this post was submitted on 13 Oct 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.
Agitprop (I.E. everything that would be more fitting on a poster than a meme) goes here.
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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. Please post agitprop here)
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(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.
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When writing stuff like "lol" and "iirc", it's a good idea to try and replace those with their all caps counterpart
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- etc.
Why? Because otherwise (AFAIK), screen readers will try to read them out as actually words instead of spelling them
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The only dangerous minority is the rich.
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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.
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rofl you think I'm a tankie for shitting on capitalism!?
ahahaha way to broadcast how pitifully tiny your understanding is...
People being lifted out of poverty as an economic test COMPLETELY IGNORES the reality of technological advancement. Way to further demonstrate how you do not know even the major milestones of history, let alone economic history...
The technological advancements were in large part due to the large scale growth of industry under capitalism. Although lots of bloodshed and suffering was involved in the process, and without leftists fighting for reforms, we wouldn't be able to enjoy its fruits today.
The mass availability of the internet, and many other pillars of infrastructure are a result of capitalism. And these developments definitely have increased living standards for the majority of humans, even ones in third world nations (The popular image of a destitute country with rampant poverty is extremely rare these days.)
Capitalism was most responsible for underdeveloping the global south. Europeans genocided the indigenous Americans and needed a large supply of labor, so they used their (at the time) minor technological advantage to trade high-demand commodities exclusively for slaves in Africa. This depressed African development and skyrocketed European development, and this expanded in colonialism.
Capitalism was progressive as compared with feudalism, yes, but it's been socialist economies that have been most responsible of eradicating poverty. If you remove socialist countries, poverty has gone up in the last century.
I fully agree with the first part. Countries with already developed industry and trade got the boost, and that's the major reason for the large difference in development between Underdeveloped and Developed nations.
I don't get it. Remove in what way? Too vague to carry any meaning.
If you mean their political, economic, and ideological impact on surrounding nations then yeah, obviously. But the socialist countries themselves had to adopt some form of capitalism to continue to grow economically (see: china). The countries that didn't move away from central planning eventually collapsed (eg. USSR*).
*I understand how the cause of the USSR's collapse is not soley the inefficiency of central planning, but even if the country was allowed to continue unimpeded, it would have collapsed because of that one reason.
There's several misconceptions here, but I'll get to them after addressing the poverty point. When I said "when we remove socialist countries," I mean the absolute poverty worldwide has primarily gone down when you include socialist countries in that statistic, if you only include capitalist countries then poverty goes up as compared to the total number, because poverty isn't systematically targeted for alleviation in capitalism but instead is a requirement for it to function. That's not vague, it's clear-cut.
Onto the misconceptions. Markets and private property are not themselves capitalism. What distinguishes capitalism as a system from socialism as a system is whether private ownership or public ownership is principle, ie covers the large firms and key industries at a minimum. The USSR had some small degree of private property, and so did China even under Mao and later the Gang of Four. China opened up their capital markets to foreign investment while maintaining control of the large firms and key industries, and rely heavily on central planning to direct the economy. They are in the earlier stages of socialism, as shown here:
The reason for adopting controlled markets for the smaller and medium firms is because that form of ownership better suited China's level of development. Public ownership works more effectively at higher levels of development, so it's like a controlled fire for heat before replacing with an electric system when the tech advances. Out of control, the fire can be destructive, but by maintaining control of the large firms and key industries you maintain control over the rest of production.
As for central planning, that's not why the USSR dissolved, and was actually one of its greatest strengths. The economy grew rapidly and consistently throughout the USSR's existence:
Instead, what happened is that reforms such as those under Gorbachev created economic and political division against central planning, as well as problems such as nationalism in some of the SSRs and SFSRs, as well as the fact that the USSR had to dedicate tons of resources and production to maintaining millitary parity with the US Empire despite also needing to recover from the devastation of World War II.
There's absolutely no basis for the idea that central planning induces collapse, China relies on it heavily as do other socialist countries like Cuba, and even megacorporations these days rely more on internal planning and minor cyberbetics than price signals as was traditional for earlier capitalism.