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!
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)
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.
as well as condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavor.
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).
The only dangerous minority is the rich.
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)
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.
(This is not a definitive list, the spirit of the other rules still counts! Eventual duplicates with other rules are for emphasis.)
Ever seen someone doing their "unskilled job" all their life? It's just fucking magic!
The truth is that capitalists hate skilled workers, because those workers have bargaining power. This is why they love the sort of automation which completely removes workers or thought from the equation, even if the ultimate solution is multiple times more expensive or less competent than before.
Nothing is more infuriating to a boss, than a worker that can talk back with experience.
I would disagree. We all need a living wage even for doing the most unskilled labor. Picking up dog poop or shoveling cow poop from one truck to another. There are jobs that require skills,
But everyone deserves a living wage absolutely.
The problem is capitalism, not the fact that our society has unskilled labor jobs
Yeah, a jobs a job, it should pay a living wage at a minimum. I guess the difference is supply and demand. Anyone can stock shelves at a supermarket, making the employee pool large, meaning they can lower the wage and still get someone desperate.
The government needs to step in and force companies to make that "lower wage" at least liveable.
Although to be honest that may speed up the implementation of robot shelf stockers, which creates another set of problems.
If certain jobs aren't valuable enough to pay a living wage, then maybe they should be done by robots instead of humans.
Agreed, but I don't think the world's ready for that. We'll probably let masses of people starve to death/resort to crime before we start paying people a UBI or an alternate arrangement that allows people to feed themselves when they are unable to find work.