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.
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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)
0.5 [Provisional Rule] Use alt text or image descriptions to allow greater accessibility
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.
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.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/36828107
ID: WookieeMark @EvilGenXer posted:
"OK so look, Capitalism is right wing.
Period.
If you are pro-capitalism, you are Right Wing.
There is no pro-capitalist Left. That's a polite fiction in the US that no one can afford any longer as the ecosystem is actually collapsing around us."
This isn't changing people's minds about crapitalism. Amerikkkans will keep calling liberals, "the left," and liberals will keep loving crapitalism. This only shows how right wing Amerikkka is as a country. Liberals would much rather be forced to identify as right wing than as anti-crapitalist. These distinctions only bother the keft as we get conflated with liberals constantly. Nobody else gives a shit.
The number of defensive whining from libs in the replies to the OP beg to differ lol, they clearly very much do give a shit. So you keep slapping them in the face with reality until they can't hide from it anymore, and they have to make a choice, pick a side, and be comfortable with their own decision, and the consequences it brings (including *shock horror*, being called what they choose to be - right wingers and fascism enablers, meanwhile the rest of us have the consequences of said fascism to face).
Leftists coddling liberal feeling is just as productive (E: to progress) as liberals coddling fascist feelings, that is to say - it isn't, at all. We're long past the point of prioritising privileged feelings over marginalised lives.
Calling liberals and progressives pro-capitalist is less true than calling self-proclaimed leftists tankies.
The tankies are the ones making shit up and painting liberals as the bad guys and the tankie movement will remain a joke for as long as that continues.
At least libertarians had the balls to go try libertarianism, sure it results in bears but tankies will never try because it's a victim mentality.
This is the dumbest shit I have ever read. My brain hurts and I almost feel bad for you, but that would require way more emotional labor than this reply is worth. I would honestly be fine with it if tankies would purge the liberals.
That's the Overton Window I'm talkin' about
Capitalism is like fire. Unchecked, it will happily consume your house. Never the less, it's an excellent tool for certain tasks. It must be handled with care and contained appropriately.
Right now, a lit of the world looks like London during the great fire. Capitalism has been allowed to run unchecked, and has gotten completely out of control. The massive dilemma is how to reign it in, without collapsing large chunks of society.
Abandoning Capitalism completely is almost as bad as letting it run unchecked.
Marx identified that capitalism by necessity leads to an endless cycle of collapses. There is no way to avoid suffering under capitalism.
A fully planned system has also shown to become highly inefficient.
The the key phrase there is "under capitalism". My point is capitalism can't be the top level. If it is, then it will run away, exactly as Marx saw.
At the same time, it's an incredibly effective tool. It allows for dynamic value assessment in a system that has minimal trust. It's a perfect method of fairly distributing luxuries. It's akin to a fire being useful when trapped in a fireplace, or a blast furnace. The problems occur when it's allowed to run amock.
How would you go about fairly distributing limited luxuries, particularly when the value to a given person varies?
Firstly, I challenge the assumption that efficiency is the most important goal. This was addressed very convincingly almost 70 years ago in The Affluent Society:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Affluent_Society
This book explains that we should not use the same policies for a society which is constantly struggling on a knife edge between starvation and death. That was not the reality 70 years ago and is much less tha case today.
Even if we assume that efficiency is the most important goal, what you are actually arguing for is well-designed markets as the tool to achieve that. I question even this, since a profitable company is by definition less efficient than one that makes little or no profit, since profit is the extra wealth that the company extracts after paying all bills.
Even if we assume that a for profit market is the best way to manage resources and achieve efficiency, capitalism is fundamentally a bad model for that, since practices like hiding information from consumers or capturing regulators are great ways to increase profits without improving efficiency or managing resources effectively.
tl;dr fuck capitalism. 😉
I agree that a hyper focus on efficiency is a bad plan. At the same time, we would need some corrective mechanism.
A good example would be food preference. Say you have 3 food options, A,B and C. A is the easiest to produce, but bland. B and C are more difficult and so more limited. Some people love B but hate C, others vice versa. Some people would happily just have A, and use the excess value on other luxuries. How do you resolve this?
A limited capital based system would find it easy. Each person has an assigned value. They can choose how to distribute it. This dynamically finds the fairest distribution. By passing it to the farmers, they can choose how to direct effort.
As for regulatory capture, etc. That's a sign that capitalism is getting out of control. It's akin to your curtains starting to smoulder. It needs to be used like fire on a wooden ship, with extreme care and control.
I guess we'll never know if the system you describe here would work, since it has never existed. Companies have been using induced demand, loss leaders, cross subsidies, bundling, marketing, and a million other similar tricks to limit consumers access to knowledge and confuse them since long before Adam Smith fantasized about capital as the best of all possible worlds.
How would you go about fairly distributing limited luxuries, particularly when the value to a given person varies?
I don't think it should matter, at least not until we've guaranteed everyone their human rights. Nutritious food, safe shelter, clean water, medical care.
I don't think we can afford to worry about luxuries until we solve the problem of affording people.
A fully planned system has also shown to become highly inefficient
Nobody was arguing that.
I don't think you understand what actually is meant by the term "capitalism". Capitalism does not mean free markets. Capitalism primarily means the ownership of the means of production in private hands. You can come up with a system which is highly regulated, to some degree even planned, which can still be considered capitalistic.
On the other hand, it is easy to imagine a socialist system whose economy consist solely of companies fully owned by the people that work there, i.e. the workers, while the companies themselves engage in a competitive and free market. It would be just like today, except workers have a say in who leads the organization, and how, in a democratic process.
In short capitalism != free market and vice versa.
Tf is this nonsense? Why do you think "a little capitalism" is a good thing? Just a sprinkling of exploitation to keep things spicy?
