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.
It would seem the common problem in any political system is always authoritarianism? Is there historical case where a king or similar actually helped the people that I can study more?
bhutan maybe?
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.
Where do dictators support workers owning the means of production?
Another person who doesnt understand socialism.
Then it’s some form of dictatorship. And that can happen in any form of government, however “socialism” is usually used by wannabe authoritarian types as bait to get the population on their side during upheaval and regime change.
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.
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.
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.
China needs Taiwan to fail because the Chinese Communist Party maintains that democracy is incompatible with the Chinese culture. Having a very successful Chinese democracy shows that Chinese culture is compatible with democracy.
In a similar way, capitalists do everything they can to scuttle socialist countries, because a working socialist country would show that it was viable. Hence endless embargoes, wars, and a steady stream of propaganda. This was true for the entire life of the Soviet Union, and continues to this day for socialist countries.
Indeed my friend… Sad state of affairs.
There are plenty of surviving socialist states, and Cuba, Venezuela, and Vietnam for that matter still exist despite extensive US meddling so it’s weird to call them non-surviving.
Whether you want to call China socialist is a whole different kettle of worms, but I think it demonstrates rather handily that socialism’s second greatest burden beyond the necessity of fighting off capitalists is the authoritarianism of Marxists.
China produced more billionaires than the US this year.
I’m a total lamen but what makes Marxism authoritarian?
Marxism posits that socialism is best achieved through a command/centralized economy. There’s plenty of room for interpretation and of course being a Marxist doesn’t mean you have to agree with 150 year old socioeconomic theories on every point but generally that’s the form Marxist governments have assumed, probably because it is in the interest of the people running a government to take all the power they can.
If the government controls production from the ground up there’s just no other model to call it but authoritarian, everything within that society can only happen by their consent or by breaking the law.
I agree, that’s why I called them non-working socialist states.
My point is we haven’t yet seen how well (or bad) could a socialist state work if left alone.
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.
Such a good point. Every once in a while I come across a particular social policy in a European country that someone from there is astonished doesn’t exist in other countries and on paper you think this would be great but you would know it would be such a hard sell in your / other countries. I think on a city / regional level there is a lot more about looking what other places are doing well top adopt them but don’t see it as much on an international level (outside of the EU anyway)
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.
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.
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.
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.
