Reflections on the Polish revolution The Polish revolution of August 1980 to December 1981 was one of the greatest workers' revolutions in history in terms of the duration of the revolutionary upsurge and dual power and the scope of the masses' self-activity. But it is because it was one of the most directly and exclusively working class revolutions that it takes on a particular historical significance. In their major features, revolutions decisive for workers' liberation on a world scale will be closer to the Polish experience than many that have occurred previously. The working class character of the revolution Why do we say that the Polish revolution has such an unambiguous and unmitigated working class character? Firstly, the working class was not simply the main motor force and leadership in political terms, but also the social vanguard and strike force of the Polish revolution, composed of workers from large scale industry and other sectors concentrated in the country's biggest workplaces. During the most important mass actions (the national warning strikes or the general strike preparations, notably in March 1981), these sectors were followed by the vast majority, if not the near totality, of the productive workers of the state sector of the economy-the most important, given the post-capitalist character of Poland. The revolution was born in these big factories and in the public transport sector. From the beginning to the end of the upsurge these workplaces were the revolution's strongholds and provided its leadership. No social layer external to the working class played any sort of "detonating' role, triggering off a revolutionary explosion. On the contrary, both the university youth and the peasantry followed the working class and looked to it for support when they mobilised.
Secondly, a form of struggle specific to the working class—the mass strike-was the most powerful instrument of the Polish revolution, the main lever for bringing the masses into motion and the principal feature of the
80 International Marxist Review rise of the movement. We have to further emphasise that the highest form of strike was used during the Polish revolution-the mass political strike with workplace occupations. No social layer involved in the revolution outside the working class tried to introduce its own forms of struggle into the mass movement which the working class would have found 'unnatural'. Indeed, other social layers followed the working class model of struggle as far as possible. The most important battles of the student youth took the form of mass strikes with university occupations. The peasants centralised their struggles through occupying public buildings with delegations from their unions.
Thirdly, the working class character of this revolution was expressed through the forms of organisation adopted by the mass movement. The trade union, the natural form of working class organisation, was the fundamental means of self-organisation used by the masses-including groups not belonging to this class. Solidarnosc, the union of waged and salaried workers, set the example for peasants who organised their own unions and for students who formed their own independent association. Artisans and independent taxi-drivers did the same. Furthermore Solidarnose was the most advanced form of trade union organisation ever seen anywhere in the world. It radically broke with the traditions of craft trade unionism or industrial unionism and united workers on a territorial basis. The constituent elements of Solidarnosc were workplace organisations, which elected regional leaderships which were then coordinated or, if one prefers the expression, centralised on a national scale. Trade union branches on a craft or industry-wide basis could be set up regionally or nationally, but Solidarnosc's statutes only accorded them consultative and not decision-making power. Any attempt to impose the particular interests of any one trade or category of workers was considered to be an attack on class unity and was vigorously resisted.
Even if Solidarnosc considered itself above all a trade union, the new and superior type of mass organisation it represented did not correspond to a trade unionist tradition, but to the experiences of the 'workers' unions' that emerged in embryonic form in certain developed capitalist countries after the First World War and the Russian revolution. These experiences were then theorised by the German and Dutch ultra-left 'councilist' current. 'For unionism workers must organise in workplaces, then in economic regions (and not by industrial sector)'; a general workers' union 'goes beyond craft, workplace or industrial interests, it is in fact a strategic geographic grouping which has a perspective of revolution and transforming the proletarian condition itself. 2
To understand the decisive importance of such a form of organisation it has to be remembered that even during the great active strike of 400,000 Italian metal workers in September 1920, the strike was led and organised along industrial and sectoral lines—stemming from divisions in the working class-including those in Turin, at the heart of the factory council move-
ment. 'The pre-existing capitalist structure was thus maintained under workers' control. There was nothing like the drastic reorganisation and rationalisation under workers' control which the CNT-UGT committees effected in Barcelona during the Spanish revolution of 1936. " In Poland the movement for workers' self-management tended very much to break up bureaucratic management structures based on industrial sectors. This flowed naturally from the organisational forms of Solidarnosc which had launched
It is not by chance that the first workers' union worthy of the name-
Solidarnosc-bringing together the quasi-totality of waged and salaried, manual and intellectual workers, was formed in a post-capitalist society.
