this post was submitted on 23 Mar 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.

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, upvoting good contributions and downvoting 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,

as well as 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.

7. Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:

(This is not a definitive list, the spirit of the other rules still counts! Eventual duplicates with other rules are for emphasis.)

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Own something valuable and then borrow against that thing. Easiest example would be to own stock worth say a thousand dollars and borrow a hundred dollars from that stock value you get to keep the stock worth nine hundred dollars growing in value while you pay the one hundred dollar "debt" off. If you ever get to where you could not pay it for some reason, you could always take $100 and pay it off immediately. I've heard this referred to as the buy borrow strategy and some people to avoid taxes will use this perpetually and they call it the buy borrow die strategy. Selling an asset often involves extremely heavy extortion from gangs that we call governments, where borrowing from the value of that asset does not incur such an extortion penalty.

Edit: The most important part though is just to make more than you spend from whatever you do.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Tbf, most tax authorities haven't been completely captured by billionaires and they recognise what your just described as a disguised remuneration package.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

It works even in the United States. If you sell a stock within a year of owning it, you get charged like 30% extortion. If you sell it after a year, you get charged your normal extortion rate. And if you borrow from it, you get charged zero extortion.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Calling it taxes extortion makes you a temporarily embarrassed billionaire.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Thats what taxes are though. Its men with guns telling you to give them some of what you worked for or else... Sounds like extortion to me.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago

Yes, that's the Iam14andThisIsDeep perspective of taxes. It's what libertarians, aka diet-republicans say.

Blaming taxes being too high as the reason for why the wealthy are wealthy is them performing mind control on you.

And if that's what not what you're saying, check the thread you're in.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Other countries haven't had their tax authorities completely captured by billionaires.

Its funny, wage thieves are happy to charge a levy on other peoples labour, for using their things to make money, but as soon as a country comes along and says "yeah, so, about that whole charging people for using our things to making money thing...." they act like you just asked to fuck thier mum.

And they'll look you dead in eye and claim its a moral issue too, without a hint of shame.