Socialist democracy

'"[14] Journalist William Pfaff wrote: "It might be argued that socialism ineluctably breeds state bureaucracy, which then imposes its own kinds of restrictions upon individual liberties.

"[14] Marxist theorist Leon Trotsky had proposed the election of a new Soviet presidium with other socialist parties on the basis of proportional representation in 1917.

He noted that several engineers and economists who had created the plan were themselves later put on trial as "conscious wreckers who had acted on the instructions of a foreign power".

He would later elaborate on the need for Soviet democracy in relation to the industrialisation period when questioned by the Dewey Commission in 1937:“The successes are very important, and I affirmed it every time.

[19] Russian historian Vadim Rogovin attributed the establishment of the one-party Soviet socialist system to the conditions which were “imposed on Bolshevism by hostile political forces”.

[14] Chicago School economist Milton Friedman argued that a "society which is socialist cannot also be democratic" in the sense of "guaranteeing individual freedom".

[14] Sociologist Robert Nisbet, a philosophical conservative who began his career as a leftist, argued in 1978 that there is "not a single free socialism to be found anywhere in the world.

"[14] Irving Kristol, a neoconservative journalist, argued: "Democratic socialism turns out to be an inherently unstable compound, a contradiction in terms.

"[14] Anti-communist academic Richard Pipes argued: "The merger of political and economic power implicit in socialism greatly strengthens the ability of the state and its bureaucracy to control the population.

For one thing, the socialization of the economy must lead to a numerical growth of the bureaucracy required to administer it, and this process cannot fail to augment the power of the state.