Yes it is right wing... Obviously? Any other big news?
This is controversial and possiblt world-shattering to many who exist entirely within the American political bubble.
Acting as if the terms left and right aren't completely arbitrary.
I was told it was because of the French revolution. Imho, I think the terms are mostly rigid concepts.
They aren't. Right wing is oriented to tradition and hierarchy while left wing is oriented to progress and equality. This has been understood since the concept originated during the French Revolution.
That's some fine hamburger intellectionlism, right there. Crass, to the pont, confidently incorrect and with a hint of ignorance of anything un-American.
Seeing a lot of that right now; i.e., incendiary, unidimensional, nonsensical hot takes. I think it’s best to ignore them, because there’s IRL work to be done and all this type of person does is blather for attention online.
True enough
Greed is really the problem. Capitalism is just another apparatus without the means to solve it.
I'd say that Capitalism encourages greed and amplify it.
I think this is not really true. Capitalism means that even if you are not greedy you are forced to destroy all rivals and collect all capital for yourself... otherwise you will be destroyed.
yeah uh, that's why we invented government homie.
capitalism is right wing, correct.
but not all pro-capitalists are capitalists.
a pro-capitalist could be right wing, or they could be a victim of the powerful capitalist propaganda machine. this is how we get “bootlickers” and “temporarily embarrassed billionaires.”
more generally, OOP commits the sin of trying to wedge a specific category with economic meaning into a broad unspecific category which can have various economic manifestations depending on who you ask and at what time.
it’s an okay post. not particularly insightful and could use some workshopping.
object oriented programming <3
(Michael Perenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism)
Yes, i believe: war is inherently a right-wing thing, and capitalism is the moral equivalent of war, just channeled into formulas.
I also believe that war is inherently unstable and only an unavoidable side-effect of technological progress. It decays naturally into peace, at which point left-wing takes over.
Nah. It's a form of economics that rewards supply following demand. I'm pretty lefty liberal and I'm 100% in favor of fair capitalism. For most things.
Capitalism is just a machine, a system, and I fully believe in intelligence and hard work being rewarded over sitting on your couch playing video games. Capitalism also requires a well regulated system, progressive taxes, safety nets,etc. There are also some areas where capitalism doesn't work and another system should be used, such as health care, police, fire, etc.
However the idea that capitalism is right wing is bullshit. Maybe uncontrolled capitalism is right wing, but I take strong issue with the most effective economic system in the world being considered "right wing", it's not.
Capitalism is much bigger and more insidious than just a economic system. Despite irrefutable proof to the contrary, people still look at the world in this very limiting way that allows them to see capitalism as just this little neutral effective economic system. Its intellectualizing and abstracting reality to fit a narrative. The fact that you look at things in this narrow way, despite centuries of evidence to the contrary proves capitalism is not only an economic system but an ideology as well. And if it is both an economic system and an ideology, then where does the ideology come from?
Liberal ideology covers up the worst abuses of capitalism, fixates on the individual, guarantees rights it can't protect in the face of capitalist expansion.
Liberal isn't even an economic category to a liberal, it is a set of ideals that protect freedom and guarantee safety, prevent against corruption. Never mind that people have always been oppressed under liberalism, always been enslaved under liberalism. Liberalism is, and always has been a set of economic beliefs, that claim to guarantee certain human rights, through the individual ownership of private property.
I'm sorry, because I know that many liberals are extremely well meaning people, leftists who genuinely care about those rights. These people are exactly the ones this ideology hopes to trick. I'm sure that you personally are a good person with lovely friends, who donates to good causes, maybe shows up to a demonstration or two, votes for Democrats and believes in fair rational governance. But capitalism is just another form of class domination, one that hides its incredible cruelty through its total domination of every part of our lives.
The fact that you can't see it should concern you. I assure you I am a rational and well meaning person. I'm an organizer and work hard to understand the forces at work, I'm not just repeating stuff I heard on the internet or whatever. Some of these thing I worked out when I was a well meaning liberal, whose curiosity unravelled my worldview. I can't say that my views are perfect while yours are flawed, that's not what I'm trying to accomplish. I just ask that rather than dismissing me and other critics of liberalism who are also on the left, consider that your very narrow view might be why you believe what you do. The same is consequently true of me too, its a basic philosophical problem. But i question myself on my views constantly, and I understand your tradition and history. I just wish you and other well meaning liberals understood it a little better.
None of that is capitalism.
Capitalism is when a small number of people (an elite, by definition) control the majority of the Capital, which is property that can be used to conduct business and make money. What lefties call "the means of production." Capital is things like factories, data centers, power plants, mines, large acres of land used for farming, and so on.
What you're failing to describe properly is Markets. Markets aren't evil, free trade between well-informed parties isn't evil. Money, in fact, is the root of all evil but is not in itself evil. None of those things are Capitalism.
I’m 100% in favor of fair capitalism.
How funny! I am 100% in favor of magic pixie dust!
Capitalism is just a machine, a system,
Yeah, a machine that produces extreme wealth disparity that the 1% then use to buy politicians, all our media, and fund neo-fascist groups that want to destroy democracy.
Capitalism is also a machine poisoned the entire US with a very nasty neurotoxin known to greatly reduce intelligence and increase violence. And for what? To sell more cars. Capitalists put a nasty neurotoxin in gasoline just to make a quick buck.
Capitalism is also a machine that is destroying the planet and driving a mass extinction event that could potentially wipe out humanity.
100%
Uh oh, something not blatantly anti-capitalist! Here comes the down votes!
This thread is exactly why leftist unity communities need to make it clear to liberals that they aren't leftist.
Because otherwise you end up with what you see in these comments: a bunch of people in your "movement" who are completely willing to acquiesce to Capital