Reforming Communism, Refusing Capitalism: The Rise and Fall of the Concept of “Socialist Market” (Revisiting Communism: Collectivist Economic and Political Thought in Historical Perspective)

Reforming Communism, Refusing Capitalism: The Rise and Fall of the Concept of "Socialist Market" focuses on the concept of “socialist market,: a cornerstone of political economy in Soviet-type societies undergoing economic reforms from the 1950s onward.Encouraged by the success of non-capitalist mixed economies, market reformers (also called ’market socialists’) offered the communist ruling elites a remedy for the persistent crises of the planned economy.Besides optimal planning and pluralization of social ownership, this was the third major attempt under existing socialism to revise the communist utopia of a centrally planned economy free from private property and the market. The authors trace the rise and fall of marketization theories in the communist era in eight countries of Eastern Europe (including the Soviet Union) and China, describing why the mission of mixing the planned economy and the market, while refusing large-scale private ownership and accepting one-party rule, was do