this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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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.
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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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Insomuch as the power to tax is the power to destroy, yes.... But I'm sure there are better examples (military?), and the oppression is less caused by the ACTUAL cost of such things, and more the oppression of what is LOST in providing such things.
Isn't that a photo a perfect example of what happens when we let private institutions provide public services (which is what you're suggesting be done instead).
Are you trying to say that things would be better if elementary and High school also had to be paid for directly instead of being publicly funded?
lol... it did not even occur to me. I don't have a straight answer for you because I don't ordinarily consider bifurcating the problem along a public/private line.
It's such a blurry line, like in this case where you have public funding for private schools, or in other cases where you have private corporations that produce only for the public government; or tax-funded incentives to private products or private payment networks replacing government currency.
Instead, I usually consider the size of the political system or corporation in question with a heuristic of "smaller is better", and bias towards presuming enmeshment: like the whole system is one gigantic oppressive blob and the public/private labels are just superficial colorations.
I guess if I had any suggestion, it would be to somehow excise schooling from the blob, and find the smallest size where it works, and use the ones that work well as templates to repair or replace those that fail.
The first Lemming you replied to here.
I don't disagree with you in that post.
But I think that for that unemmeshment to work we'll have to end Capitalism first. Once that's done small scale local communities with large scale networks for sure could do a good job with education and roads.