It is necessary to raise the question of social classes and strata in connection with self-government as social planning. When we deal with the “working people” in general we run the risk of organizing reactionary forces. We have no instruments to deal with such forces if we are not allowed to see the “working people” as a stratified phenomenon. By not accepting the potential conflicts beforehand we make actual conflicts much more difficult to deal with when they actually surface.

Self-government, as presently conceived in Yugoslavia, is not selective in the above sense. It therefore is not a weapon of class struggle, but an instrument that may well dull and confuse it. Self-government organs harbor a great proportion of people who are not concerned with socialism, but with democracy. Socialism implies a different form and content of democracy, which by definition does not permit the generalization of freedom. Paradoxically, if one sharpens the issues of social stratification one appears to be limiting the basis of self-government. Actually, this basis must be limited if one is concerned with the development of socialist self-government.