THE DISSIDENT MOVEMENT IN U.S.S.R. terests of the ruling class. Although they do not participate directly in political decisions, they belong to the State apparatus by discharging responsible fonctions as experts, specialists, administrators and technicians, and by maintaining and developing it guarantee their often relatively privileged social positions as well as their opportunities of advancement within their professional hierarchies, and sometimes beyond. As subordinate officiais of the State apparatus whose social fonctions is the service of the ruling class's monopoly of decision-making ( 1), they display no unity of organisation or action against it. Their interest in the imperturbable reproduction of the social and political system, however, gives them a common cause vis-à-vis the masses who are inevitably disadvantaged by reproduction of this monopoly. So long as their fonctional integrations into the State apparatus stops them organising themselves as a social and political stratum which can advance its particular interests against those who control the apparatus, their fondamental community of interest with these latter makes them a middle class with regard to the social stratum whose members discharge no controlling or responsible fonction and only serve as a mean for the reproduction of the social and political system. From the point of view of the ruling class the middle class is composed of superior, subordinate and juxtaposed layers in accod:1ace with the fonctional structure of the administrative and professional hierarchies of which they form a part, these layers acting as intermediaries between the ruling class and the masses. Entrusted with the application, the improvement and the popularisation of industrial, agricultural and administrative techniques and of economic, social, scientific, cultural and politica! institutions which perpetuate the ruling class's monopolv of decision-making, these layers are not supposed to parncipate directly and actively in the political decisions concerning the strategies of the use and development of these techuiques and institutions. But their exclusion from the making of strategically important political decisions seems justified by the potential threat that the defence and uncontrolled rivalry of their particular professional and institutional inte- (1) «Official» soviet writers or artists, members of the Writers' Union or the various artists' unions, are also functionaries in the State apparatus, and hence entrusted with the reproduction, popularisation and development of certain aspects of the dominant ideology. 31
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