Socialism101
An international (English speaking) Lemmy community for learning and understanding socialist principles, theory, philosophy, and ideology in general. This is a place where people willing to learn meet knowledgeable socialists.
For discussions between socialists please visit c/Socialism.
Memes go in c/Lefty Memes
Please don't forget to help keep this community clean by reporting rule violations, upvoting good contributions and downvoting those of low-quality!
Rules
1. For everyone:
1.0 Mutual respect and good faith discussion is enforced here
1.1 There are three allowed types of posts:
- Questions about anarchism, communism or socialism, including all tendencies/currents/factions within these traditions, or specifically aimed at one or several currents
- Meta Posts about this community. Anyone may start a meta post, meta posts about other communities will be deleted. Short questions (for example those about moderation policy) are better send directly to the mods
- AMAs ("Ask Me Anything") or AMAXs ("Ask Me About X") with an expert or group of experts. These should be arranged with and are coordinated by the mods, so please send a message if you are interested in holding one. Announcements must wait for clearance first so they can be pinned.
Posts not falling within these categories will be actively deleted.
1.2 No Bigotry
The only dangerous minority is the rich.
1.3 No sectarianism / Socialist Unity is enforced here
Answers should not promote sectarian behaviours. Behaviour on the level of pointing out differences in schools of thought, however, is OK. Questions should not be aimed against other socialists. This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Marxism vs. Anarchism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism
1.4 Absolutely no questions or answers 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
(This is not a definitive list, the spirit of the other rules still counts! Eventual duplicates with other rules are for emphasis.)
2. For asking questions:
2.0 Only ask questions if you are genuinely interested in learning
Asking questions means you are ready to be taught something new or to accept that you might have been wrong about a few things.
2.1 Check for duplicate questions
Please search through the post history and (eventual) FAQ, to not ask a question that has already been answered. If you want a different perspective or something has changed significantly about the subject, feel free to ask again.
2.2 No questions aimed at "debating" or "lecturing" socialists.
This is not a place to bolster your ego, "debatebro" behaviour is explicitly not welcome.
2.3 There are no "stupid" questions as long as you adhere to the guidelines. Feel free to ask anything, even if it might appear trivial. Remember that everyone starts their learning journey in their own time and that no one is born an expert.
2.4 Please also avoid loaded questions like:
"[Person X]/[Group Y] was/were a criminal/terrorist (group) or tyrant who killed babies and bazillions of people. Why do you worship them?"
More welcome versions, free of baseless assumptions would be:
Why do socialists like [Person X]/[Group Y]?
What do socialists like about [Person X]/[Group Y]?
3. For answering questions:
3.0 No teaching by liberals, (right-wing) revisionists or reactionaries
That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . 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).
(if you are reading the rules to apply for modding this community, mention "Focal Fossa" when answering question 2)
3.1 Giving sources and follow-up resources is highly encouraged
Well-rounded responses should be backed by relevant and reliable sources. Primary sources are preferable, secondary sources are fine as well. Provide dates when relevant and apply theories accurately and with integrity.
You don't have to provide sources with every answer, if someone request them in good faith, however, it's expected that you provide them willingly and gladly. If you are not prepared to back up your statements when asked, please reconsider whether you should answer in the first place.
Please be aware that all posters who fail to support their posts when asked in good faith may have their posts removed.
3.2 Give in-depth answers
A good answer gives context to the discussed ideas/events so that people new to the topic can understand it. It's usually longer than a few sentences and strikes a balance between context, explanations, sources, and quotations.
Being able to use a search engine does not make you an expert, please refrain from contributing if you can only provide a few articles you just found online.
If you:
- have the expertise needed to answer the question
- have done the research on the question
- can cite your sources
- can answer follow-up questions
Please consider answering and sharing your knowledge with others. If you do not meet these criteria, please seriously reflect on what you're about to post.
3.3 Comments consisting only or largely of images, videos, or memes are not welcome Photos/pictures and documentaries are more than welcome if they support your answer.
Generic images, gifs or memes
3.4 Please also refrain from:
- Hurrying with your answer, good responses take time and that's OK
- Giving partial answers / Using placeholders
- Using personal anecdotes
- Speculating in your answers
- Demonizing or Idolizing/Glorifying previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals
3.5 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" flavour.
view the rest of the comments
Some of those "capitalists that own the media" are solo individuals barely scrapping a living together.
And you're oversimplifying to make your point, what about the Capitalists that own the Gen AI tools? Anthropic, Meta, Google, OpenAI. Y'know, the multibillion dollar corporations, many of which directly donated to the Trump Administration.
And sure, FOSS options are starting to appear, but they're not ready for primetime, and they only have about 0.0000001% of users.
I don't get how ANY of that relates to what I wrote. Whether it's a large or small capitalist who's scraping accessible data for their AI model makes literally no difference other than the scale.
The short analysis I wrote is about how it's not some vague notion of "stolen labor".
Doesn't actually my question.
And it does matter, because money and influence are linked under capitalism, so bigger fish can fuck over smaller fish
Crazy to hear someone who thinks AIhorde run by @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com and just general open source models people run and train on their own PCs are "huge corporate entities". And you wonder why we consider most of the anti-AI people trolls?
Like Bro, you're coming to a socialist community on an anarchist instance and whining about how people don't respect intellectual property of artists because "wE aLL sTiLl liVe uNDeR cAPitALisM". Learn to understand what you're talking about and also how to read the room.
Cool, learn to read
Now that's a huge load of horseshit right there...
Maybe you should actually read about and check for yourself the state of Open Source AI before parroting what others say, because so much of what the FuckAI people say is them talking directly out their asses. It's funny because you could've said it last year when many diffusion models were poorer quality and had higher error rates but AI moves fast even in the Open source space and many of the anti-AI people know that, yet you still keep recycling the same talking points even when they are well and truly outdated by this point.
Good cherrypicking
You could just as easily check yourself, but I know you won't. Because it's way easier just to just lie or recycle outdated talking points.
Funnily enough we are tired of our niche little community being conflated with the likes of openAI by folks like you. Nobody is here defending those assholes.
I've seen plenty do exactly that
Where? Show me the dbzer0 users praising OpenAI and Anthropic because I hear a lot of you assholes claiming people here do but that's all I'm seeing, you claiming it (The AI gen communities here literally require you use stable diffusion, they don't allow those corporate models). So it seems it's largely lying and strawmanning. Which is kind of the point @Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com is making here. People strawmanning, lying, and bad-jacketing users is unacceptable and I don't know why anyone would expect us to tolerate it.
Bring receipts then.