Of all the ideal systems that have engaged the attention of political movements during the twentieth century, it seems the ideal of a government controlled and centrally planned economic system has been the most influential and the least successful. Market systems have been predominant in most of the world, but the ideal of a market system has become politically dominant only late in the century. The collapse of totalitarian governments in countries with central planning has been widely blamed on the inadequate performance of central planning, but this seems a hasty judgment. The timing is wrong. The centrally planned countries had economic problems from the start, in fields such as agriculture, and their performance deteriorated steadily in some other areas; but despite this they were able to keep up economic growth at a more rapid rate than the capitalist and less developed nations until the collapse of their political systems. It was this political collapse that caused their transformation, and it came about because the ruling groups themselves lost confidence in the political system they led. But a more detailed look at the performance of these countries is not encouraging. They did fail in many ways, long before their political collapse. The character of these failures may not be especially important from a neoclassical point of view. From that point of view, a high rate of economic growth can redeem most other shortcomings. But from the point of view of the values that led socialists to support economic planning, the failures of the Soviet-type economies were damning. They did not support human services and substitute human values for the tawdry values of the marketplace. They did not build socialism nor communism. They simply made themselves the new exploiting class, and, finally, the new capitalist class. And even that they have done badly, so far. The other practitioners of economic planning, the fascists and "socialist" emerging nations, did even worse from the neoclassical point of view. So, while we must admit that some future society may make an all-around success of economic planning, since it is hard to judge what may happen hundreds and thousands of years in the future, there is good reason to doubt that people now living will see successful economic planning.
The other ideal systems, market socialism and labor management, have been given less complete trials. By the same token, they remain somewhat abstract and incomplete in their conception. If we are to see successful systems of market socialism or labor management or some combination of both in the future, there are still details to be worked out. How can enterprises be government-owned and the government not "bail them out" with subsidies if they fail? And if labor-managed enterprises are not to be government-owned, who shall own them? What can "social property" mean? For those who want to see a class-less society, those will be difficult problems to solve, requiring a good deal of thought, trial and error. For those who see no need for a class-less society, they will seem to be fatal flaws in socialist thinking. Time will tell the answer, and perhaps some of us will live to see it.