The hate against socialism is the idea that someone who doesn’t work as hard as you, gets the same benefits as you, and that’s not fair.
Something like that could never work under capitalism. Everybody knows that rich people work extremely hard to be rich. I work hard, and I’ll be rich some day too.
decades of red scare propaganda and purposefully sabotaging public education
Seriously. People don’t seem to remember or understand how intense anti-communist feelings were during the Cold War. It would be un-American to assume anything different than capitalism.
I heard that most of my life, so it feels extremely unsettling to experience MAGA love affair with some of the tyrants their forbears would have most hated
Anti-socialism is just collateral damage
Also Cubans who act like they weren’t children when their family left. Souith Florida Spanish radio is wild!
“Socialism is when the government does stuff 😭” - Average American, unfortunately
Nah seriously this is what they legit believe, they just think the government doing it means it’s going to be shitty. Which is not entirely untrue. But at least it’s not trying to actively rip you off while continuing to offer less and less, like any publicly traded company has a good track record of doing.
Those who are educated on the matter and oppose socialism do so because of a belief that continuing high-intensity development of the economy is preferable, for one reason or another.
Many of us would argue that, with the economy in developed countries at the point where everyone could very easily be guaranteed a good quality of life without further improvements, and that, in fact, further improvements at this point are more likely to come from the cultural and technological development enabled by a more equal and less labor-intensive society, capitalism has overstayed its welcome.
What you have to remember is that socialism means everyone paying their fair share, and some people don’t want to do that.
If everyone does better, then you’re doing worse by comparison.
I want 10% unemployment and 0% interest rates. That’s the magic formula where I can sexually harass my au pair and she has no choice but to put up with it.
Someone should print this on a t-shirt. Or stickers. Both!
People are scared of it because every incarnation of it has been hellish shit show. No matter how many times people moralise about it that simple truth is always looming.
Just because a state self-proclaims to be socialist, doesn’t mean it is.
It’s the PR and marketing campaigns. Capitalism concentrated the wealth with the bosses so they can send a coherent message. A message people can buy into.
Socialism marketing makes it sound like a MLM scheme. The lack of centralization puts different unions against each other.
here in the us we opperate like a socialist country pretending to be capitalist. “Distributing things evenly” is hard when no one agrees what evenly is
The ultra rich have successfully convinced a lot of people that they, too, could become ultra rich some day - but there’s no place for ultra rich under socialism.
Then further, a lot of people have been convinced that only the very very poor would be better off and everyone else would be worse off. That is of course also untrue.
I think this is true, but id add that most socialist societies we have seen have been awful. Lots of corruption and poverty. Turns out whichever system you have there will be evil scumbags seeking to self-enrich.
Thats not to say it couldn’t work, but that there are no shining examples of success and lots of examples of failure.
How can a person who resolves their conflicts with hate feel comfortable about socialism if socialism creates a space without hate? Some people want to fight and can only fight. Removing fights removes their ability to gain status and respect.
It is due to lobbying and astroturfing.
Simple as.
It’s definitely not based in data, because that overwhelmingly shows massive economic and happiness growth happens in these states
Where in the world has socialism been successful in the past?
I’ll wait.
I’m Canadian and my country is extremely successful. We’re also pretty socialist. Obviously socialism isnt a binary, but we have universal Healthcare, strong financial regulations, and a stronger more centralized federal government than the US. We’re doing very well, and the elements which cause us the most pain tend to be where we are more like the states, not where we’re more like Denmark.
I’m Canadian and my country is extremely successful.
That‘s a stretch, isn‘t it? What‘s the housing market like over there?
Worlddata.info - Canada 26th in World Quality of Life index vs. US rank 38 IM Global Wealth News - 10th in quality of life, US not listed U.S. News - 4th overall to US third. Wagecenter.com - Canada has the highest rated standard of living, US not listed in the top 10 UN Happiness report - We’ve dropped to 18th, vs the US 24th.
It is absolutely not a stretch to say Canada is extremely successful. Perfection is an awful long way off, of course. Costs are up, happiness is down. American influence has caused a rise in right-wing hate groups. But I’ll repeat - the more socialist we lean, the better we seem to do.
Anarchist Catalonia, Socialist Yugoslavia, any number of modern workers’ coops and corporations, including Mondragon Corp.
Off the top of my head: Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland.
Here is an important example of the disconnect between liberal and conservative interpretation of the word “socialist”. Economists would not label Scandinavian countries as socialist. Meanwhile conservatives point to Cuba and Venezuela as examples of socialist failure when that’s not entirely true either. We’re talking past each other in these debates.
