"Libertarian socialism" is practically a form of anarchy and has nothing to do with the modern usage. If you want to make it acceptable and frictionless for people to voluntarily offer their services for free, I don't think you'll get much push back.
Basically trying to lump both unrelated ideas under the umbrella of "socialism" does nothing except confuse people.
Anarchism (or libertarian socialism if you prefer) isn't just about "offering services for free". It's about a lack of hierarchy. You don't have billionaires. Americans today are not ready to embrace anarchism.
If you want a good sci-fi novel that explores practically how anarchism could evolve from the current US state, The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin is a classic.
I will say that if you devise a system where no one can become a billionaire but you don’t expressly say that, I think a lot of people would in principle support it. If you say people will live and work in one location, they will own that land and the facilities, and they will cooperate to produce output and they have agreed to share the output as needed between their community members, most Americans I think would say they do not oppose you doing that, and many leftists I think would be interested in joining.
It is difficult to achieve from where we are but by no means impossible. It certainly seems fair and worthwhile, and it is my goal to realize this in the US.
And you’re right! Most people who oppose socialism actually just oppose centralized control, so we have many unknowing allies in the US and that makes it more realistically achievable here.
In fact... The same thoughts probably apply to most modern and developed countries, as most of them has a significant amount of socialistic elements already...
At the core, whatever the reason for it, government is not, in fact, a 'they'; it is an 'us.' Many of us insist otherwise, and give many, many different reasons for it, but at it's core government is the mechanism we have for figuring out how to live together.
I don't have proof of this, but I suspect that any other mechanism we come up with is going to inevitably converge towards becoming a government.
I don't think that is the reality. I think that is the illusion that shelter in. It's easy to see them as completely disconnected, but they're not really. Many times, this is a result of having to deal with much greater complexity the larger the scale, and people not taking the time to understand or appreciate that complexity.
We live in a globally connected world. There is no way to get rid of that complexity. Smaller governing bodies might solve some problems, but they will also create problems when considered at a global scale.
In governing we are trying to cover up this complexity with moving decision making into higher levels. Such covering up does not solve complexity, it just makes it look like it is not happening, but it is still out there.
To reduce that complexity, you might get a lot of jurisdictions to band together and decide 'hey, businesses must interact with us via this standard way we all agree on." Congratulations, they have just created a government.
I think managing this complexity is incredibly difficult, no matter which strategy is used, and I don't think there is any one strategy available that solves these problems.
In some cases, it makes sense to keep the jurisdictions as small as possible. In other cases, the opposite is true, especially when considering things related to the Problem of the Commons and the like.
A welfare state in an otherwise mostly capitalist society, like Scandinavia or Germany, has worked better in practice for these aims. Mostly because the pie is bigger than in the socialisms tried so far.
The idea that we could care for one another without a state is both obvious and perplexing. People have always cared for themselves somewhere in the world even if some societies have been highly centralized.
All this said, I have been fostering a deep appreciation for socialism as a utopian ideal to be discussed rather than either a bogey man or as something that requires the expansion of state power to realize. Many well meaning leftists have empowered authoritarians in their effort to force their desired outcomes. At the same time, the state as it stands today could be used to materially improve the lives of many impoverished people.
I think the answer is to use the state as needed in the short term to help those in need, while recognizing the “technical debt” it creates by ultimately undermining freedom. Any work done with the state should be done cautiously and with the understanding that the state power will need in the long term to be eclipsed by power organized by the people. And we cannot simply advocate for state power - long term we must build these structures inside our society, not rely on state power to enforce our idea of a just society.
But we must fight for socialism. I’ve enjoyed these two videos by Murray Bookchin recently.
This critique of the left from 1986 is hugely applicable to today (he even mentions Bernie Sanders briefly): https://youtu.be/kBP_BMOblzc
This video gets at the way our fantasies about technology can ignore our own desires as human beings, and presents an interesting contrast between then notion of futurism and utopianism: https://youtu.be/wS3-PffLKqM