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Following the collapse of hitherto-existing socialism in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, there was a crisis in socialist economic thought. If we contrast the situation of the 1990s with what had existed 40 years earlier, we see that whilst in the 1950s, socialism and economic planning were almost universally accepted, even by enemies of socialism, as being viable ways to organize an economy, by the 1990s the reverse applied. Among orthodox opinion it was now taken for granted that socialism was the "god that failed" and that socialist economic forms, when judged in the balance of history, had been found wanting. And among socialist theorists there was a general retreat from ideas that had previously been taken for granted, a movement towards market socialist ideas, an accommodation with the idea that the market was a neutral economic mechanism.

Whilst accommodation to the market was, to anyone familiar with Marx, completely at odds with his critique of civil society[44], it nonetheless gained considerable credence. Former governing socialist parties, thrown suddenly into opposition in renascent capitalist states, felt that they had to restrict their ambitions to reforms within a market economy.