A Future For Socialism.

• Author: Samuels, Warren J.

It will not surprise anyone familiar with John Roemer's work that this book is another closely reasoned analysis by a brilliant and distinguished theorist. And it will not surprise anyone familiar with my work to learn that Roemer's premises are attractive to me: That the historic meaning of socialism lies neither necessarily nor fundamentally in such strategies as public ownership of the means of production but in making the polity and the economy responsive to and promotive of a wider range of interests, that is, pluralistic and democratic. That institutions can be variably structured. That markets are a function of and specific to the institutions (power structure) which give rise to and operate through them. That government is fundamental to the organization, operation and performance of the economic system, through determining whose interests are to count. That government historically has tended to be an instrument of the already powerful and privileged, with private power resting upon the past hierarchic use of government. That the market economy is normatively more attractive than Soviet-type (and perhaps any other) centrally planned economy, especially if the latter is autocratic; and that a pluralistic market economy is more attractive than an autocratic one. That income and wealth distributions are a function of institutions (power), in which respect markets do not merely give effect to some transcendent "productivity."

Roemer asks fundamental questions about the relationships between the means and ends of socialism; about how to democratize the corporation and the corporate system; about how to create legal and private institutions that truly pluralize and democratize the economy; and so on. He advances an egalitarian agenda which seeks more equitable - more widely diffused - distributions of opportunity, income, wealth and control of government and private enterprise. He knows that neither the wage system nor private enterprise can or should be done away with. He seeks a market socialism in which "hired agents could as well run firms . . . in which profits would be distributed even more diffusely than they are under capitalism. Indeed, the mechanisms that have evolved (or been designed) under capitalism that enable owners to control management can be transported to a socialist framework" [p. 5]. Socialism, in brief, requires satisfactory institutionalization of principal-agent relations, but in a system of worker and poor...