In this decade private shareholders have purchased, in part or completely, almost sixty state-owned businesses around the world, valued at more than $90 billion. By the 1990s, some 2,000 more-including companies owned by countries such as Britain, France, Mexico, and Bangladesh-will share the same fate.

             A term often used to describe the mixed economies of Western Europe is democratic socialism. These countries have governments selected in free, open elections. Though their legal systems are often quite different from ours, they are designed to protect individual rights.

             Communism .

             More than half the world's population lives under political systems that claim to be organised according to principles developed by Karl Marx. A great scholar and fierce political writer, Marx viewed history as a series of struggles between social classes. He foresaw conflict between the working class and the capitalist class for control over the means of production, the factories in which the workers toiled and the capital needed to organise and build the plants. Marx also advocated a labour theory of value, which holds that labour is what gives value to goods and services and labour therefore deserves to be rewarded for this production.

             According to Marx, the working class would ultimately triumph. From that victory would emerge communism, a classless, propertyless society whose banners would read "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need !116AIthough many planned economies have been based on Marxist doctrine with all property owned by the state, pure communism has never been a reality. Indeed, Mikhail Gorbachev's attempt to revitalise the stagnant Soviet economy is reversing cherished Marxist principles.

             Within Russia's still state-owned industrial sector, managers are being encouraged to pay more attention to customers and less to central planners. By the early 1990s, all but a thousand or so of the more than 500,000 prices currently fixed by Moscow are meant to be set by negotiations among individual enterprises.