One reason I can think is we haven't yet seen a working socialist society, which often fail for external reasons.
For example, the socialist government in Cuba was severely undermined by the USA imposed blockade.
A more recent example is Venezuela, while you can think what you want about its current government, I don't think USA should interfere with any sovereign nation.
There's almost like a pattern, like someone, somewhere doesn't like the idea of socialism to succeed.
There are plenty of surviving socialist states, and Cuba, Venezuela, and Vietnam for that matter still exist despite extensive US meddling so it's weird to call them non-surviving.
Whether you want to call China socialist is a whole different kettle of worms, but I think it demonstrates rather handily that socialism's second greatest burden beyond the necessity of fighting off capitalists is the authoritarianism of Marxists.
China produced more billionaires than the US this year.
Sure, and they do plenty of capitalist hellscape shit in general and I'll shitpost about that all day. They've also raised nearly a billion people out of poverty since 1978 and one of the original conceits of Marxism is that capitalism might be necessarily to build the industrial foundation for socialism to be viable in the first place so... We'll see what happens as they come closer and closer to undeniably a society that could enact true socialism if it wanted to.
We do know their state has absolutely no qualms about disappearing billionaires as is. Or, you know, millions of Muslims.
I think the general idea of those against it is that they assume it is zero sum. Meaning, for everyone to be taken care of, the person must lose or have less.
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.
In case you're not aware, lemmy.world has (pre-emptively) defederated from the two instances that have the vast majority of socialists and communists on Lemmy, hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml.
If you want a lot more socialists to read your question and provide more informative answers, you may want to post in a community on lemmy.ml or lemmy.zip, which don't defederate those instances.
People will downvote my message and complain that hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml are "tankie" instances, which I interpret to mean that they hate people who want to make socialism happen in real life some day.
Down voting because, indeed, I don't want socialism to happen with fascism. Those instances are places that I do not want to visit.
No, we hate people who want to execute others. We hate people who think that authoritarianism is in any way connected to anything resembling communism.
We hate people who worship mass murderers. So no, socialism sounds nice, what the wannabe communists on tankie instances are doing on the other hand sounds just idiotic.
Rich people are selfish sociopaths and poor people imitate the rich thinking it will make them rich, too.
I think the standard thing at this point is to agree it's a nice idea, but also say it doesn't work in practice. Edit: And sometimes a certain kind of person will turn a simple disagreement into tribalistic hate.
A version was tried a few times from 1917 on, and it went poorly. So, if you're still for collective ownership of the means of production, you either need to be a denialist about that history, or explain why your version would be better.
There's also people who use a weaker definition not mutually exclusive with capitalism.
Because people have been repeatedly trained since the decline of Imperialism to believe that “socialism” is “when capitalism.” When the populace is afraid of the label, the label can be used as a blunt instrument to keep them enslaved to the parasitic Capitalist rulers.
To be fair to liberals, liberalism is also a system to take care of your neighbors.
Liberalism is basically capitalism with patches. Public option health care, government contractors, food stamps, tuition assistance, bus vouchers, child tax credits.
Socialism is a capitalism replacement. Universal health care, government organizations, free government grocery stores, free education, free public transportation, free day care.
Both groups on the left care about their neighbors.
Some of y'all need to go live in a socialist country for a few years and learn something about how it actually works.
Spoiler alert. You don't want any part of it.
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