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Before we criticize socialism, let's answer the question of what this socialism arose and developed against.�
Today you have 8 hours of work, two days off a week, 28 days of paid vacation a year, sick leave, insurance and compensation for injuries at work, and finally a pension. Changes in this area are already related to your personal career or material interests. Capitalism of the 19th and early 20th centuries did not know this. Any indulgences were a whim of the industrialist purely in private. Work for 12-14 hours, live in a barrack, have a day off only on Sundays, or even on holidays in general, due to disability ( if you lived up to it in this mode, of course ) you are thrown out on the street without any obligations. No vacations or compensation for injuries at work ( and with poor qualifications and safety techniques, there were a lot of them ). Would you like to live like this, eh? Perhaps not, but that's how people lived their lives. If you don't want to starve to death, work hard, if you don't like it, get lost.
Socialism was aimed at building a new type of society that would eliminate such blatant injustice. Socialism advocated the sacralization of labor, and the deprivation of access to wealth of parasitic strata.
But our life is more complicated, and of course the ideology of socialism in its pure form is not viable. But it has transformed itself into a social democracy, and exists as a political leader in the vast majority of countries around the world.
You can scold the USSR for the same type and gray Khrushchevkas and Brezhnevkas that filled urban landscapes, but they were an alternative to barracks and communal apartments. You can scold for cramped housing, but before that, people lived in even more cramped rooms of barracks, huts and communal apartments, most often without running water and quite often even without electricity.
In the United States, for example, in the same era, there were millions of homeless and impoverished people living in dugouts and makeshift housing, sometimes with their families. And the state and capitalism were not responsible to them in any way, they had no obligations other than moral ones. Social programs became more an initiative of the president and the ruling party ( and often for the sake of votes), rather than a constitutional obligation.
The dictatorship of the proletariat is bad, but is the dictatorship of the capitalist better? Debatable. Today, socialism is not just needed, but adapted to the system of political competition, and reformatted to exist in a market economy. But many basic ideas in social democracy are alive, effective, and very much needed by society within the framework of checks and balances.
It depends on what is meant by socialism. From a doctrinal point of view, this is not a single structured concept that has one or at least 2-3 authors. The socialist idea is a set of diverse ideas about a society in which social injustice and social inequality are overcome and in which there is no place for the oppression of some people by others. Since Plato, many outstanding thinkers have made a great intellectual contribution to the creation of the image of a just future. Marx's concept is presented in a concentrated form in the Communist Manifesto. The Bolsheviks fulfilled almost all the points of the Manifesto, thus plunging the country into a catastrophe, which, despite attempts to correct everything, still swallowed the country like a black hole. It hardly makes sense to repeat this whole sad experiment. The fundamental flaw in Marx's concept is not the attitude to the means of production, but the attitude to power, the question of who is desperate to make everyone happy. Remember that socialism has always been built by dictatorships. It is no coincidence that the Nazis called themselves National Socialists, and the fascist “corporate state” is a variant of socialism.
And now let's look at Switzerland, where the Bolsheviks lived in considerable numbers, and which never sought to build anything. Now they have to vote on the next of numerous referendums, whether to pay each citizen of the country monthly, in my opinion, 2 thousand euros for life or not to pay. At the same time, we understand that a negative vote does not mean that the country has no funds for such nonsense. It will simply mean ” not now.” In Switzerland, there is no oil, no gas, no metal is produced, and, in my opinion, nothing from the Periodic table is extracted. The general public does not know the head of this state – it is obvious that this is a very dim personality. That's where socialism is?
The essence of the question is not entirely clear because it is impossible to tell humanity to abandon ideology.
Is socialism, so to speak, a feasible ideology?�It is believed that socialism is an ideology of social engineering, that is, it does not take into account the qualities of the individual existing today, but rather speaks about what institutions need to be created in order to form a new person with the help of them in the future, who will fulfill all the precepts of socialism. Is this approach a lack of ideology? As Gerald Cohen, the founder of analytical Marxism, put it, this confluence of circumstances is not a problem of ideology, but a problem of people. It seems to me that the ideals of socialism do not take into account the very essence of human nature, and I see this circumstance as problematic.
From a purely economic point of view, classical socialism, with its rejection of private property and planned economy, is not viable in principle (and no amount of disadvantages will make me give up this opinion). However, this type of economic structure is not the only subspecies of socialism, and here you can argue for a long time.
So, should humanity abandon socialism? Of course not. Socialism is the main alternative to capitalism and the study of the former is necessary in order to make the latter better.
Socialism is possible in the future, when robots will work and robots from asteroids will also extract resources.
But as long as you have to work on your own and your resources are limited, there can be no socialism.
In fact, they refused, leaving only Cuba and the DPRK, where the identity of socialism is in full growth. The local leaders there have no problems in anything, but the vast majority of the population ekes out a miserable existence.