Socialism will never work because it’s founded on emancipation, and you can’t force people to emancipate themselves. That would be the opposite of emancipation.
I’m not sure if this is a quote, I can’t remember where I heard it.
“Emancipation” in this case meaning emancipation from wage slavery.
[Apologies in advance for the essay]
I think your description is utopian because it distills civilization (and by extension the universe) into a stable system in an ideal balance. Any society has to exist within its material constraints and those limits invariably devolve and shift through entropy.
Socialism (and basically all early-modern political theory) was born in a time of incredible scientific advancement. It has an implicit axiom that all factors can be solved and accounted for, and by doing so we can asymptomatically approach a perfect society.
But we know a lot more now and can prove that’s just not possible. Our physical reality imposes instability on society whether we like it or not. An unstoppable, aggressive blight could destroy the agricultural output of an entire continent. Suddenly it’s just not possible to give to each according to their need and only the most insular and asocial pockets of civilization survive.
There’s no amount of creativity or human goodwill that can weather the unfathomable forces beyond our control. I mean, what happens to our carefully crafted socialist society when the earth’s magnetic poles flip. Or when the moon finally drifts away from the earth and permanently ends our seasonal stability. Or when the sun explodes or we deplete Earth’s finite resources or etc…
I don’t say all of this to be unreasonably pessimistic or nihilistic, but to point out that these ideological theories are fundamentally unsound. Our current world does desperately need these socialist policies, but dogmatic adherence to them as indelible rules is counter productive.
In my opinion we should focus on instilling basic guiding principles and solve our problems in any way that satisfies as many as possible. Some off the top of my head, in a rough ordering:
You’ll almost never be able to satisfy every principle, but establishing something like that as a baseline allows for good faith discussion and decision-making without the need to villify your opposition.