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, updooting good contributions and downdooting 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
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.
- 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
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It's one of those things that's true, while also being misleading. Or maybe over simplified would be a better choice of words, I dunno.
It really doesn't matter what system you have, even anarchy, because at some point, there's a threat that if you don't go along with the majority, there will be consequences.
Those consequences may or may not involve police. And the majority may all share both the same socioeconomic group (as would be the case with full, proper anarchy), and ethnicity, while still exercising the threat of the majority.
Laws are nothing more than spelling out what actions will and will not be open to action by the majority.
Even if you don't call the grouping of people a nation, it is a de facto nation once you have a group working together in a way that restricts the actions of others. Doesn't really matter if the group is three people sharing an entire jungle, or three roommates in an apartment, all agreements rely on both the good behavior of all parties, and the bare minimum threat of being excluded from the group.
That's what a law is. It's a very complicated way of saying "not in this house". Obviously, the more people there are, the more representative the organization is (as opposed to being purely democratic, or other consensus based systems), the more distant the individual is from making those laws, but it doesn't change that it's all the same thing, just at different scales.
Police are, at the heart of what they represent, the people that make other people obey the majority. If that's two roommates evicting the third by ostracism, by threat, by action, that's still the same thing.
The exact nature of the "majority" that current police in any of the nations any of us are likely from may vary. As you said, it could well be a minority that simply hold the threat of withdrawal of funding via socioeconomic control, and thus control the police despite being a numerical minority. But that still exists as an extension of a more simple majority.
That more simple majority is the mass of people that don't care, or want the status quo, or think they stand to gain more with the system as is, even though they aren't actually dominant in any way.
The reason all of that matters is that we all have to understand what power we do and don't have in order to have a hope of changing things.