In the US they had the Red Scare(s), and of course people are propagandized over here too, but not to such a level. The main reason as to why communist movements don’t proliferate in Europe is said to be the social democracy, which alleviates inequality to a certain degree while keeping the mode of production that generates it.
With the 2008 crisis these social democracies have worsened sharply, but (from what I gather) communist movements didn’t gain a substantial amount of followers.
From my experience as a zoomer, I had been told since primary school that democracy (and therefore politics) boiled down to voting, and the myths that communism was tried but failed and this is the best we will ever have. My family was affected post-2008 and everyone in my family gravitated (and still does) around the left. Later, as I grew up, I looked at communists not as foolish but as unserious; communism as an aesthetic and not a framework to view the world by and act accordingly. Like “haha fuck fascists” I actually thought it was cool but nothing more than that. This sensation was reinforced by how niche the communist party is (by number of votes, as that was “politics”). In the end, I was a politically inactive socdem.
This is why I think it’s seen as “not an option” from a socdem perspective. Of course, it doesn’t help that the communist party is in a socdem coalition. What worries me is that there’s lots of people living in much worse conditions, but that discontent is only expressed as not voting, or turns reactionary.
What do you think? I’m trying to piece together why we’re here and how (wrt communism in my country) but I just don’t know anybody older than me. Does this make any sense?
(Edited to change line breaks)
The welfare state does not oppose socialism by existing. By and large, it is still a progressive element under capitalism, as it is a set of concessions which the post-war workers’ movement fought hard to wrest from the bourgeoisie. What opposes socialism is the capitalists pointing to these concessions and threatening “You lose this if you revolt”. Therefore, the decline of the welfare state does not need to correspond to a rise in socialism when the threats don’t decrease in volume. Notice how this can be done even if there is no welfare state at all, by threatening that people would lose even what little they have outside of the welfare state if they rise up.
Therefore, the central reason of why communism is outside the political mainstream is equal in both the US and Europe: It is that the mainstream of opinion is controlled by a few media conglomerates who would rather not tell you anything about socialism except the typical campfire horror stories about billions dying and there being nothing to eat. Outside of academia, the West cannot have any serious, broad discussion of the modern developments in planned economics, the phenomenology of the various leftist factions, the merits and demerits of concrete actions of socialist countries, or the future of humanity after capitalism, because someone would have to pay for people witnessing and partaking in such a discussion, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a capitalist to chip in.
Yeah, you’re right, but something about that second paragraph leaves me dissatisfied. Seems to me like the current efforts by the nominally communist parties don’t help much in that field, and it’s not clear whether it’s a problem of scale (in counter-propaganda) or of approach, or something else. To be fair, I’ve only recently turned my attention toward the political climate in my country, and so I’m not involved, not organized, which I’m trying to change.
Thanks for the insight!
The EU is an imperialist system, and the EU countries are either Imperialist or Neo-Colonies, sometimes aspects of both.
The EU gets a lot of free lunch from the Global South and their workers form a labor aristocracy.
In my, somewhat limited, understanding, the said American red scare was the more intense version of and sentiment that was widespread throughout the capitalist world, it can be noted that from the beginning the Bolsheviks were supressed by 14 foreign nations, and the distrust never let off, even now its not uncommon to see Europeans with the horseshoe mentality. So I believe that the same type of propaganda campaign has been happening in Europe as well but with different clothes, on the history books, especially when you see how east Germany, the USSR and any other socialist endeavor is depicted, and probably many other ways as well.
