Even if they win their alt, it cannot be distanced from market logic -- otherwise makes it impossible for them to solve.

Goldman, Addis. "The Socialist Calculation Debate | Addis Goldman." Lapham’s Quarterly, 1 May 2023, https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/socialist-calculation-debate.

According to historians Allin Cottrell and Paul Cockshott, the conceptual viability of “market socialism” (a term Lange never used) already had been established by the Italian economists Vilfredo Pareto and Enrico Barone in the early twentieth century, when they purportedly demonstrated “the formal equivalence between the optimal allocation of resources in a socialist economy and the equilibrium of a perfectly competitive market system.” Lange’s designs nonetheless seemed to constitute a fresh rejoinder to the strong Austrian School claim that rational economic activity under socialism was impossible. The Russian-born American–British economist Abba P. Lerner, a social democratic thinker who would go on to collaborate with Lange, agreed that socialist systems would benefit from incorporating market logic into their designs (as did the British economist H.D. Dickinson), arguing by the mid-1930s, “without the pricing system…it is impossible for an economic system of any complexity to function with any reasonable degree of efficiency.” The neoclassical model of market socialism represented a partial concession to the proposition that market mechanisms are indispensable to the coordination of complex economic activity. Unsurprisingly, this conceptual development exposed an intra-socialist rift. For the Marxist economist Maurice Dobb, incorporating market principles into designs for a socialized economy was a contradiction in terms. Adopting the “competitive solution” only served to enshrine the principle of “consumer sovereignty,” which betrayed the collectivist ideal. Dobb was deeply suspicious of the analogy, drawn by free-market thinkers, between consumer choice and democratic choice. Not only did Dobb critique the fetishization of possessive individualism and “exchange value,” the oldest of Marxian hobbyhorses, implied by the incorporation of market principles into a socialized economy. In his 1933 work “Economic Theory and the Problems of a Socialist Economy,” he assailed the “purely formal character of economic theory” in the neoclassical mold, anticipating a critique that economic theorists across the political spectrum would take up throughout the mid-twentieth century: that neoclassical analysis was a disinterested science that had become detached from reality. For Dobb, neoclassical economics had nothing to say about ends, only means. For his part, Lerner responded that Dobb—and Soviet Communists—held “superior contempt for the tastes and judgment of the masses,” who seem to “become more and more a recalcitrant material for the weaving of social patterns pleasing to bureaucratic aesthetics.” In the mid-to-late 1930s, with the market socialist position firmly established, free-market thinkers shifted the debate onto fresh terrain. Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian free-market guru and admiring student of Mises, had weighed in on the debate in 1935 with Collectivist Economic Planning, a collection of essays (not all his own) on socialist economic thought and the status of the calculation debate. In “The Nature and History of the Problem,” Hayek criticized historical materialists for their faith in the inexorable rise of socialism, and in “The Present State of the Debate,” he claimed that the “central direction of all economic activity presents a task which cannot be rationally solved under the complex conditions of modern life.” It was not until the late 1930s and into the 1940s, however, that Hayek refined what is often considered the ‘second line of defense’ in the Austrian position. In a series of articles published in Economica and the American Economic Review—“Economics and Knowledge” in 1937, “Socialist Calculation: The Competitive Solution” in 1940, and “The Use of Knowledge in Society” in 1945—Hayek moved away from arguments about the theoretical impossibility of rational accounting in a socialized economy, and instead emphasized the practical infeasibility of centralized economic planning, given the nature of knowledge and its dispersal. For Hayek, the beauty of capitalism—indeed, the “marvel” of the invisible hand—was that unregulated interactions between private individuals and firms, each bringing to bear on their economic decision-making processes forms of “tacit knowledge,” produce a form of “spontaneous order” that no amount of planning could simulate. Economic historian Max Hancock explains that, for Hayek, “the dispersal of knowledge in society is so complete…and the mechanism by which order emerges from discrete transactions is so opaque, that it is not possible to possess a functional overview of the economy. Ergo, rational economic planning is an oxymoron, and socialists cannot hope to replicate the wisdom of the price mechanism.” Hayek’s concerns about economic planning—and his scorn for the Promethean visions of socialist administrators and their economic theorists—were not without precedent. By 1932 Leon Trotsky had already lambasted the Soviet bureaucracy for imagining it “had at its disposal a universal mind” that could “register simultaneously all the processes of nature and society.” In some sense, Hayek’s position rested on an inverse but similar proposition: that market society itself constituted a universal mind; markets were capable of registering simultaneously all the processes of nature and society. The notion of “spontaneous order” was not entirely new, either. Such ideas had been espoused by luminaries like Adam Smith, David Hume, Bernard Mandeville, Jeremy Bentham, Karl Polanyi, and the Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou in the fourth century bc. In reality, as political theorist Bernard E. Harcourt explains, “the history of modern economic thought begins with the introduction of ‘natural order’ into the field of political economy in the mid-eighteenth century: the idea that economic exchange constitutes a system that autonomously can achieve equilibrium without government intervention.” Hayek’s epistemological arguments complicated the case for economic planning and enriched the debate, but in the early 1940s, it still seemed as though market socialists had not been effectively refuted at the level of theory. The Austrian-born American economist Joseph Schumpeter, a heterodox figure famous for popularizing the term “creative destruction” to describe innovation engendered by entrepreneurship, concluded as much in his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, in which he usefully narrated the debate.