Introduction to Poland: solidarity and counter-revolution
General Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland’s last communist president, died on 25 May 2014. He was responsible for the imposition of martial law in December 1981 in response to waves of strikes and organised opposition to the communist government. Solidarnosc, the trade union and social movement, was banned and its leaders were arrested. International support for this anti-communist movement came from the likes of US President Reagan, British Prime Minister Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, a Pole who actively opposed communism. Behind the scenes the CIA, the Catholic Church and AFL-CIO provided funds for the counter-revolution. Believing that any movement supported by the mass of the working class would necessarily be progressive, the British left were keen to jump on the bandwagon of anti-communist and anti-Soviet reaction. As our article from Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! (published January 1982) shows, a review of Solidarnosc’s programme at the time reveals its real anti-working class character. Events since 1982 confirm how correct our analysis was – Poland is now ruled by a right-wing party closely aligned to the Catholic Church and its opposition to women’s rights.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 15, January 1982
Poland: solidarity and counter-revolution
‘Our country is on the edge of the abyss. Achievements of many generations, raised from the ashes, are collapsing into ruin. State structures no longer function. New blows are struck each day at our weakened economy. Living conditions are oppressing people with growing burdens.’
With these words General Jaruzelski announced the introduction of martial law in Poland. This extreme measure had become necessary to defend the very existence of the socialist state. The RCG unreservedly defends the right of the socialist forces in Poland to take these measures.
For a whole period of time the imperialists have been actively fomenting pro-capitalist, anti-Soviet forces in Poland. Whilst hypocritically demanding that the Soviet Union ‘keep out of Poland’ the imperialists have for years past interfered in the political and economic affairs of Poland. They have used Poland’s crippling indebtedness to the imperialist banks as a means of exerting greater and greater control over Poland’s internal economic affairs. Today the expansion of industry, the building of houses, the standard of living of the Polish masses are held to ransom by the massive interest payments – $200 million per month – that Poland has to pay to the parasitic, bloodsucking imperialist banks.
Not content with bankrupting the Polish economy, the imperialists have actively aided the anti-Soviet opposition in Poland. The imperialists have found a willing tool for their schemes in the pro-imperialist trade union movements in Europe and the USA. The latter have channelled large amounts of equipment and other aid to Solidarity, the Polish trade union that has rapidly become the major instrument of counter-revolution in Poland. Organisations like the virulently right wing and racist US trade union, the AFL-CIO, set up a fund of $200,000 for Solidarity. Other countries’ unions have followed suit including the reactionary British TUC. These unions joined with the neo-fascist Franz-Josef Strauss who donated DM1 million (nearly $200,000) to Solidarity through his front organisation, the Hans Seidel Foundation. So much for ‘non-intervention’ by the imperialists. When Reagan, the imperialist butcher of the Salvadorean people, and Carrington, the smooth-tongued, imperialist defender of British torture in Ireland, champion trade union rights in Poland, honest people will look closely at what they are defending.
What is Solidarity?
It is a strange trade union which argues for a programme which would lead to unemployment. Yet Solidarity, with massive Western support, has put its weight behind measures which, if implemented, would lead to an end to full employment in Poland. A brief look at the main planks of its programme shows that Solidarity has taken a pro-capitalist direction:
An end to central planning
‘Socialised concerns should be given the freedom to determine their production plans and methods … the centralised distribution of raw materials and other elements of production should be limited and eventually done away with … the concerns should be self-financing … they should be evaluated not on the basis of fulfilling the plan, but on the basis of economic efficiency … The self management bodies … should have the right to exercise control over the assets of the concern, to decide on the aims of production and sales, the choice of production methods, and investment goals. They should also decide on the distribution of the profits of the enterprise.’
Capitalist competition
‘… a precondition of the proper functioning of an enterprise under the new system is the de-monopolisation of the market and the appearance of competing producers to a certain extent.’
Capitalist (Kulak) agriculture
‘… it is particularly necessary to eliminate all restrictions on the development of family farms and family owned handicraft and service shops … Full respect for the private ownership of land by individual farmers …’
The freedom to be unemployed
‘The union recognises that the enterprises will have the right to make changes in their employment level as they need to. But the government authorities will still be responsible for carrying out a full employment policy, although this policy must no longer hinder productive concerns … the self-financing of the enterprise may also result in some having to cut back or close down …’
This is a petit bourgeois programme for the restoration of a kind of ‘welfare capitalism’. Central planning is to go. Workers in every firm will compete with workers in other firms. Capitalist enterprise should be allowed to compete with socialism. Private farming is to be encouraged. Firms can hire or fire workers according to free market criteria. Lenin said of such proposals in his own time:
‘Any direct or indirect legalisation of the rights of ownership of the workers of any given factory or any given trade on their particular production, or of their right to weaken or impede the orders of the state authority, is a flagrant distortion of the basic principles of Soviet power and a complete rejection of socialism.’ CW, Vol 42, p100
The Solidarity programme represents just such a complete rejection of socialism. One week before martial law was declared Lech Walesa himself admitted at a meeting at Radom where leaders of Solidarity were discussing plans to overthrow the state:
‘They are well aware that if we implement our programme, that if we distribute the land from state farms to private peasants and create self-management committees everywhere, we will be dismantling their system.
