If economic dirigisme was an extreme version of the regulated market economy, the centrally planned system was the most extreme version of economic dirigisme. It was equally statist and interventionist. If economic dirigisme was strongly growth-oriented in an autarchic way, and served war preparation, the centrally planned economy was a special system to achieve a forced maximum economic growth and self-sufficiency. It was a “child” of the German war economy, and also served, with an extraordinary radicalism, the modernization and war preparation of economically less developed countries. The state socialist planned economy abolished private ownership, the market mechanism, the role of market prices, and the role of supply and demand. Unlike all the other systems, this first non-market economic regime was, at least partly, born from a theory.

Marxist theoretical legacy, Lenin and the Bolshevik program

Karl Marx was an extraordinary product of his time: the philosophy of Enlightenment and passionate Romanticism. A renaissance scholar, Marx, as his later disciples maintained, combined German philosophy, English political economy, and French socialism, and made important contributions to philosophy, economics, and history. As a radical journalist he left Germany and emigrated to Britain after the 1848 Revolution and became a student of contemporary British capitalism. According to Marx, capitalism historically opened the road toward a stormy development of productive forces, technology, and organization, but meanwhile led to a polarization of society. Marx believed that economically interpreted history and political economy were the master sciences to understand and influence social development.