[...] the Bolesheviks were to march their starving, despondent, war-wearing people into modernity at the point of a gun. Many of the most politically militant workers had perished in the Western-backed civil war, leaving the Bolshevik party with a dwindling social base. [...] Russia's economy lay in ruins, and its social fabric had disintegrated. In a tragic irony that was to mark the twentieth century as a whole, socialism proved least possible where it was most necessary.

[...] So-called market socialism envisages a future in which the means of production would be socially owned, but where self-governing cooperatives would compete with one another in the marketplace. in this way, some of the virtues of the market could be retained, while some of its vices could be shed. At the level of individual enterprises, cooperation would ensure increased efficiency [...]