(The following article appeared in the January 20 issue of the French-language fortnightly Inprecor published in Paris. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
More than a half million people attended the ceremonies in Gdansk, Poland, in memory of the Baltic Coast workers who were shot down by the police ten years ago. A huge monument to those who fell in 1970 was unveiled on December 16.
Hundreds of buses covered with slogans of the Solidarity union movement, special trains organized by railroad workers in several cities, unending lines in front of the places selling commemorative buttons and posters, all testified to the fantastic mobilization of the workers of all of Poland on December 16 and 17.
The unanimous sentiment at these ceremonies was "never again will we let such a thing happen." Solidarity had decided to turn these events into a demonstration of its strength, and that is what in fact happened.
"This monument will be the symbol of unity. It will cement the unity of the workers of all of Poland" said one of the main leaders of the Warsaw MKZ two days after the ceremony. (The MKZs are regional union bodies.)
But he quickly added: "Thankfully I was not at Gdansk because hearing all those speeches would have made me sick.... Given the importance of this event, they should have limited themselves to having one minute of silence, instead of ending up with a super-traditional ceremony.
"Everything that was said simply obscured the meaning of that anniversary, of the fact that we had to wait ten years to pay tribute to our comrades. Some of the statements by the priests sounded bizarre, not to say dangerous for Solidarity. They prove that the bishopric is trying to manipulate the union, which the speech by Lech Walesa also shows. Walesa is too much the good believer and lets himself be too influenced by the Church."
These thoughts, in fact, express the reaction of many members and leaders of Solidarity, who were troubled and shocked that the speech Lech Walesa gave on that occasion had been written by a church official, with half the speech devoted to quotes from the bishopric.
"Peace, order, prudence, defense of the homeland...." This theme dominated all the speeches. It was the theme of the speeches by the church figures, by the leader of Solidarity, and by Tadeusz Fiszbach, first secretary of the Polish United Workers Party (PUWP-the Communist Party) in Gdansk.
Fiszbach was hissed when he stated that "thanks to the Red Army, Poland was freed from its chains at the end of the Second World War." At the end of his speech there was only heavy silence, barely broken by the applause of the clergy at the bottom of the platform.
"If the government had even sent a representative to say I'm sorry for what happened" the Warsaw Solidarity leader continued. "But that's not what happened. Instead we saw a member of the party who, as a leader, bears his share of the responsibility for the massacre in 1970, speak nonsense about peace and everyone's responsibility!"
Although the establishment of this monument was one of the main demands of the workers in the shipyards last August, not a word was said at the ceremony about these twenty-one demands. Not even one word was said about perspectives for the movement. It was therefore easy for Polish television to present these ceremonies as sort of a national anthem, wiping away anything that dealt with the mobilization and demands of the working class.
But the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Gdansk massacre would have been an unparalleled opportunity for the leadership of Solidarity to address the massive number of members of the independent unions who were present and to indicate the road to follow in the coming period.
The justifiable desire to avoid any uncontrolled incidents does not in itself explain the more than moderate tone of Lech Walesa's speech. The church's pressure was all too obvious in his speech. Even though for many Solidarity members the words spoken at the ceremony seemed less important than the event itself, many union members reacted very sharply to what they felt was a kind of violation of the movement's independence.
This Christmas period there were worse food shortages throughout Poland than ever before. No butter was available, except in restaurants, no sugar, no meat, no fruit except apples. In some regions there began to be bread shortages.
Lines would form in a few seconds in front of a store because "someone" had heard them say that there was a shipment of mushrooms or tomatoes, or even "someone" thought they heard someone say...
In a country where family celebration of holidays is still sacred, everyone learned to make prodigious efforts to organize a decent meal. People knew that the 12,000 tons of carp-the traditional Christmas meal-was a thousand tons less than the year before, despite an increase in imports. And there was 30 percent less herring, another basic dish in Poland.
People also knew that hundreds of thousands of tons of spoiled fish had just been thrown out because of the carelessness of the manager of a cannery.
