Economic gains could not restore legitimacy once consent to coercion collapsed

Evidence

But the failure of the system to correct itself politically, to construct an egalitarian social space where problems could be openly faced and alternative ways of building socialism could be found, meant also that the further gains in living standards which continued through the 1970s (albeit at a slower pace) accomplished nothing by way of restoring the lost political hegemony, since there was now no collective consent to bear comparative scarcities, nor to accept the coercive ways in which the entirely salutary project of building secular, multi-ethnic, multinational societies was being implemented. The paradox, of course, is that once those regimes of ‘existing socialism’ had decisively and violently disjoined the socialist project from issues of a superior morality and a fuller democracy, ‘socialism’ became a mere authoritarian developmentalism, promising not much more than economic security and rising living standards, so that the regimes which had so distorted the project were then judged not only from the standpoints of morality and democracy (glasnost, the scandals of bureaucratic privilege) but also from the standards of commodity fetishism set in the advanced capitalist countries — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 45

Related

• Economic success built on coercion may collapse when rule liberalizes (similarity 0.81)