this post was submitted on 08 Jul 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)
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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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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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This is exactly how it's supposed to work in a functioning democracy.
Where ideally everyone, but at least a critical percentage of citizens is educated enough to recognize the pattern of deceit and false, but easy answers to very complex questions from extremist parties.
Where established parties don't feel the need to pander to the votes of extremist parties by cooperating and adapting points pushed by extremists.
Where the average citizen doesn't feel left out by the system and is tempted to align themselves with extremist parties in order to protest the current reality of said system.
Where the system implements safeguards to not allow the system to be taken hostage by extremists.
Would be nice, eh?
May I introduce you to the idea of POSIWID?
There are more ways to structure a society democratically than with representational democracy. Other, less fundamentally hierarchichal ways of implementing democracy aren't as prone to fascism developing.
Also fascism is ultimately the grand conclusion of capitalist neoliberal democracies. Fascists seek to amass, consolidate, and wield power. Liberal democracies fail to resist this amassment because the purpose of a system is what it does, and neoliberals ultimately want it to be possible to amass power in the hands of their wealthy corporate cronies. They are ultimately fascists not because they implement fascism but because they are willing to tolerate fascists implementing fascism as long as they get to benefit from it. Obviously this systems theory stuff is complicated. That's the point of studying systems.
Anyway. This was a long comment when I fundamentally agree with you. I just want people to think about ur-fascism, where it comes from, and what to do about it
No worries. This is a lefty space after all ;)