IN THEIR NOTE, "Alienation and Central Planning in Marx," Professors Roberts and Stephenson maintain that for Marx "the goal of a socialist society" is "the abolition of alienation" and that Marx sees "central economic planning as the means by which alienation in the Marxist sense is eliminated in the socialist society." In pursuing this argument they begin with the assertion that for Marx the phenomenon of alienation results from commodity production for the market, since this means preoccupation with things rather than people, and rule by impersonal market forces rather than human rule. In this sense, they argue that Engels' reference to the transition from necessity to freedom in socialism means the change from an automatic market to central planning. Specifically, they present quotations from Marx and Paul Sweezy (who is not Marx) to prove that under socialism "commodity production is eliminated," with the result that the "law of value" is eliminated, to be replaced by central planning. Since central planning is control by human beings, it will mean the end of workers' alienation from the economy. Finally, they argue that the Bolsheviks deliberately introduced the system of "war communism," meaning complete central planning, as their first main economic step toward the end of alienation in the Soviet Union. It was necessary to restate this argument in detail because it is an excellent statement of an erroneous interpretation of Marx, a thoroughly developed presentation of one side of a complex debate. This brief comment aims only to clarify some of the issues and take note of the opposite arguments, not to indulge in the game of "proof" by quotation from the large volume of available statements by Marx. It is certainly true that during Stalin's reign it was accepted by most Marxists as dogma that "commodity production" is limited to capitalism, and that the "law of value" could only apply where there is commodity production, and therefore that socialism is governed only by the "law of planning." Unfortunately, these terms were all used somewhat ambiguously. "Commodity production" was supposed to take place only where exchange is by a purely competitive automatic market mechanism. The "law of value" then meant that commodities would all be sold at a value equal to the amount of labor embodied in them. No one, least of all Sweezy in the book cited, ever explained what the law of planning was. Does it simply mean that those goods will be produced that the planners (or Stalin) decide will be produced? Even Stalin, in his last pamphlet, called the Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, found it necessary to emphasize that planners are governed by certain objective limitations, and that some commodity production is to be found in socialism, at least in the sphere of the collective farm purchases and sales. After Stalin's death and his denunciation in 1956 a furious debate broke out in which most Soviet economists came to believe that the law of value does operate under socialism.' One view was that the "law of value" operates in all exchanges between economic units, even those that are not conducted in an automatic market. That view is still semantic or theological, but does reach the conclusion that value and therefore objective limits to planning must operate under socialism. The more