The hundreds of thousands of people who participated in the street demonstrations on Tuesday August 31, to celebrate the anniversary of the signing of the Gdansk Agreement in 1980 clearly showed the strength of Solidarnosc. General Jaruzelski and his police did not hesitate to kill five demonstrators.
However on Monday September 13, the date on which Poland entered the tenth month of the state of war, thousands of workers again took to the streets. At the Huta Lenina steelworks in Cracow - the biggest workplace in the country - the young workers formed a contingent at the factory gate to go to the town. In Wroclaw the militia were assailed from all sides by groups of demonstrators.
All this is witness to the desire of the masses to finish with the state of siege, the determination of the working class in its rejection of the bureaucratic military dictatorship, and the deep desire of the masses to reconquer the gains they won from August 1980.
The worsening of the economic situation can only increase the exasperation of a working class which, for eighteen months, denounced the parasitism of the bureaucracy and stated its wish and its ability to take affairs into its own hands. The 'normalisation' policy of the Military Council of National Salvation (WRON) has already led to a drop of thirty per cent in buying power. Everything indicates that this will continue.
The bureaucracy has proved that it has nothing to offer to workers, except bloody and brutal repression. The ZOMO (motorised police reserves) do not hesitate to shoot at point blank range on workers and the crowd, as they did at the mine at Wujek on Wednesday December 16, 1981, or at Lublin on August 31. Fierce new confrontations are looming on the horizon. Warsaw and Moscow are preparing themselves.
The regime is stepping up repression. More and more convictions are being handed down. For distributing leaflets, or participating in strikes or demonstrations, more than 2,000 militants have been sentenced to 4, 5, indeed 10 years in prison.
Thousands of workers have been sacked for having said no to the despotism of the bureaucrats by go-slows at work, supporting the demands of Solidarnosc, in showing their solidarity with their companions suffering the repression.
In the camps fenced with barbed wire the regime has begun to 'stop' militants - at the moment primarily those from the KOR (Social Self-Defence Committees) - and begin trials of them. The junta accuses them of conspiracy aiming to 'overthrow the government of people's Poland by force'.
Once more these attacks against Jacek Kuron, Adam Michnik, Jan Litynski, Henryk Wujek, and Jan Jozef Lipski show General Jaruzelski's wish to find scapegoats, and to do everything to divide the movement between the advisors of Solidarnosc, intellectuals and workers. In accusing Jacek Kuron and his comrades of 'terrorism' the bureaucracy is trying in vain to present them as provocateurs, responsible for the present repression and the maintenance of the state of war.
But the Polish workers have shown more than once that they have not been fooled by these manoeuvres. The leadership of Solidarnosc underground, the Provisional Commission for Coordination (TKK) has already declared, in taking up the struggle for liberty for the former members of KOR, "This measure opens the way for other show trials which aim to put trade union militants out of social life for long years. The KOR affair is only a beginning. Afterwards other internees will be called to appear before the tribunals under false accusations."
The Polish workers and Solidarnosc should find support that is as strong as their own determination within the international workers movement. For some months it has been proved that only the workers are prepared to actively help the struggle of the Polish workers and the underground trade union. What is surprising in this? Attacks on trade-union freedoms and the workers movement are the outcome of the bourgeoisie's policy of austerity. The only preoccupation of the bankers and their allies is that 'order' be definitively re-established to assure the payment of the interest due on the Polish debt.
The interests of Polish workers converge with those of workers throughout the world. But for a real solidarity campaign to exist it is necessary to build it, to break from routine. Those who limit themselves to declarations of good intent must be forced to act. We should denounce the hypocrisy of those who refuse to actively mobilise because they have in their heads a project of reconciliation between the Polish workers and the junta, aiming ultimately to make them accept the bureaucratic yoke.
The leaderships of the workers organisations are today put to the test: the breadth of the campaign against the intended trials of the KOR leaders and for the freeing of all political prisoners will give the measure of the desire to give resolute and unconditional support to the demands and struggles of millions of Polish workers.
In the workers movement revolutionaries must do everything to launch concrete solidarity initiatives, to win broad and united mobilisation against repression:
- Free Lech Walesa, Jacek Kuron and their comrades!
- Lift the state of war!
- Restore democratic and trade-union rights!
Bureau of the United Secretariat of the FOURTH INTERNATIONAL Friday, September 17, 1982.