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!
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.
Ever seen someone doing their "unskilled job" all their life? It's just fucking magic!
The truth is that capitalists hate skilled workers, because those workers have bargaining power. This is why they love the sort of automation which completely removes workers or thought from the equation, even if the ultimate solution is multiple times more expensive or less competent than before.
Nothing is more infuriating to a boss, than a worker that can talk back with experience.
The only idiots that repeat this, are unskilled workers who have no idea what skilled workers do. Just assume they sit in a cubicle and browse Facebook all day for big money.
As others have said, your job is unskilled if you don't need to be trained for many years to do it. A retail worker, in any position, can be trained very easily. Go from McDonald's to Starbucks to Target. Same shit, different company. But from working the till at McDonald's to being a neurosurgeon? Just a surgeon? A doctor of any kind? Yeah, no. That takes training and skill.
You are reverting to the capitalist brainwashing that has been repeated to you for your entire life.
Nobody is arguing that a grocery stocker requires less skill and training than brain surgery. Literally nobody. And yet you people repeat this idea over and over.
I mean this not as an attack on you but a chance to expand your worldview. Cognitive dissonance hurts, and it’s important to recognize when it’s happening so you can ask further questions.
There is no such thing as an “unskilled worker” because all jobs require skill. It’s called human skill, and it’s what enables us to build societies greater than the sum of its citizens.
The logical conclusion you are suggesting is that because some humans are less capable, they don’t deserve basic needs such as a home, reliable transportation, internet, food, utilities, etc.
And if your basic premise starts with the notion that society should not be meeting the basic needs of its people, then there’s only one thing that would convince you anyway.
Lol, you're an idiot. I am a skilled worker. You couldn't do my job to save your life.
We know you aren't arguing that every job requires the exact same degree of skill. All that we want to do is say that there are jobs whose required skills are quick to acquire and are therefore easily replaceable. Meanwhile, there are other jobs whose skills take a long time to acquire and are not easily replaceable. We use the term "unskilled labor" to refer to the former group and "skilled labor" to refer to the latter group as a point of convention. When people claim that unskilled labor doesn't exist, they imply that every single job requires skills that are slow to obtain and therefore every worker is difficult to replace, which is clearly false.
Where is the cognitive dissonance? Where is the contradiction in distinguishing between jobs that require trained applicants and jobs that don't require trained applicants?
If you decide to use "skilled worker" to mean a worker who has a skill, then you are correct that "unskilled workers" do not exist. Unfortunately, that's not what the phrase "skilled worker" means. If that's how you use the term, then you're talking about something different to everyone else.
The logical conclusion of "unskilled labor exists" is simply that unskilled labor exists. You cannot jump from the observation that "unskilled labor exists" to the claim that "some people don't deserve their basic needs." It's a non sequitur, and it's not a position anyone in this thread would support.
This is a straw man. No one here has expressed the position that society shouldn't meet the basic needs of its people. The position you are arguing against is the position that some jobs require training before hiring and others don't. Again, that's just what people mean when they refer to skilled labor and unskilled labor.
I think you're taking the terms too literally. Unskilled labor doesn't actually mean the jobs require zero skill. It means they can be learned and mastered relatively quickly compared to other jobs. I've had many jobs and I've done both skilled and unskilled labor.
When I worked in retail I was able to learn the job in a day and master it in a month. For my current job as a software engineer I've been learning for over a decade and there's still a lot I don't know. The technology changes rapidly and you have to be constantly learning to keep up. I'm significantly better at my job now than I was when I only had 5 years of experience.
That said, ironically it's people that work in skilled jobs that are generally the biggest advocates of social policies for the good of all. I believe everyone should have all of their basic needs met just for existing, and I would gladly pay more taxes to contribute to that goal.
My guy do you think jumping on a teams meeting or using Excel and sending emails is difficult? Office work is unskilled work. Management is unskilled work. Having a degree didn't suddenly make you a skilled worker. Hell, even sys administrator and programming are unskilled, all you have to know is how to Google stuff. They consider car mechanics unskilled for reference.
You're proving my point. You have NO fucking idea what skilled labour is.
I'll give you all my tools and lab equipment. Design a semiconductor. Do the electrical simulations at transistor level. Do the block level sims. Do the HDL. Do the layout. Send to fab, get it back, and now bring it up in the lab.
If I give you $1 billion if you did it yourself, you couldn't.
These are skills that take 4 to 5 years minimum of training just to look like an idiot. Then another 10 years to start getting the hang of it. By the time you're a gray beard with the mega skills and knowledge, it's been 30+ years of hard skilled work. To know where to swing that proverbial hammer.
Office work is not just excel and PowerPoint. There is office work that is skilled. And idiots who don't know what they don't know, have no idea how hard it is. And will never know, because they're too stupid to figure it out.
For a billion I would absolutely make it happen.
And by the time you did, 20 years later, you'd be a skilled worker!
Maybe we should call them extremely skilled workers.
It's probably a lot harder without any social skills, lmao
It's basically a job requirement