That’s because Conservatives have no argument other than pedantry when it comes to their villifying of “socialism”.
“They aren’t socialist, they’re Democratic Socialism or Social Democrats, which are totally different from each other and not socialism at all!” (Is their pedantry, in case anyone was wondering)
It’s ALL socialism, just with a few different policies at play. But that would destroy the conservative argument that you can’t have a successful capital economy under socialism. So they play the “They aren’t real socialists” bullshit game.
In the same vein you could argue that US is not true Capitalism because trickle down doesn’t happen and many means of production are still owned by the government.
And yet we call them a Capitalist country, no?
Economists would not label Scandinavian countries as socialist.
Economists would say that’s a matter for political scientists. And aren’t all conservative.
But yes, in the English-speaking world, conservatives and the far left use the traditional definition, while the mainstream left has recently gravitated towards something like “when the government does things”.
To me the hate is quite simple to understand. Socialism means that the extremely rich will be worse off financially. The 1% have an unnatural love for money, and the idea of being less wealthy for the greater good is totally abhorrent to them.
For generations they’ve been able to demonise socialism using their disproportionate influence through the media, to the extent that the majority of the population now fear it.
We’ve really not moved on that far intellectually from the witch trials. People are collectively ignorant and fearful, and with the right nudges are easy to control to the point where they’ll literally vote against their own good. They are the proverbial Turkeys voting for Christmas and I honestly don’t know how we will ever get past it.
We’ve really not moved on that far intellectually from the witch trials.
Cognitive biases seem to be unavoidable. Even if you are well-educated about a particular bias, it often takes reflection (internally or externally motivated) to recognize it in your decisions / behavior.
Fallacious reasoning is often just as good at convincing an audience, which is one of the reasons they are still in use despite many or most being documented and named in ancient times.
Individual training in critical thinking skills can help, but theocrats (in specific) and authoritarians (in general) spend a lot of effort making sure that public education is robbed of that. But, that’s not enough to “intellectually move on”; even with that training, bias occurs. So, we have to build systems for bias detection and remediation if we want a just global society.
Thankfully, we’re now reaching a turning point where PragerU will be used to teach directly in schools, letting kids know why socialism is bad and capitalism is good. Wait, that’s the opposite of what we want, fuck!
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A lot of people mix up “socialism” with “people being good neighbors.” That’s not actually what the term means. Socialism is specifically about who owns the big stuff, the means of production. In a socialist setup, people still work jobs, they still get paid, and daily life still involves employment and compensation. The difference is that major industries aren’t privately owned by large corporations. They’re controlled collectively by the public or by the workers themselves.
Small private businesses can still exist; they’re not eliminated outright. What changes is the ownership of large-scale systems: energy, manufacturing, transportation, resources, things on that level. These are shifted away from private corporate control and toward collective control.
The fundamental issue of socialism and why it doesn’t and has not worked historically is because of human nature. A corporateocracy or a capitalist based society aligns much better to human nature than socialism does which is why it’s significantly more “successful”.
Maybe the real problem is people wanting to apply one answer to all problems. I’m fine with a capitalist economy where an ethical government regulates the market to serve the people and there are socialist structures where appropriate
You’re referring to social democracy there are several social Democrats in office right now in the United States they are among the politicians I would vote for for president.
The fundamental issue of socialism and why it doesn’t and has not worked historically is because of human nature. A corporateocracy or a capitalist based society aligns much better to human nature than socialism does which is why it’s significantly more “successful”.
Except the only major sovereign socialist experiments have been either crushed by non-economic forces, or been Soviet-style totalitarianism.
The idea that capitalism is more based on ‘human nature’ ignores why capitalism actually works. You could argue, with much more validity, I would say, that feudalism is more in-tune with human nature than capitalism, yet almost no one disputes that feudalism is worse than capitalism.
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Conservative reactionaries since the French Thermidor Reaction opposed it, believing communalism and eventually socialism undermines their existing hierarchical, feudal system. Stalin also did not help matters at all.
Yeah Stalin was like “You want to see totalitarianism with socialist window dressing?”
This is also why I can’t stand tankies. Worshipping the Soviet Union, China and even modern day Russia. Clearly the “is not The West™” is the important part for them, not socialism or communism. Also, I’ve had interactions with people on reddit where they said that the mass deportations were absolutely justified, etc.
Look, I also want a lot of the things socialism offers, without necessarily going full communist. But I’ll argue all day that Nordic countries do it better. Not perfectly of course, there’s still billionaires and there are still issues. But people are by and large much more free than they are or were in any of the countries tankies love, and those who aren’t well-off still have it much better than they do in, say, the US.
