A NEW TURN TO THE RIGHT IN POLAND
During the last months the situation in Poland has feld, a leader of the Left-wing social-democats who ıgain significantly worsened. The mistakes of bureaucratic planning have created a serious shortage of meat; assisted by a surprise offensive from General Winer, they have caused Warsaw to fall without heat, light and even water on tap! Clamoring for discipline, Gomulka has told the grumbling but despairing Polish masses that the time has come for a regime of austerity and tightening of belts.
It was in these circumstances that the Polish workers, students and intellectuals received the startling news of important changes in the leading personnel of the United Workers' Party. Edward Ochab was to be re laced as Minister of Agriculture, to become propaganda boss. Jerzy Morawski, the most faithful of Gomulka's ieutenants and - apart from Matwin, who had already ›een "disciplined" earlier - the most "Leftist" of the central committee members, who played a decisive rôle in October 1956, was dismissed as secretary of the CC in charge of propaganda. An old-time Stalinist and "Natolinist", Szyr, who favors developing huge heavyindustry projects, was put in charge of the Centra 'lanning Board. One of the most hated Stalinists, exMinister Tucharski, who by his bureaucratic despotism towards the workers of the Ciegielski Plant had caused the general strike and uprising in sping 1956 at Poznan, was taken back into the government. General Witaszewski, another Stalinist henchman, responsible for the repression of the Poznan uprising, was named head of the political department of the army. Julian Hochwent over to the Stalinist party in the post-war fusion, but who had played an intellectually leading rôle in the "thaw" of 1956-1957, lost his position in the Institute of Foreign Affairs, though still a deputy in the Sejm. Two explanations are offered for these startling changes. According to one version, the serious meat shortage has forced Poland to call for Soviet help, and the Soviet bureaucracy has imposed on Gomulka, «Natolinists." There as the price of this help, a rehabilitation of the minor is, however, little reason to accept this version of events. All the signs indicate that Khrushchev has fully made his peace with Gomulka and regards him - in the same way as he regards Kadar in Hungary - as the only possible leader of the Polish party under present conditions. The strong attack made by Khrushchev on "Rakosi and his clique" at the second congress of the Socialist Workers' Party of Hungary indicates that the Kremlin has no love lost for its former agents who, through their "excesses", , are considered mainly responsible for the 1956 events in Poland and Hungary.
The other explanation of these astonishing changes in the Polish party leadership seems to us much more plausible. As we already indicated before the third congress of the Polish United Workers' Party (in the spring 1959 issue of Fourth International) Gomulka is driven cy to he eriblems of polish spirty. Yesterday a victim of the bureaucracy, he has become in a few years its instrument and its main support", we wrote
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL in May 1959. The logical final stage of this evolution, the end of the 180-degree turn, is precisely his becoming convinced that his former main enemies, the ultraStalinist diehards of the "Natolinist" school, are the best leaders for Poland under present conditions...
In a typically bureaucratic, Stalinist way, Gomulka has arrived at the conclusion that all the decisive problems of Polish economy can only be solved through "discipline" • There is a clear inflationary trend in the country? In order to do away with it, workers must be "disciplined" (i e, not receive any more big bonuses), and farmers must be "disciplined" too (in the first place, they must pay at once the huge arrears of taxes and fines which have accumulated in the countryside.) There is an evident and desperate distrustfulness inside the Party? In order to eliminate it "liberals", "doubters", "deviationists," must be disciplined, and the seeds of "excessive liberalism" stamped out right inside the central committee and its secretariat. There is a terrible mood of indifference and hostility towards the Party in the country? To do away with it, people must be "disciplined", must be prevented from reading "anti-Party literature and newspapers" ; newspapers must be straitjacketed again. The Writers' Union itself, that fortress of "rotten liberalism", , must be "disciplined" too, as was done at its recently-held congress, when its president, Slonimski, was replaced by the official candidate of the Party for this job.
And who are more capable of doing an efficient job of "disciplining" than those very people who amassed a huge body of experience in this field during the years 1944-1956, "disciplining" thousands of men and women to death and prison, as they unfortunately did with Gomulka himself?
Social and economic problems, however, cannot be solved by "discipline" if the basic facts of life are not taken into account. It is sufficient to compare the Poland of today with Jugoslavia in order to discover the tremendous chance Poland missed in 1957 when, under Gomulka's pressure, the Party stopped short on the road towards workers' management, and a new and less rigid approach towards central planning
There is no better "discipline than the discipline of good results. Productivity of labor and economy of resources have tremendously increased in Jugoslav factories as compared with Polish factories - not because jugoslav managers are better, or less bureaucratic, than their Polish colleagues, but because the workers' say in management, and their direct stake in the financial results of the plants, have taught them a lesson which they will never forget. It now depends on their own output whether they get a thirteenth or fourteenth month of pay a year, whether their apartments can be repaired, or whether a new block and a new school can be built in their quarter. The direct link between creased production and increased wellbeing for the people, on the spot, has done more to further produc Poles speeches in favor of "socialist competition". TH tivity than a million motions on "discipline" Poles were rapidly learning the same lesson in 19561957; when it was brutally interrupted, their leaders courted disaster. Disaster has now overtaken the United Workers' Party.
true of the countryside. An increased flow of consumer goods to the farmers, coupled with big investment in agriculture and the development of blems of the transition period in the village. For the first time since Stalin's catastrophic experiment with forced collectivization, there now exists an example of a successful socialist policy in agriculture. Gomulka did not fail to try to seduce the peasant. But he failed to develop at the same time the parallel pressure of huge investments in efficiently-run state farms. As a result, the private farmer became the master of the market in agricultural goods. Again disaster was courted; again disaster overtook the Polish party.
There is no chance that the inner resources of the Polish vanguard, or of the Polish working class — terribly demoralized by the abrupt end of their "October" hopes - will be able to force a change of line in the coming months. If a positive solution of the Polish crisis could be brought about, it would be only through an international development: a new stage in the "de-Stalinization" of the Soviet Union itself, or a big upheaval, e g in eastern Germany. But at least the scattered vanguard elements, who are all that remains from the October upsurge, can ponder the political lessons implicit in this terrible experience. These lessons can be summarized in one sentence: the bureaucracy is a social force which can be neutralized and overcome only through increased power, freedom and liberty of action for the working as such. Any other approach to the problem remains pragmatic, and leads inevitably along Gomulka's road - back to Natolin!