this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2025
646 points (96.8% liked)
Lefty Memes
6143 readers
52 users here now
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.
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. Please post agitprop here)
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.
- 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
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
To be fair experimenting is good. It's still better than feudal system. I just wish we experimented with other models once in a while too.
I will read a sci-fi novel thousands of years into the future with fantasy-magic system, and economic model is still "21st century capitalism but we replaced the word money with credits so it's future now."
we do. those just get bombed away a lot of the time they pop up.
or explained away as a brutal undemocratic regime or something.
Would be harder to explain it away if they weren't brutal undemocratic regimes though
don't be silly. the most brutal and undemocratic country in the world is the us.
Erm, Somalia anyone?
african countries are still bad mostly because of the empire's imperialism.
What relevance does the US have here
its literally the country pulling the lever in the meme, AND the one bombing or propagandizing against others trying to do things differently.
Why do you think it's the US specifically and none of all the other capitalist countries?
Maybe because of this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change
No need to read the entire article. Just skim through it a bit.
Btw, I can attest that the 1964 regime change in Brazil was real because I live here and we study the military dictatorship period in middle/high school and the theme is still relevant to this day (hence why we jailed Bolsonaro). (Edit: I forgot to mention that the reveal that 1964 had a hand from operation condor is recent. it was just a "leftist hoax" before but, "today", the papers of US involvement in Brazil's coup made the "leftist hoax" not be a hoax anymore)
We will need to wait a a few more decades before going public that US also interfered with our politics on the impeachment of Dilma and raise of Bolsonaro to power.
But at least Obama government bugging Dilma's phone was true
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/7/5/us-spied-on-brazilian-president-and-top-officials
https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/246869-wikileaks-nsa-spied-on-brazils-president/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-25441408 (Angela Merkel was another target for spionage from NSA).
Also, did anyone ever mentioned that the only country who used nukes in wars up to this day was US? the country that bombed 2 civilians cities for "research purposes"?
If Russia and France didn't got their bombs in time, I can almost assure you that history would be different a lot of other countries would receive radioactive democracy blessings from US intead of the "boring" democracy US employs in the world nowadays.
It just seems so US centric that it's always the US this the US that, there's like the whole rest of the world too but the discussion always is "socialist country do something bad" "well what about the US???". Like goddamn
then you go about
Can you first decide if you are talking about capitalist countries (as stated first) or socialist countries? Or are you going to be moving goalposts?
I wrote a direct and on the point answer on why do some people think it is US specifically.
As pointed out, US backed coups and regime changes (unless you want to argue that these facts are untrue).
Now, if you want to go about other capitalist countries, then France and UK have their hands on some regime changes as well over the years.
Although this wkipedia entry doesn't look as bad as the US' one, only a fool would think that France has good intention about their interference in the middle east:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_relations_of_France#Middle_East
Even my country, Brazil, has some dirt on it by being an economical powerhouse among Latin America.
We did try to make comercial relations that mixed both the style of EU (Mercosul) with our neighbors and also similar to China-african countries relation as we did with Cuba by bringing Cuban physicians to work here while we helped them economically (but I'm sure there was some strings attached. we aren't saints and nor do we pretend to be the savior of free democratic world).
But we do know that, if left unchecked, we could derail again into being imperialist or into being a dictatorship (again, we just jailed Jair Bolsonar for trying a coup d'etat to make another military dictatorship in the shape of the 1964 that happened).
Speaking of Bolsonaro, one of the first things he did was to cut out the deal Brazil had with Cuba because our Brazilian physicians don't want to work in the countryside (they claim the pay is low or that municipalities may freeze payment over months) but at the same time, they didn't wanted anybody else in that market-share (in this case, Cuban doctors).
So it is all shitty situations around and no one is a saint.
I hope it does satisfy your desire for a "nobody is a saint", but, keep in mind that in terms of actual harm, US and Russia are the greatest danger right now.
US and Russia together have around 90% of nuclear warheads of the world.
If they even (hypothetically) join political forces and "work as one country", then they could bomb whatever the fuck of whatever country with almost no pushback.
