Why Does Socialism Have a Negative Connotation?

[MessiahDecoy123]

It's not surprising that it has a negative connotation given that it was the ideology and goal of major authoritarian/totalitarian countries although enough time has passed that that's becoming less influential. But even aside from that background, with its focus against income inequality and for redistribution a lot of people would fear that socialism would tend to be anti-growth and lead to everyone, or at least a lot of people, becoming equally poor.

I think Americans are unique in, to a greater extent than others, perceiving themselves as middle class so they would especially resent that socialism would be most helpful to the poor (which they perceive themselves to not be) and most harmful to the rich (which they want to be) while they themselves would get squeezed a lot if not being even more harmed than the rich.

I think the middle class should be remineded of four facts.

1) The bottom 80% have only 7% of the wealth.

2) 65% of jobs pay under $40,000.

3) The vast majority live check to check.

4) Most of their taxes go to the elderly, the military, and interest, not towards food stamps for the jobless.

 

[Axl Van Sixx]

 

[Lily Adler]

View attachment 36102

Again it is the inevitable foregone conclusion that we will evolve into a Socialist planet. Despite how many corporate leaders try to fight it.

 

[DJ Kornphlake]

It's not hard to see why a generation that's had to face two national financial crises in a little over a decade as they joined the job market might not be a fan of a system that keeps rewarding bailouts to the corporations that keep causing the problems.

 

[Axl Van Sixx]

Again it is the inevitable foregone conclusion that we will evolve into a Socialist planet. Despite how many corporate leaders try to fight it.

Hell yeah.

 

[The Overlord]

I think it's a combination of bunch of things, Stalin is the socialist boogeyman that the Right has been using and a long hangover from the Cold War and something called "capitalist realism" (which I bought into for a long time).

I think the Right has overplayed its hand and gotten lazy. When they say "Medicare for all is socialism" they make socialism seem appealing to younger people.

 

[chamber-music]

It seems like in America the conservatives have demonized basic social democratic policies so much that it has lost potency outside of much of their own base.

It is hard to take serious any basic reforms on things like minimum wage or healthcare or workers rights or the environment being treated like the death nail of America when multiple western democratic countries have already enacted those policies with little ill effect.

 

[Axl Van Sixx]

The word "socialism" became popular again after Republicans and Fox News spent 8 years screaming that Obama and his (very conservative, centre-right) policies were "socialist". When your political opponents keep denouncing everything they hate as "socialist", it's easy for people to start to think that maybe "socialism" isn't so bad after all. Especially when you're talking about a younger generation that didn't grow up in the shadow of the Cold War. Bernie Sanders continued the rehabilitation and popularization of the word "socialist", though his capitulation to the capitalist Democratic Party leadership in 2016 and 2020 showed the limitation of his outlook.

If anything, the idea of "socialism" has become so popular that the real problem now is defining precisely what it means. Some people think that socialism just means "anything the government does": health care, roads, public libraries, etc. But socialism really means public ownership of the means of production in the hands of workers organized as the ruling class. In the Marxist sense, it's a transitional stage between capitalism and communism, the latter referring to a stateless, classless society.

If you think millennials are starting to become more radical, zoomers are on a whole other level. A lot of my comrades attending the global climate strike protests last fall would talk to high school students about the need for revolution and the response from students would be, "Well, yeah, of course!" like it was the most obvious thing in the world. The kids are alright.

Capitalism has shown that it cannot provide a future for the current generation of youth. It can't provide people with jobs or affordable housing; in the U.S., the richest country in the world, it can't even provide people with health care. It can't address climate change or stop the pandemic. All it offers is racism, oppression, poverty, war and ecological disaster.

 

[InCali]

I started to weigh in on this, but think I didn't post. I think the negative connotations come from the deformed political superstructures of (relatively) recent socialist economies. Socialism has therefore come to be seen by many through the lens of these political establishments.

I am speaking specifically of post Lenin/Trotsky USSR and China as the 2 highest profile examples. To a certain extent, other socialist countries suffer from the same malaise, but, ask yourself, don't capitalist countries, including the USA suffer from the same? When corporations are viewed as "people", won't the richest generally be able to control the narrative and, hence, elections? When a number approaching a majority of people in this country want to nationalize agriculture, power, water, etc., come and talk to me about democracy in the US.

I could go on with some nuances, but, for now, I'll leave it at that.

 

[Axl Van Sixx]

@InCali, didn't you say at some point that you were familiar with Trotsky's writings? I may be thinking of another Hype member. But if so, that's awesome.

Personally, I don't think you can really understand the experience of the USSR, Maoist China, etc. without Trotsky's analysis. No one else has been able to explain the bureaucratic degeneration or deformation of these states as well as he did. Trotsky was a genius IMHO, but part of that is because he was a consistent Marxist who applied the method of Marxism to analyzing why the Soviet Union, founded as a workers' state, degenerated under Stalin.

If you say you're a socialist, sooner or later someone is going to ask you "What about the USSR? What about Stalin?" And it's important to have a response to that.

 

[InCali]

@InCali, didn't you say at some point that you were familiar with Trotsky's writings? I may be thinking of another Hype member. But if so, that's awesome.

Personally, I don't think you can really understand the experience of the USSR, Maoist China, etc. without Trotsky's analysis. No one else has been able to explain the bureaucratic degeneration or deformation of these states as well as he did. Trotsky was a genius IMHO, but part of that is because he was a consistent Marxist who applied the method of Marxism to analyzing why the Soviet Union, founded as a workers' state, degenerated under Stalin.

