I
Since the end of November 1980, changes have occurred in the situation in Poland caused by the tremendous rise in workers militancy, their independent organization beginning in July-August, and the important victories gained by the working class as a result of the Szczecin, Gdansk, and Katowice agreements. These changes can be summarized by four points.
1. The radicalization of the working class continues, especially among the young workers and the workers in large enterprises.
Despite heavy government and media pressure, Solidarity's January 24, 1981 appeal to stop work was a big success. This was called in order to force implementation of the August agreement that recognized the five-day workweek. Eighty percent of the workers in big factories remained at home.
The workers have gone further than the August agreements, carrying out direct action for the legal recognition of Rural Solidarity. In Rzeszow, they went on strike in support of their small-farmer allies.
The workers have moved to more radical forms of action, such as the occupation of public offices, in order to obtain the dismissal of corrupt and incompetent local and regional state and party officials, including a minister and a former regional party secretary. In the southwest of the country (the Bielsko-Biala region), around Jelemia Gora, a strike having this aim broke out. Factory managers have been dismissed by the workers.
The bureaucracy's provocations, such as its refusal to give the independent trade unions access to the mass media or attempts to censure Solidarity's press organs, are beginning to meet with militant resistance: four-hour strikes in Lodz and Bialystok on January 27, militant actions in Wroclaw, and strikes in Szczecin that prevented all the official media from appearing.
All these movements objectively express the incompatibility between the workers' massive independent organization and the tendency towards self-management on the one hand, and the bureaucracy's monopoly of political power on the other hand, as well as the growing consciousness of this incompatibility by larger and larger sectors of the working class.
The mass movement is on an upswing. On the whole, all the workers' struggles continue to be victorious, even though some partial compromises have had to be made.
2. Simultaneously, the Kania leadership of the bureaucracy, pushed on by the Kremlin and its bureaucratic allies in Eastern Europe, started a concerted counteroffensive.
For the first time since the August agreements, the militia intervened against the workers in Nowy Sacz and Ustrzyki Dolne, driving them out of occupied build ings. The implementation of some key points in the August agreements (the abolition of censorship, the access of Solidarity to the mass media) is being denied or postponed.
There has been no recognition of Rural Solidarity—the powerful expression of a workers and farmers alliance—especially in the region populated by poor farmers and the rural semiproletariat, as in southeast Poland around Rzeszow.
The prosecutor general has threatened editors and collaborators of publications that appear without being censored with legal action and arrest. There have even been threats to declare a state of emergency. The Kremlin openly challenges the Polish workers' major gain—the right to strike.
While the bureaucracy's provocations undoubtedly accelerate the radicalization of large sectors of the independent workers organizations, they have a clear strategic purpose.
With the full support of the Church hierarchy, and many neo-ZNAK "reformist" Warsaw intellectuals who act as "advisers" for Solidarity, the Kania wing of the bureaucracy tries to demoralize the workers by making it appear that the independent trade unions cannot get any economic, material advantages for them. The bureaucracy does not hesitate to openly use economic sabotage to attain that goal.
The Kania current tries to divide Solidarity into a radical wing and a more moderate wing, supporting some regional leaders of the independent trade unions. It tries to apply the classical "salami" tactic: first isolating the most radical leaders and advisers of Solidarity; then eliminating them, so it can go on to a more widespread attack against the organization as a whole, once the movement is in retreat and larger sectors of the masses are disoriented and demoralized.
3. A process of widespread differentiation has begun inside Solidarity. This is partly a result of the internal logic of the objective situation in Poland, and partly a result of the beginning of a counter-offensive by the bureaucracy. But it is also an inevitable product of the initial lack of political clarity and clearly conceived and stated medium- and long-term programatic goals inside Solidarity, (in contrast to immediate demands, on which there was full clarity and broad unity).
A more radical left wing has appeared among local and regional cadres and leaders, while a wing more openly ready to collaborate with the bureaucracy has appeared at the opposite pole. In between there are many intermediary positions vacillating between these different cur rents, which are best exemplified by Lech Walesa.
In spite of his immense popularity and authority, rightly gained by the extraordinary determination he showed in the August-September period, Walesa is now starting to waver under the contradictory pressure of the Catholic Church hierarchy and the "liberal" wing of the bureaucracy on the one hand, and the growing pressure of a more and more militant rank and file—not only in Gdansk, but also in Warsaw, Szczecin, Bydgoszcz, Wroclaw, and other regions—on the other hand. I The lack of any centralized, or nationally circulated news on what is happening in the factories and in the unions, is also another objective factor accounting for this differentiation.
4. Lastly, the tremendous rise of workers' self-confidence, independent organization, and desire for workers democracy has begun to have deep repercussions inside the Communist Party (the Polish United Workers Party—PUWP). This was inevitable, given the size of the workers' upsurge and the size of the PUWP itself. This is a key change that has taken place in the situation.
