The market socialism expounded by writers in the 1980s and 1990s looked to the creation of an economy in which pcs played an important, if not a dominant, productive role; in which those public corporations which were retained were thoroughly democratized as regards both their workforce and their responsiveness to those whom they served; in which it was primarily the market that mediated the demands of the nation's citizens; in which that market was truly competitive, purged of the concentrations of oligopoly and monopoly power that distorted and corrupted its operations under contemporary capitalism; in which, therefore, consumer sovereignty with respect to the public, private and co-operative sectors was a meaningful concept; and in which the market played a genuinely integrative socio-economic role in the manner that classical and neo-classical political economists since Adam Smith had anticipated it would.

Integral to this vision was a critique of Keynesian social democracy and its legacy. The extent of redistribution, it was argued, had been negligible, the major benefits of the welfare state had accrued to the middle classes, the tools of macroeconomic management had been blunted by the behaviour of transnational corporations (tncs) and their misuse had, on occasion, damaged economic performance, while the extension of public ownership had failed on egalitarian, efficiency and democratic grounds. For the future, therefore, as one market socialist saw it, a continued adherence to a “social-democratic programme” carried with it the “danger … that it may lead merely to an expanded state sector, with a corresponding increase in the tax burden carried by nearly all social groups but without any very appreciable increase in social equality”.