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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
"I won't start a company because it may be worth over a billion one day and that would only leave me with hundreds of millions of dollars. That doesn't seem worthwhile," thought no one ever in your hypothetical.
No, it's more like
" why start a company when if it becomes too successful it will literally be taken away from me for being too successful". I don't believe we should be taking away businesses from business owners, do you?
I do. Fuck 'em. They already have 100 million dollars. They can go cry into that.
So your argument is "Fuck them because they have more than me". Is that about right? We can steal from them because they have more to steal?
They stole it from "me" first.
How did they do that exactly?
Come on, man, at least understand the concept of the reification of labour-power-at-work if you're going to debate the very concept of what it means to have capital.
The value of arbeitskraft is only extracted when the means of production are privately owned. Assets and liabilities have to cost less than the output for value to be generated, I'm saying that value should have an (extremely generous) upper bound as a compensation for the initial outlay of creating a private capital asset, after which additional value is returned either to the creators of the labour in the labour-power or the labour-power-at-work is deemed valuable to society and the value is returned in general there.
I don't know all the details of Marxism, basically because I think it's a flawed view and don't see the value in dedicating a lot of time to understanding the whole thing.
The problem is that, again, you are suggesting that company owners be forced to give up their ownership, in this case it seems like you are saying they should be forced to give it away to employees? That's where all the value we are talking about is, it's the value of stock, or ownership, that's worth billions.
Why should owners of anything be forced to give up that ownership? If they sell or give any ownership that should be their choice, not forced. This goes for anything from your car to your house to your company, ownership is ownership.
pro-capitalism, pro-socialism, pro-communism, pro-anarchism are all post-Marxist.
Just like things like "subconscious" or "trauma" or "unconscious thought" are post-Freudian.
You can be the most ardent unrestricted market Libertarian, you're still using Marxist terminology. We're not debating whether money exists, we're debating about how to use it.
For e.g., it's talking about whether you like strawberry or chocolate ice cream, not that milk doesn't exist.
Or maybe you're the successful owner and you reward the people that made you successful with a larger portion of that success?
Sure, give the owner that option, just don't steal ownership from them.
If you've gone public with the company yes, you've set up the situation where paying your due means giving up some control of the company. That was a you decision. But congratulations you're worth hundreds of millions. If you find yourself thinking that's not enough you're deeply broken and one of the most selfish people in human history, a true 0.01%er.
And again, this is a billion dollar baseline people are talking about. This is the same as people upset about the possibility of inheritance taxes because then they'd only get $10,000,000 tax free. No one is not starting a business because of that, which was your original argument.
It's one thing to willfully sell some company shares to investors, it's another to be forced to give up more shares just to pay taxes on wealth because of those shares.
This brings up an interesting point though, let's say it's a private company worth billions, where one person owns 100% of the shares, do you force them to sell also?
People may not start a business with the intent to be a billionaire, but if we say that if you make it that far we will just tax you so much you will be forced to sell away your ownership, who would keep their company here when they get close to that? I think it's telling that many of the most successful worldwide companies are US companies.
At some point you just have to give them a gold sticker, a "Congratulations! You won capitalism!" plaque, and leave something for the rest of humanity.