There hasn’t been one yet. The only country that calls/called itself socialist that had a genuine working-class revolution - an indispensable element for starting to build a socialist society - was Russia; Eastern Europe became ‘socialist’ on the tips of Russian bayonets, Cuba and China pretty much told their workers to sit down and let the revolutionaries handle it, and North Korea - that’s a clusterfuck of a different kind entirely (although I’m pretty sure China and/or Russia bucking for an Asian sphere of influence after the Korean War had a lot to do with it). Cambodia, as I understand it, had a power vacuum as a result of Nixon trying to widen the Vietnam war, and the Khmer Rouge were organized enough to step into it with little effort. Again, without the involvement or real support of Cambodian workers.
Russia, as I’ve noted here and in other threads, got economically decimated by the First World War and then the civil war after the revolution. The revolutionary workers who made October went off to defend it in 1918-1920 and died on the front lines of the civil war, leaving their jobs to be filled by non- or anti-revolutionary workers and peasants from the countryside who, as psychonaut noted, had no tradition of radical politics whatsoever. The Bolsheviks found themselves in the position of being a revolutionary workers’ government without the revolutionary base of support that had put them there - perfect breeding grounds for arrogant demagogues like Stalin. Had the revolution spread to Europe his perspective of “socialism in one country” would have lost out to the internationalist (and fundamentally more correct) Bolsheviks like Trotsky, but the isolation of the revolution after the mid-1920s gave Stalin the political advantage. Thus the strangulation of the revolution in its cradle, and the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s and so on.
As a final note, I should add that I also look to the Paris Commune, with all its flaws, as another model I look to for an example of a genuine attempt to establish socialism.
People’s ideas change through both argument and experience. The more their ideas lead them to be active instead of passive, the better.
Dunno what you mean by the ‘socialist framework’, but seeing as socialist society will be the creation of the workers themselves, I’m sure they’ll be quite able to work out what they want to do and what they don’t. Again, if they’re convinced that they need to abolish the death penalty as a part of building socialist society, they’re probably not going to reconsider that approach later on.
No idea. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
Let me try phrasing this another way. A person, or a corporation, that runs a farm for profit is going to look for the most cost-effective ways of doing so - maximizing income and minimizing outlay. The most profitable methods are not necessarily the best; they may be detrimental to soil replenishment, or chemical treatments that remain in the food, or low wages, long hours and unsafe conditions for the field workers, things like that. And companies that own massive farms are run by people who have probably never farmed a day in their lives. The workers they hire to plant, tend, and harvest, however, obviously know a lot more about the soil, the crops, and the working conditions that serve them best since they’re out in the fields every day. They would be the ones I trust to make smarter decisions about the best methods to produce clean, healthy food that don’t require backbreaking effort.
