Ry Chorloc.Andró dri
[The following article appeared as an editorial in the September 11 issue of the French-language fortnightly Inprecor, published in Paris. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
By taking up the slogan, The emancipation of the workers will be the task of the workers themselves," the Polish workers have caused the bureaucratic caste to vacillate and have shaken all the defenders of stability throughout Europe.
It is now more than two months since the working class began to mobilize to batter down a governmental decision to raise food prices. The workers rapidly won substantial wage increases, and those initial victories raised their self confidence. The battles gave them a chance to take a step forward in organization. Basing themselves on these gains, the workers then advanced demands that went far beyond the price of meat. The power of the bureaucratic caste itself has been called into question.
A Blow to the Heart of the Bureaucratic System
The Gdansk shipyard workers opened the gates, and the power of the entire working class surged forth. Manual workers, who make up more than 49 percent of the population, are the starting point for an independent workers movement—a development unprecedented in the "people's democracies." These are events of historic scope.
In fact, ever since 1970 and in an accelerated way since 1976, the Polish workers have been gathering their forces in the factories and work places. Since the June 1976 explosion, there have been numerous mobilizations around more and more specific demands. They have centered on the formation of autonomous workers' bodies inside the factories.
This entire molecular process has now borne fruit in broad daylight. The circulation of papers such as Robotnik (Worker) has helped to establish links, however tenuous, between the many different experiences of struggle and organization. The various groups of workers have thus been able to refine their demands and tactics.
The actions of the workers of Gdansk, Szczecin, Wroclaw, Nowa Huta (steel), and Ursus (tractors), around precisely formulated demands and with a significant level of self-organization, strike at the heart of the bureaucracy's system of domination.
The survival of this privileged layer depends fundamentally on its ability to keep the working masses depoliticized and thus put a brake on their activity. Repression, the bureaucratic monopoly on information, tight control over institutions such as the trade unions, the one-party regime, organization of all spheres of social and political life (what Kuron and Modzelewski called "the organization of disorganization") make up the bureaucracy's arsenal for preventing any renewal of action and organization by the workers.
Nonetheless, the accumulation of experience in struggles allowed the painstaking formation of a layer of battle-hardened workers, able to utilize both the bureaucracy's weak points and the deepening of the economic crisis (which in turn has repercussions on the bureaucratic leadership). This creates the conditions for beginning to overcome the obstacles erected by the bureaucracy.
The demands for free and independent trade unions and for the abolition of censorship-taken up by all the strike committees-represent an intolerable attack on bureaucratic privileges. Many other privileges, material ones that this caste arrogated to itself, depend on these questions. That is why Gierek was ready to make any number of material concessions, even pledging to erect a statue in honor of the "provocateurs and anti-socialist elements" that his police murdered in 1970, but was not willing to allow effectively free and independent trade unions.
The Organized Workers and Economic Management
Having acquired a great deal of knowledge about the enterprises and having drawn the lessons of the myriad promises of Gomulka, Gierek, and Babiuch, the workers went to the roots of the crisis-the bureaucratic regime. They understood that the "bad economic choices" the government has been forced to acknowledge every time the working class has raised its voice are really the inevitable outcome of bureaucratic mismanagement—in other words, of a planning system in which the motor force is the combination (however contradictory) of the interests of a privileged layer of managers and the needs of those who have the upper hand in an apparatus in which the state is identified with the party. This cannot but augment all kinds of distortions and waste, which in turn are affected by the pressures of the world market and the recession in the capitalist economies.
In an economy where all the major means of production are state property, where private appropriation of them is constitutionally prohibited, where the state holds a monopoly on foreign trade, and where centralized planning exists, there is no way to achieve optimum functioning of the economy other than through demomolin antel by the geenpisted workare cratic control by the associated workers over planning, production, and distribution. This is what Polish workers instinctively understand when they explain: "The unions must be able to discuss production plans within each enterprise. This is the only means of avoiding such catastrophic errors as the building of a new factory here in Gdansk for prefabricated construction materials when the first two do not function at even 30 or 40 percent of capacity."
There can be no doubt that the most conscious of the workers, after being blackmailed for years over economic difficulties, have realized the precariousness of wage increases or even of a sliding scale of wages. To confront the chronic crisis, they have had to provide themselves with their own instrument, one capable not only of defending their material interests but also of giving weight to their rights and choices at the economic level. The workers want free and independent trade unions, the ability to communicate among themselves and to make their opinions known publiely, especially on the big problems of economic policy and the fundamental choices that it implies.
Faced with economic crisis, the bureaucracy came up with a response diametrically opposed to that of the workers: the workers must work harder, increase labor discipline, and accept the sacrifices "necessary for Poland"-for the Poland of Gierek, Babiuch, and Jagielski!
The radical difference between these two answers to the crisis exposes the dividing line in Poland today: On one side, a minority layer, privileged and parasitic, that pretends to represent the very workers it has deprived of all political rights and independent organization. On the other, the proletariat, whose numerical growth and increasing education and culture have made it the candidate for the economic and social management of the country, and whose current actions reveal at once the will and the ability to take on that task. This is what is really dividing Poland, not the false perspectives from the distorting mirrors of Catholic ideology, and not the reformist speeches of the "Experiences and Prospects" group.
