managements if they are given such a leading role in the councils.
In Yugoslavia, to take a different example, not only are workers
supposed to assume this role, but it is also stipulated that a
specified percentage of the council's members must be workers ac-
tually involved in production directly. This seems to be par-
ticularly good idea in situations like ours where paternalism still
plays a part in allocating positions.

The tendency of electing the heads of institutions into top party
positions in the respective institutions for example, can be ex-
plained partly by the obvious enstrangement of the institutions
from the workers, partly may be by the anxiety of those on top to
ensure they control all possible decision-making positions, and
partly by the workers’ endeavours to win the favours of their
bosses. At the Friendship Textile Mill, the party branch chair-
manship has until recently remained in the hands of the General
Managers who succeded one another. The same is true of the
University and other institutions and ministries. It is unlikely
therefore that the leadership of these councils will somehow slip
into the hands of the workers just like that.

Apart from the fact that management dominates them, the
councils will not be in a position to combat bureaucratism in any
case because their function is merely to advise the management.
The range of topics they are supposed to deliberate on is truly
wide, covering such things as wages and incomes policies,
marketing, productivity, planning and general organisational and
technical problems. But on all these the councils are merely asked
to advise the management.

The management consists principally of the usual capitalist
‘boards of directors’ — organs which have no worker represen-
tation of course, and whose membership consists of mainly in-
dividuals without any connection with the enterprise. Under a true
bourgeois system, these are the organs of the shareholders whose
only interest in the business is profit. It is unfortunate that they
have been allowed to continue unaltered even in this supposedly
new scheme of management. They still function under typically
capitalist norms, keeping secret from the workers all their
deliberations. Now you have an additional organ, however, the
executive committee which from the look of things will be a small
committee with advisory powers on the manager.

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