While the different wings of the bureaucracy obviously pursue the same goals of safeguarding the bureaucracy's monopoly of power, powerful rank-and-file tendencies have appeared inside the PUWP which are fighting, not only for a total reorientation of the CP's policies, but also for a democratization of the party. The focal point of this tendency is the struggle for a special party congress, for which local activists have already started to elect delegates on a democratic basis, despite the explicit instructions of the Central Committee. This has taken place in cities such as Lodz, Poznan, Torun, and others.
The most left-wing tendencies inside Solidarity are made up of a significant number of PUWP oppositionists. This growing rank-and-file pressure inside the CP will inevitably give rise to a new deepening of the differentiations inside the bureaucracy. But at present, no central figure and no wing of the top bureaucracy supports the radical demands of the workers or those of the left-wing oppositionists inside the PUWP. The Polish bureaucracy, and especially Moscow, must assure at all costs that the coming PUWP congress opens the process of "normalization" inside the PUWP as well.
II
The plans of the Kania-led CP bureaucracy are presently supported by the Catholic Church hierarchy, a sector of the reformist intellectuals, and the wing of Solidarity's leadership that they influence. This is a powerful convergence of forces, whose possibility of influencing large sectors of the toiling masses should not be underestimated. These plans are essentially based on two arguments, which are repeated again and again by all the mass media and are also expressed inside the independent trade union movement by conciliationist forces.
These arguments are: the material impossibility of granting economic concessions to the workers and farmers, given the sad state of the Polish economy; and the impossibility of granting any more political concessions to the workers other than the legal recognition of Solidarity, without provoking a military intervention by the Kremlin. Therefore, it is necessary to stop strikes and militant actions and replace them by eternal negotiations and more and more rotten compromises.
The aim of these arguments is to divide and demoralize the workers, to show them that all future struggles will come to nothing, and could even lead to the gains of August 1980 being taken back one by one.
In spite of their apparent "common sense" character, these arguments are utterly unfounded and can be easily refuted. It is simply not true that there is no material basis for a considerable improvement in the workers' living and working conditions.
The best example of the barefaced lies the bureaucrats are spreading is the argument that granting a five-day workweek would automatically entail a 10 percent reduction in production. This is totally refuted by concrete investigations conducted by workers in many workplaces, which have shown in facts and figures that any loss in output through a reduction in working hours can be more than offset by eliminating bureaucratic mismanagement of the economy.
For example: by stopping the discontinuity in the flow of raw materials and energy, which means that many machines remain idle part of the week; by stopping bureaucratic waste and theft, which means that a significant part of the actual output does not reach normal distribution within the framework of the planned economy; and correcting the unbelievable disorder, and lack of proportion and equilibrium within Polish "planning," which could be better characterized as "non-planning."
If the bureaucracy refuses to recognize these obvious facts, let them "open the hooks" of the national economy to Solidarity and to the entire working class! Let the Polish workers and small farmers extend workers control on a national level! Let Solidarity work out and present before the mass media an economic counterplan that concretely shows how it is possible to assure better living and working conditions for the masses without any reduction in production.
It is not true that an increasing "moderation" of Solidarity's leadership and a gradual abandonment of all democratic demands and all demands for radical change with respect to economic management, will be a sufficient deterrent to military intervention by the Kremlin. This argument would only hold up if the objective factor of the rise and massive radicalization of 10 million Polish workers is disregarded.
And no moderation, even that of a "skillful" tactician, is going to stop the workers on the road towards gaining complete control over their economic, social, and political conditions.
For this reason, whether such an intervention actually occurs or not, and at what moment it occurs, depends upon the Soviet bureaucracy's judgement of the advantages and disadvantages of such an intervention from the viewpoint of defense of the conservative bureaucratic caste's power and privileges. That judgement is strongly influenced by the evolution of the relationship of forces inside Poland, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union itself, and on a world scale.
Everything that weakens the unity and cohesiveness of the Polish proletariat, even without sucessfully breaking its basic militancy, can only objectively favor a military intervention by the Kremlin, as it would reduce the price the Kremlin would have to pay for it.
A policy of "moderation" and conciliation by the trade union leadership, which in and of itself cannot halt the upsurge of the Polish masses, would have the precise effect of disorienting and demoralizing one sector of the proletariat, even though other sectors would continue to radicalize. Let us not forget that in Czechoslovakia, the Dubcek leadership followed a similar policy of "moderation" and this did not at all prevent the Kremlin from intervening militarily.
Conversely, everything that increases the unity, cohesiveness, and determination of the free trade unions as a whole, can only convince the Kremlin that in case of military intervention, every Polish factory will become a center of resistance.
