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.
Good thing we (the US) lost the war, or this lady would probably have her own team of lobbyists running their country.
Since when is it leftist to support the death penalty, let alone take glee in it. This is like the boomer FB shit
I'm against the death penalty in general, but I also acknowledge that in terms of tangible damage to humanity, any billionaire walking the Earth makes any serial killer who has ever walked the Earth seem positively quaint by scale.
I also recognize that we are living under class occupation. The owner class handily won the class war by convincing most of the developed world not to fight it half a century ago.
The peasants don't have the luxury of taking prisoners. We are the losers of a war, in spite of the fact that many have come to worship their occupying oppressors.
Keeping the most destructive humans locked away and well fed until they die of natural causes is a peacetime luxury for those in charge, and unless you're holding a reprehensible amount of capital, that isn't us. You might believe we are in peacetime, but if we refuse to stop them, and it looks that way, they will force our shared, communal habitat to stop us all through their insatiable, sociopathic avarice.
We love to think we're not, but we're still subjects wholly dependant on this world, even the owners activily attacking us and it simultaneously.
well fucking said.
The French revolution shows that the guilotines don't necessarily stop when the aristocrats are all dead. I'm not enthusiastic about mob justice
Yeah, I know a lot of Republicans that claim the left is only on their "high horse" when it suits them. I still don't believe that, but this thread really helps me understand where they got this notion of duplicity. Not a good look. SMH
I 100 % oppose the existence of Billionaires but not murdering people for being rich. History is littered with the monstrous actions of mobs thinking they were slaying a beast. We should always be wary of simplistic, violent final solutions
I mean, why not? POWs have their own self-evident advantages, as we've seen taking place in palestine right now. Hostages are a pretty good thing to have if you want to create a long term negotiating strategy with other people.
But also, if you get rid of the billioinaire's billions, then you get rid of the billionaire. Now you just have a 'naire. Maybe a thousandaire, or something. Like, all the rich people that fled from cuba to florida didn't really end up doing a whole lot with their lives except being mad and super bitter about the fact that they weren't able to keep participating in a fascist government that oppressed the people. Most of them were petite bourgeois anyways. It's the ones that refused to leave that you end up murdering by way of this being the only thing that can force them to leave.
None of that is really similar to this situation at all, even, this is just an independent government killing someone that realistically could have no recourse if they were just completely stripped of their money and sent off to go fuck around in some other country. It's also, to me, kind of an illustration of the divide that you conceive of prison as a "way to keep the most destructive humans locked away and well fed until they die of natural causes". There's, ideally, a greater purpose to prison beyond that. You're justifying this by conceiving of this as like, a "war", an extreme war, a life or death war, oooh it's a war, wartime wartime wartime, but then, the police do the same thing when they justify shooting some guy on the street.
I dunno, this strikes me as a lot of nice sounding guilt-assuaging talk, as good rhetoric, but you haven't really given me any logical argumentation to chew on here, as to why this would be good or why this had to be done, really.
Because with the apparent exception of Vietnam, billionaires run the show in the society they live in. They use their capital, which is just an expression of power, to change laws, buy courts, shift responsibility to their corporate entities that receive a cute lil meaningless fine that costs less than the profit of the crime instead of prison time, and here in the US they even literally OWN and PROFIT off many of our prisons. That's the primary reason billionaires shouldn't exist, because it's close to impossible to put a check on such insane levels of power, which again, at those quantities, is what capital becomes, raw power. You can't have a functioning representative democracy where people can grow so wealthy that their power over society extends beyond their single vote.
Most of the peasants in the world are subject to their respective judicial systems and prison systems largely configured to protect PROPERTY rights over human rights by design of those they work for, and guess who that is?
There are beautiful exceptions, the Nordic nations come to mind, but sadly my country, the US, has been spreading its greed disease for decades. We toppled south American rigimes daring to make something better to keep their markets open for our capitalists to rape using our military industrial complex, and we've been converting Europe with our greed disease a little at a time(YOU can live larger than you've ever dreamed, foreign legislator, just betray your countrymen for our profit!), the UK has fallen to it, the French are fighting it but losing, etc.
1789
It is perfectly reasonable to oppose the death penalty, but the foundational event of the modern left movement was people chopping off a king's head.
I'm against the death penalty on the grounds that I don't want the government to have the authority to kill because they keep fucking it up. Either they get the wrong person or botch the execution.
There's no question that a person is a billionaire.
Since you can't make a revolution with white gloves.
The term "leftist" is too broad and "death penalty" too loosely defined.
Auth-leftists definitely support the death penalty, as in a powerful state should have authority to kill.
Anarchists don't think there should be a state therefore there is no body authorized to kill. If someone must die, it would be at the hands of an individual or an ad-hoc grouping and be called "self-defense".
Thinking things can change without the 0.1% being killed at all is a liberal idea.
Welcome to Lemmy!
billionaires aren't people. their existence requires a river of blood, and they all deserve death, regardless of the states opinion.
I think its good to remind them they can be killed. I think they forget.
Is someone with $900 million a person without a river of blood to their name?
The idea (or my opinion at least) is we start at the top, working our way down the high score list. After the first few, hopefully the rest come to their senses and voluntarily stop being scum.
People are always looking up, so they think about themselves as the little guy. Meanwhile people with smart phones and designer clothes are wading through a river of blood themselves, but they don't look down, so they don't see it. Reality is, if you live in America or Europe there's a good chance you're in the top 10% of global wealth. So when I hear this sentiment that we should start chopping from the top, I always notice how they think the chopping should stop right before it gets to their neck. Oh and look who that would leave on top... Interesting.
Fun sentiment but there's no way to exist without participating in capitalism. My smart phone may be made with slave labor but it's not like there are alternatives. Even if there were they'd be unaffordable.
If you can't see the massive difference between a handful of billionaires causing the suffering in the world to become richer, and the hundreds of millions of people who are just participating in capitalism because there's no other choice, then there's no point in talking to you.
I can absolutely see the difference, just like the Vietnamese factory workers can see the difference between them and you claiming you have to buy an iPhone. In a billionaire's world, what they're doing is the norm. Do I think they have a responsibility to wake up and smell their bullshit? Absolutely.Their actions hurt many people and it's inexcusable. But doesn't that ring a little hollow if I'm not willing to do the same?
probably not. but let's try to be real careful about killing innocent people here
Up to $999,999,999.99 you're in the clear!
Got a penny in my left hand and a knife in my right.
You can put me in whatever category you like. I still want to see the 1% hang.
People are extremely bitter that rich people exist, and openly would call for their deaths, regardless of however much their lives would actually improve, were they to die, or however much their oppression might continue under a more conventional arrangement, or a less, sort of, offensive level of wealth inequality. People do find it offensive, basically, they find it ostentatious, and what's more commonly called for, to be put to death, than ostentatiousness? Than the offense of sensibilities?
I dunno. You get a lot of hard talk from supposed leftists who understand nothing of the kind of core principles at play, but none of them will realistically do anything, they're just floating by and passively regurgitating whatever they consume in the spectacle. They lack the empathy to commit real violence or change, I think.
It always stops at the death of the rich. The money they have doesn't magically go into the public coffers to be distributed for the benefit of those who need it. It's all just grievance and schadenfreude rather than a way to change up the structure of power.