this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2025
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Lefty Memes

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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

Version without spoilers

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.


0.5.1 Style tip about abbreviations and short forms


When writing stuff like "lol" and "iirc", it's a good idea to try and replace those with their all caps counterpart

  • ofc => OFC
  • af = AF
  • ok => OK
  • lol => LOL
  • bc => BC
  • bs => BS
  • iirc => IIRC
  • cia => CIA
  • nato => Nato (you don't spell it when talking, right?)
  • usa => USA
  • prc => PRC
  • etc.

Why? Because otherwise (AFAIK), screen readers will try to read them out as actually words instead of spelling them


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 irrationally 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.



  1. Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:

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[–] masquenox@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You assume everyone is doing avg productivity for their job.

On average, people only manage about 4hrs of productivity on any given day - no matter whether you are paying them for 6hrs or 8hrs.

You're essentially creating conditions for people who just sit around and pretend to work - while the people who cannot spend 8hrs per day at the workplace (like working mothers, for instance) start getting miffed because they can't access the extra "sitting-around-and-doing-nothing" money.

Otherwise you enter the fools errand of performance measurements and evaluation

You're going to have to measure and evaluate something. In my experience, corporations loves measuring all the wrong things. They can usually barely even define what "performance" means, never mind measure it correctly.

It's not evaluation that's the problem... it's the people deciding what should be evaluated that's almost always the problem.

[–] altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You're going to have to measure and evaluate something. In my experience, corporations loves measuring all the wrong things. They can usually barely even define what "performance" means, never mind measure it correctly.

I'm wondering if there is even the right way to do that in most trades, and moreso a uniformal way to do it across several activities. Maybe the whole conversation is misleading and inescapably drive you off the path, because the problem itself is erroneously set. Like this blurry line when you start to care about genetics that much it start to smell like eugenics. Measuring people's worth in money does leave this bitter taste, and under capitalism you are supposed to do so to get by, if not as a boss, but as a worker estimating own value convertable into quality of life. It wasn't always the case, and probably, the bright future is when we will abandon this concept and would freely replicate food from reusable and abundant energy traversing space and searching for it's many wonders.

[–] masquenox@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago

The reason anything is so difficult to measure under the capitalist mode of production is simple... corporate subterfuge.

Here's a corporate talking head caught in a moment of (highly) abberrant honesty -

"We are not technically in the food business. We are in the real estate business. The only reason we sell fifteen-cent hamburgers is because they are the greatest producer of revenue, from which our tenants can pay us our rent.” - former McDonald’s CFO, Harry J. Sonneborn

What this means is that the employees (in the case of McDonalds) can devise a million and one methods to measure say, the quality of the food or the experience customers have... none of it will really matter because the capitalists at the top doesn't actually care - the actual measurements they care about is rarely communicated down the line with such honesty for very obvious reasons... they want their employees and customers to believe that McDonalds actually gives a damn about the stuff they sell people. The truth of the matter is, they don't.

Measuring and evaluating things isn't rocket science - it's something people have been doing for centuries. But measurement and evaluation is only possible if the people in power wants something to be honestly measured and evaluated.