: Why don't you enlighten us as to what your vision of socialist society would look like. Small-scale communes growing organic food (in greenhouses if necessary), using solar and geothermal and wind energy, taking care of the planet, people spending a lot of energy cleaning up the mess this generation has made of it. Naturally, I have only a few clues as to how we are all going to get from here to there.
And remember that you would be speculating as well.
: I have two questions for you concerning the above quote from Marx. Number one, how does the all-around development of people take place? Did he think that mankind would evolve to this state on their own, or would the state play a part in this development?
The writings of Karl Marx can be found on the Internet, so you don't have to trust me... this question has to be nipped in the bud, though. Marx was NOT a statist, and looked forward to the "withering away of the state" as a necessary prerequisite of socialism. This is why true believers in this stuff repeat over and over again, with tiresome regularity, that the Soviet Union does not count as an example of "socialism." The most dramatic (and contradictory) illustration of Marx's ideas in this regard is his essay "The Civil War in France," which also contains the half-baked concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat."
As for the all-around development of people, Marx thought that the progress of the human race was being stunted by the obsession with market values that he called "commodity fetishism," that made the working classes who made the world of his day into cheap objects for easy exploitation. Read Volume 1 of CAPITAL for more. Read Volume 1 of CAPITAL anyway, it will make you smarter whether you agree or violently disagree.
My own concern with the all-around development of people, today, is that sleazy attitudes toward the capitalism of our day are being fostered by school systems, public and private, which are boring and joyless and which turn out boring and joyless graduates.
: Number two, concerning the distribution of wealth and goods according to one's own needs. Obviously the state would have to enforce this.
I really don't see any "obviousness" to this at all. The government's role has been, since the beginnings of Western civilization, to create and preserve the games of property and money which distribute wealth and goods not according to "needs" but according to the principle of "I found it first." Capitalism treats our planet, in the words of Gary Snyder, as a giant refrigerator, with the goodies going to whomever raids the fridge first. Marx assumed that human society would be able to transcend the games of property and money, and produce and distribute for the sake of humanity as a "species-being" (see THE 1844 MANUSCRIPTS for more).
Jurgen Habermas, a modern theorist of this stuff, assumes that modern industrial society is much too complex to do away with the rule of money and power, as "steering systems" for what can't be decided by consensual agreement between people, and thus that Marx's concept of socialism is impossible under the conditions of today's industry. Thus for Habermas the point is to strengthen the ability of small communities of people to decide their own fates democratically, even though money and power rule the world. Habermas's thinking reveals some parameters of the current intellectual debate about whether socialism is possible.
:Would the state decide what's best for its citizens in other areas as well? Would this be a democratic process?
Now "democratic process" is a complex word. What did you have in mind? What would we get to vote on? How would votes be regarded? Would socialism be more likely with a process that used proportional representation, or a "none of the above" ballot option, or with a consensus process, or with straight majoritarianism? Now it's up to you to reveal your ideas about socialism.
