'socialism' in the marxist/economic sense (central planning, command economy, state ownership of businesses) cannot 'work' on principle because it rips apart the incentive structure that makes business function, it destroys the mechanism that spreads information about supply and demand throughout the economy (pricing) - without that mechanism you lose any sense of market efficiency and end up with massive misallocation of resources, malinvestment, and general economic mismanagement. this is what drove the soviet union into the era of economic decline that eventually resulted in its demise. (see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem)
'socialism' in the sense of having a reasonable and functional welfare state can absolutely work if the people responsible for implementing and operating it act with the interest of honest working people at heart. if they don't, then you end up with what we have currently in most western countries: massively bloated and oversized welfare states that are set up to enable parasitic lifestyles of all kinds on a gigantic scale, permeated with political corruption and financial fraud at every layer.