ultimate and most important revolutionary aspiration is to see man
freed from alienation’.3?

This is not however to say that the socialist countries of the
present day have wonderfully succeeded in translating these ob-
jectives into practice in their respective conditions. In fact I think
it is in this aspect of the socialist experience that these countries
— the European ones in particular — have failed most and nur-
tured the October Revolution have left an indelible mark on the
world revolution in the form of bureaucratic control and leader-
ship. It is this mark which today characterises the fundamental
contradiction of the Soviet and other socialist societies: the con-
tradiction between the non-capitalist mode of production achieved
and the bourgeois form of distribution which is a result of the
bourgeois form of management.3?

Vast social inequalities, the encouragement of competition bet-
ween workers, and the subsequent breakdown of class solidarity
became ‘socialist emulation’ in the Soviet Union. This is true also
in the case of the ‘people’s democracies’ where the ‘people’, at
least in the short run, cannot exert effectively their will upon the
bureaucratic machinery. Thus Lenin’s statement that the Soviet
Union was not simply a workers’ state but a workers’ state with
bureaucratic distortions unfortunately still remains true.®*

The ancestry of workers’ councils in the Eastern European
countries refers to the 1905 Russian Revolution when striking
workers in Ivanovo-Volnesenk entrusted the leadership of their
strike to an elected workers’ council. In St. Petersburg an overall
‘Soviet of Workers' Deputies’ was soon formed which from
economic bargaining turned to political organisation and agitation.
This became the prototype of the soldiers’ and workers’ councils
of 1917, the Soviets of Bolshevik Russia.

These became essentially political instruments for the
Revolution: ‘All Power to the Soviets’. Later they were turned into
managerial devices when they acquired complete control of all en-
terprises. Later still, they were transformed into trade union bran-
ches. With the development of the bureaucratic system in the
Soviet Union, these soviets soon again became a part of the
‘troika’: plant director, party cell secretary, and secretary of the
trade union branch. Finally, in 1922, they were abolished com-
pletely.3®

It is Yugoslavia which is best known, both in the West and in

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