A SURVEY OF MARKET SOCIALIST FORMS

Considerable interest is currently emerging in an economic system that would combine the basic socialist principle of public ownership of the non‐human factors of production with the basic free market principle of relatively limited control over the economy by the central government. Such a system has come to be known as “market socialism”. This paper provides a survey over the four primary variants of market socialism that may be distinguished in the economic literature. These are as follows: 1) Langian socialism aims at a socialist equivalent to perfectly competitive capitalism; 2) service socialism aims at replacing profit maximization with constrained output or revenue maximization: 3) cooperative socialism aims at installing the employees of the enterprise as its “ultimate” managers; 4) pragmatic socialism aims at a socialist equivalent to contemporary real‐world capitalism, whether this system is perfectly competitive or not. A brief description and discussion of each of these variants is provided, together with a review of the relevant literature. The article is concluded with an argument that of the four variants, the pragmatic is the most attractive in terms of possible real‐world implementation both because its similarity to capitalism reduces the possibility of imfortunate deficiencies of theoretical blueprints as a guide to actual behavior, and because it best reflects those aspects of the traditional socialist ideal and intent that remain fully valid even at the present time.