ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the institutions of citizen participation in the democratic republic against the background of economic and social modernization and that of the official ideological treatment of the problem of socialist democracy. It attempts to answer the question of the relationship of existing participatory practices to the changing character of communist societies and the image of utopia. DDR social statistics combine blue-collar with white-collar employees and treat the collectivized peasantry as an allied, nonantagonistic class whose ideological status is nearly equal to that of the working class proper. One may quarrel with the official theory on several counts; the most serious is the uncritical assumption that party rule is proletarian rule, and degenerate into self-perpetuating oligarchy, that the official ideology will always be a sort of general will expressing the true interests of workers and citizens.
