OK, some thoughts. I don't know how a socialist economy would work (I don't know whether anyone does), but it may be worthwhile getting a sense of the nature of the challenge. I hope you feel this post is helpful!
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I hope this is not taken as off-topic, but I want to start with a general observation: criticisms to the effect that 'socialism will never work' because of human nature (e.g. humans are greedy / selfish) oversimplify the matter.
- For one thing, most humans are a mess of contradictory impulses - some selfish, some altruistic. The social arrangements that ensue vary greatly from situation to situation.
- For another, there is a lot of evidence indicating that early human societies (we are talking hunter-gatherers here) were actually pretty egalitarian and involved high levels of resource sharing. Many such societies often had very powerful mechanisms ensuring that goods were 'fairly' shared, and that decisions were broadly consensual (for a lovely attempt to imagine what life in societies were like, read Kim Stanley Robinson's fabulous new novel
Shaman Highly recommended for Christmas reading!).
- But it is one thing sharing resources and making decisions together when you are a small band of 25 hunter gatherers competing for resources with mountain lions and bears. It is another matter entirely when you are in a big mass society.
Karl M wrote extensively about this, of course, and though his writings about 'primitive communism', as he rather patronisingly called it, fall far short of the mark by the standards of today's anthropoly and archaeology, he was basically correct. Crucially also, he offered a powerful and sophisticated explanation of how inequality evolved in mass society. (Again, historical research has to some extent moved on: currently, the most powerful and authoritative take on how this worked at the moment is probably Flannery and Marcus's book
The Creation of Inequality. Though their explanation of the details is in many ways different from Marx's, their main point is similar: inequality is not natural, it was invented.)
(Sorry for that bookish digression, but the 'human nature' argument needs to be gotten out of the way.
)
Interestingly Marx, in many ways, thought that the development of capitalism was an enormously
positive development.
Capitalism brought with it the explosion of productive and technological resources that made it possible for human beings no longer to live in scarcity and want. It created the foundations for the possibility of returning, not to primitive communalism, but to a society in which everybody has an equal chance to get what they need and want.
But how do you do it in a
mass society, in which people don't have a face to face relationship? Marx did not really have any clear answers (as Funk pointed out, he hoped that people would sorta develop the answers along the way). He made some remarks along the way (e.g. the state shriveling away, the government of men giving way to the administration of things) which indicated that he thought that once class interest could be gotten out of the way, the distribution of goods and services could be an essentially technical matter, something that could be adjudicated by rational decision making.
Since then, the challenge has simply seemed more and more daunting.
For one thing as Galt has pointed out, rationally adjudicating between competing human needs is actually quite difficult. Sure, someone's need for bread is obviously more urgent than another's need for Izod Lacoste shirts - but most resource conflicts are way more complicated than that. And the conflicts get even more complicated in multicultural societies in which people have deeply different value bases
For another, so far the most obvious social technology by which to do this - some kind of overarching administration that tries to take care of everyone - has generally proved to be disastrous. Bureaucracies tend to develop their own interests. And in the absence of the kind of pressure and information about people's needs provided by their purchasing decisions they have turned out to be really bad at organizing production and allocating resources. (This is why classical economists like markets)
Some answers try to get away from the problem of mass society by imagining not one big society with one big administration, but lots of little self-organizing communities, essentially relying on people's capacity for self-organization. There are lots of different spins on that - from lefty anarchism to right wing libertarianisms. I am not sure how realistic those are.
Thirdly, we have a new problem that Marx did not really factor into his plans: the limited nature of natural resources. He offered strong arguments against Malthus, the original profit of resource-scarcity doom. But these days there are concerns about climate change, ocean acidification and the sheer pressure that would be put on these if all of the world's six billion people were to achieve the lifestyles currently enjoyed by us on this thread. So scarcity is back, with a vengeance.
I have to say that I have not come across any convincing modern-day proposals that offer realistic frameworks to explain how these problems can be solved. I'd be interested in learning from anyone who knows about some.
But - and here's the kicker for me - the impracticability of 'pure' and 'utopian' socialism does not in my view make irrelevant the entire socialist tradition. Much of that tradition (other than the 'pure' revolutionary strands) is concerned with thinking in more concrete ways about the distribution of resources and how address social needs. And there is a lot to argue about here. In Britain, for instance, where the Universities have remained really excellent in spite of the worst that Thatcher and Blair could do to them, Cameron's government is pushing for a further privatization of Universities that could really do them serious damage. . I am also think about the public protests in Turkey, where ordinary citizens protested against the destruction of park space. Here in South Africa, many of my colleagues and I are involved in working on the food system, and how to ensure that it does not only create profits for a few people, create benefits for society as a whole.
So my take is: I don't think a pure socialist economy is realistic. Not in this universe. But ensuring that societies and economies are governed to benefit as many people as possible - that's still possible and still worthwhile.
(Sorry, that was a long post, but the question is kinda complicated. )