In such a society the working class not only needs an entirely free trade union, but it also experiences conditions allowing it to go further and to integrate trade union tasks within a higher form of organisation. At the same time, the transition from trade unionism to general unionism is probably-in fact we can say certainly —an indispensable condition for the working class to exercise and to hold on to power. Can the working class become the real leadership of society and the state if it is not capable, at the level of its most natural organisation, to base itself on its unity and not on the divisions which inevitably flow from any classic trade union organisation?
In his description of the structural difference between trade unions and workers' councils, Antonio Gramsci stated the following:
... the factory council is an institution of a 'public' character while the Party and the trade unions are associations of a 'private' nature. In the factory councils the worker, because of his very nature, plays the role of producer as a result of his position and function in society, in the same way as the citizen plays a role in the democratic parliamentary state. In the Party and the trade unions the worker plays his role 'voluntarily', signing a written pledge—a contract which he can tear up at any moment. The Party and the trade unions, because of this
'voluntary' character, because of their 'contractual' nature, are not to be confused with the councils which are representative institutions and do not develop mathematically but morphologically, and in their higher forms tend to give a proletarian meaning to the apparatus, created by the capitalist for the purpose
Such an arrangement can only be ensured through a radical reorganisation of the internal regime of the factory enabling the factory council to
Solidarnosc, as a trade union, necessarily had a voluntary and contractual side like any association, and so as with any trade union it was a nonorganic expression of the working class. But its character in this respect was only formal since in practice Solidarnosc went considerably beyond these features by establishing a near-organic relationship with the working class to the extent that it brought into its membership the overwhelming majority of the working people, directly organising them in their workplaces anc expression of the general interests of the working class is an attribute of this movement.
of extracting profit, of production and exchange.4 root its power in a system of self-managed teams.
representing the workers'
Reflections on the Polish revolution 81 general interests. Classically speaking this organic
workers' councils and not a trade union. This is Solidarnosc's uniqueness.
Fourthly, the democracy established by the Polish revolution had a clearly working class character. Solidarnosc's internal functioning was based on council-type democracy, combining representative and democracy. Furthermore, this type of democracy imposed in the bodies controlling production and struggling for workers' management of the workplaces served as a model for the projects of territorial management.
Some of the most important principles adopted, implemented and defended were: election of the leadership bodies by mass meetings and congresses;
right of recall of leaders, the latter being responsible to the people mandating them; combining decision-making and executive tasks, thus making these leaderships (or management) structures real working bodies. Solidarnosc's programme, adopted at its national congress in October 1981, stated:
Pluralism of social, political and cultural ideas must form the basis of democracy in the self-governed Republic. Public life in Poland requires deep reforms which should lead to the definitive establishment of self-government, democracy and pluralism. For this reason, we shall struggle both for a change in state structures and for the development of independent, self-governing institutions in every field of social life... We hold that the principles of pluralism should apply to political life. Our union will assist and protect civil initiatives which seek to propose different socio-political and economic programmes to society ... The reform must socialize planning, so that the central plan reflects the aspirations of society and is freely accepted by it. Public debates are therefore indispensable. It should be possible to bring forward plans of every kind, including those
Independently of the weight that the masses' aspirations to reestablish a real parliamentary democracy at a state level may have had in the Polish revolution, in practice the masses built up a council democracy through building the democratic counter-power of civil society. While it may have been the case—if we judge by tendencies existing in the mass movementthat the self-governed republic projected in the Solidarnosc programme would probably combine forms of parliamentary democracy with the generalised democracy of the councils, this combination had nothing to do with the old 'Austro-Marxist' idea. In his Ideological Principles written in 1976-77 (the period when the Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) was formed), Jacek Kuron, although he had already given up revolutionary
Parliamentary democracy allows individuals to fulfill their aspirations during their free time, but it does not let them do so during their working time. I am convinced that this is an essential question facing humanity. My position is that within a system of parliamentary democracy I will participate in the movement for direct democracy, but without parliamentary (representative) democracy.
direct democracy is powerless against the power of the state.
Kuron rejected the possibility that in a country like Poland, where
82 International Marxist Review
Through its similarity to a 'workers' union' trade union with those of a workers' council system.
drafted by social or civil organisations. S
Marxism, wrote the following:
it combined the features of a direct mass
private property had been abolished, 'the system of parliamentary democracy would determine in any way the nature of the ownership of the means of production', since, 'even if in Poland there are people who would like to become owners of the steel mills or the mines, they have no chance of fin-
The question is a real one. One thing is the elimination of parliamentary democracy in a situation where the democracy of the councils or soviets is not firmly established, which can lead to the elimination of all democracy—a danger which Rosa Luxemburg warned the Bolsheviks about.
