You should really check out some of the classics like Marx and Engels. I’d recommend maybe Socialism Utopian and Scientific by Engels. One of the reasons Marx became a key figure in socialist thought is because he approached the question scientifically.

Other socialists during his time were trying to lay out how they thought an idealized socialist world might work. Marx pushed back against this way of thinking and in essence proposed that you could only build socialism through an experimental process of trial and error. He also laid out a very thorough analysis for how capitalism works based on his observations and what aspects of capitalism could be exploited in order to bring about socialism. Some of his hypotheses have come to pass while others have failed. In either case, socialists can learn from those results and try to formulate new hypotheses to test.

Think about it like this, when medical scientists set about curing a disease they don’t know how they’ll actually do it. They know what they mean when they say they want to cure a disease. They also know that it would benefit humanity if they can indeed cure said disease. However the process through which that happens is unknowable until they use the scientific process to figure it out.