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)
0.5 [Provisional Rule] Use alt text or image descriptions to allow greater accessibility
(Please take a look at our wiki page for the guidelines on how to actually write alternative text!)
We require alternative text (from now referred to as "alt text") to be added to all posts/comments containing media, such as images, animated GIFs, videos, audio files, and custom emojis.
EDIT: For files you share in the comments, a simple summary should be enough if they’re too complex.
We are committed to social equity and to reducing barriers of entry, including (digital) communication and culture. It takes each of us only a few moments to make a whole world of content (more) accessible to a bunch of folks.
When alt text is absent, a reminder will be issued. If you don't add the missing alt text within 48 hours, the post will be removed. No hard feelings.
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.
Alt Text:
Three-panel meme showing a man in military fatigues speaking in a forest setting. In the first panel, he says “The pace of oppression outstrips our ability to understand it…” In the second panel, he continues “…and that is the real trick of the Imperial thought machine.” In the third panel, he concludes “It’s easier to hide behind 40 atrocities than it is behind a single incident.”
Every day, I identify a little bit more with Luthen Rael
I, too, am busy making my mind a sunless space.
My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape
Me, too! We should totally hang out!
Okay but have you considered my short attention span, rabid derealization, and fact that 'caring' is just play for me?
I don't understand it. What is meant by incident?
An administration or official that is otherwise competent, stable and uneventful can be rocked by a single scandal. If everyone can focus on one thing, spend time researching it, and drive it to ground finding out everything about the situation, they can shine a light on it and try to make a giant political issue out of it. A mistake can be career ending if they can find or manufacture some culpability or negligence in it.
But if you just constantly make incompetent decisions, mistakes, lies, threats, scandals, military actions, crimes, etc. and never give any breathing room between them, then despite the plethora of things to scandalize, no one ever had time to run any single issue to ground and use it against you politically. It's a high risk, high reward strategy that works, unfortunately, very well. It puts your opponents on the back foot and makes their work seem daunting, and by the time someone does put in the time with one issue to expose the details, dozens more issues have stolen the limelight.
Think about this. Years later, everyone remembers scandals under or related to the Obama and Biden administrations. Benghazi, Hunter's Laptop, Hillary's Emails... but despite the overwhelming number of scandals under or related to Trump, it is a lot harder to pick just one off the top of your head. The exception to that is probably the things he was actually tried for, because those got a.lot of time and focus and people understand them well, and he wasn't in a position of power to generate a many new scandals to steal the focus away. But things that didn't get that focus? Despite being bigger deals than any of that shit accused of Democrats, they are just blips on the radar among many. Someone might bring one up and you think, "Oh yeah! I remember that!" That's the strategy. That's what they are doing. Intentionally.
In the context of Andor (Star Wars series this scene is from), people stopped caring about what the Empire does because they made all of their atrocities commonplace. People grow apathetic because they just internalize it as a new normal and assume "If we couldn't/didn't do anything about it all those other times, why care now?"
It's a bit like how I feel every day I come to Lemmy and see yet another news article about any 2d20 number of Palestinian civilians murdered by Israel. It's just an everyday thing now. Hamas's indiscriminate murder of Israeli civilians on Oct 7 was met with immediate retaliation and condemnation, but when Israel performs several Oct 7-scale massacres on a regular basis, no one bats an eye. There's no arbitrary point where you can convince people "Enough is enough, now we have to do something," because people couldn't or didn't do anything all the other times and they don't see why this instance should be any different.
Remember teapot-dome?
Subprime mortgages?
9/11?
President getting his dick sucked by his secretary?
They stood out in the narrative. They were specific things you could dig into, dissect, promise "never again" and have it feel substantial even if you didn't mean it.
Now, name one incident from the current trump admin that isnt currently in the forefront, and one from the last trump admin.
Took a while, didn't it? And you don't have as deep an understanding, do you?
If theres one thing sticking out, you can grab ahood of the thing. If its just covered in spikes, they become a defense. It just becomes the texture of the thing.
Or if you've ever been in a fight. Try grappling a championship wrestler. Youll lose but you can get hands on. Track whats going on. Now try to get hands on enough people to surround you in a thick crowd. You cant even track that shit.
"Flood the zone"