Socialism - John Roemer.pdf

8/10/2019 Socialism - John Roemer.pdf

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For the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics January 5, 2005

word count: 5398

Socialism

by

John E. Roemer1

In the Marxian theory of historical materialism, the ruling class in each mode of

production has its special method for extracting the economic surplus from the direct

producers; that method follows from the characteristic property relations under the mode.

Under the slave mode, the surplus produced by slaves is forcibly appropriated by the

slave owner; under feudalism, the lord extracts surplus serf labor through the corve and

various forms of taxation. Capitalism, Marx argued, was the first mode in which

surplus extraction was not obviously coercive: no capitalist owns his workers or forcibly

takes their product. Indeed, under capitalism, workers and capitalists form contracts in

which labor power is exchanged for a wage. The capitalist keeps the product of the

workers labor.

Indeed, Marx wished to explain capitalist surplus extraction as a process that

would emerge under competitive contracting, in which workers and capitalists bargain

and, in the end, competitive markets set the terms of labor exchange. (As Makowski and

Ostroy have written, prices are what appear after the dust of the competitive brawl has

cleared. It is incorrect to think of prices as directing trade; rather, bargaining amongmany pairs of individuals reaches an equilibrium summarized by a price.)

Why is it that capitalists end up getting the better part of the deal that is, they

end up with the surplus, and the worker ends up with his wage, which in the Marxian

view was only enough for him to subsist upon? The answer lies not in the fact that the

capitalist is more clever or has the police on his side: it is that capital is scarce relative to

the available supply of labor, and workers must bid for the right to use that scarce capital,

which provides them with a wage. Were labor scarce, then capital would have to bid for

labor, and profits would be bid down to a minimal level, at which capitalists were

indifferent between continuing to own capital and becoming workers. Whycapitalism

seems to have been characterized, throughout its history, as a situation of capital scarcity

is not fully understood. Marx argued that capitalists as a class, perhaps represented by

1Yale University.


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the state, undertook strategies to guarantee a reserve army of the unemployed, in order

to maintain the imbalance. Indeed, the proletarianization of the agricultural periphery is

an important process by which labor abundance has been maintained until the present

(see Rosa Luxemburg). Keynes and Schumpeter envisaged a time when capital would

cease to be scarce, bringing about the euthanasia of the capitalist class.

Thus, the fundamental source of the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a

small class, through profits created in production, is that abundant workers must bid for

the privilege of using their labor power on privately owned productive assets that

increase its productivity immensely. This provides them with a wage greater than they

could have earned in the non-capitalist sector (back on the family farm, so to speak, or

selling apples from a street cart), and also produces an additional amount that, according

to the labor-capitalist bargain, belongs to the capitalist. Capitalists consume a part of this

surplus product, and invest the rest in other profit-making activities.

Some writers have argued that capitalism isa system that extracts the surplus

from workers coercively; they point to the struggles between workers and bosses at the

point of production. It is, I believe, important to point out that capitalist accumulation

could transpire, in principle, if capitalists were competitive, and if coercion at the point of

production of the worker by the capitalist and his agents did not occur. That coercion,

upon which many have focused as a central evil of capitalism, only exists because laborcontracts are incomplete and not costlessly enforceable. Imagine that the worker and

capitalist could contract about every eventuality that might occur during production. If,

in addition, the contract were costlessly enforceable (imagine an omnipotent arbitrator

who is at hand to deal with any disagreement), then there would be no petty coercion at

the point of production: capitalists would not try to speed up assembly lines, force

workers to work overtime, cheat them of their wages, discipline them in demeaning ways,

and so on. I believe that Marx thought that the essence of capitalism was the

accumulation of capital even undersuch conditions. That actual capitalism is not

perfectly competitive, that contracts are incomplete, and that capitalists and workers will

haggle over who is to do what when a situation not described in the contract comes up, is

something which makes capitalism more unpleasant than the ideal type would be, but is

not of its essence.


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Marx believed that the property relations of each mode of production would last

only so long as they succeeded in inducing production in an efficient way. The water

mill gives us the feudal lord, the steam engine, the industrial capitalist. He believed

that eventually productive forces would develop to such an extent that the capitalist mode

of extracting economic surplus would no longer be effective. Indeed, the next stage in

economic history, Marx conjectured, would be socialism, a period in which the means of

production were collectively owned and the economic surplus thereby became the

property of the workers.

