In the 1970s or so there was a joke told among Soviet state planners; regarding that old saw of Communist ideology: the eventual World-wide Communist Revolution; the expectation that the revolution that had taken place in Russia would eventually spread world-wide and hence the resulting efforts to promote that, etc. The joke went: "When the world wide revolution is finally accomplished we'll have to keep one country with a capitalist (market) economy.... just so we know what things cost! In a planned economy "pricing" resources was at best arbitrary and at worst completely wrong; Soviet central planners did, in fact, rely on price signals from the capitalist west to do a little better job.