Beyond all of this, however, there is the very important fact
that the full potential of workers’ participation goes far beyond an
improvement in the operation of particular firms. The im-
plementation of a coherent and mass oriented development
strategy requires the political wherewithal to curb the ability of
those interest groups who have preferential access to the decision-
making mechanism from entrenching and legalising their position
of privilege. It has been recognised by some leaders that in the
Tanzanian context this requires the raising of political con-
sciousness among the masses of both peasants and workers.
Workers' participation is seen as a means through which the
workers can come to play a progressive political role, thus con-
tributing to the establishment of socialism in Tanzania. Un-
fortunately this ambition has not on the whole been realised, a
failing which reflects on one hand the difficulty of relating such
general intentions to specific situations, and on the other hand the
seeming inability of the National Union of Tanganyika Workers
(NUTA) to re-define creatively its role in the context of Tanzania’s
quest for socialism.

The centralisation and state control of the trade unions which
followed independence harboured extreme dangers. The leader-
ship was at that time seeking to establish institutions which would
inhibit the centrifugal tendencies which naturally followed Uhuru,
and while there were some who were concerned with achieving
development on a broad front and who were aware of the im-
portance of participation, the institutions that were established
were hierarchical and concentrated power in the hands of petty
bourgeois bureaucrats. Hence control always took precedence over
participation and in the absence of the latter the spectre of a
parasitic bourgeoisie, entrenched and able to pursue its own in-
tercsts unopposed, became more and more real.

Thus although Tanzania has been, at times, remarkable in its
encouragement of internal criticism and dissent, that dissent has
too often been the purview of a few articulate ‘misfits’ among the
educated. As such it has been passive dissent; dissent without
teeth; dissent which has seemed always to rely on the hope that
the highest leadership might see fit to redress imbalances or to
right grievous wrongs. Though such dissent has an important
educative function in stimulating public debate it is not enough,
for there will be issues, and often the most crucial ones, on which

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