struction; they are the class whose interest it is to push through
socialist solutions to the economic development problem.
Similarly, in summing up his recent critique of Tanzanian socialist
experience, Shivji has quite specifically concluded (echoing Isaac
Deutscher) that ‘building socialism is the workers’ and not the
bureaucrats’ business.’4® In Tanzania, of course, the situation is
more ambiguous than within the model of advanced capitalism
which has underlain some of this theorising. While the workers
are less favourably placed than the elites, the best organised and
most articulate are still privileged as compared with much of the
peasantry, and a successful assertion of their demands for an in-
creased share of national surpluses could be at the expense of the
peasant group. Nonetheless, they do, as a class, have an objective
interest in the sort of coherent, mass-based, economic develop-
ment strategies which we have seen to be vital to progress, for
these strategies could be expected both to guarantee the
stabilisation and even betterment of their own employment op-
portunities. Moreover, such workers have good and immediate
reasons to be resentful of the authoritarian ‘Methods of work’
which can characterise bureaucratic structures in Tanzania and
which, from the point of view of the society as a whole, can
cumulatively choke off the full release of human energies
necessary for socialist development. Tanzanian workers, properly
plugged into the national development ef fort, thus remain a poten-
tially important building-block for socialist construction.

The Tanzanian government’s initial post-independence moves
via-a-vis the workers were more by way of disciplining and con-
trolling them than realising any release of their energies. The
results of establishing NUTA, and of attendant legislation in the
industrial relations field (however well justified by short-run con-
siderations) were in many ways to demobilise the workers. ‘¢ More
recently the tide has seemed to turn and, as already hinted, two
substantial initiatives have together begun to alter the workers’
role within the system. These are, first, the programme of
workers’ participation itself which has been already mentioned in
a previous section and, second, the implications of certain closely
related sections of Mwongozo.

The signal for workers participation in Tanzania was given in
Presidential Circular No. 1 of 1970, entitled ‘The Establishment of

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