I hear it from stupid people all the time, "we can't do that because when I'm rich I wouldn't want that to happen to me".

Socialism was under attack before there was officially socialism.

Collectives were common in the 1820 s, and they were under attack immediately.

Europe. America was always sold and still is to a large extent sold on the Horatio Alger type mythology. And to be fair there was in the past some truth to it - not entirely - but not entirely untrue either. However data now indicates that class mobility which was once extremely high in America is dissipating and is now less true in America than in many other Western democracies while we see the development of a fairly large and somewhat permanent underclass. Is it possible that class consciousness will take root and more Americans will see themselves as an exploited proletariat? To be a red as opposed to a liberal does require a deep sense of victimization. Unfortunately a significant part of that rising sense of victimization is being exploited by some of the most reactionary elements. Can what remains of a class conscious American left become a voice for the underclass and be seen on the popular mainstream level as such? I would hope so. But I don't know.

The socialist labor and farmers movements had tremendous impact.

without exception developed permanent mainstream socialist political organizations

The development of socialism requires that the working class perceive itself as a unified block of shared-interest.

Ethnic division in America was stronger than most places because of slavery and being a nation of immigrants in general.

The stark workers versus capital dynamic doesn't develop well when differences between workers perceive ethnic differences as greater than their commonalities.

And, of course, where a divide-and-conquer dynamic existed to be exploited, capital was happy to exploit it.

The divergence of interests even in the same class group is so great in that tremendous area that wholly different groups and interests are represented in each of the two big parties, depending on the locality, and almost each particular section of the possessing class has its representatives in each of the two parties to a very large degree, though today big industry forms the core of the Republicans on the whole, just as the big landowners of the South form that of the Democrats. The apparent haphazardness of this jumbling together is what provides the splendid soil for the corruption and the plundering of the government that flourish there so beautifully. Only when the land — the public lands — is completely in the hands of the speculators, and settlement on the land thus becomes more and more difficult or falls prey to gouging — only then, I think, will the time come, with peaceful development, for a third party. Land is the basis of speculation, and the American speculative mania and speculative opportunity are the chief levers that hold the native-born worker in bondage to the bourgeoisie. Only when there is a generation of native- born workers that cannot expect anything from speculation any more will we have a solid foothold in America. But, of course, who can count on peaceful development in America! There are economic jumps over there, like the political ones in France — to be sure, they produce the same momentary retrogressions.

"The small farmer and the petty bourgeois will hardly ever succeed in forming a strong party; they consist of elements that change too rapidly — the farmer is often a migratory farmer, farming two, three, and four farms in succession in different states and territories, immigration and bankruptcy promote the change in personnel, and economic dependence upon the creditor also hampers independence — but to make up for it they are a splendid element for politicians, who speculate on their discontent in order to sell them out to one of the big parties afterward.

"The tenacity of the Yankees, who are even rehashing the Greenback humbug, is a result of their theoretical backwardness and their Anglo- Saxon contempt for all theory. They are punished for this by a superstitious belief in every philosophical and economic absurdity, by religious sectarianism, and by idiotic economic experiments, out of which, however, certain bourgeois cliques profit."

- Friedrich Engels, 1892

Yep.