My attempts at follow-up questions have been met with non-responsive answers.
Some of the questions posed in this thread presuppose things that don't exist and couldn't. The most promiment of them is "what will (would) socialism do about x, y, and z?" That presupposes there is some way of knowing the future.
Let's make a basic distinction: there is socialism as a possible outcome of history, the history of class struggle; and there is socialism as a pipe dream devised by various people, usually called "utopian socialists" in the jargon of the trade. If you want a blueprint, go to the utopians. If you don't like the very idea of socialism, you will be very happy--because the blueprints they lay out describe one hideous prison or beehive after another. You will have correctly judged that no one would want to live in a place like that! Pat yourself on the back.
Then consider this: the few times in history there has been even the beginning of a socialist experiment--the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, the uprisings in Hungary in 1956, the French and Italian uprisings in 1968, for example--some themes have emerged. One is that the legacy forms of democracy don't work. Another is that new ones arise, based on practices such as workers' control and workers' councils.
So we can talk in generalities. If socialism is workers' control of the economy, the only way they can control it is democratically. Otherwise someone else is controlling it. Etc. Once we are using words the same way, talking about the same thing, then we can try on the particulars--speculate about what might happen and what might work. (The most sustained fantasy of a future socialism is William Morris'
News From Nowhere.) Since we don't even know what's going to happen tomorrow in capitalism, and we have its track record for hundreds of years right in front of us, don't expect too much from our speculations about the details of a socialism that has never even taken root.
