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for workers« action that we knowtoday is nothing morę than a reserva-tion in which the workers like a by-gone class live under the illusion that, in managing themselves as a section of society, they are controlling the destiny of society as a whole. Present-day Self-management is not management of the entire society by the working class but me-rely Self-management of workers amongst themselves.«¹

The workers react in various ways in this situation. An increasingly freąuent reaction is the strike, as a traditional means of defending the workers’ interest. From 1958 to mid-1969- 1,732 strikes were regist-ered, which is in any case an indication that the workers could not al-ways settle those problems which affected their interests within the institution of the Self-management system. Until now those have been for them problems concerning tarifs or problems of a narrow status character within the bounds of the factory, so that their demands have not in fact had a bearing upon the wider social context. But outside a very limited social framework and context strikes constitute the most significant evidence of social conflicts which clearly indicate that Yu-goslav society is fundamentally a class society and that the working class is in search of roads leading to a fuli consciousness of itself.

What basie mechanisms led to such a situation? To demonstrate that the interests of the working class have not become the basie interests of the social system, but rather that those basie interests are in fact those of the bureaucratic structure, means in fact to speak of existing phenomena rather than of the elements which brought them about. The mechanisms of domination and manipulation by means of which the domination over the working class (in the name of the working class) maintains itself are numerous. If we leave to one side institutionalized mechanisms, it can be said that the domination of political centers of power projects itself in the absolute ideological and political monopoly of the Party apparatus, and that it maintains itself with the aid of a number of basie mechanismus of manipulation. Two of these will be mentioned here.

The first is based on the Stalinist conceptions of working people, of non-antagonistic contradictions in Socialism and of a society without conflicts. These ideas are at the basis of our thesis concerning the working man, or working people, or the nation of workers. Actual social contradictions conceal themselves morę or less successfully under the basis that we are all working people. Groups with differing interests may eventually emerge, it may be possible to speak even of pres-sure groups, but we are all basically in a similar social situation, as working people we are all of a similar social status. Certain working people, it is true, have villas in the country, while others subsist in subhuman conditions and follow the plough, but what is important is that we are all working people. Certain working people can spend summer holidays in Switzerland, and send their children to be educat-ed in English colleges, while others must exploit their children econ-omically in order to maintain their households, and the notion of summer holidays, for such people, does not exist in any form- but we

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1

Milan Mirić, ’Reservations’, p. 54. Razlog, Zagreb, 1970.