Back in the early days of socialism it needs to be understood that socialism was not as we know it today. Marxism and Anarchism fundamentally changed the dynamic of the socialist programme. Before these two tendencies socialism remained largely an academic ideal. And among the still developing national bourgeoisies was dismissed generally. The socialist programme had yet to take on material form. It proposed a freer future as an abstract idea. And the capitalists had no need or want of such a thing. They were already busy with constructing their own epoch.

After Marxism, things did change, but the question was not about the red terror of socialism, but of nationalism. And great effort was put into homogenising the public discourse toward capitalist nationalism. By the turn of the 20th century we see this most overtly in the development of imperialism. Socialists of all flavours dislodged themselves from the material base that had guided it for the latter half of the 19th century. Here we find the birth of Social Democracy and the two pronged assault on the working class from both the bureaucratic middle class (in the form of union bureaucrats, parliamentarians, and academics) and bourgeois ministers. Criticism of socialism was not the name of the game here. Altering the narrative of socialism to fall in line with nationalism and the interests of the petty-bourgeois philosophers and bourgeoisie were.

The kind of critiques of socialism we have today are a largely modern invention, spearheaded by the reactionaries and the social democrats in the wake of the collapse of the soviets and the rise of Stalinism. These criticisms were compounded during the Cold War, as U.S. and broader western imperialism became threatened by the red bloc (Hello, McCarthyism!). The further back we go the less necessary all out assaults on socialism become. This is also in part due to the fact that back when the bourgeoisie did not have to abide certain placating rules, and freely used violence to disperse militant workers - socialists or otherwise.