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ing class is at the »periphery of economic and political processes in the society«, due to its economic and social position. This makes it impossible for the working class to »anticipate a positive change of the present situation«; nor is it likely that the workers will »alter their

social status within these processes«.²⁶

Ali this demonstrates the absence of true social control over politics. Politics appears to be outside of the existing »self-managing« institu-tions in Yugoslav society and it is constituted independently of these institutions. Workers’ and social self-management is enclosed within the practical, particularly economic, sphere, and is thus not defined as a way along which the State as a political power will wither away. On the other hand, politics that is confined to itself, and independent of the will of the people, tends to impose itself upon all other activit-ies - which is madę possible for it by the system. Politics infiltrates into all other activities through the election of the representatives of the party and the State to the organs of social management - as »re-presentatives of the society«. In this way, »self-management« in or-ganizations outside of industry actually secures the influence of »poli-ticians« on the decisions madę in self-managing cells, whereas the exact opposite should be the case. I have elsewhere²⁷ termed this phe-nomenon as ideologization (or politization) of social activities: politics, an alienated force, imposes itself as the single creator of generał social objectives and as such has a decisive influence in all other social spheres, instead of being »dissolved« in »social politics« in the creat-ion of which the maximum number of members of the society should participate.

This is why the system appears to be its own purpose; there is an insistence on the »preservation of the order« (social formation), sińce politics as an alienated force must have a foothold in a petrified system. Question is not asked as to whether the system contributes to the achievement of the goals for which it had been built. Above all the tendency is to perpetuate the power and the system.

As an antipode to politics as an alienated force which merely strives to preserve the system, »social politics« has its source in the socialist movement and consciously transforms the system into a transitory tool for the realization of socialist objectives, reexamining continually the elements of the system as well as the system as a whole with res-pect to the objectives - not the reverse. When this is not the case, there is a conflict between the forces which act in the name of »law and order« (organs of the State), failing to answer questions concerned with the realization of »defined« goals, and those which do not belong to centers of political power, but demand - in the name of socialist objectives — a reexamination of policies which lead to the closing of the system into itself and to its transformation into its own goal. These orces attempt to reclaim the rights which have been alienated from

²® D. Popov, Op. cit., pp. 619 and 627.

²⁷ See the present author*s report at the 1970 sociologists* conference »Dva vida otudenja u kulturi u socijalizmu i njihov medusobni odnoś* (Two forms of cul-tural alienation in socialism and their interrelation). Published in the materials of the conference.

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