GABOR TAMAS RITTERSPORN ture; to determine to what extent their aspirations and activities form any part of the political fonctions inherent in the system which are discharged by the social stratum in which they are rccruitcd, and to what extent these aspirations and activities go beyond these fonctions; it also seeks to describe the problems one of the most visible symptoms of which is the appearance of the dissident movement. By definition the dissidents are not recruited from amongst those people who monopolise effective control of all public activities in Soviet society. The interest of these people in direct participation in the taking of politica.l decisions at all levels is the imperturbable reproduction of the social and political system as the institutional framework and objective condition of their dominating, controlling and privileged position. Their activity as leaders and responsible managers of Party agencies, administrative and economic institutions and the most important research, teaching and cultural establishments, leads to the maintenance of their monopoly of decisionmaking and to the adaptation of the rest of society to the exigencies implicit in the maintenance of this monopoly. They have no need of a fixed social group from which to recruit themselves since their controlling fonction is almost completely embodied in the command-structure of the State apparatus: they rule society « ex officio ». They are a ruling class par excellence whose directive role and unity of interests are assured by the command-structure objectively present in the hierarchically integrated system of planning and orientation of all public activities in the USSR. The rules of conduct and the ideology of this system are conditioned by the need for its imperturbable self-reproduction. Its unity of organisation and action are guaranteed by the structural and functional cohesion of all the agencies and institutions of the State apparatus as well as by its ineluctable opposition to the rest of society. Scientists, writers, teachers, artists, engineers, technicians or aspirants to such careers, the vast majority of known dissidents belong, or aspire to belong, to a stratum of Soviet society whose members - specialists, experts and administrative and technical employees - owe their real or virtual position in society to their professional activity. This activity, by its contribution to the management and the organisational and to the formulation and development of its dominant ideology, objectively puts its executants at the service of the fondamental in30
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