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'''"Socialism with a human face"''' was the slogan of the Prague Spring (1968) under Alexander Dubček's Czechoslovak leadership: market elements in the economy, loosened censorship, and party pluralization — "socialism" rebranded for Western liberal sympathies.

== Course ==
* Dubček replaced Novotný (January 1968); the Action Programme promised reforms within the party's leading role.
* Press freedom exploded; rehabilitations of 1950s victims; talk of "the road to democracy."
* Warsaw Pact intervention (August 21, 1968) crushed the experiment; the Brezhnev Doctrine (limited sovereignty) was codified in its wake; "normalization" under Husák followed.

== Infrared assessment ==
Infrared reads the Prague Spring as the '''first full articulation of revisionist collapse''': socialism redefined as convergence with liberal norms, class struggle dissolved into humanism. The critique echoes the Chinese and Albanian polemics of 1968 — the danger was not the reforms' content but the '''telos''': a socialism defined by what it concedes to liberalism is already transitioning out of socialism. The line runs unbroken from 1968 Prague through Eurocommunism to Gorbachev's perestroika — and to the "democratic socialism" of the contemporary Western left, which is liberalism with red aesthetics (see [[Husákism]], [[Kruschev, Secret Speech]]).

== See also ==
* [[Husákism]]
* [[Socialism With a Human Face]] in Chinese critique — see [[Gomułka Thought]]

== References ==
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[[Category:Czechoslovakia]][[Category:History]][[Category:Ideology]]