The authorities also claimed that some of the problem was the fault of people who were hoarding-which, of course, only aggravates shortages. The figures on hoarding were available and showed this to be true. They show the depth of the economic morass that the bureaucracy's policies have plunged Poland into.
Besides, who provoked the panic of the residents, so that in spite of their good sense they went out and hoarded? It was the regime itself, by blowing hot and cold and issuing extremely alarmist reports about the threat of famine this winter. Although the country is not yet in that state, there is the danger of want, especially in the most disadvantaged regions.
The fight that Solidarity waged in favor of equally sharing the available meat supplies-which have been rationed since December 18—was specifically aimed at ending inequality in supplies that prevail between regions and areas.
The leaders of the MKZ in Warsaw discovered, for example, that residents of towns around Warsaw were being discriminated against compared to those in the capital. In the outlying towns people were receiving only 500 or even 300 grams of sausage instead of 800 for the whole holiday period, and were getting less than half the pork that was available to Warsaw residents. "It has always been like that," they were told by the mayor of the town, who they went to for an explanation.
The Solidarity leaders ended up insisting that stores in the capital begin selling meat to residents of other cities in the province. Those residents had a different ration ticket, which did not give them the right to buy food in Warsaw. While the new measure benefitted those around Warsaw, it did not resolve the situation in other regions, where supplies of meat per resident were as much as three times lower than in the capital.
In some cities the independent unions did not hesitate to show their discontent.
Lech Walesa addressing striking workers in Gdansk last year.
In Piotrkow Trybunalski, in Chelm, and elsewhere, Solidarity members occupied the county seat to demand that negotiations begin. In general, agreements were reached in these cases. But the bureaucrats in Chelm initially had sent militia men armed with submachine guns to try to intimidate the Solidarity members. A one hour warning strike took place in Chelm on December 23 to protest this abuse of power.
The confrontation between Solidarity and the bureaucracy on this question seems all the more unavoidable when we realize that the militia's stores in a city like Radom received ten times as much meat as regular stores, although their clientele is much smaller.
The Radom MKZ issued a leaflet exposing the fact that-among other abusesone hundred kilograms of pork had been given to the public prosecutor's office, which employs less than fifty people. The leaflet called on residents to inform the union of other abuses of this type and to exercise rigorous control over supplies.
This desire to exercise control over the distribution of food supplies is especially explosive because it would end up exposing the embezzlement by the bureaucrats. It would also show that those who limit supplies by hoarding had quite a small effect compared to the policy of leaders seeking to preserve their privileges.
At the Ursus tractor plant, we saw an example of the workers' determination not to be led around on a string by the bureaucrats. Management had refused to proceed with wage increases under the pretext that the money was not available and that the workers had already gotten a raise several months earlier. The workers responded by setting up a commission to find out how much money is wasted in the plant. They carried out an inventory of all the unused stock, machines, and so forth that could be resold and used elsewhere, and they organized an exhibition of photos showing the results of their inquiry. They immediately won their demands!
Further evidence of their desire to control production was seen when the Ursus workers got in contact with Rural Solidarity to discuss problems regarding the manufacture of tractors. As a result of these talks they concluded that tractor production should be lowered by 10 percent in order to increase the production of spare parts that were in extremely short supply. This would make it possible to repair the thousands of broken down tractors that are now unusable. The measure will notably improve the available fleet of tractors. Imposing Workers Control
Solidarity's determination to exercise some control over the entire economic and social situation in the country can be seen in its establishment of various commissions at the national as well as regional levels. Notable among these is a commission to control prices and wages, which will immediately intervene to demand wage increases if prices should increase, and which will enforce a social minimum wage of 2,400 zlotys per month.
At present the spread of wages runs from 2,000 to 100,000 zlotys per month, with the average being around 6,000 zlotys after the raises granted following the strikes last summer. About 30 percent of the population receives less than the minimum wage.
The union leaders are also demanding the establishment of a commission, under the control of parliament, which would make it possible to exercise control over working conditions. And if that structure proves unable to fight abuses, they will take whatever measures are necessary to control the situation themselves.
