THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM AS AN END OR AS A MEANS AND THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM: AN EVOLUTIONARY VIEWPOINT1 Alberto Chilosi Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche Facoltà di Scienze Politiche via Serafini 3 - Pisa E-mail: chilosi@sp.unipi.it
ABSTRACT After the demise of “real” socialism and the decline of “western” socialism, socialism can be salvaged as a social preference system oriented towards equality and social justice, to be implemented without systemic constraints in the organizational and institutional sense. At the same time there is a case for maintaining an institutional framework allowing different forms of economic organization, capitalist and noncapitalist, to compete on equal footing, in an evolutionary perspective, thus allowing the second to develop if proven efficient. Another way for a spontaneous extension of the domain of socialism could derive from the socialization of consumption, if the consumption of public goods continues to make up a growing component of real consumption. JEL Classification number: P50
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A much shortened version has been published in Economic Systems (vol. 26, 2002, n. 4, pp. 401-407). This paper was originally prepared for a session on the “Future of Capitalism” at the Annual Scientific Meeting of the Italian Economic Association, Rome October 2001. Subsequent versions have been presented to a seminar in the Department of Economics, University of Pisa, to the 7-th Conference of EACES, June 2002, and to the 11-th IAFEP Conference, July 4-6, 2002. I am grateful to Domenico Mario Nuti and to participants in those events for useful comments and suggestions. Needless to say, I am the only one to blame for its present contents.