Another thing is the replacement of parliamentary democracy by council democracy when the latter is fully developed and established, which was
So we can say that Kuron sensed what the Polish social movement instinctively experienced later. But his error was to be for a struggle in 'stages' for council democracy, which was neither theoretically justifiable nor politically relevant and did not coincide with the real dynamic of the Polish
In the last analysis the working class character of the Polish revolution was determined by its social content or, what amounts to the same thing, the character of its objective tasks. There was a spontaneous tendency in favour of the socialisation (the social appropriation) of the means of production.
The struggle over who should in practice control the means of production raged more and more fiercely between the bureaucratic regime and the working class. It tended from the very beginning (the national strike of 1980)
to become increasingly the direct expression of the fundamental contradiction driving forward the Polish revolution. This is what gave the revolution its self-management character. The power of this tendency for social appropriation inside the working class was expressed and realised in the
1980 strike: the generalised occupation of the workplaces. The occupation is more than a tactic of struggle. Everywhere where the Polish workers went on strike spontaneously they occupied the factories because they had sufficient objective maturity (they wanted social appropriation) independently of whether they were subjectively conscious of this at the time that the
The factory occupation itself is an important factor in workers becoming politically aware of this maturity. We can recall the brilliant observations made concerning the wave of strikes with occupations in the West in the
1930s. 'Every sit-down strike poses in a practical manner the question of who is the next boss of the factory: the capitalist or the workers', (Leon
Trotsky)?. "Through the factory occupation the still-vague feeling is born that they (the workers) must be fully masters of production, that they must
Now in our case, despite the fact that the bureaucrats are parasites, they ding any social support for their aspirations.
not the case in the Russian revolution.
revolution.
The social content of the revolution revolution broke out.
expel the intruders, the capitalists'
Reflections on the Polish revolution 83
', (Anton Pannekoek)8.
84 International Marxist Review are nevertheless one hundred times more of an intrusion than the capitalists. For some Solidarnosc activists, the real life phenomenon of factory occupations during the mass strike armed us with the conviction that workers self management was on the agenda of the Polish revolution, perhaps better than any ideological position. Somebody who was among the first to realise this was Father Jozef Tischner, the spokesperson of the 'ethics of solidarity' current inside the Polish Catholic Church. Months before us he stated the following about the particularity of the Polish strikes:
During the strike, and to a certain extent thanks to the strike, a new type of relationship between the people and their workplaces was shaped. Workers themselves began to administer their workplaces. They were at home. They felt ing to work. But over and beyond this first effect a strike unmasks some essen- at home ... Of course the meaning of a strike is first of all to give back a meantial truths about men and women and the worker in particular... The real strength of the strike which restored the natural ownership of their workplace back to the workers does not lie in the fact that it was organised against someone. Rather it lies in the fact that it appears to be an action with this important meaning in
The totalitarian regime definitively decided to smash our trade union under a world which has lost its sense of purpose.? the boot of military dictatorship when Solidarnose decisively raised the banner of workers' self management and began to build self-management bodies; when the workers' councils began to take increasing power inside the factories and began to coordinate regionally and nationally; when Solidarnosc declared at its congress that it was ready to violate the restrictive legislation imposed on the workers' councils; and when increasingly large sectors of the working class began to prepare to seize economic power in the country through the revolutionary means of the active strike.
