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.
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.
decades of red scare propaganda and purposefully sabotaging public education
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.
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.
What you have to remember is that socialism means everyone paying their fair share, and some people don’t want to do that.
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
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.
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”.
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.
Some of y’all need to go live in a socialist country for a few years and learn something about how it actually works.
Spoiler alert. You don’t want any part of it.
Propaganda works.
Arguments I hear are usually something along the lines of “it’s going to destroy the economy”, “it destroys jobs”, “I’m rich and they’ll tax me a lot” (said by people who aren’t actually rich). Also, confusing social democracy (Germany, Nordic countries) with what the Soviet Union and China were doing.
Yeah, capitalism has conspired to make us believe, as a group, that resources are somehow incredibly limited while a small cabal of elites gobble up insane quantities of resources for themselves while depriving the majority of those same resources.
Pure altruistic socialism would evenly redivide those resources, giving to those who need what they need.
It is anathema to capitalism, but it is the only society that would actually work in a post-scarcity world, which we might actually be approaching, assuming that the capitalists don’t destroy it first.
The world has had enough resources for post-scarcity for decades, if not centuries. Before, the problem was logistics, now it’s will.
I think the estimate I’ve seen that tries to compute this out has people showering once every 3 weeks and using the internet for ~1 hour a week. Is this the post-scarcity lifestyle you had in mind, am I confused, or have we tipped past the point of being able to do much better?
Ah, we can’t produce water, can we? Better we check consumption, especially corporate.
I’m not sure what you mean.
But yes, desalination and cleaning are very expensive still afaik. We pipe water quite far between states, which seems crazy to me.
Oh it has always been will. Let‘s not pretend like capitalism has the better logistics and therefore a better world wouldn‘t have been possible sooner. That’s only romanticizing capitalism.
I’m talking about methods of transport and storage. Food isn’t likely to rot before it gets where it’s going, like it was a couple hundred years ago.
You can eat Southafrican oranges in Europe. Food could go wherever it’s needed but rich people doesn’t want it.
I think very few of the ruling elite would support a post scarcity world. Elon Musk keeps talking about it the most and he is one of the guys I trust the least to intentionally bring it about.
A socialist society where everyone is more or less equal. Yeah, Musk and his company of wannabe trillionaires are going to fight that to their last breath.
I think this is the biggest one. It’s the word, but it doesn’t matter which word is used. All the propaganda machines will fuck with it as quick as they can.
Also, confusing social democracy (Germany, Nordic countries) with what the Soviet Union and China were doing.
yes socialism means a lot of things to a lot of people
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism#Etymology
it was invented a long time ago in association with a utopian fantasy
IMHO remnants from the cold war indoctrination.
Probably US-Americans confusing anything that’s not predatory capitalism with Russia and China.
Confusing or deliberately conflating, depending on whether they’re the fraudster or the mark.
And unfortunately this conflation was also exploited by the Soviet Union and CCP to point their state capitalism as the only alternative to (neo)liberal capitalism.
