Socialism is essentially only an extension of democracy to the economic system. Since democracy seems to work relatively decently (warts and all) for most prosperous societies, I don't see why human nature is a good argument for saying it's impossible.
To the extent that we can agree that democracy works better than autocratic systems, it may be due in part to basing decisions on more input from more people. If we consider a line from consolidated, low-information (CL) decisions to distributed, high-information (DH) decisions, dictatorships' decisions mostly would fall to the CL end, and democracies would be DH-ward of them. Free interactions between individuals in a market, however, are even more DH-ward, and arguing for grocery stores or other price-driven systems to be converted to democratic systems seems like a step backward.
Socialism and the free market (at least the free market of goods, capital markets are a different discussion) are perfectly compatible.
The democracy I'm talking about is inside corporations. Corporations in capitalism are extremely autocratic entities, while in socialism they would be democratically organized. Worker-owned enterprises would still compete on the free market.
Capitalism is also an extension of democracy, the difference is that with capitalism you get to choose how to vote, by giving part of your vote to someone who have created a better product, and get someone elses vote by doing something useful. With socialism you get the same amount of votes whether you do something useful or not, and can spend that vote on the only type of product whether you like it or not.
This is actually rather similar to the form of democracy we have in our governing system, where you get to choose between two bundles of policies you do not like, and i'd say we need to make our governing democracy more similar to our economic democracy instead!
> Unless it's 1 person, 1 vote, it's not democracy
Let's say every person has one vote And there are thousands and thousands of elections going on every day. Most of the people are not interested in most of elections, so they ignore elections because it is not possible to follow everything. Which means we end up with 1 person 0 votes most of the time. Now to improve the situation we can agree to collaborate i'll vote the way you want for the issue you care and you'll help me in return. Money is simply a way to make this kind of collaboration easier. Saying that any kind of cooperation should be banned doesn't help anyone, and leads to a stalemate in the case when there are many issues to vote on. In fact if our governments were real democracies where votes could decide real policies instead of picking someone who is going to lie for the next 4 years, we would have a system very similar to money to help us to deal with the large amount of issues to vote on.
Buying is an extremely indirect form of voting. What socialism means is that workers inside a corporation would democratically decide how to run that corporation, instead of being handed down directions from an absolute ruler (the CEO/Board of directors).
That's only the first half of what socialism means, the second half is that if they make poor choices, and their corporation goes bankrupt, the other corporation has to employ them and give the same amount of voting power, as to the old workers who had made better choices, and kept their corporation working.
The first half is pretty much uncontroversial, and would work under capitalism too. The problematic part is the second half which resets the board, giving the same voting power to qualified and unqualified worker, and removing the incentive to work well.
To my understanding, the only obligation would be that, IF you "employed" someone, they should have the same voting power as everyone else, since they should always be empowered to have some say on their own work. But I don't know of any socialist principle that would force any particular company to "employ"/associate with any particular person.
Interesting, i have never seen this definition of socialism where it is simply about the way companies are governed and companies themselves are free to compete with each other. I expected a system that would try to equalise everyone in the whole country instead of simply everyone working for a given company, so it would need some way to redistribute goods instead of simply giving equal voting rights to all employees.
Would the system you describe be the same as capitalism, with the exception that workers are prohibited from selling their voting rights to anyone else?