An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of "ML" (read: Dengist) influence. 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, discussion and agitprop/stuff that's better fit for a poster than a meme 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!
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
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" (read: Dengists) (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.
Since we're playing this game:
Going to play devil's advocate here a bit, but the US has had a continuous state since 1789 for parts of it, since the civil war for other parts, and the late 50s for small bits.
The current Chinese state was formed in 1949. This entire map should be white. The Republic of China predates its formation by at least a year, and one could argue by some 30 years.
In the original map, the yellow map areas are for places which have been a part of China for 200-500 years.
If the same gradiant was applied to a map of the US, the entire map would be yellow or white.
Noah has labeled the parts in yellow as "not really china", so following that logic, none of the US would 'really' be the US either.
According to the original map, Orange has been a part of China for longer than the US has existed. For example, the parts of xinjiang that the silk road passes through.
The thing is, no part of the land that currently falls under the Peoples Republic of China has been part of the PRC for more than 100 years, because the PRC didn't exist before 1949. Almost all of the US predates that, except for (I think) Hawaii.
Were the Chinese Imperial dynasties the same thing as the PRC is now? And even if it was, the Republic of China was in between the two, and it even still exists.
So, you can complain about the US, but the Chinese state is MUCH newer, and had a huge fucking war about large swathes of it not wanting to belong to the state relatively recently.
Both maps aren't extremely disingenuous.
Isn't the original post just a visualization of the history of the Chinese empire? Not sure how there was any game being played.
The tweet's caption along with the circles+text try and deny Chinese Sovereignty over historical territory based arbitrarily on how long they have controlled it. This comparison is being made by a supporter of the US. The US has possessed it's entire territory for a span of time shorter that was on this map is considered "Not Really China", thus the US has no real claim to it's territory by their logic. The big difference is that China isn't a settler colony who genocided an indigenous population to exist, unlike the US.
Not sure how there was any game being played.
I'm assuming you've never seen anything Noah Smith said before (I wish that was me). Look at the flags in his twitter handle. He's an American nationalist and a NATO imperialist. It's very clear that this is a fantasy about balkanizing China.
So we're discussing imperialism, and how does it look around the world? Nice.
You can also add Russia, and them there are a lot of good examples of what some European countries did in Africa and so on.
Death to the settler-colonial entity know us "The United States of America", sometimes called AmeriKKKa.
