Włodzimierz Brus and the Law of Value Under Socialism

This paper surveys the intellectual trajectory of the Polish political economist Włodzimierz Brus, who took up the arguments for use of the ‘price mechanism’ in socialism from the pre-War work of Oskar Lange. Brus advanced the idea that a ‘Law of Value’ applied under socialism, which would allow prices and appropriate material incentives to bring the socialist economy into equilibrium. Kalecki, however, opposed the use of cost-minimising incentives, and Brus never fully resolved the problem of how investment is to be guided in a decentralised way. A lively discussion of ‘market socialism’ did not survive the 1960s. In exile from 1972, Brus participated in China's post-Mao discussions on economic reform. But his interest in prices and markets under socialism ceased effectively with the fall of Communism at the end of the 1980s.