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
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.
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
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.
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”.
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.
Well. Maybe it depends on your definition. When it comes to providing a good quality of life for your citizens, Canada is probably doing alright. But not exceptionally well. When the working class can’t afford to enter the housing market, and GDP per capita is around 60% of the US; that’s not so good. I’d classify Switzerland and Singapore as extremely successful.
Anarchist Catalonia, Socialist Yugoslavia, any number of modern workers’ coops and corporations, including Mondragon Corp.
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.
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!
Removed by mod
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.
Years of propaganda from oligarchs, their think tanks and their propaganda spreaders. This has been an attack for many decades but especially after WW2 during the red scare and then after 1970 when the Powell Memo was issued. That is the origin of all of our messes, including Reagan and Trump.
Many of the same right wing think tanks are from the same oligarchs from decades ago and/or their heirs. Think Timothy Mellon or Birch Society (Koch Brother father). Even then, there was “the business plot” where the oligarchs of the 1930s wanted fascism because of the threat FDR had to their wealth and power.
The red scare is a huge factor that continues to this day.
Removed by mod
IMHO remnants from the cold war indoctrination.
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
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.
Removed by mod
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.
People don’t know what socialism actually is beyond literally defining it as bad and scary. It’s insane how uneducated and stupid most of us are.
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.
The people who hate it are those who think themselves better than their peers. They think they deserve more than their peers, and that socialism transfers their superior effort to the benefit of their inferiors.
They see socialism not as everyone helping everyone, but as they, the successful being forced to support them, the lazy.
Yes. My one note would be that it may be more to the root of it to say that they see it as the good (anything they like) having to help the bad (anything else). These sorts almost always reduce down to good/bad, me/them, clean/dirty because they (like all of us in our own ways) simply desire understanding and the surety it provides. Framing things as 0/1 is much easier to understand than actually facing the grey of reality. It’s easy to want easy. Not often good or helpful, but just so dang easy to abide by.
