SOCIALISM AND LIBERATION
509
ment in socialist societies, while trade unions in the former in actual
practice enjoy far more control than workers' councils in theory.
Lenin recognized the limited role of the trade unions in correcting
"the excesses and blunders resulting from the bureaucratic distortions
of the state apparatus," and this stand was of tremendous impor–
tance in that it provided a justification of the right of the workers
to strike in the so-called "workers' state"-to strike in all state en–
terprises. That this right was hedged in by all sorts of restrictions
and qualifications, that it was more honored in the breach than in
the observance, does not detract from its significance and its use as
a rallying cry in the present and future. It was this truncated right
which was lost under Stalin and in all Stalinist regimes.
It
was a
grievous loss, for the abolition of the right to strike means in effect
the existence of a system of forced labor with all its multiform
kinds of exploitation and aggression.
In Yugoslavia today a very limited kind of workers' control
through workers' councils operates in conjunction with a largely de–
centralized industry planned to meet the market needs of local regions.
This system came into existence more because of economic necessity
than . because of political virtue. And however limited the control,
Soviet critical reaction has not been less severe. What is interesting is
the theoretical justification of these institutional deviations from the
Soviet pattern expressed by Kardelj and other Yugoslav Communists
in grandiose ideological terms.
Kardelj, in his speech of December 7, 1956, before the Yugo–
slav People's Assembly, frankly accepts the theory of exceptionalism,
but he claims Yugoslavia to be exceptional in being most faithful to
the conceptions of Marx and Lenin. The development of socialist
industry, he asserts, must take place concomitantly with a progressive
democratization of all social relations. "Human beings should not in
a socialist system become the slaves of a state machine in the name
of any higher interests whatsoever." To achieve independence from
the state machine, the social and economic position of the worker
must be secured by strengthening the democratic control of the work–
ers in the factories and in their communities. Only in this way can
the state wither away in Marxist fashion instead of becoming an
a.Jl-devouring Frankenstein monster.
Kardelj makes some interesting distinctions, for example be-
