this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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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.
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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)
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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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I love how Adam Smith was literally mocking market absolutists when he coined the term “invisible hand”. Like he was mocking people who believed the market was a self regulating divine entity, and likened how they saw the market regulating itself to how god would “regulate” nature, with his “invisible hand”.
None of these nerds ever read Adam Smith and keep using his words to support them…
Smith also agreed with Marx that under capitalism the wage for most labor will spiral down to the lowest amount capable of keeping a human being alive, damning the proletariat to live in filth regardless of how much wealth they're actually able to produce. If you look at modern libertarian arguments against wealth redistribution, they all tacitly admit that the system is designed to keep an army of people fighting with one another to be the one who lives with the least. That's what their inflation argument is, it's an admission that no matter how much wealth labor creates, or even how much they're allowed to keep, the cost of living under capitalism will simply rise to ensure that that amount is the new bare minimum. That's what happened in America after WWII, it took less than one generation of unfettered capitalism to go from "one member of a family can make enough money to keep that family in relative luxury" to "between the two of us we have four jobs and we still go to bed hungry to afford our kids' medicine".
Smith was almost an anti-capitalist, but dude was too optimistic. He foresaw how things could go wrong, and how some were already going wrong, but he saw capitalism as the material manifestation of enlightenment ideals (as did most liberals) and thought in the end, when it won out, it would bring the ideals into reality.
I’m sure if he was born a century or more later, he would be a socialist lmao.