Socialism, Bourgeois Economic Theories of, conceptions falsifying the essence of socialism, the economic laws of its development, and the objectives of the economic policy of the socialist countries and communist parties. The theory and practice of scientific socialism are countered by theoretically abstracted "socialist models”. Bourgeois economic theories of socialism appeared in the 19th century as a reaction to the growing revolutionary working class movement and to Marxist theory. Their objective is to divert the working masses from scientific socialism, and to make the working-class movement serve the interests of bourgeoisie. Bourgeois economic theories of socialism are founded on various schools and trends of bourgeois economics. Their most prominent 19th century representatives were Johann K. Rodbertus and the Katheder-socialists in Germany; and the advocates of so-called agrarian socialism (Henry George and his followers) in the USA. At the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, attempts were made to apply subjective psychological theories of marginal utility (see Theory of Marginal Utility) and of economic equilibrium (F. Wieser, V. Pareto) to the analysis of socialist economics. After the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution bourgeois ideologists tried to theoretically substantiate the anti-communist propaganda levelled at the then only socialist country in the world. Central to bourgeois economic literature of the 1920s-1940s period was the so-called economic calculation problem (i. e., rational distribution of resources) under socialism. The "orthodox liberals" L. Mises and F. Hayek (Austria), and the German sociologist and economist M. Weber expounded a theory of the "logical and practical invalidity of socialism”, which was founded on an overt apology of capitalism and private ownership. It claimed that under socialism, because there is no free market, there was no mechanism to regulate the rational distribution of resources. Contrary to that, reformist economists of the bourgeois and social-democratic hue (A. Lerner 328 in the USA; A. Pigou, H. Dickinson and R. Hall in Great Britain, and others) anticipated the practicability of the rational utilisation of resources under socialism and its superior effectiveness to capitalism. However, unable to visualise an economy functioning without a free market, they tried to build a mechanism for adjusting the proportions of socialist reproduction patterned after the mechanism of capitalist competition. Real socialism was counterposed with hypothetical models of " competitive socialism" (e. g., the model of J. Schumpeter). Typical of those models is their claim that socialism is compatible with private ownership, their distortion of socialist economic categories, and their mechanical transfer of those categories into the system of capitalist relations of production (especially true of such categories as “planning” and "balanced character”). Their "models of socialism" and illusion of the multiplicity of socialism are based, above all, on the falsification of socialist social ownership of the means of production. Thus, the model of market socialism (see Theory of Market Socialism) substitutes the ownership by certain groups of people for the ownership by the whole people—the leading form of socialist ownership. In many other models socialist ownership is not even identified. The ignoring of social ownership of the means of production as the determining factor of socialism enabled some bourgeois economists (e.-g., P. Samuelson) to view socialism as an ideology, which he claims is plagued by "a multitude of contradictory trends”. There are attempts to prove the idea that there is no radical qualitative opposition between socialism and state- monopoly capitalism. The British Sovietologist P. Wiles, unable to perceive any essential qualitative differences between socialist ownership by the whole people and state ownership, identifies them with forms of organisation and management of state ownership, thus creating a foundation for building his models of state socialism and regulated socialism. He says that both the state industry in the USSR and the British nationalised industries are of the first model only because industrial management in both instances is part of the state machine (i.e., they are government-run). The second model incorporates nationalised industries and companies of other West European countries, since they "operate on the free market independently of the state”, i. e., they are free to dispose of their own product, buy and sell on the market, receive loans. Models of this kind completely distort the very essence of socialism, and obscure its radical distinctions from capitalism. When they build their models of socialism, bourgeois economists fail to see the essential differences in the class nature of the state under capitalism and socialism. Yet, it is the class content that determines in whose interests and for what purpose state property is created and employed. Under state-monopoly capitalism, state property is created and used in the interests of the leading monopoly groups. Under socialism, the state promotes the interests of socialist society as a whole. Therefore, state socialist property is the property of the whole people, which in both principle and essence differs from state-monopoly property. Ignoring the objective economic laws of socialism, a group of bourgeois theorists declares that the Soviet economy is a “centrally-planned” economy operating on orders "from above" (see Theory of Centrally-planned Economy, Bourgeois). All these theories pervert, each in its own way, the mechanism of the economic functioning of socialism. The application to socialism of the bourgeois theories of industrial society (see Theory of Industrial Society), convergence (see Theory of Convergence) is prompted by the fact that the USSR has entered the stage of mature socialist economy, and by the fact that developed socialism is being built in other countries of the socialist community; the authors of these theories are trying to erase the basic differences between socialism and capitalism, and reject advantages of socialism.