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

I think it’s fear. People fear that their country doesn’t produce enough and isn’t wealthy enough to support an army that is capable enough to keep any real or imagined enemies at bay. Add a good amount of corruption and propaganda to it, and you get a perpetual cycle where this fear needs continuous fuelling.

The worst part of it is that the fear isn’t entirely justified. As the Ukraine war shows, predators will try to pray on the weak, and Europe has been complacent about its own defence.

That doesn’t mean I think capitalism is the answer of course, but it is a horribly delicate balancing act to consider all concerns.

Ask a typical American what they hate about socialism and they will perfectly describe capitalism

WKUK-Backseat

The US is run by very rich people who benefit from the current system.

It’s manufactured hate.

It benefits those in power to make average citizens fear socialism.

We already live in a system with numerous socialist programs. Many of the people who have been brainwashed to hate the concept of socialism already benefit from some of these socialist programs.

As with pretty much everything in life, you have to find a happy medium. That goes for socialism too. A full on 100% socialist society may not function well. Just like how we’re witnessing the failures of the ultra-capitalist society we live in.

But the brainwashed don’t want to meet in the middle. They fear socialism and don’t want any trace of it in our society…despite the fact that there are already many socialist aspects present.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare

It’s pretty much all US propaganda that makes people hate socialism

The most common gripe I hear is that because not all labor is similar[EG: Healthcare vs Mining] there is no easy way to make sure that people are putting in the same value into the system. For people that already mistakenly believe there is a large group of “lazy immigrants” draining resources in the current system, this is a deal breaker. The internal logic isn’t too much to swallow its just a hurdle to get people to sit long enough to hear the answer. They would rather fight over the crumbs than share the whole because somehow thats more “fair”.

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.

the argument against it that I see the most is that governments are inherently corruptible and bad at managing taxpayer money and so it’s destined to become a big scam.

fair enough, to be honest

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.

I think most of the hate is from hard working people who are afraid “lazy ones” will get benefits that they themselves deserve.

I dont disagree. The amount of people on lemmy that say they just wanna sit on their ass and smoke weed is quite high, and im convinced if they had their way all our infrastructure would crumble in a week (no one thinks about the sewer/wastewater, the electricity, and the food plants that need to keep running for your comfortable lazy life)

We would need a way to keep people working crap jobs, while also supporting them. We cant all be influencers and movie stars. Someone has to shovel shit.

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.