Calculation in-Natura, from Neurath to Kantorovich

Following the collapse of hither too existing socialism in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. There was a crisis in socialist economic thought. If we contrast the situation of the 1990s with what had existed 40 years earlier, we see that whilst in the 1950s, socialism and economic planning were almost universally accepted, even by enemies of socialism, as being viable ways to organize an economy, by the 1990s the reverse applied. Among orthodox opinion it was now taken for granted that socialism was the ’god that failed’, and that socialist economic forms, when judged in the balance of history had been found wanting. And among socialist theorists there was a general retreat from ideas that had previously been taken for granted, a movement towards market socialist ideas, an accommodation with the idea that the market was a neutral economic mechanism. Whilst accommodation to the market was, to anyone familiar with Marx, completely at odds with his critique of civil society[44], it nonetheless gained considerable credence. Former governing socialist parties, thrown suddenly into opposition in renascent capitalist states, felt that they had to restrict their ambitions to reforms within a market economy. In retrospect one can see that the mid 1970s represented the high water mark of the socialist tide. Whilst the Vietnamese were driving the US out of Saigon, and the last colonial empire in Africa, that of Portugal, was falling, the collapse of the cultural revolution in China was setting the economic scene for the triumph of capitalism in the 80s and 90s. When, after the death of Mao, Deng threw open the Chinese economy to western capital investment, the balance of economic forces across the whole world was upset. An immense reserve army of labour, hireable of the lowest of wages, was thrown onto the scales. The bargaining position of business in its struggles with domestic labour movements was, in one country after another, immensely strengthened. The general intellectual/ideological environment today is thus much less favorable to socialism than it was in the 20th century. This is not merely a consequence of the counter-revolutions that occurred at the end of the 20th century, but stems from a new and more vigorous assertion of the classic tenets