Socialism and Planning

Was the Soviet Union’s a planned economy? The simple, answer is no. Is a planned economy possible? That is a more difficult question to answer. Marx never had a theory of a planned economy, for he thought—from The Communist Manifesto to the penultimate chapter of Volume One of Capital—that capitalism would solve the problem of “production,” that is, overcome scarcity through the “forces of production,” restrained only by the private property ...