The Question of Power
Once again, the workers upsurge in Poland indicates that every strengthening of the workers movement, every organized action of the working class, points toward the restoration of socialist democracy. This means a regime where political power is in the hands of the proletariat and is exercised through democratically elected workers and people's councils, in which all viewpoints can be expressed (which requires a multiparty system and freedom of press and assembly) and where planning is subordinated to the strategic choices and democratic control of the workers.
Many things indicate that the underlying dynamic of this broad movement is going in the direction of socialist democracy: the direct mass democracy that has characterized the organization of the strikes, the beginnings of coordination among the different MKSs (Inter-Factory Strike Committees), the discussion of workers' newspapers produced by the strikers, the demands themselves, the workers' concern for preserving the tools of production, and so on.
But the installation of such a regime means doing away with bureaucratic domination-overthrowing the caste in power and putting political and economic power in the hands of the workers. The confrontation under way in Poland places this question-that of the political revolutionon the order of the day.
This is what makes the Giereks and Rakowskis turn pale. This is what is causing a deep crisis in the summits of power of the PUWP [Polish United Workers Party] apparatus. This is what gives rise to the discontents, petitions, and regroupments in the party ranks. This is what enables the church bureaucracy to eagerly agree to give its support to the party. (It was no accident that 'Humanité opened its columns to the Primate of Poland but not to the MKS.)
This is also why the "intellectual experts" have called for moderation-they are neither able nor willing to pose the question of power. And it is why the Schmidts, Carters, and Giscards have made known to the first secretary of the PUWP that they are ready to help-"for political reasons," as the German chancellor emphasized.
It is also because of this that the Western banks have agreed to new and generous credits for the Gierek regime.
This workers' upsurge, just as the "Prague Spring" did in 1968, objectively puts on the agenda the need for a congress of workers committees that could be the mechanism for centralization and action and for expressing the workers' will. Such a congress would be the initial response to the crucial question of power.
The workers have justly declared that the government's incompetence exacerbated the economic crisis. This government does not have the support of the masses. Did not Gierek himself declare that the "links of the party with the working class have been profoundly shaken"? So what could be more logical than the workers making known, after discussion, their own solutions for escaping the snares of the crisis? Wouldn't the most adequate instrument for doing this be the election of workers delegates from the factories and the neighborhood committees to a congress that could discuss the various solutions proposed by all currents of opinion?
Sooner or later, the workers vanguard in Poland will have to develop an answer to this question of power. To fail to do this would be to allow the bureaucracywhatever the subterfuges, compromises, and momentary reactions-to impose its solution on the laboring masses in the end. To Take Advantage of a Favorable Relationship of Forces
For the moment, the workers have the initiative. They have already gotten the MKS recognized and have achieved substantial concessions in a number of other areas, in particular the recognition of their right to form "autonomous self-controlled
Strikers in Gdansk.
unions." The longer such a situation lasts; the more the links develop between Gdansk, Szczecin, Nowa Huta, and the Silesian mines; and the greater the breaches open up in the monopolistic information system, the greater the possibilities then grow for a maturing of the political consciousness of an important layer of workers. This is what all factions of the bureaucracy fear above all. They have all tried and will never give up trying to keep the movement fragmented. The arrest of members of the KOR to prevent their playing a certain coordinating role among the various arenas of struggle served this purpose. The Polish bureaucracy will try to keep its concessions within the most controllable institutional framework. This will be clear when the draft trade-union legislation is put on the parliamentary agenda. For if the bureaucracy now agrees to accept whatever is necessary in order to obtain a rapid normalization, tomorrow it will immediately launch a counteroffensive. As in the past, it will use a combination of corruption, attempts at division, and, finally, repression against the most intransigent sectors of the movement.
This does not mean that the workers will not be able to take advantage of the unstable compromise that ended the initial confrontation in order to organize their forces. A first plateau has been reached in the overall struggle launched by the Polish working class.
The threat of Soviet military intervention has been used throughout the negotiations. Certainly this had, and will continue to have, an effect on all the strikers and on the Polish workers as a whole, even if it fails to paralyze their capacity for initiatives. (In the latter event, this would hold a very important lesson for the workers in all the "people's democracies.")
Gierek and all the bureaucratic currents have used and will continue to use the Soviet invasion threat. (Not a few of them would admit that this is the final guarantee of their own survival.) In this way they seek to increase the pressure on the masses. Pravda has launched war cries against "antisocialist and counterrevolutionary elements infiltrated among the workers." The Rumanian CP organ Scinteia has violently attacked the use of strikes. And Rude Pravo in Czechoslovakia has called on workers commissions there to be more sensitive to the ranks. This nervousness on the part of "sister" bureaucracies only increases the weight of the threat to call on "friendly armor" for help.
To lift this lead weight off the shoulders of the Gdansk workers, the emergence of mass activity in the other "people's democracies" would be the most effective aid. But more immediately, the development of the broadest movement of workers solidarity, especially in capitalist Europe, remains the most indispensable and most realizable support. Various initiatives to encourage the workers parties and the unions they lead-in particular, the CPs and currents within the CP-to participate in a united front of proletarian and internationalist solidarity represents the most pressing task of revolutionary Marxists. This is what the Fourth International has done and will do.