We must define exploitation in the Marxian sense. Marx said that workers were

exploited because the labor required to produce the goods they could purchase with their

wages including the labor needed to reproduce the capital stock used up in that

production was smaller in quantity that the labor expended by workers for which they

received those wage goods. The surplus labor, the difference between these two

quantities, became embodied in goods which, according to the contract, are owned by

capitalists, and which they sell for profit. Why does the worker put up with this

situation? Because he has no access to the means of production; the surplus labor he

supplies is, so to speak, the rent he pays the capitalist for access to those means.

Exploitation is defined as the fact that workers labor for more hours than are

embodied in the goods they receive as the real wage. Note that, although Marx insistedthe wage was one of subsistence, this is entirely unnecessary for the argument. All that

must be the case, for exploitation to exist, is that the hours of labor embodied in goods

which wages purchase are less than the hours worked by workers.

Marx viewed socialism as the system that would end capitalist exploitation, in this

sense. There are, however, at least prime facie, several ways of ending exploitation short

of collectivizing ownership in the means of production, and hence in collectivizing the

product they produce above what workers receive as wages. One is syndicalism, in

which groups of workers own their factories collectively; another is peoples capitalism,

a system in which firms are privately owned by citizens, each of whom owns a small

share of all firms. Syndicalism would quickly generate a system with highly unequal

ownership of productive assets, so some groups of workers would exploit others

through trade, not to speak of hiring contract laborers. Designing a peoples capitalism


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in which Marxian exploitation were eliminated is possible in the abstract, but it would be

difficult to implement in actuality. One should note that the distribution of shares in

firms to citizens that would abolish exploitation could not be an equal one. Consider the

situation of a person who does not work out of choice (a surfer), but collects dividends:

he would be exploiting others, in the Marxian sense, because the amount of labor

embodied in the goods he can purchase with his income is greater than the labor he

expends. Indeed, for exploitation to be abolished ( in the sense that the labor accounts

balance) those who choose not to work should receive zero shares of the capital stock.

It is in fact possible to design a system of share ownership so that, when individuals

choose their labor supply to maximize their preferences over labor and income, the

income they receive from wages and their dividendsis precisely enough to purchase

goods embodying exactly the labor they expended, and in addition, the allocation of

labor and goods is Pareto efficient. This arrangement, called the proportional solution by

Joaquim Silvestre, solves an interesting intellectual problem, but it has little importance

as a way of solving the problem of capitalist exploitation, because of the difficulty of

actually computing the shares of firms citizens should receive, when information about

preferences is asymmetric. (The proportional solution, however, may be used by a small

community [for example of fisherman] who collectively own a resource [such as a lake]

and wish to exploit it efficiently, avoiding congestion and overuse.) Moreover, as weshall see below, it is not necessarily ethically desirable if workers are significantly

heterogeneous in skill.

Socialism, then, became identified with collectivization of the means of

production. Workers would produce more goods than they consumed (nobody claims

that investment should be zero under socialism), but the existence of a surplus product

would not constitute exploitation because it would be owned by all. This presumably

meant that the state, which represented the working class, would decide upon its use.

Whether this would be the case because workers obtain the suffrage and vote in a party to

represent them, or because a party proclaiming itself to represent the working class takes

power by non-democratic means, is another question.

A terminological point is in order. Some advocates of socialism define it as a

system in which everyone reaches his full potential, racism and sexism vanish, and


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citizens view each other as brothers. This is a mistake. To be true to the theory of

historical materialism, socialism should be defined as a nexus of property relations that

eliminates capitalist exploitation. Whether such a system possesses other nice

characteristics in consequence is a scientific question, one that cannot be settled by

definition.

A special word must be said about equality. If workers are highly heterogeneous

in skills, eliminating capitalist exploitation does not eliminate inequality in incomes.

Nevertheless, there has been a tradition of viewing socialism as a system of quite equal

incomes. This is partly due to the level of abstraction of Marxs thinking, in which he

often viewed capitalism as characterized by a mass of homogeneous workers struggling

against a small elite of homogeneous capitalists. It is, however, also due to the belief that

many of the inequalities in workers skills come from unequal opportunities fostered by

capitalism, and were capitalism to be eliminated, workers would therefore becomemore

equal in skills. I believe this view of what socialist transformation, in the sense of Marx,

would accomplish is too optimistic on which more below, when we return to the

conception of socialism as equality.