Guns can achieve many things. But they cannot force 12 million workers who refuse to do so, to collaborate with a hated management or to work harder—except by resorting to extreme terror and a bloodbath on a scale which the Kremlin did not even dare to carry out in Hungary in 1956, not to mention Czechoslovakia in 1968.
So a resolute defense of workers' interests, a resolute struggle for the full implementation of the August agreements, and for a national program of workers control, and the strengthening of the workerfarmer alliance is a powerful, although by no means sufficient, deterrent to military intervention.
A strong worker-farmer alliance— through the legalization of Rural Solidarity and "farmers self-management"—could lead to a solution of the food crisis. Today, this means that while defending the small farmers' right to own their own farms, they will begin to understand and implement the advantages of free cooperation and collective ownership of tractors and other modern agricultural implements, because "self-management" on one-hectare farms just doesn't make sense. In any case, this could be a much more powerful weapon than an unprincipled policy of conciliation.
It is worth noting that up to now, Kania's line has not been able to stop the growth of workers' struggles, nor prevent them from being victorious. So, his credibility in the eyes of the bureaucracy and the Kremlin is quickly eroding, as is the credibility of the "conciliationist" elements within Solidarity.
In this context, the forces within the Polish and Soviet bureaucracies who favor open repression (like the Olszowski-Grabski wing in the PUWP), who are conscious that a situation of dual power is beginning to spontaneously develop in the country, can only grow stronger.
III
It must be stressed that world imperialism and the international bourgeoisie have significantly changed their attitude towards the social and political struggles unfolding in Poland.
For revolutionary Marxists, it was clear from the beginning that imperialism feared the tremendous upsurge of militancy and independent organization by the Polish working class, which is as explosive for the capitalist system as for the bureaucratic dictatorships. The example of the Polish workers can easily inspire workers in Western Europe and elsewhere, as it can inspire and serve as an example to workers in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China.
While at the beginning, imperialism covered up for this fear by making verbal declarations of sympathy with the Polish workers and used their justified fear of military intervention by the Kremlin to step up its anticommunist hysteria as a justification for an intensified arms race, things radically changed when the five-day workweek became a central issue in the struggle in Poland.
This change in attitude came about not only because the struggle for a shorter workweek is today the central focus for workers defending themselves against the onslaught of the capitialists and their governments throughout the world (especially the struggle for a thirty-five-hour workweek in Western Europe), but above all because the Polish bureaucracy owes Western banks some 20 billion dollars.
The bankers and the International Monetary Fund, anxious about their "assets," exercise a growing pressure upon the Polish bureaucracy to take all "necessary measures to be sure the goods are delivered," i.e. imposing austerity measures upon the Polish working class instead of granting it new economic concessions.
This was confirmed quite openly by a January 10-11, 1981 International Herald Tribune editorial and by an article written by a key economist in the January 25-26, 1981 French daily Le Monde, which preached "moderation" for the Solidarity leadership, exactly as did the pope, the Polish Catholic hierarchy, the Kania wing of the Polish bureaucracy, and the Kremlin. They urged them to abandon the "unrealistic" goal of immediate implementation of the five-day week. The Soviet news agency Tass also approvingly quoted the conservative statements made by French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing on the events in Poland.
This is an additional reason why the international working class, its trade unions, and especially the CP-led unions in Italy, France, Spain, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere, must give full and unconditional support to the Polish workers' just demands for a forty-hour week. This is also further reason why Solidarity should make seeking fraternal solidarity from these unions and their members a priority. This in turn would create additional embarrassment for the Kremlin if it decided to launch a counterrevolutionary intervention.
It should be noted in this context, that most of the CP's throughout the world— from the Hungarian to the Cuban, from the Italian and French to the Mexican and Brazilian—have aligned themselves with the Kremlin-inspired Kania line of trying to break the workers' upsurge by rallying together all the conservative forces inside Poland.
All these CP's characterize large sectors of Solidarity as "antisocialist" and "counterrevolutionary." This politically prepares the ground for military intervention by the Kremlin. It is for this reason also that audacious initiatives and appeals for solidarity with the Polish workers, directed towards CP-led unions inside and outside the workers states, are so urgent.
IV
One of the key weaknesses of Solidarity and its active membership is the fact that, while their enemies know what they want and apply a consciously worked out and deliberate strategy to get it, the militant workers, the radicalized young workers, the radical left among the intellectuals, and the Solidarity leaders, as well as the left oppositionists inside the PUWP, still operate in a dispersed manner. They have . no common, overall program and no clear understanding of the way to politically advance in order to get the support of the overwhelming majority of the workers and poor farmers in the coming, unavoidable confrontation.
