I feel like I’m in the same situation - although I haven’t done as much reading as you have. I want a movement with concrete objectives to rally behind, but I’m not sure where to find it. Besides wanting things to be better, real wages have been flat for decades while cost of living has been going up. That makes people look more and more for some kind of dramatic change. I worry that fascists have been more organized than socialists in presenting people with an idea that feels like dramatic change. (It doesn’t matter if fascism won’t make anything better if people believe it when they lie and say it will.)

From what I’ve heard the school of socialism that most speaks to me is “economic revisionism”, despite that term being invented as a pejorative. The idea is that a series of reforms can be implemented within a democratic-capitalist system to shift to a democratic-socialist one. I think that although it has flaws we have a sturdy democratic political system, and we would lose a lot by toppling it. If revolutionary socialists or anarchists had ever come up with a comprehensive plan for a better system I might think differently; but everything I’ve heard of or read about is very hand-wavy. My understanding is that both Marx-Engels and Bakunin had ideas something like: we can’t predict exactly what the better future will be like, but it will emerge naturally if we eliminate barriers inhibiting better human behavior. I’m not willing to risk throwing out what stability we have in the hope that something better will emerge if we believe hard enough. I think the next fight is socioeconomic, not political.

I’ve heard arguments like, “incremental reforms will never work because capitalists will chip away at them to take back any power they lose.” I’m not currently sold on that argument because I think you’re likely to have an unstable equilibrium of assholes making power grabs in any system. I’ve also heard “capitalism is fundamentally broken”, but at this point in time I’m more optimistic about fixing the broken parts incrementally than about starting from scratch because I don’t know what the replacement would be.

What I’d really like is a discussion of what reforms would make things better for everybody which would hopefully lead to a concrete plan that people can point to when talking to politicians, protesting, striking, etc. Or even better would be a plan that is already formulated that I can start pointing to. That might include reforms to spread wealth more evenly like a wealth tax, closing tax loopholes, raising the minimum wage, more social services. It could include political reforms to help pry power away from the wealthy such as campaign finance reform, stricter rules around gerrymandering and polling place access, more regulation on politicized mass media. Ultimately I think what would be required to clinch the shift from capitalism to socialism could be to democratize capital which might be accomplished by ideas like requiring companies over a certain size to have democratic governance models and employee ownership, or limiting the amount of capital investment a single individual can make. I’m sure there is work on these ideas, but I don’t know where to look. I want to hear a discussion about what people more knowledgeable than me think.

A plan that caught my eye at one point was the book One Way Forward by Lawrence Lessig which Lessig seemed to want to turn into a political movement. I’m not sure what the state of that is.

Anyway, economic revisionism is not as exciting as the idea of tearing down everything bad, and replacing it with something perfect. But until I find an argument with an amazing new idea, it’s what I think is the most practical solution.