In addition, they are involved in negotiations with the authorities to work out a plan to rationalize the supply of electricity to factories in order to end the present waste in this sphere. Blackouts that can take place at any time are one of the main factors responsible for the decline in production.
But this tendency toward asserting control is not limited to economic or social problems. Although most resist using the term, the working class's desire to exercise control is also expressed in regard to questions that are directly political. One clear example was the strike by Warsaw workers in November to win the freedom of Jan Narozniak-a Solidarity member jailed for possession of a "confidential" document on repression of oppositionists.
A poll of 1,000 Solidarity delegates in the region was taken after that strike. Asked if they approved of the decision to call the strike, 95 percent of them said yes without any hesitation. The percentage answering any nesitation. The percentage answering "yes" was higher among the delegates from the big factories than among the white collar workers and intellectuals.
When asked if it was within Solidarity's scope to intervene in cases of this type, nearly 50 percent responded that it was and that the defense of workers arrested for offenses involving their opinions relates to a basic point in the Gdansk agreements.
The other half thought that in general the union should restrict itself to intervening around trade-union type questions, but that it had been correct to intervene in that particular case. Only 0.5 percent of the workers polled thought that it was an error.
On each question, the proportion of workers adopting a radical position was higher than the proportion of other social layers.
Their viewpoint was simply "to defend the rights of man and the interests of the working class," as some workers told me in a discussion at the Huta Warszawa steel mill. But in fact they were putting forward the demand for control over the militia and police by forcing the authorities into negotiations on the activities of those forces.
"Through this strike," the Huta Warszawa workers added, "we wanted to make sure that such arrests would not be repeated. And the aim of discussions with the government was both to determine who was responsible for the repression and to show our strength to the authorities, who must understand that they cannot be allowed to repeat situations like in 1968, 1970, or 1976."
At year's end typesetters threatened to stop printing Trybuna Ludu through a rolling strike effecting one region after another if the bureaucracy did not back down on its decision to prohibit the showing of Worker 80, a film shot during last summer's strikes. Here too, the political character of their action was obvious to everyone.
All these examples show that in the past two months the independent unions have made significant progress along the path toward workers control. Z. Bujak, the chairman of the Warsaw MKZ laughingly told me: "We are not yet strong enough to force the choice of leaders we want to head the factories everywhere, but we are already strong enough to kick out the directors we do not want."
The movement's strength flows not just from the mobilization of the mass of wage workers-about 80 percent of whom now belong to Solidarity-but also from the mobilizations of the small independent farmers organized in Rural Solidarity, which, although not yet legally recognized at the time of this writing, claims 600,000 members, and from the unity that exists between these two unions. This unity was clearly expressed during the national conference of Rural Solidarity.
Both groups are conscious of the importance of this unity. The workers have clearly stated that they are ready to go on strike to support the farmers if the government refuses to change its position on registering Rural Solidarity. And the farmers themselves plan to strike if their organization is not legalized, and will determine the date for their action in consultations with Solidarity's National Coordinating Commission.
Moreover, the farmers have just proposed organizing points of direct sales of meat in order to support Solidarity's struggle against the bureaucracy's manipulation of the distribution of supplies.
Who is Responsible for What?
The situation becomes especially explosive since no one is sure who they should deal with. "At least you in the West fight against the bosses and you know who your enemies are," a representative of Solidarity at the Ursus factory in Warsaw told us. "But at this point we do not know who we're supposed to deal with. For example, everyone is waiting for the authorities to present the plan that they are in the process of working up. But at present no one knows what the plan looks like or who will be in charge of it."
The internal crisis of the party has reached the point where no one knows any longer exactly which wing is dominant nor what will come out of the PUP congress to be held in March.
The revolt against the local bureaucrats is not restricted to the population's accusations against county leaders and their expulsion, as happened in Czestochowa, Olsztyn, or Bielsko-Biala. It is also expressed by an open revolt of rank-and-file party members, as expressed in the document from the PUP factory committee at the Fonica radio plant in Lodz.
