Why do people give up on socialist ideas...

Manual labour jobs tend to do that.
Not being sarcastic, I've worked in a factory before as a summer job, people there are begging to be unionized and hate their supervisors like hell.

Well my first job also gave me an intense hatred of Sam Walton and wish to invent resurrection tech just so I could kill him in front of his kids, but thats neither here nor there

your country educates children into bootlickers, so they become sad pathetic defeatist workers and make fun of others who reject their shit situation

I find most of these people never had a solid grasp of Marxist analysis in the first place.

and thats why the youth of today wont move right

Exactly, they just say shit socdems would say and when the bureaucrats fail them they go oh socialism is a lie! I doubt any red liberal has read Engels

Because they just sided with it out of familial tradition, social environment/workplace culture, peer pressure, etc.

Rolled 4, 5, 3, 16, 13 = 41 (5d20)

Because they get beaten down by the system, until they settle down to maybe taking a vacation every now and then and hopefully, over decades, build enough of a safety net that they no longer feel the headman's axe of debt over their neck and can afford to lose a job or have an expensive incident.

At this point, admitting you got cheated and defeated into practically servitude and that your days are mostly interchangeable in a dull routine of work-consume-sleep is rather bleak.Thinking this is the way things naturally are and misrepresenting the struggle as merit is much more attractive.

From this perspective, the defeatists must rationalize their own struggle as necessary, as it has become their identity and pride, with alternatives being naive or selfish, wanting to skip the process by which they believe they "earned" their status.
Politicians, specially socdems , love to pander to these idiots under the guise or meritocracy.
Boomers basically, except their past or present prosperity is entirely inside their heads.

Then don't get those things? That's what I did.

The only people with a solid grasp of Marxist analysis seem to be only on this forum though.

All of that may be true, but most people still pretend it isn't.

Bootlickers for the drug cartels?

Why not just join and form co-ops until the revolution? You would still be limited by the current system but at least you don't have to complain about the hierarchy in the classical workplace.

Schools are capitalist

No time and energy.

Lack of unity I feel

Because half of all those former "socialists" actually just wanted lots of welfare and actually believed that's what socialism meant. The they got jobs and realized how expensive all the welfare they supported was and decided they want to keep their money.
tl;dr greedy sheltered socdems

The other half were tankies who grew up and realized how retarded they were for supporting authoritarian shitholes, and forgot that limited and no government socialism is a thing.

Seriousposting for a bit: I think the key issue here is that no one knows how to further socialism at the moment.

Way back at the beginning of the USSR, it was obvious: you joined a communist party, which was effectively a chapter of an international conspiracy to putatively build a better world, or you could join some insignificant alternative faction. As time went on and more and more word got around of how badly the Russians and Chinese fucked everything up, resolve faltered. Socialists who didn't become disillusioned outright maybe sought these other far left alternatives. Seeing as they had been fucked by both porkies and gommies, there pretty much were no non-ML alternatives after WW2, so socialists had to pick between helping real-but-rather-crap socialism or nothin' at all. And after fucking Gorbachev, now the former was gone. No one can see any way you can actually contribute to the cause. All we can do is wait until another opportunity presents itself, and meanwhile try to write decent theory and/or shitpost here.

As orwell put it
Basically this plus the fact that now the mainstream "left" is more interested in crusty liberals than working class now that we alienated them thanks to lifestylism, intersectionality and SJW trash like that

This too is another thing.

well you have alternative job system and tax free trade in los cartellos, so those that want to play rough don't wait for worker strike

that's the problem, mass movements are just a clog of opportunist normies who have zero idea what they're doing other than making a mess on the street in a retarded reenacment of cargo cult rituals

My frame of reference is Brazil so some of this might not be relatable to you, but I think it's all part of the life course, it's something embedded in youth culture.

Go to any college campus and you'll see why. Once you get there as a new student you might be very apolitical or even conservative, but when you see a pun with Marx's name on the Facebook event for a party, you hear a cute girl talking about patriarchy and the people around you are all socialists, your brain realises what has to be done in order to adjust and you just naturally learn to parrot everything they say in order to fit in. Then you have the fact that much of "activism" today is a great pretext for sex and drugs and it's not hard to see how completely sheepish, hedonistic impulses can be linked to radical politics, and how they will, by design, be only attached to radical politics as long as the environment allows it to.