Some Marxist observers in the West are inclined to think that the class consciousness of the working class in the Polish revolution remained at a trade unionist or syndicalist level: Indeed a superficial approach inspired theoretically by the Leninist classification of the working class's forms of social consciousness could suggest such a conclusion. If the Polish workers organised themselves for a revolution inside a trade union and if none of these sectors formed a political party then what else could its consciousness be but narrowly syndicalist? But against this it must be pointed out that when a trade union is confronting a single 'boss' and this 'boss' is the state and when this trade union can only exist if it maintains itself as a counter-power (something we will come back to), it is impossible to accept that only a syndicalist consciousness develops. In addition, the dichotomy between 'trade union consciousness' materialising in the trade union and "political consciousness' in the party is anachronistic. It became anachronistic just three years after Lenin laid it down in What is to be Done. The 1905 Petersburg council of workers' delegates already pointed to the emergence of another form of workers' consciousness—a self-management consciousness which is the political self-consciousness of the working class. In general it is difficult
Reflections on the Polish revolution 85 to understand the phenomenon of workers' councils in different revolutions if this is not seen as the realisation of a specific form of consciousness far superior to syndicalist consciousness. If we take into account the particularities of Solidarnosc analysed above we can clearly see that in additon to a syndicalist consciousness that it was precisely a self-management consciousness that developed through its activity. This is true even if we leave on one side the bodies of working class self-management or embryos of territorial self-management that existed during the Polish revolution. The desire to build a self-managed society, an aspiration shared by broad sectors of the social vanguard of the working class, also shows this. The specificities of dual power Solidarnose has been criticised, not unreasonably, because at the same time as the workers were spontaneously advancing to the seizure of power in the workplaces and the whole state sector of the national economy, the movement neglected the necessity of overthrowing the central political power of the totalitarian bureaucracy. This is a correct criticism. but at the same time the question is more complex than it seems. It is probable that even in the future the Polish revolution will see the workers seizing power through taking control of production and distribution—in other words by developing the power and coordination of the workers' councils in the workplaces. Furthermore, this will generally be the road followed by the revolution in those countries with a more or less advanced level of industrial development. The working class instinctively understands that without democracy in working time, any democracy in the state (whatever the formparliamentary or council) is gutted of content or disappears completely.
Let us review Leninist strategy on this question. In order to extend free time, thereby enabling workers to participate in the management of the state, Lenin opted for the elimination of democracy during working time by introducing Taylorism as a form of work organisation—a heritage from capitalism. Consequently despotism was re-established in the factory. Already in 1918 Lenin stated that in order to ensure 'an absolute and strict unity of will, which directs the joint labours of hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of people... organised on the pattern of large scale machine industry .... we now have to stand for a ruthlessly firm government, for the dictatorship of individuals in definite processes of work, in definite aspects of purely executive functions. 'o.
The Czech revolutionary socialist Petr Uhl goes to the heart of the question when he states: 'If revolutionaries still accept Engels' slogan"when entering the factory give up an idea of autonomy" —as the Russian Bolsheviks accepted it in practice, then human society will never break its chains'"!.
In future revolutions the working class will proceed in an exactly inverse manner. Before establishing workers' and citizens' democracy in the state it will build solid bases of workers' democracy at work; it will prepare for
86 International Marxist Review workers' management of production units, basing itself on workers' self-organisation of the work process and working conditions. At the same time or later the workers will establish the bases for local and territorial self-management on the basis of which they will extend democratic collective control over larger spheres of social life, above all over those determining the conditions of reproduction of labour power. The modern workers' revolution will never follow the Bolshevik attempt of establishing workers' democracy at the level of the state at the cost of introducing a bureaucratic regime in the very heart of production, in the work process itself. If that is done the revolution will inevitably succumb to the blows of the bureaucratic counter-revolution.
The Polish revolution suffered from many limitations-that goes without saying. But before criticising its limits we should look at its contributions. The first of these is to have taught us that if the central seizure of political power by the working class is to be durable and stable it has to have material bases of support, above all through the take-over of the factories. (This is particularly relevant to the 1918-1923 German and 1936 Catalan revolutions.) The Polish revolution did not teach us how to take central state power, but it did teach us how to build up the bases for the seizure of power. While the Russian revolution concentrated its active forces in the soviets, the later, more working class revolutions turned rather to the factory workers' councils, which corresponded in Russia not to the soviets but to the factory committees. The Polish revolution clearly illustrates this unexpected turn that Trotsky tried so hard to come to grips with in his writings on Germany in 193112. It is especially for this reason that one can conclude that in more directly and purely working class revolutions the length of the period of dual power will be much longer than in Russia in 1917. In Poland this period was already twice as long as in Russia. This prolongation exposes dual power and the revolution to a greater danger of being destroyed. But the other side of the coin is that this revolution is better armed against the danger of degeneration which, as history has shown us, is one of the most monstrous dangers hanging over the workers' movement. The working class has paid, and for a long time will continue to pay, a terrible price for the degeneration of the Russian revolution.
