‘Socialism’ more popular than ‘Capitalism’ (2025)

From the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Opinion polls are worth what they are worth. In many cases the answers depend on how the question is framed. And they can’t distinguish between a passing off-the-cuff reply and a deeply-held opinion. Still, within these limitations, they are not entirely useless. Selecting a representative sample to question, if done properly, has been shown to be broadly valid.

In December YouGov published the result of a poll carried out in August to find out what people thought of what it called ‘political ideologies’. A representative sample of 2,127 adults in Great Britain (ie excluding Northern Ireland) were asked ‘Do you have a favourable or unfavourable opinion of the following’ — Liberalism, Conservatism, Socialism, Communism, Fascism, Nationalism, Feminism, Capitalism, Populism, Anarchism, Environmentalism, and Libertarianism. Those polled could answer ‘very favourable’, ‘somewhat favourable’, ‘somewhat unfavourable’, ‘very unfavourable’, as well as ‘don’t know’.

Since none of the twelve isms was defined, those questioned were in effect being asked to give their reaction just to the word. On average about a quarter replied ‘don’t know’, rising to nearly a half for ‘populism’ and ‘libertarianism’ (not surprising in this case as it is not a commonly used word). Amongst those who did express an opinion, the most favoured were Environmentalism and Feminism. The only others with a positive net favourable opinion (more favourable than unfavourable) were Liberalism and Socialism. The remaining eight all had a net unfavourable opinion, the most unfavoured, by far, being Communism, Anarchism and Fascism.

The word Socialism was more favoured, by quite a margin, than the word Capitalism. 38 percent were very or somewhat favourable to Socialism and 36 very or somewhat unfavourable. For Capitalism the figures were 30 and 45 percent. 10 percent expressed a very favourable opinion of Socialism compared with only 5 percent for Capitalism. For very unfavourable, the figures were 17 and 18 percent.

This echoes the result of other polls, even in the United States, but what does it mean? Obviously those questioned weren’t understanding ‘Socialism’ in our sense (otherwise we’d be well on our way there). So in what sense was the word being understood?

Commenting on the result, the US website, UnHerd, pointed out:

‘Each of the 12 -isms needs to be understood on at least two levels. There’s the academic meaning of the words, of primary interest to political scientists and ideological obsessives, and then there’s how normal people react to them as labels’.

And

‘As for socialism, the public perceptions focus on the social part rather than the -ism. Tony Blair was well aware of that and famously redefined Labour’s creed as (note the hyphen) “social-ism”, by which he meant the “moral assertion that individuals are interdependent”. Actual socialists who believe in a centrally planned economy still exist, of course, but for most people it just means security, solidarity and clapping for the NHS’.

Of course ‘actual socialists’ don’t believe in a centrally planned state-capitalist economy such as used to exist in the USSR, but we do exist. But that those who have a favourable opinion of socialism are really expressing a preference for social-reformism seems reasonable. It is understandable that many should prefer this to letting the market rip.

In any event, it can’t be bad for us ‘actual socialists’ that some 45 percent of those questioned had an unfavourable opinion of capitalism (however understood). That gives us a foot in the door.

One interesting result concerned who had a ‘very favourable’ opinion of the word socialism. The top ones were 28 percent of Green Party voters, 19 percent of those aged 18-24, 18 percent of Labour voters, 18 percent of Remain voters and 18 percent of those in Scotland. Even 7 percent of those who voted for the Liberal Democrats. Since there were over four times as many Labour voters questioned as Green Party ones, in absolute terms most of those who had a favourable opinion of the word socialism were Labour voters.

We already knew this from our own experience of doing better on average in elections when we contest safe Labour constituencies and wards.

Adam Buick