The Polish shipyard workers who struck against speedup threats and savage boosts in food prices have been subjected to a brutal repression by a bureaucracy with its back to the wall. Gomulka has forgotten all about his solemn promises at the Ninth Plenum of the Polish Communist party Central Committee in November 1956, where he affirmed the right to strike and refuted the slanders about "hooligans" being to blame for the "interruptions in work" and "riots." Now he is making the same sort of accusations against the Polish workers that he previously denounced.
By talking this line, Gomulka is implicitly admitting the falseness of the reactionary argument advanced in 1968 that the only ones unhappy with his regime were a small handful of students and "Zionists." It is the toiling masses, above all the working class and the young workers, who are in the forefront of the struggle to establish a democratic socialist system on the foundation of the socialized economy, a system in which the workers themselves would be the masters of the economy and the state and would eliminate the pilfering and waste engendered by an inept, privileged, and narrow-minded bureaucracy.
The fact that the demonstrators in Gdansk, Gdynia, and Szczecin sang the "Internationale" and that the police and army repressed such a demonstration with the greatest brutality is eloquent testimony to the gap that has opened up between the Polish working masses and the bureaucratic dictatorship.
The Fourth International declares its complete solidarity with the Polish intellectuals, students, and workers, who are struggling to achieve an antibureaucratic political revolution that would consolidate the foundations of socialism in Poland, the foundations being increasingly undermined by the bureaucracy.
The Fourth International denounce[s] the ignoble repression against the workers, and the bankruptcy of a regime that dares call itself "Communist" and orders its forces to fire on strikers and demonstrating workers and students. In this way, the Warsaw government is offering the best service to the murderer Franco, who can now use the crimes of the Polish bureaucracy as a cover for his own.
The Fourth International calls on all communists to struggle for a return to soviet democracy, to the democracy of workers' councils in the USSR and East Europe, as the sole means of overcoming the way Stalin and his successors have so terribly discredited communism.
The Fourth International calls on all revolutionary activists throughout the world to demonstrate their solidarity with the struggling Polish workers—but without mixing up their banners with those of the anti-Communists and capitalists, with those of the justifiers of the aggression against the Vietnamese people and repression against all the victims of imperialism.