4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST pable: the economic system that was consolidated in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and adopted elsewhere in the socialist countries, often with important differences, has or is about to come to an end. In this paper I shall try to address two questions: (a) what have been the reasons behind the collapse of the actually prevailing socialism? and (b) since this has been the only form of Marxian socialism in actual existence, what does its failure indicate for the feasibility of socialism? THE CHARACTERISTICS AND ACHIEVEMENTS OF ACTUALLY PREVAILING SOCIALISM The Main Characteristics of the System The economic system of actually prevailing socialism was consolidated in the Soviet Union in the decade or so after the launching of the First Five Year Plan in 1928. Its main features were the replacement of private ownership of means of production by public and collective ownership and the replacement of market by central planning. Public ownership of means of production was promoted throughout the economy to the extent of severely limiting individual ownership (i.e., private enterprise based on own and family labor without resort to hired labor). The part of agriculture that was not under public ownership was collectivized and put under strict state control. Legal individual enterprise was by and large limited to the private plots of the collective farm workers. The market was rejected as the mechanism to determine the allocation of resources. It was replaced by a system of planning by command implemented through a hierarchical administrative structure with the central planning organization at the top and enterprises at the bottom interacting through the intermediate layers represented by government ministries and departments. The system varied from one country to another. Collectivization was implemented with less use of force in China than in the USSR. Poland never succeeded in imposing collectivization on its peasantry and Yugoslavia too avoided collectivization. The degree of private activity was greater in some countries than in the others. But most of the features of the basic model applied to all the countries adhering to the system. Growth and Distribution A comprehensive account of the performance of the system is far too big a task to be addressed in a paper like this. Instead we shall briefly summarize the performance of the two giants of the system, the Soviet Union and China, in terms of two economic indicators, growth and income distribution. Admittedly the performance in these two areas cannot be taken as an overall indicator of the performance of a system. But one might argue that superior performance in these areas would be the minimum evidence of credibility of the socialist system whose