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DanaC, if I were your social sciences teacher I would give that paper a failing grade. Socialism, whether it overtly says so or not, merely replaces an employer-class with the official class, and the exploitation merrily continues otherwise unchanged -- if anything, worse, with Throne and Mammon conjoined, and paying in fiat currency too. Ask anyone with a memory of day to day Soviet life.
You'd protest immediately "But we'd make laws to prevent exploitation!" Oh sure, you could and would. Make laws by the bushel, regulations and policies by the tome until the shelf is full and appendixes, revisions, and addenda are stacking up on the floor at the shelf's end, all to hedge about the actions of the official-employers... and in the process, quietly kill flexibility, creativity and initiative, hardly aware that that is what you're doing in an attempt to craft omnicompetent policy.
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Fortunately, you are not my teacher. I have excellent teachers. I attend a very good university, with a well respected school of history and am currently on track for a first, with my grades putting me into the top 5% in a school of 260 students. What I am not, is an economist.
As a matter of fact, I agree that in the countries where revolutionary socialism, or soviet style communism has taken root, what has actually resulted, effectively is state-capitalism.
Socialism, in its purist sense, has never actually been put effectively into action; partly because in order for it to truly work it needs to be global. What has been successful in many countries, is the adoption of some of the values of socialism, whilst still harnessing many of the advantages of capitalism.
I would no more wish to live in a state of pure socialism, than I would seek to live under the most extreme form of laissez-faire, free market capitalism. Neither system alone answers all of society's needs/problems, neither system alone truly allows for the realisation of all its citizens' potential. What works, in my opinion, is a balance of the two.
Where that balance lies is a lot to do with cultural norms and assumptions. Your cultural assumptions (right down to the layers of meaning which we attach to words and concepts, despite the fact that we share a base language) are different to my cultural assumptions. You and I are not just on opposite sides of a spectrum, we are almost on different spectrums.