834707504

them through spontaneous actions. Attempts to stop such spontaneous movements by labeling them as antisocialist, due to the fact that they are taking place outside of the »institutionalized forms of self-manag-ement«. is an example of political sophism. There is no attempt to prove the major premise, i. e. that there indeed are institutionalized forms of self-management which permit and encourage the expression of these spontaneous movements’ demands.²⁸ Simultaneously, the meet-ings within work organizations, which are the most authentic form of self-management, are denied the right to make political decisions, by dealing with problems through professional channels. In this way, circulus viliosus turns out to be the best method of maintaining the status quo, i. e. of preserving the privileged position of politics and of those who are engaged in it. It is believed that bureaucracy is the inevitable consequence of alienation of politics and of the existence of the State as a political power, rather than of the distorted psychology of political power, rather than of the distorted psychology of political functionaries. However, except for verbal claims that this is so, there are no proofs for this statement - especially proofs strong enough to justify the far-reaching conclusions that are derived from it, above all the one concerned with the withering away of the State as a political power.

For this reason, conditions have not been created in Yugoslav soc-iety to compel »society’s clerks« to serve the people. (Imperative man-date has been replaced by »rotation« of functionaries: governmental functions and the position of functionaries do not depend on the will of the people, but on the hierarchical structure of power. Therefore, the criterion of their activity is not service in the generał interest, but rather loyalty to higher functionaries). In fact, it may be said that the situation is reverse: the holders of political power have at their dis-posal all the means to force the people to serve them.

The political power of the State and party mechanism is a condens-ed version of their economic power, of their role of arbiters in all social activities: it is the power to superimpose the official ideology over all other ideologies and to control them: the power to set all organs of the State in motion againsl disloyal citizens and groups. In other words, by utilizing classical means for taking over the mono-poly of social power, socialist State to an increasing degree performs the functions of the classical State, even when it is not based on ab-solute centralistic power as the Stalinist theory of the strengthening of the State would have it.

Such a social climate favors »escape from freedom« - not only in the case of individuals belonging to social strata which are objectively

^M The least part of cvaluations of such spontaneous movemcnts has been devot-ed to the analysis of the participants motivcs, and of the objcctivcs they were trying to reach. The main argument against them has been the fact that they took place outside of the existing organizations. and that they were not organized by such organizations. The ability of the managements of the existing organizations, and of the organizations themselves, to exprcss the revolutionary tendcncies of the present time is usually not questioned.

417