In the event, the world saw two major kinds of socialist experiment: one, initiated

by the Bolshevik revolution, was brought to power by a communist party which ruled

undemocratically, and shunned the use of markets, which, they feared, would bring withthem the old capitalist mentality, where traders tried to accumulate capital, and hence to

exploit others. The other was social democracy, in which parties representing workers

won state power through democratic means, and attempted to tax profits for the purpose

of investment and augmenting workers consumption (the so-called social wage). The

social democratic path did not as a principle abolish private ownership of capital assets,

although some firms were nationalized.

In principle, both of these techniques could abolish the kind of exploitation

associated with capitalism. If communist parties were perfect agents of their collective

principal, the working masses, they could set the rate of accumulation at that rate desired

by workers (there is a problem here of how to aggregate workers disparate preferences

over that rate), and then invest the surplus in that way which would best meet the

interests of workers (another preference aggregation problem). And under social


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democracy, private capital could be taxed at a rate sufficiently high that, although rates of

exploitation would not be zero, they would be small. To keep capital from fleeing to

more profitable venues, under that situation, workers would have to be sufficiently skilled

so that, even under such a regime, capitalists profits would be sufficiently high. Thus,

guaranteeing highly skilled labor would appear to be a part of the social-democratic

formula if capital is freely mobile.

With regard to equalizing the distribution of income, both the Soviet-type

economies (the USSR and eastern Europe) and the Nordic social democracies did an

excellent job. (Indeed, at least in the Soviet Union, it is arguable that skilled workers

contributed more labor, in efficiency units, then they received back in goods.) The major

difference was that the Soviet economies equalized incomes at low levels, while the

social democracies did so at high levels. To what was due the failure of the Soviet

economies? We still do not have a completely satisfying explanation, but it seems as if

their abrogation of markets was an important factor.

Although the Soviet-type economies used markets from time to time , beginning

with Lenins introduction of the NEP in the 1920s, they were never allowed to operate

with the kind of freedom that would have fostered technological innovation, and by the

1960s, it was the lack of innovation that was largely responsible for the low level of

living standards. (Of course, when the state acted to concentrate talent in one sector, suchas the space industry, it was able to achieve impressive results, but the Soviet economy

never succeeded in fostering innovation across the board.) These problems were seen

much earlier, however, in the debate around market socialism that began in the 1930s,

with Oskar Langes argument that markets could in large part replace central planning in

a socialist economy. Lange proposed that central planners announce to industrial

managers prices for their inputs and outputs, and require the managers to report back with

the amounts of inputs they would demand, and outputs they would produce at those

prices, if they were to equate the prices to marginal costs (a necessary condition for

Pareto efficiency). The planners would then sum up, observe the discrepancies in the

supply and demand of each commodity, announce a second set of prices, raising those for

goods in excess demand and lowering those for goods in excess supply, and go through

the exercise again, hoping to eliminate the imbalances. Lange believed this process


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would converge rapidly to an equilibrium; then the planners would post the equilibrium

prices and instruct firms to produce accordingly.

Lange also suggested that each household receive a certain fraction of the firms

profits, perhaps allocated according to family size.

Lange did not deal properly with the demands of consumers. But assuming that

these could be incorporated into the scheme, what is the point of his kind of planning?

Why not simply let the market run autonomously? Lange has no convincing answer: he

did say that the central planning bureau (CPB) would be able to achieve equilibrium

much faster than the market, avoiding the disequilibrium phase that he considered to be

socially costly. (Today, this seems to be a quaint view, given the millions of

commodities that are produced in a complex economy. Indeed, economic theory still has

no full explanation of how the market finds the equilibrium, and there are theorems that

the kind of ttonnement Lange proposed would, with high probability, not converge.)

Perhaps Lange thought that the CPB would control economic activity through setting

interest rates of various kinds, thus directing firms to invest in the directions the planners

desired.

Friedrich Hayek, however, offered a critique of another type. He wrote that it was

an illusion to believe that managers could respond with their input demands, facing prices

announced by planners, because they did not knowtheir production functions, andtherefore could not compute marginal costs. Capitalist firm managers, he said, learn how

much they can produce with given inputs by the discipline of competition. It is the

competitive brawl that teaches managers how to cut costs and produce efficiently, and to

suppose that managers would know how to do so in the sterilized situation envisaged by

Lange was wrong. Indeed, how would the CPB deal with innovation, with new

commodities? The secret of real markets, Hayek argued, was that they provide incentives

and a mechanism for people (entrepreneurs) with local information about needs and

production possibilities to realize their ideas. Thus fixing the set of managers ex antewas

already dooming the system to conservatism and inefficiency.