Meanwhile, of course, you can try to read Marx, make your way into a few chapters of Hobsbawm's trilogy, find a radical historical figure who wasn't too violent and didn't really make it into power (so the romantic "revolutionary" appeal remains) to identify yourself as a follower of, and you just keep doing that until your social surroundings changes completely, you find yourself being 35 among a bunch of braindead regular people in an office, you're no longer member of the subculture and the undergrad girls want nothing to do with you, and so you learn to laugh at your own radical past in order to stop it from stigmatizing you.

In the entire process, going from regular to radical to regular again, you experience zero personal growth, never really challenged your beliefs seriously, and just had the same experiences that you could have had without any of the political pretenses. Which is why people who once talked about Trotsky and Rosa can fall back into a completely mundane, mediocre worldview within a very short amount of time, to the point when it almost seems like they were lobotomized.

People can have economic and political motivations, but in the end of the day we're first and foremost social beings that will gladly sacrifice our own material self-interest for the sake of fitting in. Nobody wants to have political opinion that you pushes you into the margins of a group and everyone always secretly wonders if their political opinions reflect on negative traits about them that people can see (which is why calling the alt-right loser and virgins and the left unemployed and lazy works and will continue to). There are a few different paths in life that almost everyone follows, "youthful radicalism" is part of a few of them, and the illusion of individual agency follows you throughout most of the course of life, to the point when you celebrate becoming a regular simpleton with mainstream political outlook, a boring 9 to 5 and a family, i.e. attending all the expectations society had of you, as a sign of growth and maturity, a truly spiritual awakening, instead of imposition from the outside.

Proofs?

this was beautiful.

you just described how a normie brain functions, like a fucking zombie

on the contrary a push to conform is a sign of immaturity, underdeveloped sense of self results in being unable to discern your interest from the interest of others and ultimately prevents the sufferer from discerning human being from an object. later such zombified normie starts a cookie-cutter family on behest of peer pressure and proceeds to treat it's children like personal property

...

test

There is admittedly a lot of idealism in the left; it doesn't appeal to older folks who have enough life experience to understand that heady ideas don't work out as planned when applied. Unfortunately, this has the effect of causing these people to write off completely practical left-wing ideas like worker's rights as unrealistic as well.

Republicans also waged a VERY effective campaign to take in the working class. They now think that getting cucked = being tough and not ~asking for handouts like them faggot europeans~.

Thank you for the answers guys

Gotta agree with user here.

If you allow socialistdemocrats or liberals to call themselves socialists and they, as expected, do neoliberal third-way anti-worker politics, is it a wonder that people give up on politics all together?

I can't really fault them. A big issue, as far as I can see, is that a revolution is a matter of the moment. Lenin said you just plain can't start a revolution (color-coded """""revolutions""""" notwithstanding), it happens when those below can't handle this shit anymore, and the ones above can't keep that shit going anymore. In other words, things have to get really, really bad before people give up on marches and sit-ins and shit and pick up the molotovs and rifles. Seeing as the West is going through (the ending of?) its most prosperous era, revolution is then at least several decades away, unless something truly cataclysmic happens that sends Western living standards cratering.

Not as much as you're implying. A bigger factor here is that capitalism has had centuries of people figuring out how to make its ideas work. People who live under highly-developed capitalism look at a hypothetical system and ask "How will this new system deal with [complex problem]?" and there isn't an immediate answer because solving complex problems doesn't happen in theory or hypothesis. You need to be applying the ideas and testing what works and what doesn't. Older people especially who have a lot of "personal investment" in capitalism don't want to switch to something new because it's unfamiliar and they fear they'll lose what they' got from working for a big chunk of their lives.

Oh also some people get extremely bitter in old age and are enraged by the idea that younger generations would have it easier than they had it.

I agree but if you're seriously a ML then you are precisely part of this problem.

As points out, people invested all their energy into idolizing social democratic states, and grew disillusioned when they developed in the same way as any other capitalist state. Mao warned against book worship, yet his Quotations became to the New Left what the Bible is to Christian fundamentalists.

The key to establishing a new communist movement is a return to Marx, not through Lenin, not through Stalin nor through Mao, not even through Engels. We need to read Marx for what he actually says, and see how he is applicable to our contemporary situation (and how he isn't!), not that of Russia in 1917 (or 1930), or China in 1950s.

They were never socialists in the first place, they were just red liberals/edgy socdems and became regular liberals/socdems.

Liberals

Maybe it becomes untenable over time, were all guilty of the occasional "it'll never happen in our lifetimes" but maybe that coupled with stress and being busy cause people to drift from it eventually