Goodbye Lenin! How Capitalism Taught the World to Fear Socialism

By Sianna Zewdie (Y12)

With the NYC mayoral race dominating the news, I turned to a kid in my debate club earlier this week, whom I knew to be a staunch conservative, and asked him what he thought of Zohran Mamdani.

“Mamdani?” he responded. “He’s a socialist bastard.”

Interesting. “Hmm—you don’t like him? Why?”

“Because!” The guy looked at me, with a slight patronizing look in his eye. “He’s a socialist bastard!” It was evident that he was proud of his contrarian streak, thought it gave him an edge over me.

Still I pressed. “Okay, I got that the first time, but why is he a socialist bastard? What do you have against socialism?”

And then. Cue the vague mutterings, the hemming and hawing, the brief references to the USSR, to Romania, to North Korea, never quite giving me a straight answer. 

And yet, when I grilled him on specific policies—worker’s rights, universal healthcare, affordable housing—he conceded, step by step, until his ideal world shared alarming similarities to one that might be proposed by a socialist.

But why fear the word ‘socialist’ then? Was he born with a natural aversion to socialism, coded in his DNA alongside his need to eat, drink and move? A warning from his subconscious telling him not to go there, for here there be dragons?

Absolutely not, and it would be foolish to say so. It is likely a subconscious aversion, yes, but it is not born out of genetic coding nor evolutionary needs—rather, he, like hundreds of millions of others—is a victim of American anti-communist propaganda, a nasty lingering scar from the Cold War era that still pervasive in today’s world as a way to preserve the cultural hegemony of capitalism. 

Decades of propaganda didn’t just make people fear the red flag—it made them worship the dollar. And that blind faith comes with a price. Capitalism, in theory, rewards innovators. In practice, it rewards a tiny elite while everyone else spins on the hamster wheel. Debt cycles act as a ball and chain to the government, through student loan debts, mortgage payments, and medical bills, trapping you in an eternal cycle of debt and repayment. And, the further right we walk down the political spectrum, the further we fall under the shadow of privatization—for example, railways in the U.K., healthcare in the U.S. (to an extent), and insurance here in Switzerland. And to anyone who reads, thinking ‘I never see that happening’, well, don’t forget we are all students at a private school in Switzerland; we were all born at the top of the ladder.

Also, of course, as before, we are the result of over half a century of propaganda and cultural conditioning, an inheritance passed down by films, schooling, and education. The 1950s saw the rise of the United States propaganda machine, thanks to the Cold War, with it working overtime to manufacture fear and hatred of anything that challenged the capitalist consensus. Paranoia swept the nation, conveniently coinciding with the increase in television ownership—a new outlet for governments’ cultural programming and reinforcement of the American anti-communist ideology.

The propaganda campaign capitalized (pun intended) on the weariness and anxieties of Americans following the trials of the Great Depression and the Second World War by glorifying the myth of the American Dream (which, by the way, was a marketing slogan that offered the illusion of class mobility but was really just a way to keep the working class obedient, but, anyway, I digress)—and portraying socialists as the villains who wished to tear it down. 

In the early 50s, Senator Joseph McCarthy used the dubious conviction of the Rosenbergs to lead the charge, conducting a symphony of fear and suspicion that would later come to be known as the Red Scare. His policies of McCarthyism involved blacklisting, investigations and accusations based on minimal evidence, and the systematic intimidation of anyone suspected of harboring left-wing sympathies. They took to the schools: textbooks’ accounts of communism and the USSR were edited to cast socialism as an evil that had to be castrated, and academic warfare ensued to guarantee that no left-leaning person would ever hold a teaching position. And up and down the Hollywood Walk of Fame, stars were blacklisted by the creeping fear of communism. The HUAC, FBI Investigations, the Federal Loyalty Campaign: allegiance to capitalism was no longer a political ideology, but patriotic duty.

We often equate such tactics to authoritarian states or Orwellian narratives, proving once again the power of Western revisionist history: not only does it engage in tactics of mass indoctrination, but it can suppress the evidence of doing so, thereby shaping collective memory and controlling the past. Make no mistake—America was not the only nation complicit; Australia, Canada and much of Western Europe led their own propaganda campaigns, with the entire effort spearheaded by Truman’s America.

But America’s role was not contained by its borders. Much like a disease, America’s aggressive crusade for capitalist dominance infiltrated other nations whether through propaganda or more insidious means, because the U.S. Government realized that there was one outcome it could never tolerate: the flourishing of a socialist nation.

And so as the dominoes fell, so did the political leaders, as the CIA rushed to depose anyone who might challenge the delicate web of lies and propaganda they had spent decades constructing. In Chile, Salvador Allende’s vision of social and labor reforms was toppled by a military coup guided by the U.S.’s invisible hand. The U.S. and Britain collaborated to fund riots in Iran and restore a tyrant into power, to replace Mohammad Mosaddegh—who’s only crime was to protect Iran’s wealth and oil from foreign greed. And in the infamous war in ‘Nam the U.S. poured its youth into a living furnace, wave after wave, to extinguish the flame of socialism and preserve a distant capitalist empire.

And when people dared question? The USSR served as the perfect pretext, an example of socialism in decay, shifting into the authoritarian regime that Marx never meant it to be. Socialism and communism are simply umbrella terms that encompass a spectrum of ideologies. The socialist states envisioned by Allende and Mossafegh did not resemble the totalitarian regime under Stalin, which liberals and capitalists often invoke as a strawman against leftist theory. Rather, the USSR was an authoritarian communist state that prioritized state power over worker control, deviating sharply from the core three questions every socialist state should adhere to. Lenism-Marxism and state-socialism are entirely distinct from the more participatory, democratic forms of socialism, as any literate person could read socialist theory and realize immediately—but once again American propaganda rears its ugly head; labelling the innocent act of thinking outside the capitalist box as thoughtcrime.

The danger that lies in remaining inside the capitalist box—or, for anyone who earns under $50 000 a year, prison—is that you end up working tirelessly for a system that rewards the few while keeping the rest comfortably confined. This is not me waging war against iPhones or McDonald’s, but a reminder that the problems that are sold as an unfortunate side effect of the world we live in, are usually just flaws in the capitalist system. It is just difficult to consider an alternative world, when we’ve been raised to see this one as the only possible version of freedom.

But just because we are at the end of the food chain doesn’t mean we cannot recognize where change has to be made. Democratic socialist theory, as Mamdani proposes, offers an alternative, more equitable view. Instead of commodifying labor and privatizing essential services, we can give all workers democratic control and treat universal human rights—healthcare, education, housing—are rights, not luxuries for the fortunate few.

Perhaps if the kid from my debate club climbed down from his private school ladder, he would notice the world below. But then again, I did hear him later start extolling Ronald Reagan, so let’s not hold our breath.