[jschveibinz]

I believe that the real answer lies in small socialistic mutual aid organizations, similar to the kinds of ethnic immigrant organizations that were formed in the US in the first half of the 20th century.

The radical Russian philosopher-aristocrat Kripotkin advocated for a wholesale government-social system based on the mutual aid or cooperative concept after spending time in poor, remote Russian villages as a young man. His takeaway: despite their rough situations, these people were happy and hopeful because they supported each other.

In the US, ethnic mutual aid organizations operated as clubs similar to a labor union or church by having regular gatherings, fundraisers, and social events. They remained viable by charging dues (on top of fundraising through events) to support the meeting facility and administration, and by operating a separate “insurance” payment to cover the membership if they ran into hard times, e.g. death of wage earner.

In short: For social support systems to be successful, I think it’s best to think small, local and shared culture and/or values. It has worked before.

[UtopiaPunk]

You may like Marta Harnecker's "A World to Build: New Paths Toward Twenty-first Century Socialism." She outlines a vision that I resonated with a lot, but it is a little hard to put a neat label on. She comes from a Marxist background and usually frames her vision in such terms, but she frequently emphasizes the importance of decentralizing systems, and the importance of pushing power down towards the local levels as much as possible ("cities" are not local enough, for example, and she outlines a systems of communes that organize at something more like the neighborhood level). So there's still some level of national organization, but the goal is for ordinary people to have as much influence over that process as possible and to move decisions away from national levels down to more local levels.

The book can be found here: https://monthlyreview.org/product/a_world_to_build/

And she wrote this essay on the subject, each can kind of serve an introduction or high level summary of the ideas in the book: https://monthlyreview.org/2010/07/01/ii-twenty-first-century...