ABSTRACT
The revival of economic debate in the USSR in the period from the late 1950s through the reforms of 1965-70 attracted considerable interest among Western economists. Because of the prevailing neoclassical orthodoxy and lack of familiarity and/or sympathy with the Marxian tradition, however, comment has focused mainly on proposals for optimal planning based on programming models and their associated dual or "shadow" prices. The continuing discussion of labor value calculation and the implications of Marxian formulations for current practice has been dismissed as an unfortunate holdover from a prescientific stage of economic thought; in particular, the materials on "cost-plus" pricing have been rejected in favor of putatively superior programming models, which after all show a clear likeness to Walrasian general equilibrium and the marginal principle. 1
