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mocracy, and for the creation of centers of gravity upon the abohtion of hired labor. But it was not the class interests of the workers which obscured that pre-supposition, but rather the struggle of the bureau-cratic power center structures for their own position, as is best evid-enced by their readiness to link up with authentic nationalists.

The protagonists of this type of manipulation forget that it is not sufficient to be a member of one nation and also a fighter for Self-managing Socialism. They forget that the working class can be and is exploited within the framework of its own nation - as though they had never heard that the workers’ homeland is there where there is human freedom. They likewise forget that merely to have national freedom does not signify the possession of personal freedom, but that it can signify a freedom to be nationalistic. It is as though they had never heard the summons: »Proletarians of all countries, unitę!« Last-ly, and most appalling of all, they forget that national intolerance on this soil has always been a basis on which foreign powers have pur-sued their selfish ends, making use of our conflicts.

From the foregoing it seems to follow clearly enough that the peas-antry and the working class constitute an object of social domination and are subject to constant ideological, political, economic and cultur-al manipulation. There remains the question of who occupies the dominant position of power and who carries out the manipulation. When it is said that the political apparatus possesses an absolute monopoly and a dominant social position, this ąuestion is partly answered. Clos-er consideration would lead to the conclusion that that uniform struc-ture contains four sub-groups: the techno-bureaucratic structure in the economy and State administration, the political apparatus of the power centers, the financial oligarchy and the propaganda apparatus. These four sub-groups also at the same time comprise the fundamental nuc-leus of a social elite with which numerous intellectuals and managers also associate themselves. That »power elite« does not base itself upon the working class but on the petit-bourgeois middle classes. These strata consist of the intelligentsia, routine clerks, members of every type of apparatus of coercion and order, and partly of members of the independent professions.

That, existentially viewed, »care-free« category comprises the basie mass of League of Communist membership. In 1946 clerks comprised 10.3% of League of Communist members, but 39.1% in 1966. In 1958 they comprised 18.9% of newly reeruited members, but 29.3% in 1965, while the number of clerks expelled during the same period stagnated. 60% of people in managerial positions, 50% of all in re-gularly employed intellectual professions, and 40% of routine clerks are members of the League of Communists, while the percentage of these groups in the active population is 12.4%. Of 140 members of the Council of Nationalities in the Federal Assembly, 106 are directors and professional functionaries. Employees in the health and social ser-vices and in education have their own special Assembly Councils, while the Council of Producers has been abolished!

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