Socialist clubs. A perspective on the transition

The economic literature on clubs was developed against the background of a western market economy. This paper describes how the eminent domain of clubs was however not the western market economy, but the socialist shortage economy wherein exclusion from consumption was facilitated by clubs that assigned hierarchies of entitlement and priority for the private as well as collective goods. A Talmudic example introduces a brief review of the modern literature on club theory, and anecdotal examples are used to illustrate the hierarchy of privilege of socialist clubs.