REVIEW ARTICLE 113 concept of socialism remains undifferentiated and without structure, merely an 'ideology1. Axiological relationships and tKe concrete historical weave of the transformation of the concept therefore remain unexplored. The mentioned dimensions of the concept all but disappear. Only one remains, the propaganda thesis of the Stalinist power apparatus: Socialism is that which developed in the Soviet Union under Stalin, under the leadership of the party and its apparatus. In the light of the past few years it is not surprising that a liberal thinker accepts Stalinist logic, ideologically reversed of course. What is surprising is that the author refers to 'Stalinist socialism' as 'classic socialism'. We can be sure that the analogy was inspired by the Marxist concept of 'classic capitalism'. Even the disintegration of socialism is interpreted in the spirit of the reversed Marxist theory. Paraphrasing Marx and Lenin, Kornai writes the following about the conclusion of the historical course of socialism: 'Sooner or later truly revolutionary changes will take place which will eliminate the socialist system and lead it into a capitalist market economy.'6 To act as though this were the most obvious conclusion in 1991 or 1093 is incompatible even with Kornai's earlier works, to say the least. (Although Kornai may like the Marx he has transformed into his own likeness, he cannot be spared a historical analysis.) He cannot settle the question of the eastern European restoration of capitalism based on the analogy of the concepts of western capitalism, if for no other reason than that there are only two years' worth of experience preceding the writing of the work. (The foreword of the first publication was published in April 1991, in English, and the situation has not improved since. . . .) In the Eastern European region instead of a 'democratic economy' the unique characteristics of a semi-periphery surfaced: poverty, economic decline, a restructuring of the job market resulting in unprecedented unemployment, and social marginalisation. On its foundations national populism and ethnic wars long thought to be forgotten are renascent. Kornai's analogical method slips into exaggerations elsewhere as well, for example when he defines the 'pure' form of socialism as that which existed in its Stalinist, Rakosi-ist form attributing all types of reform as being part of the precursor to a 'democratic capitalism'. Once again the mediation between theory and practice disappears, as if we were in the 1950s once again. An important difference, of course, is that Kornai's point of departure is the thesis that the superiority of a (highly developed) capitalism over a state socialism has without a doubt been proven. This is an absurd 'discovery1, since this superiority was not disputed by either Lenin or Stalin, not even by Khrushchev or Kornai. They would never have declared the §oncept of 'catching up', however utopistic and unattainable it was, had it been otherwise. As a matter of fact, based on data of the past six years we can safely say