One of the most characteristic aspects of the dual power situation in the Polish revolution was that the counter-power was fundamentally in the hands of a trade union. (Although this is not completely unprecedented. Look for example at the role of the COB in the Bolivian revolution of 1952.) Solidarnosc was a trade union organisation at the same time as being a 'workers' union' formed in the workplaces and structured regionally and nationally. This gave a much greater force, coherence and power of centralisation than in the case of the classical counter-power institutions, the soviets. We should remember that neither the soviets and even less the factory committees in Russia in 1917 developed an institutional system with a cohesion comparable to Solidarnosc's before an external centralising force—the Bolshevik party—
Reflections on the Polish revolution 87 won the leadership of these bodies. Under a regime like Poland's it is not surprising that a trade union becomes the political counter-power. The power of totalitarian bureacracy cannot coexist with an independent mass organisation without that involving 'coexistence' with a political counter-power.
Another factor comes in here-any independent trade union action under this regime is a political act in the sense that the state is immediately affected as the sole owner of the basic means of production and consequently as the sole boss" of the workers. But at the same time, and as opposed to the soviets, Solidarnose helped to set up various institutions outside its own structures, in the first place bodies of workers' self-management which were the institutions of a future power. If the Polish revolution had managed to win, if a new regime had been established, it would have not remained in the hands of Solidarnosc. For the leading bodies of Solidarnosc to take power would only be provisionally acceptable, ensuring the conquest of power by the workers themselves. Once conquered, power would have had to be handed over to more appropriate institutions independent of the trade union. Those, like ourselves, inside Solidarnosc at the end of 1981 who were preparing for the active strike, foresaw a transitional situation of the following type: in the initial period the economic power of the workers, won through the active strike, would be established in a system of Solidarnose strike committees; once this system was imposed on the bureaucracy, power would be transferred to the workers' councils and their coordinating bodies as institutions distinct from Solidarnosc.
For the workers and the people generally, Solidarnosc had more legitimacy than any other independent institution. But the masses, who identified with and expressed themselves through Solidarnosc, did not mobillise as strongly to build institutions of their future permanent power as they did to build. strengthen and defend their trade union. In a certain sense the counter-power accumulated by Solidarnose held back the formation of organs of power in the strict sense of the word—bodies of workers' self-management and especially territorial bodies of self-management (the latter began to emerge only after a particularly big delay). In fact the energy of the masses necessary for building such institutions was swallowed up first by the trade union. It was only after this drive had reached a certain level of maturity and accumulation of experience and had come into contradiction with the trade union nature of Solidarnose that they turned to building institutions outside the trade union. The self-management bodies were able to find in Solidarnosc a protection, defence and formidable aid capable of mobilising a powerful force of organised workers. The relationship between Solidarnosc and the self-management movement showed this phenomenon very well. So. to repeat, Solidarnosc itself was not the future power, but that power was developing at its very heart.
1. See H. Gorter, Lettre Ouverte au camarade Lenine (Paris: Spartacus, 1979).
2. D. Authier and J. Barrot, La Gauche communiste en Allemagne 1918-1921 (Paris:
3. Gwyn A. Williams, Proletarian Order: Antonio Gramsci, Factory Councils and the Origins of Italian Communism 1911-1921 (London, Pluto Press 1975), p. 246.
4. A Gramsci, The Modern Prince and other writings. 'The programme of Ordine
5. Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, voi 5, nos 1-2 (London: 1982), pp. 5, 9.
6. J. Kuron. Zasady ideowe (Paris: Instyut Literacki 1978). p. 20.
7. L. Trotsky, Transitional Programme (London: Socialist Labour League 1972),
8. A. Pannekoek. Les Conseils Ouvriers, vol I (Paris: Spartacus 1982), p. 123.
9. J Tischner, Etyka solidarnosci (Krakow: Znak 1981), pp. 90-91.
10. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works vol 27, (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1977), pp.
11. P. Uhl, Le Socialisme Emprisonné (Paris: Stock-La Breche 1980), p. 83.
12. L. Trotsky, The Struggle against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder
88 International Marxist Review pp. 54-64.
Payot 1976), pp. 117-118.
Nuovo' (New York: International Publishers 1970), p. 25.
p. 20.
268-275.
Press 1977), pp. 77-87.
Notes
İNTERNATiENAL MARXIST REVIEW • What is the theory of permanent revolution? - Ernest Mandel • Black revolt in South Africa - Fourth International Document • The land question in Latin America - Margarito Montes Parra • Reflections on the Polish revolution - Zbigniew Kowalewski Vol. 2, No. I Summer 1986 £2.50/$5 International Marxist Review/Quatrième Internationale Published by Presse-Edition-Communications (PEC)-SARL Administration: 2 rue Richard Lenoir, 93108 Montreuil, France Directeur de publication: Leon Cremieux Commission paritaire: 55939