Explain Like I'm Five

The people who don't like socialism mean something else. To them, socialism is when the government takes care of you and your neighbors. This is scary and can go badly: sometimes the government does not know your needs, isn't paying good attention, or is making choices in a bad way. There are examples of governments that said they would take care of everything for everyone, and then many many people didn't get enough food.

People also worry about a little socialism, because when the government takes care of some things automatically, it means local communities don't have to worry about those things. Then the people in the community forget how to do them (imagine tasks like building houses) themselves, and that makes them more dependent on the government. This is also scary, because in an emergency (like after a flood) you might not be the governments first priority. It also means that you can more easily live in a place without being part of a local community (like a church), and that loss of close friends makes everyone more lonely and sad.

It's not clear that the people with these worries are right. Other systems also have problems, and so even if there are good concerns here, maybe socialism is still best.

Remember to look for nice people who disagree with you, and listen to their fears, needs and dreams. It is easy to end up in echo chambers, and feel like everyone who disagrees with you is dumb, evil, or crazy. But usually we only see the loudest (not the smartest or kindest) voices that disagree with us. Algorithms and popularity contests online really like to reward things that make you angry.

Every politically charged term ends up having highly disputed definitions, but I think most of those will acknowledge that the term has way more baggage than just the idea of taking care of yourselves and neighbors.

From Wikipedia:

Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems[1] characterised by social ownership of the means of production,[2] as opposed to private ownership.[3][4][5] It describes the economic, political, and social theories and movements associated with the implementation of such systems.

It represents a whole set of beliefs about how the world works, in addition to political goals. Someone might broadly agree with the idea that people should be taken care of, but have strong objections about the specifics. One of those beliefs that I'll object to is the idea that just about everything should be understood as being about class conflict; I don't think that's always accurate.

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 ~~dumb~~brave 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.

Perhaps a comment against it could be something like “why should I pay for someone else’s health care?”.

I guess if your beloved leader has told you enough times that socialized health care is bad (communism?), then you won’t investigate what that kind of health care really looks like, and you’ll parrot the statement in belief and acceptance.

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.

At the national level it’s because they(the federal government) is taking your tax money to pay someone hundreds of miles away for existing. At the local level it’s because “private charity already does that.”

Care? hahahaha. You made me laugh.

It gets really hard to make money and exploit people when they don't fear for their livelihoods.

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

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.

Are you an American ?

https://lemmy.ml/post/39416509

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.

Hold over from Stalin and Mao era, the commies was the big bad. Like after 9/11 it was the Muslims