Socialism Revised and Modernized: The Case for Pragmatic Market Socialism

This volume advocates pragmatic market socialism and offers a penetrating critique of the entire range of capitalist apologetics. As James A. Yunker envisions it, market socialism would virtually duplicate the everyday economic functions of market capitalist economies, such as the United States, but with public ownership of large, established corporations, profits being distributed among the entire labour force. Pragmatic market socialism would be a means of enhancing economic justice and fairness without sacrificing the efficiency advantages of free enterprise and the market economy. Yunker presents both theoretical and empirical evidence countering various widely-accepted justifications for capitalism. He argues that much of what passes for anti-socialist thought does not actually address socialism at all, but rather the various historical correlates of socialism such as the Communist one-party state, Soviet-style central planning, or the Scandinavian welfare state. This book may be of interest to economists specializing in comparative economic systems and political scientists with an interest in the evolution of political/economic systems.