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er’s strikes but harmful because it prevents a scientific insight into ihe dynamics of our society’s development. Under present conditions it is not easy to accept the viewpoint that would define the working class as people who only perform routine physical functions in the process of materiał production. It seems that we are much closer to the truth if we include in this notion workers, scientists, and others who under the same conditions Iive from their own labor. But under our conditions this formula is unpractical and dangerous because nearly every-body thinks that he lives from his own labor and the chances arc meagre that society will objectively define it, so that this category practically covers the meaning as the term »working people«. Our stratification at least theoretically, has no problems to define crafts-men and peasants on the basis of their personal ownership of the means of production even if there exists some mystification in this. because undobutedly the greatest number of people in the socialist sector lives off someone else’s labor. The problem rises exactly in the social sector where we cannot resist the temptation, to put all our eggs in the same basket, even if life is mercilessly correcting us. So it is without doubt that in reality there is a division into workers and clerks because the latter do not life off the fruits of their work. have fixed salaries and do not strike. A division into several groups on the basis of income level is very useful because it simplifies the dynamics of society, but on the other hand it destroys the important rule of scientific classification because it interferes with the categories »of those who live or do not live from their own labor«.

All of these difficulties should not distract us from our attempts to form an operationally convenient framework of societal stratification. I am stressing that this is an ad hoc operational framework which means that it will not be theoretically flawless and we will gladly re-place it with a morę adequate one if we find it. The need is morę ur-gent because private interests, be they personal or group, are becom-ing the fundamental impetus of social movement, therefore we havc to pose the question of how this interest is constituted and what are its fundamental forms. According to our thinking this necessarily leads us to the class/interest stratification as a framework in which this movement is taking place. Without this kind of ideological framework which would demonstrate the interactions of fundamental group-ations of society’s forces any thorough discussion of our system and its functioning is almost impossible. This is also a necessary prc-con-dition for the understanding of the social conflict that surfaced during the student’s demonstrations. The conditions of existing group interest conflicts leads us to class stratification. On the other hand, being our society is in a process of tremendous changes and re-groupings, it is very difficult to delineate even the conditional framework for a con-cequential analysis of these conflicts. Starting from Lenin’s polarized model according to which: »classes are such groups of people where one group can usurp the results of another group’s work, thanks to the difference in positions that they take in a given economic system«, some of our theoreticians divide the whole socialist sector into the working class and a counter class in such a way that people who per-

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