ABSTRACT
This chapter sketches the theoretical framework and adequate for the description of the routine, everyday power structure of socialist society, as it matured historically in eastern and central Europe. Socialistic and communistic standards which, though by no means unambiguous in themselves, always involve elements of social justice and equality, form only one group among the indefinite plurality of possible points of view. Accounts of social inequality have, in fact, been limited to the problem of stratification rather than class structure. The chapter considers the two power structures: officialdom and class. Officialdom as a social body tends to encompass, exactly in the manner of market generated class structure, the whole of society and to grant each individual his proper official category. In the 'everyday' divergence of interests and correlated dissent, which is a consequence of the irremovable duality of power structures, one can see the roots of the survival ability of the eastern-European type socialist society.