Though I still think that America is more trigger happy (pun intended) than Russia.
brazil (my country too, eae paizao) has been a colony for most of it's history since the portuguese came here. first to the europeans to have our gold and natural resources, then for the US to have our consumer market and natural resources for very cheap, so they can feed their industries and markets.
a lot of the economic policy we are applying RIGHT NOW (such as the teto de gastos implemented since michel temer) are IMF impositions, which is controlled by the US.
this is essentially what makes us deindustrialized and dependent on foreign goods, and is making our public services so bad, which is the whole point of making us a colony in neoliberal capitalism. so they can come in to the "open" market and dominate everything unfairly.
we (the global south) are also doing most of the work to make western companies and their profits possible:
(source)
my last sources of employment put me to work 6 days a week (no famoso 6 por 1, disfarçado) earning a comparatively low salary to enrich us and european multinationals.
bolsonaro was literally sponsored by the CIA and planned by steve bannon to align us with the US and try to put us in line. remember how he "patriotically" simped so hard for the US throughout his term?
lula's admin is not much different in practice by the way. just ideologically more aligned with neoliberal capitalists than fascists. the best we can hope from him in terms of materially improving our lives right now is putting us closer to BRICS.
our country doesn't suck because brazilians suck, as a lot of reactionary right wing brazilians like to say. it sucks because of us imperialism.
Not disagreeing with you any bit, but I want to clarify that by "Brazil being imperialistic" I meant how we expanded our territory during the 1800s and our "most recent war" at Paraguay around late 1800
(btw, I had to search the date and found that our last "recent" territorial war was probably the Acre war (1899), a few years after Paraguay war -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Brazil )
I don't disagree with you that we were and are exploited, but we surely expanded our territory by a lot of land-grabbing in those wars (even tho I recognize these were old times).
In that specific sense that I meant we once were imperialistic (Sem falar que Dom Pedro era imperador né?! hahahaha!)
ha, that time was a bit weird. we were not under the portuguese crown anymore, but they just let their son to keep the country to play with after they were done 😂
though that was a different kind of national empire, not like the world-spanning empire the west has built.
because it's them bombing and propagandizing and financing the coups. a lot of it has even been openly admitted to by the CIA.
european countries do it too, but they are allowed to. colony capitalism is imposed on most countries by the aforementioned violence, not chosen democratically.
They aren't though.
Cuba passed a new constitution by referendum in 2019 with 90%+ in favor.
A common perspective I've heard here in Vietnam is "socialism means the government has to represent everyone". (Another common perspective is that the party is openly corrupt and not meaningfully democratic. Those typically aren't held by the same people)
Most every Chinese would tell you 1. Democracy is important. 2. The CPC represents my views via democracy.
Lay off the kool aid
What's that
Capitalism exists to replace feudal systems. It’s easier to have kings, and to have a handful of them so they aren’t fighting as much for a single spot, when you convince the average idiot that now they can also be a king and its their own fault that they aren’t(or better yet, another person’s fault as you oppress them both).
When all the people who had gotten rich by being parasites because of who they were related got afraid they just changed the rules so that it wasn’t ahout blood relation anymore(on paper) but they still had all the money they’d stolen. Nothing functionally changed.
The entire system “the rich get everything they want and no one gets to stop them” does not have a good version. It’s fucked every single way.
According to whom? I wonder what we would see if we were to compare the average amount of labour time feudal peasants had to put in to survive vs. that of the current global proletariat.
I'd agree that capitalism has been better for some - like, for instance, white ex-peasants who now gets to be members of the (so-called) "middle class" or gets to cosplay as pseudo-nobility in colonised spaces- but it has been an unmitigated disaster for lots of others.
According to Marx, Engels, Lenin and any other respectable communist.
Capitalism is a historical progression rather than something you adopt willy nilly, and it has expanded productive forces significantly allowing us to produce stuff far more efficiently in far higher quality and complexity. With feudalism, it's mode of production was far more individualized, with peasants essentially producing for their and their family's subsistence only, and artisans in guilds would only work in small groups, limiting to what they can produce.
Therefore, this expansion of productive powers in capitalism in theory leads to better life quality, less socially necessary labor time to provide for everyone, less mortality given how we can now produce things like insulin in complex labs, etc.
Keyword is in theory - in practice, everything else in the system goes against that, leads to overproduction and having us proletariat work for much higher hours than is socially necessary, it concentrates wealth to private owners giving them immense political power. That's what communists are trying to do - progress forward so we produce not for profit, but for use based on need which would solve these issues.
