Abstract: This book presents a comprehensive analysis of socialist economics. It addresses the reasons for the early successes of socialist systems, and the reasons for their gradual breakdown. There are twenty-eight chapters, of which the first two (in Part One of the book) are introductory. The remaining chapters are arranged in two further parts. Part Two, (chapters 3–15), deals with classical socialism, defined as the political structure and economy that developed in the Soviet Union under Stalin and in China under Mao Zedong, and emerged in the smaller countries of Eastern Europe and in several Asian, African, and Latin American countries. Part Three, (chapters 16–24), deals with the processes of reform, such as the changes started in Hungary under Kádár in 1968 or in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev in 1985, which were designed to renew the socialist system. The final, political conclusion is that Stalinist classical socialism is repressive and inefficient, but nevertheless constitutes a coherent system which slackens and contradicts itself when it starts to reform; hence reform is doomed to fail. An appendix provides a bibliography on the post-socialist transition.

Keywords: classical socialism, communism, failure, history, political economy, reform, socialism, socialist economics, socialist systems