In their document, which they symbolically entitled What is to Be Done? after Lenin's famous article, the workers assert:
"It is impossible to continue to lead in such a way that the party's bureaucratic apparatus—which is also the state apparatus and the economic apparatus-forces the population to adopt its own arbitrary decisions... Solidarity is the principal representative of all those who call themselves 'us, against the party and state which they define as 'them'
.... The party, with Solidarity and with other social organizations, must clearly place itself on the side of 'us. "
Their document still expresses many illusions about how such a transformation could be accomplished, but it is very explicit on the need to sweep away all the bureaucratic structures that are the cause of the present situation. Although in Lodz there is no horizontal coordination between different cells of the party, as exists in some other cities, the above-mentioned document originated out of systematically organized meetings in most of the plants in the city, and it serves as a point of reference in the debates that party members have throughout the region.
Given the wave of questioning, the
PUWP leadership usually cannot enforce repressive measures it decides upon. In Torun, the party's ranks simply decided to retain the PUP first secretary at the city's most important factory, even though he was expelled from the PUWP by the central leadership. The charge against him was that he had organized direct meetings between different PUWP cells, a practice which is formally prohibited under the PUP's normal functioning.
In Poznan the bureaucrats had to send in their big guns to impose a city secretary whom the local members did not want. In Plock, the meeting between PUWP first secretary Stanislaw Kania and local party officials in the city was so stormy that Trybuna Ludu had to report the rank-andfile discontent in its columns.
In discussions with party members almost everywhere, one more often hears them describe themselves as Solidarity members inside the PUWP, than as PUWP members in Solidarity.
Moreover, party members often are much more vigorous in their attacks on the bureaucracy than are leaders of Solidarity and Rural Solidarity who are not members of the PUWP and are careful to avoid confrontations that they are not sure they can control.
But, we should stress, the ranks of these organizations often go beyond these leaders. For example, an old peasant got long applause when he told the National Conference of Independent Producers: "We have to get rid of that entire bureaucracy and the organizations it controls, like the CZKR and the WZKR, which are nothing but bureaucratic apparatuses. We refuse to let anyone dictate forms of organization to us. What we need is a real union that allows us to carry out a united struggle with the working class. And that union is Rural Solidarity, whether the bureaucrats like it or not!"
How the Discussions Progress
The discussions concerning the elections of factory delegates, which are to be held in early January, have resulted in some progress on the question of democratically organizing the movement. This does not always develop smoothly. You hear a lot of sighs and comments about how hard it is to carry out debates within a democratic framework. This shows people are beginning to understand that there must be organizational means that enable each person to present their point of view, although the idea of the right to form tendencies has not yet appeared as such.
I was told on more than one occasion that "democracy is more difficult than we thought." One person explained that "you need time for each person to be able to express themselves and people have to learn how to debate our ideas and how to resolve our differences."
Sometimes the discussions take place on a very personal level, as we saw in a meeting of railroad worker delegates in the Warsaw region. But the idea is spreading that the elections should take place on the basis of program.
A leader of Solidarity in the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk stated that in the ideal, I think that the criteria for the election of delegates should include the candidate's personal merit, his membership in political and social organizations, his position in the factory, and the program he defends." He noted, however, that "we are so far behind, we still have so much to do in building the union, that I doubt that at present anyone would even be able to defend a program, properly speaking."
But the desire to equip themselves to overcome this backwardness is shown in many ways. For example, in hopes of accelerating the training of real tradeunion cadres, the local leaders in Katowice decided to use audiovisual media, setting up half-hour broadcasts on basic questions such as what is a union, what are the rights of union members, and so on. At Ursus, the factory's cultural commission has set up a "flying university" for the workers of the Warsaw region.
In recent weeks progress has also been made in defining the union's role as being that of a defender of the workers' interests. People are seeing that workers councils have to be established as quickly as possi cultural Circles. The agricultural circles are structures that had a cooperative origin. They have been bureaucratized and are supposed to rationalize the distribution of materials and fertilizer.
ble, and that these councils must be different from the union. Such councils would have responsibilities in managing the factory and would represent all the workers on a proportional basis.
