Lefty Memes
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, upvoting good contributions and downvoting 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,
as well as 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.
7. Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:
- Racism
- Sexism
- Queerphobia
- Ableism
- Classism
- Rape or assault
- Genocide/ethnic cleansing or (mass) deportations
- Fascism
- (National) chauvinism
- Orientalism
- Colonialism or Imperialism (and their neo- counterparts)
- Zionism
- Religious fundamentalism of any kind
(This is not a definitive list, the spirit of the other rules still counts! Eventual duplicates with other rules are for emphasis.)
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For Marxists, absolutely. Marx heavily critiqued the profit motive and the dangers of producing to fulfil greed instead of need. For Syndicalists, Market Socialists, etc? Perhaps not.
Workplace democracy is an improvement, but Marxists will argue insufficient alone in combatting class society.
What's your issue with Central Planning, other than vibes?
I'm not a theorist obviously, but it seems like it's inherently going to be a limited number of decision makers who can't possibly know everything, and they become a bottleneck to business creation at best, a corruption machine at worst. I know I wouldn't trust the government of half (or more but my point is, Republicans) the current US states to decide what business are allowed to exist.
I know the retort is of course that we have corruption now, but I'd think if we're theorizing, there's a better way to reduce extant corruption than introducing a new vector for even more corruption. And there's a way to harness the power of people starting small businesses freely without letting those businesses become unregulated behemoths.
Like just set the criteria you would be telling the Central Planning Authority to prioritize, and do that with regulation. Set an ownership tax so that as a business gets bigger the ownership moves away from the founder and into the public trust.
Advocates of Central Planning advocate for rungs, not just 5 dudes and some excel spreadsheets. There would be factory level planners, local planners, regional planners, state planners, country planners, and international planners. Nobody will know everything, but they will know their own areas inputs and outputs.
Why would it be more corrupt? Why do you believe Small Businesses are fine? Markets themselves inevitably result in those unregulated behemoths, it's better to have a cohesive whole that is thoroughly regulated and democratically controlled.
I recommend reading Wage Labor and Capital for more information on why the Profit Motive and Capitalist Production itself to be bad.
That sounds like Market Socialism by another name.
Market Socialism has competing cooperatives, not central planning.