It is interesting to note that Hayek never said that socialist managers would be

opportunistic or self-serving that they would lie to the CPB in order to influence their

allotment of inputs. Hayek postulated that managers were loyal and capable. This is in


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sharp contrast to the critique of socialist management that emerged after 1970 among

western capitalist economists, when the principal-agent problem was formulated, and

shirking and opportunism became central issues.

Indeed, this raises a critical question about the failure of centrally-planned

socialism: was it due to lack of incentivesor to lack of coordination? Markets perform

two functions: they provide incentives for workers and entrepreneurs to improve their

skills and discover new commodities so as to increase their income, but they also

coordinate economic activity. It may not be simple theoretically to distinguish precisely

these two functions, but they are clearly different. Matching of workers to firms, for

example, occurs in large part by observing wage offers; firms shop for inputs by

observing price offers. Of course the system does not work perfectly, but there is

doubtless a strong element of coordination engendered by a competitive price system.

(Price systems do not coordinate some things properly, such as control of externalities

and the supplies of public goods, and therein lies a major liberal justification of state

intervention.)

The history of the Soviet economy is replete with stories of poor incentives and

poor coordination: we do not have a complete account of the relative importance of these

two failures in the lackluster performance of centrally planned economies in their late

period. One also reads, however, of how hard Soviet workers worked, and howingenious they were at making do with poor inputs (see, for instance, Michael Burawoy).

I believe it is important to answer the question posed above, for upon it may rest the

possibility of a future for socialism.

Suppose markets are needed mainly to generate incentives to work hard, to form

skills, to invent, and so on. This implies that it will be difficult to use markets andto

redistribute income in a relatively equal manner, through taxation. After all, if workers

form skills in order to increase their incomes, but then their incomes are taxed away, why

form skills? On the other hand, suppose that markets are needed mainly to coordinate

economic activity: then in principle wage income (which would adjust competitively to

reflect marginal value products) could be taxed to produce an income distribution of

equality without harming production. In the second case, workers would form skills and

innovate because they enjoyed doing so, or felt valued for their social contributions.


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I suspect the coordination problem is relatively more important in the failure of

centrally planned economies, and the incentive problem relatively less important, than

most currently believe. Many economists, especially, assume that the opportunist kind

of behavior so prevalent in the theory of homo oeconomicusis a deep aspect of human

nature, and therefore that it must have been rampant in the Soviet Union.

Markets are essential in any complex economy, at least for coordination, and

perhaps for incentives. But, as we have seen in the Nordic countries, tremendous

accomplishments with respect to income distribution can be achieved with taxation and

wage solidarity. One might say that the future of socialism lies in emulating the

Nordic social democracies. They may, however, not be easy to emulate, as the solidarity

of their citizenries may be due to their homogeneity linguistic, religious, and ethnic.

Perhaps welfare states of that magnitude cannot be achieved in highly heterogeneous

societies.

A future for socialism may still, then, require an alternative to conventional

private ownership of firms with significant redistribution through taxation, because the

solidarity necessary for democratic approval of that degree of redistribution may not

evolve in large heterogeneous societies. If firms are not to be privately owned, as they

are in the Nordic model, then a central question concerns the way that accountability of

firm management is achieved. There is a principal-agent problem between the firmmanager (agent) and the shareholder-citizens (principal). How do the latter keep the

manager from running off with the profits and even the assets of the firm? The classical

solution is that firm ownership must be highly concentrated, so that there is a small

number of share holders who stand to gain huge amounts by carefully monitoring the

management. In this view, distributing shares of firms equally to all citizens would

destroy management accountability, resulting in unbridled corruption and inefficiency.

Recently a second theory has been proposed: that the guarantor of firm

accountability is the corporate raider. When the raider sees the price of a firms stock

fall, because the firm is not performing well (perhaps due to management corruption or

lack of imagination), he will buy a majority of shares and reorganize the firm to be

efficient, thus increasing its stock price, and providing him with a large capital gain.


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Here, too, if credit markets are imperfect, we need wealthy individuals to keep firms

running well.