"The factory directors would very much like Solidarity to take responsibility on the economic level and participate in management," a union leader told us. "But we are refusing because we know that it would be wrong, and that comanagement is impossible unless we can also make decisions. The objective is to set up workers councils with a director who would carry out the decisions made by the council. But we are not yet there."
Everyone does not yet have such a lucid understanding of the problem of comanagement and of the bureaucracy's maneuvers to try to integrate Solidarity represeners to ly to integrate sondarity representatives into the structure, the better to reduce them to silence. But it is said that in the course of discussions the ideas of Jacek Kuron on this question have gained ground among the leaders of the local MKZs.2
But the discussion gets more confused as one approaches the question of what solutions to put forward and what model of society to propose. Democracy, of course, but how?
What Solutions?
Given the present wastage, there is a natural tendency to blame the plan and propose total decentralization of the economy, to the point where people lose sight of the need for a central plan.
Many of those holding responsible positions in Solidarity will, without flinching, endorse the proposals of some union experts who call for the reintroduction of competition and market mechanisms in all spheres of the economy, and who favor requiring profitability of factories, especially through reducing the workforce.
When one pushes them a bit, most of these activists state they support collective ownership of the means of production and recognize the need to maintain the big shemical in her indoorie the steel plants, heavy industry, mines, property.
But they obviously identify the idea of a "central plan" with the "bureaucratic management system."
Most of the time they do not distinguish between the need to make compromises and accept the reintroduction of market mechanisms in agriculture and in certain areas of consumption and distribution, and the consequences of such mechanisms if they were applied to the economy as a whole.
When the commercial director of the big Huta Warszawa foundry-employing
16,000 workers-stated his satisfaction that the projected decentralization mea-
SO DAN OC
Solidarity meeting in Krakow.
sures assure the independence of the factory for the coming year, and that the volume as well as the kind of production would now be decided by the foundry management itself, this provoked no reaction from the Solidarity representatives present.
Instead, several of the workers we talked to at a union general assembly in the plant expressed an identical opinion. The implications of the adoption of a "Yugoslavtype" or "Hungarian-type" system-which are often cited as references-and of the introduction of competition between factories are clearly not understood. Many times workers would tell us that it is preferable to have a certain number of unemployed workers, who get benefits, than to have people in guaranteed jobs who have nothing to do because there is no work and who earn a poverty wage.
During one visit, an employee of the public relations department of FSO-FIAT- Polski coldly told us: The only way to be able to cure the situation is by reintroducing unemployment. If the workers know their job is not guaranteed, they will be a bit more careful in their work."
Although the Solidarity representative present, who was himself a technician, thought that this position was a bit extreme and appeared shocked by its antiworker character, he nevertheless felt that "a little unemployment wouldn't be bad." But when union officials from France, Sweden, Britain, and West Germany, who had come to make contact with Solidarity and to build solidarity activities in their respective countries, raised objections to this idea, independent union activists hesi tated and appeared very open to discussion.
Everyone insisted that it was important that the plan be decided "from below." But there was little discussion of how to centralize the proposals coming from all the factories and what methods to use to take the needs of the population as a whole into account.
Because their view is clouded by the bureaucratic character of the economic management that prevails today, most of them clearly underestimate the importance of a central plan that expresses the interests of the mass of workers. They do not see that the existence of such a plan is in fact the prerequisite for a maximum degree of decentralization of economic decisions and for the establishment of democratic relations on the factory level.
We should note, however, that some of these ideas were expressed in certain movement bulletins such as NTO (Bulletin of Scientific, Technical, and Cultural Workers of Warsaw) or in the contributions to Forum-80 put out by Solidarity. These ideas have been spontaneously taken up by workers in other cities who have reprinted some of the articles in their regional bulletins.
What Perspectives for the Movement?
