Notes taken from Tom Bottomore's Book "The Socialist Economy: Theory and practice" Introduction: Socialist economy and socialist society · Socialism, as a political doctrine and a social movement, has never set itself purely economic aims. From the beginning its ideal was the creation of a new type of society, or, as Gramsci expressed it, 'a new civilization'. Some critics indeed have argued that socialist thinkers, at any rate until the 1920s, largely ignored the question of how a socialist economy would actually function; and Mises (1920, 1922), in one of the most extreme and vitriolic attacks, claimed to show that it would not function at all. · There are, to be sure, diverse conception of socialism , but what is common to almost all of them is a conviction of the fundamental importance of the economy in shaping social life as a whole: an idea which found its most trenchant expression in Marx’s social theory. I shall interpret that theory , w