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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.

The chapter presents a short biography of Kalecki, from his early years in Łódź, through his economics research and development of his theory of business cycles, participation in the Keynesian Revolution and work after the Second World War on the economics of socialism and the developing countries. The key role of capital accumulation (investment) in determining levels of employment and total output is put forward as Kalecki's main innovation. There are evident similarities between Kalecki's theory of the business cycle and that of the Austro-Marxist Emil Lederer, as well as in the distributional analysis of Rudolf Hilferding. Kalecki's analysis of monetary circulation, and the centrality of his theory of profits was anticipated by Rosa Luxemburg in her Anti-Critique. But that monetary theory is rooted in a Marxian understanding of money as a means of settlement between capitalists.

For almost half a decade, after World War II, capitalism and socialism coexisted on the European continent. Some believed that these systems would converge, with state intervention stabilising capitalism in the west and socialism became more democratic in the east. Michał Kalecki, in his last published article, co-written with Tadeusz Kowalik, wrote about how governments had implemented a crucial reform in the developed capitalist economies. State investment had filled the demand gap, which could potentially result in the long-term mitigation of capitalism's slumps and crises. Tadeusz Kowalik later extended this notion of the crucial reform, to the troubled socialist systems in Eastern Europe during the 1980s. He argued that previous economic reforms had failed in the socialist countries as they had not been accompanied by sufficient democratic political reforms, which needed to be extended in order to fully revitalise the socialist economies. Ultimately the proposals for a crucial reform of capitalism and socialism were not realised and these systems did not converge economically or politically. This chapter examines the theses of Kalecki and Kowalik within the historical and intellectual tradition of Polish socialist and Marxist thought.

Lange's rejection of bureaucratic socialism can be traced throughout his works, from the very beginning to the end. Planners and economic agents have to act under mandatory rules provided by economic theory to avoid the risk of an autocratic regime detached from the people's needs. Drawing upon this premise, Walrasian theory played a pivotal role to introduce rules to tie the hands of socialist bureaucrats based on scientific, economic theory. In this sense, Lange's anti-bureaucratism and Walrasianism descended from a similar political premise. However, the coexistence of conflicting views into the same theory (such as Marxian and Walrasian theories) also implied potential risks, mainly when socialist democracy is conceived in technocratic terms and Marxian theory assimilates to natural sciences.

Industrial feudalism is a socioeconomic formation that the Polish Marxists Ludwik Krzywicki and Oskar Lange associated with monopoly finance capital. Industrial feudalism arises in a socially static capitalism where mobility between hierarchically defined social strata is restricted. Krzywicki's account predates Hilferding's Finance Capital and outlines the functioning of the capital market-based finance capital that has become more common in capitalism. Seemingly unaware of Krzywicki's pioneering articles, Oskar Lange then presented his own account of monopoly finance capital in the United States with similar social consequences in the early 1940s with state support for monopolies. Krzywicki's work on monopoly finance capital was discovered in the 1950s by Tadeusz Kowalik.

Industrial feudalism is a socio-economic formation of advanced capitalist countries in which society becomes stratified into closed, hierarchically-defined social groups. In the writings of Ludwik Krzywicki and Oskar Lange, industrial feudalism is associated with the dominance of monopoly finance capital. The chapter extends this analysis of twenty-first century capitalism in which social groups are differentiated by the kind of property that they own and hence the kind of credit to which they have access to prevent becoming déclassé. However asset inflation then inhibits upward social mobility, confining households to their inherited social class. This inhibits labour mobility. But the availability of credit for the propertied classes also defines attitudes towards state welfare provision.

Rosa Luxemburg is not an under-consumptionist stressing the tendency to stagnation, it is rather an under-investment perspective: the effective demand crisis results from the disequilibria determined by a vibrant capitalist accumulation, and stems from production rather than circulation. To show this, the chapter deals with three dimensions of Rosa Luxemburg's economic thought. First, how Luxemburg's approach in her 1913 book is related with some of her prior writings, especially Social Reform or Revolution? and the Introduction to Political Economy. Second, the re-reading that Luxemburg herself provided of her own argument in terms of a macro-monetary circuit model like the one we read in her Anti-Critique. Third and last, in which sense Marx's monetary labour theory of value was for her the essential starting point, which cannot be just set aside. This last point will be preceded by a détour, the critical consideration of some key papers by Kalecki on capitalism and reform, including his late paper with Kowalik on the ‘crucial reform’. The chapter concludes with some hints pointing towards an interpretation of capitalism and its recurring crises where exploitation and effective demand are both essential in accounting for the ascent and collapses of different forms of capitalism itself.