There are many reasons for these weaknesses:
• The newness of the movement and the relatively short period of the upsurge, which has not yet allowed for a new, nationally recognized leadership emerge;
• The regional structure of the movement, which is not compensated by democratically elected, national union structures;
• The ideological confusion created by decades of large-scale depolitization, Stalinist miseducation, and the deep influence of the Church;
• The reactionary role of the powerful Catholic hierarchy, which thanks to the Stalinists, has the prestige of having been the only semi-legal oppositional force for twenty-five years;
• The programmatic confusion that exists among many of Solidarity's radical cadres and among the left wing in general; and
• The absence of a strong, national, democratically centralized structure of the free trade unions which, in the best of cases, will appear only after their first national convention.
In the meantime, the movement must face the onslaught of a well-knit national, bureaucratic apparatus, albeit divided and increasingly unsure of the line to follow.
We believe that at this stage of the movement, these obstacles can still be overcome. But the longer the delay in taking the minimum steps necessary to achieve these goals, the harder it will become to achieve them.
The most important minimum measures to meet the onslaught of all the conservative forces head-on are:
1. Let the central idea of "solidarity" be fully implemented: one for all, all for one! No discrimination, no repression, no exclusion, no administrative dismissal of any cadres of Solidarity! United, 10 million Polish workers can successfully oppose Kania's "salami" tactics. They must be convinced that the campaign against Jacek Kuron and Adam Michnik and the campaign against the Gdansk, Warsaw, Szczecin, Katowice, Lodz, Torun, Bydgoszcz, and Radom radicals is a campaign, which if successful, will be the beginning of an overall onslaught to break the independent trade union movement.
2. The beginning of a national, programmatic, ideological-political discussion in the framework of preparing for a truly democratic congress of Solidarity, and to move towards a national unity in action between all the militant, radical forces and the left-wing inside Solidarity, including the oppositional forces inside the PUWP.
In this discussion, the first answers for resolution of the present economic crisis could be put forward. The left, the radicals, the activists, and the left oppositionists of the PUWP should try to map out a concrete program for workers control, workers self-management, and workers power, around which millions of workers and poor farmers can be rallied.
The discussion, which has already begun in Solidarity and in the PUWP, on to the need to build a revolutionary party—a real vanguard party that could lead the workers towards the definitive realization of their aspirations—should be advanced.
This is the only way forward towards socialism in Poland and the only way to unmask the slanderous propaganda of the Kremlin and its stooges, which asserts that the defenders of such a program are "antisocialist elements" and "counterrevolutionaries." Meanwhile, the pope, the Catholic hierarchy, and the international banking community have apparently become the supporters, or at least the "loyal allies" of socialism. This will inevitably lead to the need to assure the right to form tendencies inside the trade unions.
To attain these goals, the setting up of a national network able to circulate throughout the country the rich ideological and programmatic discussions taking place would be a big step forward. During the last weeks, this has been going on at a regional level—in the many local and regional bodies of the union. But this still remains largely unknown to the large mass of Solidarity's membership.
In the same way as the KOR and Robotninik's small network prepared and assisted the big strike wave of July-August 1980, just by breaking through the bureaucracy's monopoly on news (censored and full of lies), and informing the workers about what was really going on, the immensely more powerful unions can today break through the barrier that forbids them from having access to the mass media by circulating information throughout the country on the renewed ideological discussions and the radicalization going on at the regional levels.
3. After the present CP leadership failed in its attempt to divide the movement during the battle over free Saturdays, and given the rise in the degree of unity that the working class displayed in this confrontation, the PUWP leadership faces two alternatives. It must either grant important, new concessions to the working class or prepare a military offensive against the worker's movement.
If the party leadership opts for confrontation, a national mobilization of all Polish workers will be necessary. In this situation, the soldiers—just like the workers, farmers, and students—must think about their own independent, democratic organization.
While being conscious of the serious threat weighing upon the Polish workers' great upsurge, we of the Fourth International, along with the mass of activist and radical Polish workers, have no reason to underestimate the tremendous power of the Polish working class. The mass movement continues to be on an upswing. The battle for the forty-hour week, for the abolition of censorship, and for free access by Solidarity and all the tendencies within it to the mass media, can and must be won.
If the left unites, it can carry the overwhelming majority of organized workers and poor farmers in a resolute struggle against the bureaucracy's counteroffensive.
No austerity policy against the Polish workers and poor farmers, who bear no responsibility whatsoever for the economic mess created by bureaucratic mismanagement and corruption!
Forward towards workers control and workers self-management on a national scale!
Forward towards socialist democracy!
Forward towards a counterplan by the workers against the bureaucracy's miserable economic bankruptcy!
Forward towards complete respect and true national sovereignty of the Polish nation!
Forward towards the Polish workers' solidarity with workers' struggles and anti-imperialist battles the world over!
Forward towards full workers power in Poland!