We Americans have been conditioned from the cradle to recoil in unthinking horror at the word “socialism.” Like Pavlov’s dogs, the mere presence of that stimulus elicits an instantaneous and involuntary response.
Furthermore, when the word “socialism” is uttered, it conjures images, not of consensual worker solidarity, but only of violent statist Stalinism. When that word is spoken, we never picture worker cooperatives where labor jointly owns and manages its own businesses. Instead, our minds erupt with pre-manufactured images of mindless drones marching lock step in a frozen gulag with the music of Wagner playing in the background.
So now most Americans work like oxen with blinders preventing them from ever looking up to see they are pulling someone else’s weight in what will be for them an endless and futile circle.
We would rather endure a lifetime of indignity and wage slavery rather than consider any alternative to our bondage. Even those most injured by the economic arrangements howl involuntarily like dogs at the moon at any suggestion of worker solidarity over and against management.
It has been so very clever of our masters to render the obvious solution to our misery unthinkable.