Please define socialism for me and explain how it works

now using the phrase as your guideline , apply it to each of your questions , and figure it out how it can answer each of them
to justme btw , you wonder why i call your post asinine , its because it is , you might be unaware how capitalism has caused the uk waters to be filled with raw sewage ,
yopu might be unaware of how the water in flint michigan is unfit for anything
this is capitalism greed before need ,
so when you say socialism smells like a dirty toilet , you are wrong it is capitalism that puts profit before human need that is responsible for the stench

@TheCaptain7777 said in #59:

I've heard "from each according to ability. From each according to need" a hundred million times, so please explain the function.

1. who is in charge of handing out what is needed? And how are they stopped from being unfair?

Socialism is a democratic system. If there is no democracy then it is not socialism (e.g. the Soviet Union under the Stalinists from the late 1920s onwards). So no single person will be in charge. There will be elected leaders, who can be replaced at any time by new elections. The whole of society will be organised into a system of worker's councils (called "soviets" in Russia in the years immediately following the revolution). Workplaces will be democratised so that everyone can contribute to the development of the economy.

You will not find "blueprints for a future socialist society" written by genuine revolutionaries who are adhering to Classical Marxism. This is because of the dangers of totalitarianism. It will be up to working class men and women to decide how the new society would work and what its priorities would be. The revolution would immediately remove the existing ruling class (the capitalists) from power, and then begin expropriating and redistributing their wealth.

You can get glimpses of what a future society might look like from the period after the October Revolution 1917 in Russia. This revolution was led by Classical Marxists. However, the western imperial elites knew exactly that this new society directly threatened their existence, so they invaded Russia from all directions. They failed to destroy it completely, but the country was so badly wrecked, the industry and agriculture so badly dislocated that it caused massive damage to the new system of soviets that had been set up. To cut a long story short, the result of this dislocation, plus the failure of the revolution to spread outside Russia (Germany was a key country where the revolutionaries were defeated), led to the rise of the Stalinists, a right-wing counter-revolutionary trend emanating from the Russian Communist Party and largely located in the shattered society's government and party structures.

@TheCaptain7777 said in #59:

2. how can it be proven whether or not a man is giving to the best of his ability?

The point you are missing with questions like these is that the mentality of most working class people will have changed considerably once they have taken control of society. You could just as easily ask your question about today's capitalist society. How do we know men and women are working to their full ability when it is the capitalist who is benefitting from their labour? That is what profit is - that part of the wealth created by human labour that accrues to the capitalist because they either control or own that particular workplace. So all work is exploitative and there is no such thing as "a fair day's work for a fair day's wage".

People who have liberated themselves from exploitation and oppression will understand that they now have a much greater stake in society than before. They will no longer feel alienated and it is this, along with the solidarity that they will feel towards their workmates that will ensure that they do the best they can when they go to work. I daresay that there will still be some shirkers, particularly in the early years of the new society. These people will not be well-respected and will have very little influence in a democratic socialist system.

An excerpt from Lenin's "To the Population", published in Pravda on Novemder 17, 1917 . . .

"The resistance of the capitalists and the high-ranking employees will be smashed. Not a single person will be deprived of his property except under the special state law proclaiming nationalisation of the banks and syndicates. This law is being drafted. Not one of the working people will suffer the loss of a kopek; on the contrary, he will be helped. Apart from the strictest accounting and control, apart from levying the set taxes in full the government has no intention of introducing any other measure.

In support of these just demands the vast majority of the people have rallied round the Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government.

Comrades, working people! Remember that now you yourselves are at the helm of state. No one will help you if you yourselves do not unite and take into your hands all affairs of the state. Your Soviets are from now on the organs of state authority, legislative bodies with full powers."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/nov/05.htm

@stockwellpete said in #63:

The point you are missing with questions like these is that the mentality of most working class people will have changed considerably once they have taken control of society. You could just as easily ask your question about today's capitalist society. How do we know men and women are working to their full ability when it is the capitalist who is benefitting from their labour?

In a capitalist society, if you're not working enough for your pay you get fired, and is you're not getting payed enough for your work you quit and find a different employer. And if your work is truly valuable, then you will not have trouble finding a new employer.