Btw, comparison between feudal peasantry and proletariat is flawed - peasants were based in countryside and essentially were the middle class of it, owning a small amount of land that they worked for themselves. Proletariat are urbanized, work in factories they don't own and produce for thousands of people. A more apt comparison in work hours would be proletariat vs guild apprentices - their exploitation and work hours were essentially the same and this system was precursor to capitalist wage labor.
Concerning peasants, some (serfs) didn't own any land, while others (freemen) did. Serfs could be better off than freemen though.
Progressive =/= better. The Capitalist social relation inevitably reproduces itself across the globe because of the social forces. Not because it is an improvement.
Regardless of the debate that these modern conceptions can be attributed entirely to a change in the mode of production rather then simply the inevitable progression of humanities technological knowledge, Marx actually argued Capitalism inevitably immiserates the proletariat rather than advancing quality of life.
You try to hedge this by saying "in theory", yet not even in theory. It is a lie of the bourgeoisie the proletarian slavery is an improvement over peasant slavery. In theory, Capitalism is simply the reproduction of the capitalist social relationship and the replacement of the nobility class with the new bourgeoisie class.
The comparison is not to equalize the proletariat and peasantry in their relationship to the means of production, but in the demographic comparison for who is the majority of the planet. In Feudal times, peasants, including serfs make up the majority of people. And serfs are decidedly not middle class. Peasants were an exploited class under feudalism, duped by the bourgeoisie to support the inevitable capitalist revolution that would "improve their quality of life", only to find themselves alienated industrial laborers and at the bottom of class society once again.
Who has switch over from feudalism been a disaster to?
I mean, just off the top of my head...
And, let's not forget, those conditions never ended - they were just exported.
Do you think mining workers had it better under feodalism? Not sure things went worse for them because of capitalism, mining was always a dangerous and shitty job, often done by slaves or convicts because of how shit the conditions were.
In the pre-capitalist world mining practices were all over the place... it wasn't just chain-gangs and overseers. And the conditions for it isn't fundamentally any shittier than working a farm or a factory - I know because I can literally walk down the street and ask a zama-zama (an artisinal - "illegal", according to our bootlicking media - miner) and ask him who and what it is that actually makes their work conditions shitty and dangerous.
We all know what happens to miners under the capitalist mode of production, however - it's literally why some of the most vicious crackdowns on organised labour in history involved the mining industry.
Mining conditions are all over the place right now. Some workers have it good, with good compensation, perks and with a lot of attention paid to safety and others live in horrible deathly conditions and are practically slaves
Only in places where labour organising have managed to win concessions in spite of the capitalist mode of production - a capitalist mode of production that is reproduced globally to this very day. If it wasn't for the need to stabilise the imperial core, coal miners in Germany would be treated no differently than cobalt miners in the DRC. There is nothing comparable to that in the pre-capitalist world - not even the brutal exploitation of the Americas by the Spanish was reproduced globally.
You are trying to compare apples with oranges.
We're talking about how not all conditions are the same, you can't just discard some conditions because they differ from the point you're trying to make. Some miners have it really good inside a capitalist system, same as some might've had it good under feodalist system.
I am not discarding anything. There simply was no feudalist model of resource extraction analogous to the one that has been driving the mining industry in the capitalist era. The well-paid shift boss in a mine in Australia and the poorly-paid rock-drill-operator in South Africa is working under the same capitalist mode of production.
This was not the case under feudalism.
So again... you're comparing apples to oranges.
You're complaining about painting all feodalism era mining as brutal and hazardous while painting all mining under capitalism as brutal and hazardous. It just seems funny
The unmitigated disaster part existed under feudalism also. Capitalism is slowly turning back into feudalism, which is kinda why it sucks so much now. I hate capitalism, but feudalism was worse.
Fuedalism with a fuckload of democracy might work. But it always turns into a bloodline thing.
Perhaps, but I have to wonder how many feudal peasants would willingly exchange their existence for the precariat one we exist under.
If that is true, then it must mean that capitalism never replaced feudalism, but was instead built on top of feudalism - which is not that difficult to believe if you live in a 3rd-world extraction zone (like I do).
Its also not hard to believe if you ́look at the continuation of power across much of Europe. Its not a 1:1 comparison but lots of families of feudal lords are still wealthy and powerful today if they didn't completely fuck up. The power has spread out but has concentrated in other ways.