If these two mechanisms of accountability exhaust the possibilities, then market

economies in which firm profits are distributed in a relatively equal manner to citizens

are impossible. An apparent alternative, however, exists in Germany and Japan, where

firms are monitored by boards of directors consisting largely of officers of banks that

have a relationship to the firm. It is beyond my scope to describe this mechanism here:

suffice to say, it provides an alternative to relying upon hugely wealthy individuals for

guaranteeing firm accountability. If market socialism has a future, it may well be with

this kind of arrangement: firms will be monitored by bankers from the public sector,

whose reputations and careers depend upon doing a good job, or they may be monitored

by other stakeholders of the firm.

Another alternative (proposed by Roemer), with no present worldy examples, is a

system in which firm ownership is distributed to citizens in an initially equal way, but

ownership rights are circumscribed. An owner will collect dividends from the firms in

her portfolio, and even trade equity shares on a stock market, but she may not liquidate

her equity holdings for cash. This would be accomplished by denominating corporate

shares in a special unit of account. The values of shares, in that unit, would oscillate

according to supply and demand, reflecting traders views about the future profitability offirms, as in a standard stock market. At death, a citizens portfolio would escheat to the

Treasury, and young adults, at the age of 21, would each receive their endowment of

shares. Some inequality in the values of share holdings would emerge as a consequence

of differential luck and skill in the stock market during a lifetime, but that equality would

not be passed on to descendents. In other words, this scheme is a method by which the

nations profit income could be distributed in a relatively equal manner to citizens, while

the virtues of a stock market, with respect to the valuation of shares, and the disciplining

of management, are retained.

There are surely possibilities for undermining the intentions of such a system. If

there are also individuals (such as foreigners) who are allowed to invest in these firms,

then possibilities arise for citizens to capitalize their holdings, to cash out their shares.

Old citizens will desire that firms in which they hold shares sell their assets and pay out


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the entire value of the firm as dividends. Whether regulation could make the system

workable is an open question.

Finally, there is the possibility of state ownership of firms. We do not as yet have

a definitive experiment to test whether state ownership can work, for the Soviettype

experiments also involved lack of democracy;it is logically possible that democratic

accountability could keep state-owned firms running efficiently. There are, however,

problems here as well: politicians, to whom state-owned firm managers ultimately report,

have their own interests that do not always coincide with those of the public. The

electoral mechanism is probably too crude a tool to force politicians to monitor firms in

the public interest. (Indeed, state-owned firms often pay their workers too much, to

garner their political support.) I conjecture that non-state ownership of firms will be

significant in any future socialist experiment.

We return finally to the relationship of socialism to equality. Do socialists believe

that an economy which implements from each according to his ability, to each according

to his work, which by definition eliminates Marxian exploitation, is desirable? Most

socialists probably desire more equality than this, at least in societies where workers are

highly heterogeneous in skills. Thus, socialists have come to be, and perhaps always

were, more egalitarian than the Marxian definition would imply. Popular usage

suggests that socialism should be defined as a regime of income equality, a departurefrom the Marxian tradition.

The proposals we have discussed above are all concerned with the allocation of

profit income. But is the allocation of profits so important with regard to equalizing the

distribution of income? In contemporary advanced economies, profits (including interest

and rents) comprise at most one quarter of national income; even if this part were

distributed in an egalitarian manner to all households, and remained of the same size, the

distribution of income would still, in most advanced countries, be quite unequal. Should,

then, the difference between socialism, popularly conceived, and capitalism lie mainly in

the distribution of wage income or of the role of redistributive taxation of labor income?

Rather than trying to define at what Gini coefficient a society becomes socialist,

one can be satisfied with ordering regimes in the world with respect to their degree of

socialism. The central instruments for socialist implementation then become, as well as


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the redistribution of profit income, intensive investment in education, with a bias

towards rectifying the disadvantages children suffer due to being raised by poorly

educated parents, in order to equalize marketdetermined labor incomes, and

redistribution of labor income through taxation. The channel of intensive investment in

education of the disadvantaged is important because the provision of skills has value to

persons for reasons other than the instrumental one of providing income: education

renders life more meaningful and fruitful. But if the education conduit alone turns out

to be too costly, or too ineffective, to engender the changes in income distribution which

are desirable, then other methods must be used as well. The issue offeasiblesocialism,

therefore, will hinge upon the package of reforms that are effective, and can be realized

through democratic means.

How politically feasible is socialism, that is, to what degree can we expect

democracies to implement the reforms that move societies further along the socialist

scale? Here, the most hopeful historical evidence is provided by the Nordic and northern

European countries. Two problems seem to be paramount for the continuation of the

socialist trajectory in these economies: those of immigration and unemployment.