The tendency toward workers control seen in the various examples given earlier, as well as the evolution of the debates on the organization and role of the independent unions, shows that the bureaucracy's maneuvering room is very limited and that many of the religious hierarchy's pressures for the reestablishment of order and social peace" have had only limited effect. The previously quoted comments of the Solidarity leader regarding the attempts by priests to manipulate the situation were the most radical expression of the defiance toward the Church that we heard. Nonetheless, after Father Urszulik, a spokesfor the bishopric, attacked the man KOR and Jacek Kuron in particular in a mid-December statement, the chairman of Solidarity in the Mazowsze region did not hesitate to meet with Cardinal Wyszynski, the primate of Poland, to call him to task. He ostentatiously paid a visit to Kuron immediately after his interview with the cardinal.
The cardinal felt obliged to minimize the thrust of his subordinate's comments, assuring Solidarity of his unreserved support.
It should be said that the Catholic hierarchy is far from being assured of the being assured of the support of its own troops. In fact, some fifty priests from the diocese of Premysl protested against opinions broadcast by Father Urszulik in the name of the Polish church and sharply demanded his resignation: "If he is afraid to say what the church really thinks, he does not have the right to represent the church in this position" their letter stated.
We should not underestimate the real influence of the church and the Catholic hierarchy. But we should also be careful to avoid overestimating the clergy's ability to bring Solidarity back into line and salvage the movement," as numerous articles in the bourgeois press claimed when the church made its appearance in force at the December 16 ceremonies in Gdansk.
The whole series of obstacles Solidarity will have to confront in the period to come, the difficulties it will have in maintaining and widening the mobilization, will undoubtedly stem less from the church than the continued pressures exerted by the Soviet bureaucracy, which threatens to send in troops if the process goes too far, combined with the Polish bureaucrats' attempts to convince some sections of Solidarity that the only way to avoid a Soviet intervention is to participate in the "National United Front" under the wing of General Mieczyslaw Moczar.
But the obstacles Solidarity faces are also linked to the internal problems of building the movement. The installation of democratically elected leadershipwhich really represents the forces in motion and the various existing points of view-remains crucial to strengthening Solidarity and developing the mass movement.
The regional structures of the independent unions have a positive character. Predominant weight is given to the local and regional leaders and the regional bodies have the material bases to be able to exert "counterpower" to the power of the bureaucracy. But the strength of the regional structures is counterbalanced by the very great weakness in the national leadership.
At the time of this writing, the role of Solidarity's National Coordinating Commission is still very murky. Because there are no clear criteria defining the rights and perogatives of the presiding committee-which serves as the commission's executive committee-the national leaders who are most in the public eye, and Walesa in particular, have total freedom to intervene as they see fit. This obviously causes tensions. There is a real danger that in the confusion, differences that might exist within Solidarity could be "resolved" by way of struggles for supremacy between one or another leader of the movement.
Given this situation, the elections now taking place to designate the union delegates at the factory level and the elections that must soon take place for regional (MKZ) and national leaderships have special importance because in the weeks to come Solidarity will have to confront a series of decisive events.
The authorities have not been content to just refuse so far to register Rural Solidarity and the National Student Association. They are also trying to backtrack on the Gdansk agreements regarding the promise of free Saturdays after January 1, and they continue to obstruct Solidarity's access to television coverage, while the church now has two hours every Sunday to broadcast the mass.
The question of access to the media cannot help but focus more attention on the question of civil liberties, on the right to free expression and censorship. It indicates the directly political character of the confrontation between Solidarity and the bureaucracy.
This tendency toward taking on a political character can only increase with the resumption of negotiations on the extent of police and militia powers, through the commission set up in December following the Narozniak incident.
These are some of the questions that will help to more clearly define the positions that now exist within Solidarity. These questions make it all the more important to adopt organizational measures that allow the workers to move forward along the path of workers control that they are presently taking.
All the above shows that it is more important than ever to carry out solidarity work within the Western working class, and to send trade-union delegations to Poland to assure the Polish proletariat of the unconditional support of the international workers movement for the struggle they are waging, and to smash any impulse toward intervention by the Soviet bureaucracy.
Notes
1. CZKR: Central Association of Agricultural Circles; WZKR: Provincial Association of Agri-
2. See the document by Jacek Kuron in Intercontinental Press, November 17, 1980, p. 1203.