IMHO remnants from the cold war indoctrination.
Propaganda.
People don’t know what socialism actually means because of propaganda…
you can ask someone who is against “socialism” whether they like it by talking about elements of it without explicitly mentioning the word “socialism” and they will probably agree with it.
seriously, do this! it’s extremely fucking depressing!
Get a list of policies for a socialist party, read it to someone, then at the end say “and that’s the policies the socialist party want to implement” and watch the killswitch in their brain activate.
People don’t really like change.
Think about free public libraries. They’re fairly popular, and not controversial outside of fringe libertarian types and assholes. People like that you can borrow books and other media for free. Usually there’s a bit of a backlash if there’s a movement to shut down libraries or limit their services.
Imagine if free public libraries didn’t exist, and someone tried to invent them today. People would be having screaming fits about communism. It’s stealing from the authors. it’s ruining publishing. We don’t need tax dollars for this when we have amazon. Blah blah blah.
It’s the same with other things we could socialize. health care is a privatized nightmare. If we somehow got a public option in, eventually people would start reflexively defending it.
So what I’m saying is many people don’t really have a set of internally consistent beliefs. They just don’t like change.
People often confuse socialism with communism. The confusion is deliberate by a lot of right wing propaganda. When talking about socialism with Americans, you have to explain to them that the fire department is an example of socialism. As are other public services, like roads, police, libraries, and some utilities.
Of course in America, some people think profit is more important, so they are doing everything they can to privatize services. For example, in Texas they are slowly killing public education, and toll roads have taken over normal highway construction.
As I mentioned, people are being conned and scared of the word so that they will elect people will be replacing what remains of public services with private ones.
There are exceptions even here in Texas. My city has no toll roads and has a publicly owned power company.
We don’t have private power companies in this county. What are they gonna compete on? Price? They would buy the power from the public company. Service? The service is honestly good.
I dream of moving to a different. State but I thank my lucky stars I grew up in this city.
Socialism and communism have a lot more in common than communism and what the soviets (and those they inspired) did.
But also, communism isn’t bad either.
It’s basically advanced socialism, not whateverthefuck stalin and mao were doing. It’s like how the full name of the nazi party was “national-socialist worker’s party”, obviously the nazis aren’t actually socialists, the only reason they use that word is because people at the time actually wanted socialism.
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.
Socialism threatens capitalists -> Capitalists spend money in media and politics to ensure support for capitalism by spreading fear about socialism -> People are scared of socialism.
It’s really that simple honestly. I generally hate oversimplifications but there’s not that much more to it
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.
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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Ask a typical American what they hate about socialism and they will perfectly describe capitalism
And ask them what policies they want to see enacted, and they’ll give you a list that looks suspiciously like that of a socialist party.
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
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.
ELI5
People dislike socialism because they often feel like their hard work and effort does not get fairly rewarded. Why would you work your whole life away to become a doctor and save lives when someone else wastes their time lost in vice.
Well you’re 5 you piece of shit and your efforts at not pissing the bed have been pretty minimal at best. But do you still eat? Do you have a roof and a bed to piss all over? Who cleans that mess every time? People hate socialism because it sucks to be the provider. It also sucks to suffer. And in life we often forget this. We forget it takes all of us. We forget what it is to be helpless. We forget those who provided for us. And we get angry when we have to provide for others when we feel so left out of the party.
In short dont forget. Don’t forget what you have been given and don’t forget to share. Dumb kids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare
It’s pretty much all US propaganda that makes people hate socialism
Yes, it’s the red scare, but most translations of Karl Marx do use the word “socialism” for the state he described as a precursor to capitalism. And the name of the Russian communist federation was generally translated as “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”
Because some of the worst dictators of all time said they were communist and socialist, despite dictatorship being fundamentally antithetical to both.
Then a bunch of idiots watched a dictatorship, the USSR, burn up their economy with a space and arms race, so now they think socialism kills economic progress. It wasn’t that the USSR didn’t invest properly in the populace, or infrastructure, or that they were fundamentally a kleptocracy with a massive military, it’s that they called themselves socialist. That’s what killed them.
Note that the reason they called themselves socialists and communists is because a lot of people at the time considered this good, it’s like how many countries these days have “democratic republic” in their name, despite obviously being neither of those things.
Evil people can’t call themselves evil, they have to lie about what they are for people to get tricked into accepting them.
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Socialism by its barest definition is great.
Socialism as outlined in Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto is a little sketchier because it makes a lot of unrealistic assumptions about human nature and is just generally super hard to implement without creating a power vacuum.
Socialism as in the USSR’s Socialism is a century old practice of the cruellest and most war hungry culture imagineable, having taken advantage of the afforementioned power vacuum to starve and torture millions at home, ally with the Nazis in WWII and then change sides halfway through, tear down democracies around the globe, and push us all the closest we have ever been to thermonuclear annihilation. A threat so great that even 30 years into its grave is still a great stone over our heads, having crafted a world power balance that will threaten our destruction for generations to come.
But Socialism by its barest definition is great.
My dad was Finnish, and I think it helps to remember, Finns were fighting Russians before and during the time Russia called itself Communist and Socialist. The western side of that divide, the Nordic countries, practiced a very different version of “socialism”, with democracy, and they seem to be reaping a lot of benefits.
Yeah, and capitalism has never lead to the toppling of foreign democracies or threatened thermonuclear annihilation
Ah, shit wait
Top of the line Whataboutism
It actually wasn’t. The comment I responded to was posing socialism as being at the root of these issues. It’s hardly the cause of any of these, much like how capitalism itself also isn’t the cause of toppling foreign democracies or threatening thermonuclear annihilation, which is what I was contrasting.
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Not Socialism, I specifically said tbe USSR in this example.
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I didn’t call it the root, I don’t think Joseph Stalin invented being a King, I just think he has forever stained the word Socialism.
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When people talk about an apple that is rotten because somebody specifically asked about it, talking about all the rotten oranges and pears in the world is top of the line whataboutism.
You mean to say you weren’t actually talking about socialism, just like I wasn’t actually talking about capitalism, but instead the US hegemony in particular? 😝
I mean to say you’re talking about shit that nobody asked about and saying I made claims which I clearly didn’t.
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