The welfare states of the northern European countries, as mentioned earlier,

evolved during the period when their populations were largely homogeneous, along

ethnic, linguistic, and religious dimensions. Homogeneity may be a necessary conditionfor the democratic implementation of significant redistribution, if the welfare state is

motivated by either a purely redistributive or an insurance function. For, with respect to

the insurance function, it is not in the interest of highly educated and high-wage natives

in, let us say, Denmark, to pool their risks with poorly educated, low-wage immigrants.

And with respect to the purely redistributive function, ethnic, linguistic, and religious

heterogeneity reduce solidarity, to put it mildly, which must be the motivation of purely

redistributive taxation.

Unemployment is a problem not only for the deleterious welfare effects its

victims suffer, but because it is a severe form of economic inefficiency. If socialist

countries have high unemployment levels, and capitalist countries low levels,

eventually the inefficiency of the former may well reduce per capita income significantly

below that of the latter, and populations of the socialist countries will begin to find the


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higher incomes offered, on average, by the capitalist regimes, an attractive alternative.

If we assume that, in the coming century, the United States (and, let us say, China)

continue to offer low- unemployment, low- taxation, high-growth regimes, but with

relatively little redistribution, then democratic polities in Europe and the rest of the world

may be reluctant to move further on the socialist spectrum. This, of course, assumes

that there is some sacrifice in economic growth entailed by redistributive institutions, a

point that I have not defended here, but have taken for granted, and which may be

incorrect. Indeed, a growing literature asserts that equality increases productivity (see

Bardhan and Bowles).

It is perfectly natural for fertility rates to fall when social insurance replaces the

family as the source of income in old age: and smaller families, probably more than

anything, entail the liberation of women. (They are also, of course, an effect of that

liberation.) But European fertility rates now necessitate either a significant flow of

immigrants from poorer countries, or a sharp decline in per capita incomes in Europe for

retired workers, or an increase in the length of working life (which itself would

exacerbate the unemployment problem). So lower fertility renders the progress towards

socialism more complex at least, if not infeasible.

Consequently, the issue of multi-culturalism becomes a key intellectual problem

for socialists. What degree of integration or assimilation of immigrants is necessary fordemocratic European polities to be willing and interested to continue and perhaps expand

their welfare states? (Recall, we refer here not simply to the redistributive motive, but to

the risk-bearing motive, of natives wishing to pool risks with immigrants.) We do not, I

think, yet know the answer. And will this degree of assimilation, whatever it turns out to

be, be acceptable to poor Southerners or Easterners who are contemplating migration to

the North or West?

Socialism, in the sense of equality of incomes, with a democratic implementation

requires either a self-interested insurance motive or a selfless solidaristic motive among

the majority of voter-citizens. We can hope that as national populations come to

experience more equality, they would come to have a deeper preference for it: socialists,

at least, believe that solidaristic preferences can intensify with the experience of equality,

because equality is a public good, a fact that will be appreciated when it is experienced.


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(Indeed, we have not, in this article, discussed the negative externalities that socialists

believe accompany a regime with a highly concentrated ownership of private firms, in

which corporate and even state policy is set to further the interests of only the wealthiest

sliver of society. ) But the initial transitions along this path, taken by relatively self-

centered voters, must come from the insurance motive. Here, then, is an important

problem for progress towards socialism in our time.

References

Bardhan, P. and S. Bowles, 2000. Wealth inequality, wealth constraints and

economic performance, in A. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon, eds.,Handbook of Income

Distribution, Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Press

Burawoy, M. and J. Lukacs, 1985. Mythologies of work: A comparison of firms

in state socialism and advanced capitalism,American Sociological Review50, 723-737

Hayek, F.A. 1940. Socialist calculation: the competitive solution,Economica

7, 125-149

Lange, O. 1956 [1936]. On the economic theory of socialism, in B. Lippincott,ed., On the economic theory of socialism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Luxemburg, R. 1972 [1913]. The accumulation of capital, New York: Monthly

Review Press

Ostroy, J. and L. Makowski, 1993. General equilibrium and market socialism:

Clarifying the logic of competitive markets, in P. Bardhan and J. Roemer, eds.,

MarketsSocialism: The current debate,New York: Oxford University Press

Roemer, J.E. 1994.A future for socialism,Cambrige, Mass. : Harvard University

Press

Roemer, J.E. and J. Silvestre, 1993. The proportional solution for economies

with both private and public ownership,Journal of economic theory59, 426-444

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