That they intended to take steps to overthrow the socialist state is clear. Warsaw Solidarity leader Zbigniew Bujak was quoted as saying that the first action of the workers militia had to be ‘aimed at liberating’ the radio and television centre, establishment of a ‘social council for the national economy’ which would be ‘something like a provisional national government’, overthrowing the present government.
Indeed when Solidarity was set up the leading influences were a well known group of anti-socialist dissident intellectuals like Jacek Kuron, who wished to use the power of the Polish working class as a battering ram to destroy the Polish state and implement their own programme for the restoration of capitalism.
The Polish Communist Party (PUWP) and Solidarity
Honest communists faced with these developments must ask how they came about. How was it possible for KOR and right-wing Solidarity leaders to use the legitimate grievances of the Polish workers for their own counter-revolutionary ends? This is a question for the Polish Communists to resolve through dialogue with the Polish people when the immediate threat to the Polish state is at an end. General Jaruzelski has already accepted that the failures, mistakes, and in some cases the personal corruption of leading Communist Party members over the past decade have contributed to the crisis and to the Communist Party’s disastrous divorce from the trade union movement encompassing millions of working people. It is this divorce which has allowed bourgeois and petit bourgeois influences like KOR to masquerade as the friends of the Polish workers. The Communist Party failed to overcome this divorce by politically winning the workers so that they, together with the Communist Party, could confront the problems faced by the country. Instead, it took to borrowing massively from the imperialist banks in a vain attempt to buy itself out of the crisis.
In 1981, Fidel Castro clearly pointed to the danger of this:
‘Especially in Poland, imperialism is orchestrating a sinister act of provocation directed against the socialist camp. The success that reaction has had there is eloquent testimony to the fact that the revolutionary party in power cannot deviate from Marxist Leninist principles, neglect ideological work and divorce itself from the masses; and, when the time for rectification comes, this should not be done on the basis of concessions to the class enemy, either inside or outside the country.’
Which side are you on?
The events in Poland raise one central question – which side are you on? On the one side are the socialist states defending the gains of the working class and aiding the movements fighting imperialism throughout the world. On the other side is imperialism, intent on destroying socialism, crushing the working class and defeating liberation movements. Without significant exception the British middle class socialists have joined the Labour Party and trade union movement in taking the side of imperialism. The CPGB and the Trotskyist left (SWP, IMG, WRP et al) have lined up in outright support for the counter-revolution in Poland and have condemned the Soviet Union and its Polish allies.
Whilst real communists put revolutionary interest higher than formal democracy, the CPGB calls for the release of counter-revolutionaries in Poland under the guise of supporting democratic rights. This same Communist Party has never called for the release of Irish political prisoners from British prisons. Socialist Worker calls on Polish workers to ‘go into the streets to confront the military forces’ in order to seize political power and overthrow the Polish socialist state. This from an organisation that refused to mobilise its own membership in defence of the Irish hunger strikers and which has consistently condemned the revolutionary war of the IRA against British imperialism.
These organisations always defend British imperialism and reserve their most virulent attacks for the determined forces of socialism and liberation. It will be of interest to Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! readers to know that these organisations, which have refused to bring out their members on demonstrations in support of the Irish revolution, have within days taken steps to mobilise for an anti-Soviet demonstration on the events in Poland. At this demonstration, they will line up with a platform of Tories and Labour imperialists including Sir Bernard Braine, Peter Shore (right-wing Labour), Shirley Williams and Eric Heffer (well known for his refusal to support Irish hunger strikers in their struggle for freedom.)
Imperialists hands off socialist Poland!
Communists in Britain reject the anti-socialist campaign of the imperialists and their Labour and left allies. British banks led by Barclays and Lloyds have claims of £1 billion on the Polish people. The RCG calls for the liquidation of all Polish debts to British banks. A movement in this country, capable of enforcing this, would make a real contribution to the freedom of the Polish people.
If Solidarity were to succeed, then Poland would be turned into a base for the counter-revolution against the whole socialist camp. Any imperialist inroads into the socialist countries would set back the struggle of the vast majority of mankind for a life free from poverty, oppression and racism. It is the Soviet Union and its allies that give financial and military support to the liberation movements fighting imperialism in Southern Africa, Central America, the Middle East and elsewhere. The RCG defends the right of the Soviet Union and the Polish Communist Party to take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that Poland remains in the socialist camp.
David Reed and Maxine Williams
