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social system, and that category of society which had the greatest influence upon the overall social processes in Yugoslav society. Accord-ing to the 1961 census, 2,464,000 or 30% of the active population were workers, while in 1967 the figurę was 2,512,000 or 31%. Only the peasantry represented a numerically larger social groupation. Thus the working class according to its numbers could have represented the basie motive power in social development. But what in fact happened? Workers’ Self-management was imprisoned within the walls of fac-tories, businesses and institutions and within those frameworks it was divided into working sections and economic units and in that manner hyperinstitutionalised, which turned the real influence of the institutions themselves into a formal one. The organs of Self-management were in fact weighed down by the techno-bureuacratic structure, which did not look for the mainstay of its influence, and thence of its power, among the workers whose interests it served, but through its connections with the structures of political power outside the enter-prises. This shows up especially when the techno-bureaucratic structure of an enterprise looks for excuses for its failures or behaves arbit-rarily towards workers. When, for example, the organization of work is bad or a production programme does not succeed, that structure will blame Self-management (the decisions of the organs of Self-management); conversely for the results of faulty workmanship the worker is responsible and no one would think of blaming the Workers’ Coun-cil. For we must not forget the fact that one fifth of those employed in this country (about 700,000 people) occupy posts for which they are not qualified. Among them are obviously a large number of workers who are not sufficiently ąualified for the posts they occupy, but the incompetence of the bureaucratic structure has become almost prover-bial. And bureaucratic structure often hides behind the decisions of the organs of Self-management.

The development and stagnation of Self-management was not paralleled by a widening of the influence of the working class on the overall piane. If we bear in mind that the Party structures have a political monopoly in society, then workers’ membership of the League of Communists can be used as a relatively reliable indicator for this assertion. Only 13.4% of workers are members of the League of Communists, while of government administration that percentage is as high as 80.2. The number of workers accepted into the League of Communists was on the inerease until 1959 when it stood at 43%, falling thereafter until in 1966 it was 30.1% of newly reeruited members. On the other hand the expulsion of workers from the League of Communists has grown, rising from 24.5% in 1951 to 57.1% in 1965. Finally, workers are the most numerous group which of its own free > will resigns from the League of Communists. In Croatia alone during 1969 and 1970, of 20,500 members to leave the League of Communists. 9,922 or 48,3% were workers. In the course of two decades (1946-1966) the number of workers in the League of Communists inereased five times, the number of white-collar workers fifteen times, while membership as a whole inereased four times. Workers constitute a proportionately smali part of local, nothing of central, committees.

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