This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why is the label “socialism” often viewed negatively when discussing progressive policies? Is there a significant difference between socialism and liberalism?”
Socialism and liberalism are distinct ideologies with no practical connection between them.
Liberalism is built on three fundamental societal values: Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality. These values inspire and guide liberal minds in supporting greater degrees of social justice in a broadly unjust world.
Socialism is the public ownership of the means of production. Socialism essentially strips plutocrats of their wealth and forces an entitled class of people to live alongside as equals to the people they prefer to benefit from their exploitation.
These two disparate concepts are often conflated as part of a centuries-long class war waged by society’s plutocrats against the proletariat (the working class) while employing the bourgeoisie (capitalists) as their armies of oppression.
Every movement toward social justice is met by resistance to the entitled classes in society who possess the leverage of despair against the working class to enrich themselves while impoverishing the weakest among us.
Every movement toward social justice is a strip of power taken from the entitled classes to enable the weakest among us to survive and prosper without suffering a dehumanizing indignity imposed upon them by the wealthy classes.
For the working class to fight for and win weekends off from labour is a cost to the wealthy class that they deeply resent and respond to with strategies to strip further dignities from the working class.
Their deep resentment toward increasing social justice and decreasing power over the working class has been deeply embedded into their psyches due to historical events like the Russian Revolution of 1917. A monarchy was violently abolished through two successive revolutions and a civil war, which spread a sentiment of hatred for the ruling class in society across the globe to inspire a similar German Revolution of 1918.
Russian Revolution — Wikipedia
The nightmare of breadlines persists to this day and has been used as a weapon of ideas against another uprising by the working class.
The plutocrats of today have learned to do whatever they can to insulate themselves from another violent uprising that would result in them losing their wealth and power to angry mobs of desperate working-class citizens.
They have invested billions over the decades to have people automatically associate socialism and communism with extreme poverty and extreme oppression. Their efforts have been supremely successful to the degree that the poorest in society today will fight to protect plutocrat wealth at the expense of their well-being.
Here’s an example of a random right-wing website, their fearmongering messaging and how successful the plutocrats have been in conditioning the working class to defend what they view as the saviours of humanity they refer to as “job creators.”
(Please do take a moment to “bask” in the sheer hatred they have cultivated within their loyal lemmings toward any form of social justice for society. These are the slugs in society who beg for a salt bath… and are deeply committed to taking all the rest of us with them on a trip to human oblivion.)
We can see the cancerous attitude as a caricature of humanity within the American political system as a corrupt plutocrat who has become a convicted felon can still campaign for president. In contrast, every other convicted felon is stripped of their right to vote while they rot in prison.
The plutocrats in society have been quietly waging their class warfare for centuries; before, they were plutocrats and considered a monarchy that assumed power over the little people through physical warfare.
They have persisted for over 100 years in a steady and patient strategy of protecting their wealth and power through every influential channel they can.
Look through this resource to see how the plutocrat class influences legislation creation through a group called the “American Legislative Exchange Council” (ALEC). This association has been responsible for literally writing the laws that are implemented verbatim to benefit themselves at the expense of the public good… and this is only the tip of the iceberg for their machinations:
“Right to Work” laws enacted to strip workers of their rights while reducing “Right to Work” states have become the most impoverished in the nation.
Corrupt plutocrats like the Koch Brothers (Koch family — Wikipedia), the Walton Family (Walton family — Wikipedia), Elon Musk (Elon Musk — Wikipedia), Bill Ackman (Bill Ackman — Wikipedia), Steve Schwarzman and his Blackstone Group (Home — Blackstone), and etcetera.
Why Plutocrats Are Rallying to Trump
Most hide their money behind organizations like Blackstone Inc., which bills itself as an “alternative investment management firm” and dumps millions into SuperPAC to fund the campaigns of politicians who will support their wealth acquisition strategies at the expense of the working class and the constituents who vote for them.
These are highly paid grifters whose job is to scam hundreds of millions of people out of the value of their labours, and they have succeeded to the tune of over $50 trillion from the middle class in the last few decades alone.
They have successfully converted a system of empowering the most vulnerable among us into a system of oppressing the most vulnerable among us.
They have invested billions in their war while reducing the costs of waging it to a small tax.
Their coup de grâce has been the outright purchase of the highest court in the land, seeking to convert the world into a facsimile of a medieval state with a two-class system of rulers and serfs.
Impact of the Heritage Foundation on Supreme Court nominations
Ironically, they have succeeded so well in entrenching their power to repeat the historic levels of income inequality threatening global stability one hundred years ago that we are on the verge of repeating the same tragedies.
It’s been easy to blame the motivations for all their socially destructive activities on simple greed, but the sheer irrationality of their behaviours transcends greed. It is a self-destructive behaviour that has abandoned rationality.
All of which is intended to prohibit these kinds of social justice goals for the working class:
The minimal costs of a social safety net don’t justify the extremes of greed they’ve been displaying. The only explanation for their extreme behaviour, which resembles the trajectory of an addict, is that they have been deeply scarred by history.
The revolutions of the little people throughout history have scarred them deeply, and that explains why they have invested so much into the optics of language to cause the public to viscerally reject a concept like socialism without bothering to consider aspects of the concept that can and are beneficial to society.
No one blinks about socialism when it involves public money spent on the military because security is more important to many, particularly among those who loudly and repeatedly profess their love of freedom the most.
The most frustrating aspect of all of this is that, as captains of industry and leaders in society, one would hope they would be astute enough to avoid making manifest that which they fear so much… yet, this is the state of affairs today:
Pushing people to extremes of desperation makes it seem like they’re begging for the pikes and guillotines to come out and repeat history.
They can see the escalations occurring throughout the globe. Instead of taking action to avert catastrophe, they invest in secure bunkers to save their asses from the conflagration while hoping their billions will be worth something when the entire world’s economy collapses.
For a group of people who are generally viewed as more intelligent than the masses, they seem to wallow in more profound stupidity than the under-educated people they love to manipulate while convincing themselves of their superiority.
The environmental nightmare they are inviting into our world is rapidly approaching a tipping point in which there will be no return to stability without a dramatic shifting of power throughout the globe. Yet, no inkling of this impending catastrophe seems to grace their awareness. It’s as if they’re watching a massive iceberg drifting toward them, and they’re more fascinated by its structure than what it will do when it strikes.
thotbag 