this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
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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.
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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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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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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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I interpreted it as implying "being coerced into selling one's labor is degrading, regardless of occupation" rather than "labour is without dignity".
(And just realized that I mixed European and Simplified English spelling there... I'm going to leave it.)
I'm not gonna pretend that life under capitalism means all labour is equally dignified, or rewarding, or a benefit to your community.
But, the fundamental difference between the working class and the owners is that we work, and they don't. They only have their livelihood because of us, and that is why we are valuable, and they are not.
Your skills and abilities are dignified. The future is NOT us all choosing to be idle. That is a bourgeois ideal, and is valueless.
Obviously I'm not counting people who have no option. Ableism can also go fuck itself.
Definitely on the same page. Humans tend to opt to do things with their time without need for coercion, whether necessary for survival or not. I WOULD argue that in an ideal, highly automated world, idleness could be a valid option but, I don't suspect it would be as popular as some may think.
I'm absence of sufficient automation, people will tend to pursue what interests them or what they're good at, which allowed our species to thrive long before social constructs introduced coercion to extract value from others' labor.
Even highly automated, an idle future would mean no change.
That would require essentially a perfect, and unchanging, society.
That doesn't sound realistic given our social nature.
Oh indeed. Like I stated, I doubt that many would take that option. Humans just tend to be too driven to do something to dedicate their lives to idleness. They would also likely feel social pressures to do otherwise. And when I say "idle", I really mean it. It would take effort to avoid producing anything at all - not even art (Steevo and Bob in SLC Punk comes to mind).
Would some be inclined to be idle? Probably. Would many want to spend their whole lives idle? The data does not suggest this.