Leva：放弃幻想，社会主义制度无法改革

Kornai was a renowned authority on the Soviet and Eastern European economies, and served as a mentor to scholars like Xu Chenggang, Hu Zuliu, and Li Daokui. He was a professor at Harvard University.

He believed that the socialist system was inherently unreformable. At the beginning of his book, he wrote:

The system is incapable of stepping away from its own shadow.

Its ultimate fate is self-destruction—the eventual dissolution of the system.

The reason why socialist countries moved from enthusiastic reform to stagnation and ultimately to irreversible collapse is naturally complex and multifaceted.

The collapse of socialist countries is closely related to the overarching strategy of socialist reform: under strict political limitations, the reforms in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe could never achieve structural success.

No matter how different the reform paths were, they all ended in the same collapse.

From a comparative perspective, reforms in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe can be categorized into three types:

First, the Yugoslav model, where strongmen initiated reforms but they were later blocked and interrupted internally.

Second, countries like Czechoslovakia and Poland, where reforms were internally driven but forcibly terminated by Soviet intervention.

Third, the Soviet model, where internal contradictions drove reform, but organized anti-reform forces within the state blocked progress.

Although Yugoslavia's reform could be considered one of the most thorough among socialist reforms, it was still fundamentally a functional adjustment.

When such reforms encountered core structural issues—such as the leading role of the Communist Party and the lack of checks and balances—they became helpless.

Once competitive mechanisms were introduced into party or state power structures, the nation began to show signs of collapse.

Other Eastern European socialist countries also had internal motivations for reform. But just like Yugoslavia, the political premise of reform was the same: initially limited to economic and administrative areas, aimed at demonstrating the superiority of the socialist system.

Eventually, they were forced to confront political system issues.

However, the ruling party always absolutely refused to share power with other socio-political forces.

When such issues had to be addressed, domestic anti-reform factions would align with the Soviet Union, forming powerful forces that ultimately buried the reforms.

The Soviet Union's own reforms were initially vigorous, but since the precondition was the Party’s continued authoritarian rule and a complete refusal to share power, the reforms failed to establish a foundation of property rights, and the improvement in economic performance was unsustainable.

Thus, like Eastern European countries, the Soviet Union’s first round of reforms temporarily boosted performance, but soon led to economic stagnation.

Another round of reforms would follow, appearing new in form but remaining the same in substance, attempting to counter economic decline.

So-called “reforms” fell into this repetitive cycle. Once they touched on political structures, they either immediately retreated or achieved nothing.

The reasons for the collapse of socialist reforms are indeed very complex.

Besides the functional nature of reform being misaligned with the structural issues of socialist states, many scholars have examined macro-level institutional design and micro-level economic operations in detail.

However, few have analyzed the deeper reasons for the failure of reform and state collapse from the perspective of the common structural properties of socialist countries.

In fact, the internal limitations imposed by state structure on self-adjustment are the primary reason.

Structurally speaking, the rigid state apparatus predetermined the extremely limited space for socialist reform.

From an ideological standpoint, socialist states are political structures built on an ethic of resentment.

This structure is inherently resistant to transitioning from a state of hostility to one of cooperation.

As stated in China’s Constitution, the state operates under the “People’s Democratic Dictatorship,” with one-party rule and Party-led governance, explicitly refusing to share power.

Yet socialist reform inherently requires a transition from a revolutionary and resentful structure to a post-violent, cooperative, power-sharing system.

In this sense, “reform” touches socialism’s fatal weak spot.

Kornai believed:

Compared to classical socialism, reform socialism may reduce oppression, but as reforms deepen, internal social contradictions intensify, eventually leading to the destruction of the system.

Looking at present-day China, the situation mirrors the Soviet Union’s: it cannot return to the Deng Xiaoping era, nor can it fully return to Mao's era, nor can it move toward Western-style constitutionalism and checks and balances. It is caught in a deadlock.

Terms like “national rejuvenation” and “Chinese-style modernization” are invented to obscure the inability to advance reform, muddling the real goals of reform and exposing the institutional deadlock.

Without reforming the system of distribution, all reforms are in vain. But distributional reform entails reallocation of interests, which in turn requires redistribution of political power—that is, political system reform. Yet the window for political reform in China has long since closed.

Here we cite French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville’s evaluation of socialism—he considered it a “new form of serfdom.”

In one of his speeches, Tocqueville remarked on socialism:

......to the point where, were I to attempt to sum up what socialism is, I would say that it was simply a new system of serfdom.

So, how can serfdom be reformed? Has human history ever witnessed a successful transformation of serfdom? Is it not true that serfdom can only collapse, rather than be reformed?