But we do need to deal with his assertion that it is an axiom that socialism should be democratic. [27]
The fact is that for any person who does not live on Mars, the relation between socialism and democracy is axiomatic only in Geras’s mind. Has Geras ever heard of Stalinism, of the one-party system, of press censorship, of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, of the Polish coup d’état, of the entry of Soviet tanks into Prague and Budapest?
And if the answer is that nothing of the kind is true socialism, we have to be clear what game we are playing. There are three possibilities. The first is that Geras is constructing an ideal model of society in the way that the utopian socialists did. Nothing, of course, prevents him from doing so and from declaring that in Gerasland collective ownership of the means of production and democracy go together; but in that case we should not claim to be speaking about the real world.
The second possibility is to affirm that the authoritarian States of the Soviet bloc represent a transitory and necessary phase in the passage towards communism. This is the miserable excuse that ‘progressive’ intellectuals gave to support the worst excesses of Stalinism, from the Moscow trials onwards.
The third possibility is to assert that these states are ‘degenerate forms’ of socialism. However, the very fact that such ‘degeneration’ is possible clearly indicates that the relation between socialism and democracy is far from being axiomatic.. . ."
Socialism or dictatorship. We report. You deride.
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