It’s propaganda. The reality is that much of our system is already Socialized. In fact, some of the best stuff in our society is Socialist.

Schools, libraries, fire departments, police, military, parks, roads, etc. are all Socialist concepts at their foundation.

Fire Departments used to work by subscription. A building owner would pay a local fire brigade for protection. He would get a small cast iron badge that he’d place next to his doorway. If a building caught fire, the fire brigade would show up, and if there was a a “fire mark,” they’d fight the fire. If there wasn’t a fire mark, they’d let it burn down. That is a strictly Capitalist concept.

It was eventually decided that public tax money would be used to protect EVERYBODY from fire, which is a Socialist concept. The old subscription-based fire brigade concept evolved into the predatory insurance industry, a Capitalist concept which has been preying upon us ever since.

Like most political philosophies, Socialism has its positives and negatives. Any political philosophy, taken to its most extreme ends, would be a disaster. The best governments take the most successful parts of any philosophy, and rejects the bad parts. A pure Democratic/Republican/Socialist government would be terrible, but a combination of the best elements, could be really great.

MAGA is not a legitimate political philosophy. it’s core tenets include treason, corruption, racism, bigotry, violence, pedophilia, misogyny, intolerance, ignorance, and incompetence. MAGA is a criminal enterprise disguising itself as a legitimate political movement, and it’s influence must be fully purged from our government and our society.

No, its means workers control the means of production.

Edit: Im getting really tired of people conflating socialism with social programs. Its not socialism when the government does something, stop saying it is.

It’s mostly thanks to the worst real world attempts to create socialism in the 1900s, which ended up being not terribly different from plain fascism. In core USSR cities things were probably kind of fine for most people, but the farther away you got from the large cities and the motherland, the worse it got. Ukraine had a man-made famine that killed 3-10 million people. China has similar horrible hunger waves due to human mistakes or malevolence in planning. Gulag Archipleago, Stasi, KGB. When people attempted to free themselves from communism, the attempts were brutally crushed. Oppression was everywhere.

If you want to meet people who hate socialism most, go to places that used to be socialist. Sure, USA had some counter-propaganda against communism, but it 100% is not the only reason why people don’t like it.

Just because it has failed miserably in the past might not mean that it must fail in the future too if somebody is dumbbrave enough to try again. But there are some important differences between now and then and those differences might be important if put to good use. For instance, we have significant computer capacity today that didn’t exist back when communism was really tried the last time. Perhaps those difficult allocation problems can be worked out. Perhaps. Perhaps AI can be an impartial divider of resources. Just let me build the model, I’ll make it fair, I promise.

I wonder how Lemmy would explain the apparently much more blatant hatred towards free market capitalism though.

It’s mostly thanks to USA propaganda and the whole “Red Scare” that began in the 1950s

I mean doesn’t it mean a system where the people take care of themselves and neighbors?

Not really, the system is supposed to be about a government and economy that cares about the well being of its people first, such that several wealth distribution methods would be applied to ensure minimal inequality.

There are various kinds of socialism. Some “take care of themselves and neighbors” & some merely claim to.

One of the merely claims types is authoritarian socialism, which includes Marxism–Leninism.

Authoritarian socialism, or socialism from above, is an economic and political system supporting some form of socialist economics while rejecting political pluralism. As a term, it represents a set of economic-political systems describing themselves as “socialist” and rejecting the liberal-democratic concepts of multi-party politics, freedom of assembly, habeas corpus, and freedom of expression, either due to fear of counter-revolution or as a means to socialist ends.

That ideology does not respect & protect inherent individual rights & liberties recognized since the Enlightenment. Authoritarian socialism is hated for abusing human rights, and it’s often incorrectly assumed that all socialism is authoritarian. That explains the hatred.

Kinds of socialism that respect & protect human rights do exist, however, and they have a better claim to a system of self & mutual care. There’s little reason to hate those.

Well, over here hard-line socialism is tied directly to Soviet attempts of taking away our independence through military force after us being occupied for well over a thousand years.

So yeah, a hard sell. But we have softer socialist policies these days, but I don’t see a shift towards a fully socialist system.

The entirety of civilization is based on socialism to one degree or another. Even dictators depend on socialism. The tipping point is where that socialism becomes leveraged for personal ambitions.

The kind we know from history and China has the problem of giving some individuals way too much power over others. But so does capitalism in the long run, in way meaner ways.

Care? hahahaha. You made me laugh.

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.

One reason I can think is we haven’t yet seen a working socialist society, which often fail for external reasons.

For example, the socialist government in Cuba was severely undermined by the USA imposed blockade.

A more recent example is Venezuela, while you can think what you want about its current government, I don’t think USA should interfere with any sovereign nation.

There’s almost like a pattern, like someone, somewhere doesn’t like the idea of socialism to succeed.

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.

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.

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.

Socialism, as far as Marx was concerned, is a transitional stage to Communism. This is why it gets a lot of push back. Because of that connection. Worse, youve got generations of people conflating the two. And worse still, you have a few examples of people who were claiming to be socialist, who were really just using socialism for their own ends.

The reality is that Socialism is about everything being about the betterment of the people. That assets are a shared ownership, rather than privately owned. This in turn creates a fairer distribution of the wealth generated. So everyone’s lives improve.

The issue, the real issue, is that socialism needs a very large government in order to work. The fear is that this would create out of control bureaucracy. With middle mangers everywhere doing middle manger things that would create a system that was slow and worse far easier to corrupt. On top of that, you have the issue of competition not being the driving force of innovation. The government would control and mandate investment and innovation. Which again comes back to the middle mangers. There is also an issue with free speech. After all, if the government controls everything, where do you go if that government doesnt see the issues that its created? And worse still, how might it handle those dissenting voices?

The reality is that no one system is “the best” and really what would work best is a mixed system. One that builds a well regulated economy while maintaining a safety net for the people. So you would have private businesses, competition, innovation combined with free healthcare, free education, unemployment support, worker rights, high taxes, and high transparency and accountability.