@stockwellpete said in #63:

I daresay that there will still be some shirkers, particularly in the early years of the new society. These people will not be well-respected and will have very little influence in a democratic socialist system.

But what happens to them? Regardless of how many of them there are, this question must be answered. Do you just keep providing their needs? Or do you jail them? Banish them from the country?

Is not working criminal? And if so, how do you decide whether a man is working?

And why would the worker's councils be fair? Power attracts corruption, and historically you cannot expect people to simply act fairly. So will there be checks and balances for the worker's councils? Like miniature three branch governments?

You seem to expect that people will have different mindsets in a socialist society. Could you provide some evidence for that? I always assumed that socialism would work around people being unfair, not rely on them being fair.

@TheCaptain7777 said in #65:

In a capitalist society, if you're not working enough for your pay you get fired, and is you're not getting payed enough for your work you quit and find a different employer. And if your work is truly valuable, then you will not have trouble finding a new employer.

This is not always true at all. You can get fired for poor standards of work or misbehaviour, but you can also get fired for no fault of your own - a restructure of a particular business or service, or a wider restructuring of society as a whole (see Trumps reforms right now). Then, you can also lose your job due to the boom/slump economic cycle that is hardwired into capitalism. Working class lives can be very precarious in a capitalist system.

It is not always possible to quit a job and find a better employer for the reasons that I have already stated. It depends who is defining "truly valuable". Before I retired I worked in public sector libraries. The librarians there did very important work, in my opinion, but lots of them have been made redundant and replaced by self-check out machines.

@TheCaptain7777 said in #66:

But what happens to them? Regardless of how many of them there are, this question must be answered. Do you just keep providing their needs? Or do you jail them? Banish them from the country?

Is not working criminal? And if so, how do you decide whether a man is working?

The policy on various forms of delinquency/free-loading in a socialist society would be decided democratically through the system of worker's councils all the way up to the government itself who would legislate on the matter. I would imagine there would be a multiplicity of views about it ranging from more coercive viewpoints to much less coercive ones. Some people might argue for a very basic income if someone is not working without good cause, while others might be tolerant and give the person more time to adjust to the new society. There is no blueprint that I can point you to. It would all depend on the circumstances at the time.

I wouldn't be in favour of jailing someone for laziness at all. Prison should be reserved for violent people mainly. Banishment? No. Whether laziness would be deemed "criminal" I cannot say - the new society would have to decide how to characterise it. Anti-social rather than criminal, perhaps? You could tell if someone is working through their employment records just like you can today. I don't understand the point of this question.

@TheCaptain7777 said in #67:

And why would the worker's councils be fair? Power attracts corruption, and historically you cannot expect people to simply act fairly. So will there be checks and balances for the worker's councils? Like miniature three branch governments?

They would be democratic, that is what I am saying. Delegates would be subject to immediate recall if they stopped representing their electors properly. There would not be fixed terms where people would get away with ignoring their electoral base (as happens today everywhere in capitalism). I am not saying that difficult issues would not arise, but the system of worker's councils would provide a democratic framework for resolving any problems.

You seem to expect that people will have different mindsets in a socialist society. Could you provide some evidence for that? I always assumed that socialism would work around people being unfair, not rely on them being fair.

Well, there have been very few examples in history where working class people have run the society. There was the very short-lived Paris Commune in 1871, the revolutionary regime in Russia between 1917 and 1924, and short-lived socialist governments in Bavaria and Hungary just after World War One. That is it. Nothing else qualifies as a socialist society where working class people are in charge.

I think people who make a revolution have already started to see the world in a very different way. And they also start to feel very different about themselves. But, at the same time, the first people living in such a new type of society would have been born and socialised under the old capitalist system. So there is bound to be a great deal of uneveness in understanding and consciousness in the first decades of the new society. Gradually though, as more of the system is socialised and children are taught the values of the new society, then these problems will diminish.

If you want to get an idea how some people were thinking about what might be possible in a socialist society then try and find articles, books and films about the actual people who made the revolution = Lenin, Trotsky, Kollontai, Zetkin, Liebknecht, Luxemburg etc. Our rulers will try and hide these people from us, but they are only a click away on the internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problems_of_Everyday_Life