ABSTRACT
What concrete institutional details can we give about the socialist system fore seen by Marx and Engels? Its task was to carry the masses forward from the poverty and misery they associated with capitalism toward full communism. Along the way, the social consciousness of society’s members was to develop and expand, through education and experience, and the state was eventually supposed to wither away, as scarcity vanished. Marx did not leave exact blue prints for his future socialist system, however, which is why economies as di verse as the former Yugoslavia (for many years, the only socialist market economy) and the former Soviet Union could profess to be its embodiment.
