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cular interests (of a group or a stratum) to be proclaimed generał, and secure that the generał interest follows from the interest of the mem-bers of the society;

(4)    On the basis of the principle of equal social opportunity, socia-lism must make it possible for individuałs to choose vocations accord-ing to their ability and potential, and to create mechanisms that will eliminate the possibility of obtaining social positions and roles through ways other than personal merit;

(5)    Socialist society must create institutions which will be capable of gratifying the fundamental needs of members of the society, and which will constantly stimulate the development of human potentials (generic and individual) of the population;

(6)    Such a community must develop a characteristic system of inter-actions between indivduals in which they will engage as subjects of social actions, ceasing to be simply objects whose behavior is directed by privileged »political subjects«;

(7)    In order to make this possible, no organ of the societv in a socialist system must be given the opportunity to become independent; it must be forced by appropriate social measures to serve the members of the society (imperative mandate, developed institutions of public opinion, self-managing organs of social control; Marx also had in mind the imposition of restrictions on the materiał compensation of public functionaries in order to make these functions less attractive from the standpoint of materiał advantages).

To what degree are these ideas present in Yugoslav socialism?

2.

First of all, one ought to be aware of the fact that Yugoslav variant of socialism, which is defined as self-managing socialism, came to be under special circumstances. It differs from the first variant of socialism in that it was not created autochthonously, nor was it burdened solely by the lack of socio-economic development. Yugoslav socialism has developed under the pressure of dual heritage: (1) It has been determined by the belated process of transformation of an agricultural society into a modern industrial society (it may be stated that capital-ism reached northern parts of YugosIavia to any significant degree only in the 1930s, while in other areas the farming. patriarchal society was still predominant); (2) It has developed under the pressure of Stalinism¹ as a formed model which has suppressed the original ideas of socialism and imposed itself as the only possible perspective in an authoritarian manner. The consequences of the first determinant, his-torical backwardness, were similar to those produced everywhere in the

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1

I do not usc the term »Stalinism« to denote a purely philosophical theory. a yariant of Marxism, an ideology, or the -personality cult« as a typc of charismatic power, or, finally, to denote »dcformations« of socialism: rather, I usc it o ^cn0 ^ an established social system dcvcloped under Stalin which markcdly dii ers rom Marx’s vision of socialism with respect to its fundamental ideas.