Explain Like I'm Five

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://lemmy.ml/post/39416509

It's the PR and marketing campaigns. Capitalism concentrated the wealth with the bosses so they can send a coherent message. A message people can buy into.

Socialism marketing makes it sound like a MLM scheme. The lack of centralization puts different unions against each other.

A lot of people mix up “socialism” with “people being good neighbors.” That’s not actually what the term means. Socialism is specifically about who owns the big stuff, the means of production. In a socialist setup, people still work jobs, they still get paid, and daily life still involves employment and compensation. The difference is that major industries aren’t privately owned by large corporations. They’re controlled collectively by the public or by the workers themselves.

Small private businesses can still exist; they’re not eliminated outright. What changes is the ownership of large-scale systems: energy, manufacturing, transportation, resources, things on that level. These are shifted away from private corporate control and toward collective control.

The fundamental issue of socialism and why it doesn't and has not worked historically is because of human nature. A corporateocracy or a capitalist based society aligns much better to human nature than socialism does which is why it's significantly more "successful".