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are all working people. One working man can have a salary twenty times greater than another’s but what matters is that both are working people. This thesis about working people is a mystification of the class and repressive role of the State, for it creates the illusion that we all have an equal chance to participate in and share common tasks. Thus we have a State which pretends not to wield State-power, because al-legedly it surrenders its functions to the mechanisms of Self-manag-ement agreements. Those responsible for this mechanism of manipula-tion which obscures the true role of the State include not only the centers of political power but also numerous Yugoslav intellectuals who in their public activities help to broadcast this obscurantist thesis.

The second mechanism of mystification projects itself in the at-tempt to reinstate the idea of ethnic unity as the basie rallying point for all classes of a single nation and in that manner to make extrem-ely diverse class interests seem fundamentally the same. If, for examp-le, a Serb exploits a Serb, the fact of exploitation is not important: they are eąual because they belong to the same-nation. One’s national identity becomes morę significant than one’s class identity. If, for example, both the Croatian and the Serbian bourgeoisie exploit the Croatian working class, that is a national problem which will be solv-ed as soon as the Croatian bourgeoisie alone exploits the Croatian working class. The struggle against every exploitation become insigni-ficant beside the problem of rallying the nation with the object of uniting on the national level the interests of workers, of the techno-bureaucratic structure, of the political apparatus and of the financial oligarchy. In this way - and this is one of the fundamental objectives of this type of mystification - the techno-bureaucratic structure, the political apparatus and the financial oligarchy are offered an excel-lent chance of prescrving their class interests behind the smokescreen of national unity. Instead of solving genuine social problems arising from the development of society, those structures offer national myths and symbols, national institutions and linguistic variations as the ir-rational basis of the system, that is of social activity within the frame-work of the system. Mere personal freedom becomes inessential beside national equality, which usally means the equality of national centers of social power.

The expansion of this form of manipulation resulted in a close co-operation between the national bureaucracies in the republics, which previously had most frequently a sectarian attitude towards the national question and those middle strata, not yet sufficiently strongly constituted, to whom nationalism in this various manifestations, in-cluding even clerical nationalism, was the true banner. In that bloc a particularly dark role was played by isolated groups of nationalistic-ally orientated intellectuals. Those groups nowhere gave clearer ex-pression of their membership of middle class strata or of their employ-ment by the social elite than in the expansion of this mystification.

Naturally, no one can assert that the political solution of the national problem arrived at during the creation of the new Yugoslavia was a definitive one. That solution was merely a presupposition for the creation of genuine personal freedom, of national equality and de-

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