A system of firms managed by the workers, if organized in the LMF form as suggested by Vanek, realizes a new method of production, one of the possible forms of a market based socialism. Thus, it is interesting to investigate the issue of a transition from capitalism to the new mode of...

The Economic Theory of Socialism and the Labour-Managed Firm focuses on market socialism and the relevant debate among economic theorists. It argues that market socialism is the only rational form of socialism and that market socialism with labour-managed firms is by far the best form of market...

Economists hold that cooperatives should be free to carry on business for profit in the market. And as Marxists have traditionally been inimical to markets, it is hardly surprising that they have taken little interest in a cooperative system so far. Moreover, borrowing a well-known saying by...

The author discusses the critique of cooperatives implied in Alchian and Demsetz's argument that efficiency is maximized when the central agent managing the firm and watching the labour force at work is the residual claimant. Entering upon a number of criticisms that Alchian and Demsetz's...

This paper has a dual aim: first, to draw attention to a number of passages in which Marx explicitly extolled the cooperative movement and thereby confute the wrong but widely held assumption that Marx was inimical to the market and rejected cooperation as a production mode even for the...

According to Antonio Gramsci, workers' councils were transitional institutions expected to carry on business in a market economy and thereby prepare the ground for the revolution. However, upon seizing power, workers were expected to establish a centrally planned system and, hence, to renounce...

The importance of the notion of ‘the mode of production’ is emphasised by all those scholars who hold that the ‘history-as-totality’ approach is the core of Marx's theory of society. Among them, Gramsci argued that while scientific advancements could shed little light on the issues with...

Two main subjects are dealt with in this paper: the democratic road to socialism in Marx and Engels’s works and, more generally, a feasible transition to a new social order. Starting out from the Marxian definition of revolution as the transition from one production mode to another, the author...