THE IIIrd CONGRESS OF THE POLISH UNITED WORKERS' PARTY
Speaking on 4 November 1956, immediately after the typically Stalinist tasks of increasing production and October events, to the National Conference of Partv Cadres, Vladyslav Gomulka declared that the period of party history running from 1948 to 1956 was "past and gone forever" and that a "new period" had begun with the VIIIth Plenum of the Central Committee. This new period, he affirmed, ought to be characterized by transformations that must reach into almost all fields in the life of our nation. The content of the proposed transformations, conceived in the most general and broad manner, is the democratization of our life, carried out in the spirit of the basic principles of socialism.
Speaking on 20 March 1959 to the IIIrd Congress of the Polish United Workers' Party, Gomulka did not find a word to say about the October days, the October conquests, the "new period," and "the democratization in the life of our nation"! On the contrary, he presented things as if there had been continuity in the direction and line of the party from 1944 to the present, as if there had only been a few "infractions against socialist ality which hay been and as the mai as if the main adversary were revisionism. Doubtless he stopped just in time before affirming that the fundamental historic decision of the VIIIth Plenum had been - the condemnation of revisionism!
We know "realist" argumentation by which Gomulka and his fraction justified the liquidation, bit by bit, of the conquests of October: the petty-bourgeois and bourgeois danger is great in Poland itself; Poland must continue to form part of the Soviet bloc (it is "condemned thereto by its geographical situation"); the Consequently, if one wants to live in peace with the Kremlin, it is necessary to suppress - first in the party, then little by little outside the party - any expression of political opinion displeasing to the Soviet bureau-
That this argumentation is based on a series of obvious sophisms needs no demonstration here. What is more important is to grasp the implacable dialectic to which Gomulka himself has succumbed. He, preferred to go to jail after 1948 rather than to condemn Tito in an unjustified way, this time hurled numerous landers against the Jugoslav Communists. He, immediately after Poznan, i in his famous speech to the VIIIth Plenum, had justified the use of the strike weapon by the workers, today forbids them to use it. He, who had set so many hopes on the workers' councils, has been led in practice to replace them by "conferences of workers' autonomy," to which he assigned, in his report to the IIIrd Party Congress, the safeguarding "labor discipline."
This is no matter of Macchiavellian duplicity. What we find here is a pragmatism that is trying to solve problems on a day-to-day basis, without thoroughly analyzing the causes of the "terrible things" that had happened in Poland between 1948 and 1956, without understanding the social nature of the bureaucracy, without grasping democratization of public life with workers' democracy, the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Leninist sense of the term. Yesterday a victim of the bureaucracy, Gomulka has become in a few years its instrument and its main support.
This does not mean that in practice nothing remains of the "conquests of October. " Despite its seeming monotony and appearance of monolithism, this congress was rendered possible only by the beginning of the political revolution that Poland experienced in October 1956.
The Stalinist fraction, then solidly installed in the leadership of the party and controlling innumerable dríve-wheels in the state administration, especially thanks to the Soviet backing it openly enjoyed, has been largely eliminated. Klosiewicz and Matuszewski had already been eliminated during the XIth Plenum of the CC that preceded the IIIrd Congress. During the congress. Mazur, Mijal, Wasilkowska, Minc, and other Stalinists failed to be reelected members of the Central Committee. Three of Gomulka's solid supporters, Kliszko, Gierek, and Spychalski, were added to the Political Bureau.
This defeat of the Stalinists, surprising in view of the the working class and thrown it back into passivity, are essentially to be explained by Moscow's change of line. To carry on the struggle against a fraction actively supported by the Kremlin, the active support of the proletariat was indispensable. To crush a small fraction abandoned by Moscow and isolated from the people, a passive support by the masses was sufficient. This support Gomulka has not lost. His victory could therefore be decisive.
Furthermore, though Gomulka himself did not raise the problem of "dogmatism" is his report, various speakers alluded to it, "in various senses," it is true. Novak, the only "Natolian" to take the floor during the congress, tried to justify his attitude by affirming that, since revisionism was the main danger in 1956, he could have been quite honestly mistaken about the scope of the reforms visualized at that moment. Besides, for him revision is flatly identified with "the reëstablishment of capitalism"!
So there was Gomulka almost caught in the trap of
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL his own current theory. It was Zavadski, an ex-Stalinist who had gone over bag-and-bagage to the Gomulka camp between the VIIth and VIlIth Plena,, He made entrusted with the attack against "dogmatism. it to the frantic applause of the congress, which showed, on that occasion at least, for what language it still had a nostalgia.
Certain other controversies show through the congress minutes like a recurrent watermark: that of the rhythm of industrialization and that of agrarian policy received the most attention. On the first question, which had aroused passionate debate at the XIth Plenum of the Central Committee and which had provided the Stalinists with their last opportunity "to take the offensive," Gomulka used compromise formulæ. He did not exclude the possibility of the C C's revising the goals of the Plan, if they turned out to be too pessimistic during the coming years. On the other hand, on the agarian question he remained intransigent. The socialization of agriculture remains the ultimate goal of the party; but it cannot be reached save by the peasants voluntarily joining in it.
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5 vances in the last two years have been remarkable. If there is one fixed quantity in Gomulka's policy which he has since 1956 not permitted to be varied, it is indeed his "course toward the peasants. " To get it accepted (without much difficulty, for that matter) by Khrushchev, he was ready to sacrifice his friends and his allies. And so it is rather paradoxical to hear him fulminate against the revisionist "agents of the class enemy" when the only class that has lastingly profited from the "conquests of October" is precisely - the peasantry!
Foreign observers who were able to be present at the congress or who were in Warsaw at the time it was being held confirm that the atmosphere remains very relaxed in the Polish capital. Discussions, sarcastic remarks, needlings, objective historical researches - all that continues as it has for 30 months. Still, it would be lulling oneself with illusions to believe that Gomulka's backsliding in all political fields will have no effects in the sphere of freedom of speech. The censorship is functioning more and more efficiently; magazines are suppressed; the publication of certain books is forbidden. A glacial wind is destroying the young buds of the October Spring. But other Springs will follow.