ABSTRACT
Despite the dramatic recent collapse of Soviet Communism, reports of the “death of socialism” are probably greatly exaggerated. The Soviet Union may well have been brought down by its oligarchic political system, its centrally planned economy, and its involvement in a military-economic competition with the capitalist world which it did not have the resources to win. Whether socialism, in and of itself, was a major factor in the weakness and eventual collapse of the U.S.S.R. is a very problematical question. Ever since the seminal work of Oskar Lange in the 1930s, the Western economics profession has been aware of the possibility of democratic market socialism. What has since become a consensus verdict on the specific Langian proposal for marginal cost pricing market socialism (“interesting in theory but unpromising in practice”) was handed down by Abram Bergson in his profoundly influential essay on “Socialist Economics” in the Survey of Contemporary Economics published by the American Economic Association in 1948. 1 Clearly, however, the Langian proposal is not the only possible form through which market socialism might be realized.
