whocarz: i dont have as much time as i would prefer to respond, so i'll do it in outline--if things are not clear let me know and i'll try to explain more.
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the type of socialism marx outlined would look far more like direct democracy than anything else
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this from the first post i put on this thread.
marx did not outline socialism in a positive sense very clearly--general statements in the manifesto, the last paragraphs of capital...he was much more exact about what it was not---it did not involve the replication of capitalist relations of production under a different system of ownership, so it could not have been anything like stalinism that he had in mind.
given the above, what you understand socialism to potentially be like is a function of how much relative weight you place on the earlier vs. the later writings in the fabrication of your view of it. i think the earlier writings, particularly the 1844 manuscripts, are fundamental to the project, so much of what i understand socialism to potentially be like derives from there as a point of departure (this runs into trouble given the publication history of the text, etc.)
but i also think that the reason socialism was not outlined are consistent with the nature of marx's work as a whole, in its more historical materialist mode---because the notion of socialism would be a regulative idea that would change as the conditions in the present changed, as capitalism changed--which would mean that the kind of political/critical project that marx undertook might have been powerful in all its elements for capitalism before 1870 (before the creation of stock), but less so thereafter--and that the project marx undertook in critical terms, which would condition the sense of political possibilities, would have to be done again and again as the general character of capitalism changed. globalizing capitalism shares only general features with its mid-19th century counterpart. so the politics fitted to the mid-19th century apply only in the most general possible way to a politics operating in the present. mostly at the level of disposition--this is obviously not the best human beings can manage--in the assumption that capitalism can only correct itself to a certain point, and that beyond that something like a revolutionary change would have to occur--that organized citizens can and have and continue to acquire power--that the successes of working-class movements in gaining and maintaining power through the middle 20th century in some sense worked to obviate most if not all of the conditions that marx understood would made revolution inevitable.
so the paradox in being asked to say what i understand socialism to mean for me is that it is only in the most general ways linked to how it might have looked for marx.
the most compelling outline of socialism in a positive sense comes from the french revolutionary marixst group socialisme ou barbarie--a group with which i am perhaps a bit too familiar as one of the main points of departure for some of my work in 3-d life. pm me if you want more exact information about this.
the equation of socialism as marx outlined if and direct democracy comes from an emphasis on the nature of alienation within capitalist relations of production and what would be implied by their supercession: the abolition of the capitalist division of labor, a fundamentally different conception of hierarchy and so forth.
how would americans get to this?
i have no idea in immediate terms: i understand the entire oppositional culture rooted in marxism to have slowly collapsed over the period from the middle 1950s to the early 1980s--and i understand that one of the main effects of this collapse is the evacuation of any political weight to marx-style categories--worse than that, actually: that this implosion has placed us still in a kind of vacuum because it took down with it most coherent sense of radical opposition to the capitalist order by wiping out the persuasive power of almost all aspects of marx's terminology. which had little in the way of analytic power for a long time prior to this period, but which nonetheless functioned as a given-in-advance oppositional discourse.
to the whole project of developing a critical counter-discourse about capitalism has to be started again, but with an understanding that it probably will not resemble marxism. that it cannot resemble marxism. that it makes no sense to resemble marxism. which also means that the relative weight marx attributed to different variables in the organization of his critical apparatus are also wiped out. so all of it has to be started again, from the philosophical underpinnings through the critical apparatus through the political project--and just as marx was not individually responsiable for what became marxism, so this project would not and could not be the work of a single person, but rather would have to develop through collective activity--at this point, i would imagine the web provides a fine fine space for the launching of suich a project.
as for the status of socialism--i think you are wrong about the fairy tale term: iuf you are going to want people to smash the system they are currently trapped in, they need to be able to do it in the name of something, to have a regulative idea that would shape what they do and how they do it, how they organize themselves, how the think about the relation of revolutionary organization to the present order and to the order they want to bring into being at once.
sorry if this is not as logically organized as i might like it to be--i am trying to jam it in to a limited amount of time, as i have other committments to deal with.
one last note: if there was to be a revolution in the states right now, it would come from the right and would most likely be fascist in nature. i think we are living through something like one now--a shift in the power centers that shpae hegemony, a kind of discursive revolution that is managing to make american-style capitalism even more barbaric than it had managed previously, wiping out feedback loops and rendering the possibility of organized opposition quite difficult. the only consolation i take from or about this is the level of idiocy of the right is so obvious, and so high. that i expect this wave of discursive aggression we are living through will implode on its own.