ABSTRACT
However, I have great sympathy with the point well made by Ivan Szelenyi: the ordinary worker is all too readily disregarded, in a hierarchical system such as exists in Eastern Europe, and it is a most important object of policy to create the institutional basis for realistic and effective ways of increasing their influence and their rights. In this respect as in so many others, le mieux est l’ennemi du bien; by aiming for an unattainable ‘workers’ power’, by indulging (in Szelenyi’s words) in ‘dreams of general emancipation’, one fails to devise means by which workers can in fact exercise their power as consumers and as producers, means which are inevitably limited by practical possibility. These ideas I shall develop later in this book.
