I want to discuss the statement that "real socialist" systems are incapable of producing self-correcting mechanisms, that is, of reforming themselves from within. The advocates of this statement argue that resistance to reforms is built into the nature of a totalitarian system with a power monopoly based on a mono-organizational bureaucracy. Others who are less resolute in denying the possibilities of reforms of existing socialist states often restrict their prognoses to economic reforms alone. Failing to learn the lessons of history, they avoid the question of whether economic reforms have a real chance in a system in which politics dominates the sub-systems.