ABSTRACT
Up to the present time, the bulk of the literature on market socialism has been concerned with either the Langian or cooperative variants of the concept (Bergson, 1967; Milenkovitch, 1984; Zimbalist and Sherman, 1984, Chapter 14; Gregory and Stuart, 1985, pp. 133–143; Elliott, 1985, Chapter 15. However, it may be that a third variant of market socialism, designated herein “pragmatic” market socialism, provides a more practicable model for which a stronger economic case may be made. 1 The basic institutions and operations of a potential pragmatic market socialist economy would be almost identical to those of the contemporary capitalist economy. Profit-maximizing firms and utility-maximizing households would continue to interact in competitive economic markets, and the prices generated in these markets would guide microeconomic decisionmaking by autonomous economic agents. There would be only two fundamental differences.
