Introduction: a special issue in honoring Janos Kornai

Socialists and Marxists also need to revisit Marx in the light of the experiences of actual socialist systems; see, e.g., ‘Marx after Kornai’ (Sen 2020).

Lange (1958, p. 2) agrees that the two fundamental components of any socialist revolution are the predominance of state property and central planning: “It seems to me that first, the very process of the social revolution which liquidates one social system and establishes another requires centralised disposal of resources by the new revolutionary State, and consequently centralised management and planning. This holds, in my opinion, for any socialist revolution.”

Kornai (1991) distinguishes three phases in the development of ‘market socialism’: (1) vision, (2) project and (3) blueprints of a reform policy. Lange’s model was a vision never realized in practice and, according to Kornai, Lange himself never recommended its implementation. Market socialism as a ‘project’ was formulated by many theorists like Brus, Sik and Nove. But a project also is far from offering practical policy steps. Market socialism rarely was implemented in the form of ‘blueprints of a reform policy’. The closest one was Hungary’s New Economic Mechanism (NEM), introduced on January 1, 1968), although it was far from Lange’s model. Kornai introduced a broader definition of market socialism as a combination of preponderant state property and market coordination (Kornai 1990b). According to that definition, he distinguished classical (Stalinist) socialist systems from reformed (or market) socialism (Kornai 1992). I follow Kornai’s distinction without ignoring the fact that market socialism in practice is not an implementation of Lange’s model.