If you say you're a socialist, sooner or later someone is going to ask you "What about the USSR? What about Stalin?" And it's important to have a response to that.

I haven't read all of Trotsky's works (not nearly as much as Marx), but have read "The Permanent Revolution", which, IMO, might be the most important work he ever did because it completely debunked the Stalinist "Socialism in one country" concept. Would someone like to remind me of what happened to the USSR?

I've also read "The History of the Russian Revolution" which was pretty interesting, but the "must read" (note the font LOL) if you want to understand his ideology is "The Case of Leon Trotsky" (both volumes of the Dewey Commission of 1937). In it, he went through his archives and laid out, point by point, the fallacies of Stalinism. Yes, the man was unquestionably a genius and also one of the greatest political theoriticians who ever lived.

During my days at UC Santa Cruz, I knew a lot of people in the Spartacus Youth League. Unfortunately, they were driven out, probably, by a guy named James Robertson (who I met at a forum) and the group never recovered. It's ironic that the same group that argued against the political purges, seems to have become their worst enemy. I can't claim to be in the know as I wasn't an SYL member. I just couldn't stomach some of the other "leftist" groups on campus. One of them went so far as to call the Iranian Revolution against the Shah as "progressive". I thought I was going to lose my lunch. A friend of mine stood up and asked him if he thought gay people and women felt it to be progressive and listed how they were treated by the Ayatollah. That pretty much shut him up. Ah...but I digress....

 

[DJ Kornphlake]

 

[Axl Van Sixx]

During my days at UC Santa Cruz, I knew a lot of people in the Spartacus Youth League. Unfortunately, they were driven out, probably, by a guy named James Robertson (who I met at a forum) and the group never recovered. It's ironic that the same group that argued against the political purges, seems to have become their worst enemy. I can't claim to be in the know as I wasn't an SYL member. I just couldn't stomach some of the other "leftist" groups on campus. One of them went so far as to call the Iranian Revolution against the Shah as "progressive". I thought I was going to lose my lunch. A friend of mine stood up and asked him if he thought gay people and women felt it to be progressive and listed how they were treated by the Ayatollah. That pretty much shut him up. Ah...but I digress....

There's a lot of sectarianism among the radical left, and many of these groups have strange positions left over from debates that occurred decades ago.

If a group wants to become relevant today, it has to put forward slogans that make sense to the masses and also drive the struggle forward. The classic example is the Bolsheviks with "Peace, Land and Bread" in 1917.

I'm glad you brought up Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, because it's one of the best texts out there describing exactly what a revolution is. These ideas are more important than ever in the wake of the George Floyd protests and the general anger in the United States, which influences mass movements around the world. I like this passage in particular:

The masses go into a revolution not with a prepared plan of social reconstruction, but with a sharp feeling that they cannot endure the old régime. Only the guiding layers of a class have a political program, and even this still requires the test of events, and the approval of the masses. The fundamental political process of the revolution thus consists in the gradual comprehension by a class of the problems arising from the social crisis – the active orientation of the masses by a method of successive approximations.

 

[Sithborg]

The scars of the Cold War run deep.

It also doesn't help that "tankies" exist, who are way too pro China.

 

[Axl Van Sixx]

^Agreed. Good thing tankies are utterly insignificant outside of radical left circles, and even there most people view them as irrelevant.

 

[OtherwiseKnownAs]

Can anyone recommend me some good socialist and/or left-wing literature? I’ve only read The Communist Manifesto and Capital Vol. 1 by Marx, along with Profit over People by Chomsky. If anyone could recommend me anything else, I’d appreciate it!

 

[Axl Van Sixx]

Can anyone recommend me some good socialist and/or left-wing literature? I’ve only read The Communist Manifesto and Capital Vol. 1 by Marx, along with Profit over People by Chomsky. If anyone could recommend me anything else, I’d appreciate it!

What kind of stuff are you interested in? I organize reading groups with people in my city and usually the first texts we recommend are The Communist Manifesto and then The Transitional Program by Leon Trotsky.

Beyond that, we start to cover the basics of Marxism, with introductions to dialectical materialism, historical materialism and Marxist economics. Any of these strike your fancy? Feel free to send me a PM and I can get you involved in an online reading group if you're interested.

 

[Axl Van Sixx]

A world on the brink: revolution looming

Many people have drawn the correct conclusion that the choice between Democrats and Republicans is no choice at all. And there is a corresponding growth in interest in socialist, and even communist, ideas. This is shown by the rapid advances made by our US section, but also by the growth of the DSA membership in chapters around the country has surged. An estimated 10,000 people have joined since March, bringing the group’s total membership to roughly 66,000, according to internal figures.

One thing is clear. No matter who sits in the White House next year, nothing will ever be the same again. Turbulent times lie ahead for the USA. There will be victories and there will be defeats. But for a whole period, the pendulum will swing sharply to the left.

The revolutions of 1848-49 were confined to Europe, with only a limited echo in the rest of the world. The great October Revolution of 1917 caused waves not only in Europe, but also in Asia, where it marked the real beginning of the struggles of the enslaved colonial peoples for freedom. But now we see revolutionary movements everywhere: from France to Lebanon, from Belarus to Thailand, from the USA to Chile. In other words, we already see the outlines of world revolution.