me about it lol just had an discussion with someone that unfortunately soured pretty quickly despite my best efforts but it is what it is.
Ah that makes sense, I missed that entirely.
I feel you on a lot of what you're saying, but ultimately we are dealing with people and people don't like to be wrong, so we have to be more gentle than we'd like sometimes in the service of "buy-in." For example: in another thread there was a discussion about libertarians. Now among friends, I'm the first to throw out (tongue-in-cheek-ily I might add) "Libertarians are Republicans who like drugs" and other little quips. Probably shouldn't, but meh, I'm not perfect and it feels harmless enough. Now if I'm actually talking to someone who is a libertarian, my rhetoric shifts. This came up because someone in the thread was being pressing about firefighting and how libertarians (allegedly) all want it privatized, a line they hear all the time. Whether the person is right or wrong about the libertarian's position is honestly pretty immaterial. The goal should be discussion and understanding the libertarian's position then addressing what they believe in an effort to convince them maybe their stance is problematic or straight up incorrect (assuming that is sort of an agreed to conversation across the board, otherwise it just feels like a lecture). But you open up telling people what they believe then attacking those positions, you're basically just backsliding into strawman arguments.
So how is that relevant here? We should not walk up to people before they've even had a chance to talk about what they think and say "all your ideas are dumb and ineffective" with a meme that created a discussion without nuance. Not if we are trying to do something more than get like-minded people to nod along and piss off those who feel to be the subject. If we want them to do the things we think are effective, which is an achievable goal because ultimately we all want more or less the same things (stop climate change, fix income inequality, etc), then we have to abandon those kinds of tactics. Does that make sense?
makes sense to me.
To maybe pick up on you describing how you make the “Libertarians are Republicans who like drugs” joke: This is what I intended this community to be for. A place for socialists to joke among one another and maybe vent a bit through those memes. After all, reality can be quite harsh - even depressing - for those disillusioned with the "easy" solution provided by career politicians (at least in my experience).
If my goal was to spread Agitprop (read: Agitation + Propaganda), I'd have an entirely different rhetoric and would behave differently.
I might get to actually doing constructive Agitprop with the help of memes and social media in general once I am organized politically (as in start a work group to read up, maybe develop and then synthesize concepts for doing so). Unfortunately, due to (mental) health reasons, I haven't been able to do that and probably won't in the foreseeable future.
What I do in the meantime is reading up on theory and trying to keep up my revolutionary optimism and maybe help others with doing so as well... (My motivation in creating this batch of communities)
Honestly, I have no good response to that. I think it's unproductive but this space isn't really designed for productivity I guess, so yeah lol. I don't mean that in a loaded way. As you said, some folks just want to vent. Whether I agree or not, it's a reasonable way to feel, so do your thing! Appreciate the good discussion.
Not everything has to be productive, we don't have to be full time revolurionaries 24/7 :p
Having, or even reading, conversations like these was a rarity on Reddit, but also the thing that brought me to the platform. So thanks to lemmy and you of course, liked this as well.
(am curious btw: do you ppl on kbin see PMs sent from lemmy?)
You’re absolutely right. And at no point have I said this, so it probably behooves me to: the post is pretty funny lol
That’s a good question… I would assume so? But I haven’t tested it. Feel free to shoot me one.
Also, while I saw the notification, I can’t read the other message you sent me but I’m assuming because I blocked the dude so it’s just hiding a whole chain from me. You probably made a decent point for why you should not boot the dude and if that’s the case, then totally understand! If I’m way off the mark my bad lol. I used to mod a relatively medium/large sub on Reddit and I’ve always felt I should’ve handed out bans like 10% more than I did. They were people who became incredibly disruptive and I allowed them to linger for too long causing chaos (or even get a rise out of me). That being said, we are not on Reddit, this is not my sub, and you are not me!
dw, it was just a message asking you to report stuff like that so I can react more efficiently
and when/if I would need more mods you'd be on the list of ppl I'd ask
Appreciate that! I recently resigned as a mod on Reddit and I’m pretty focused on building up the truegaming community here but I am always happy to chat with you and help however I can!
Except what they do is only productive towards maintaining the status quo and enabling the oppressive systems that exploit us to continue chugging on regardless.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/14/liberalism-and-fascism-partners-in-crime/
https://blacklikemao.medium.com/how-liberalism-helps-fascism-d4dbdcb199d9
https://truthout.org/articles/fascism-is-possible-not-in-spite-of-liberal-capitalism-but-because-of-it/
https://nyanarchist.wordpress.com/2019/01/23/scratch-a-liberal-a-fascist-bleeds-how-the-so-called-middle-class-has-enabled-oppression-for-centuries/
I would have enjoyed a conversation about this as I am generally in the "big problems need big, often radical solutions" camp and we'd probably agree on more than we'd disagree. But given the other comment I just am not convinced we can have a fruitful discussion so, as I said, have a good one man.
Ah, yes, the tone police! What a convenient way for you to avoid engaging with content that would be challenging to your bias..
Refuses to engage with you when you try to interact on their terms, then goes ahead and tells a mod/owner to ban you 🤔
[Sarcasm] Sounds like some honest, good-faith behaviour to me! I'm glad the ComMagazine (/not-subreddit/whatever we're calling them) owner's on their side 'cause clearly you're some kinda rabble-rouser or something!