Is There No Alternative? [antikvár]

ForewordSocialism is, first and foremost, an economic ideology. Historically, it explained the root causes of the major social ills - poverty amidst plenty, inequality, exploitation, various forms of oppression - in terms of the operádon of the capitalist system, and proposed tackling these problems by replacing the capitalist mode of production with an alternative economic system, called socialism. It was more or less an article of faith amongst serious socialists that socialism, by virtue of being Not Capitalism, would enable humanity to overcome the scourges they identified with the existing economic order. But precisely how socialism would work, how it would secure the social benefits the socialists wanted, remained unclear. The opponents of socialism, including somé who agreed with much of the socialist critique of capitalism, were not slow to notice and draw attention to this weak point in the socialist case.The two essays in this pamphlet examine somé of the ways in which socialists have attempted to develop economic programmes and strategies to deal with this difficulty. The first piece, by Willie Thompson, surveys the history of socialist economic prescriptions írom the 19th century to the present day. It alsó provides somé of the contextual background to the second piece, Paul Auerbach's analysis of the Alternative Economic Strategy developed by economists on the Labour left in the 1970s and 1980s. This paper was first presented to the Socialist History Society conference 'Dissent and the State since 1945', held in London in September 2003. It has been revised and updated by the author.Francis King,July 2007