(The following article appeared in the January 11 issue of Inprecor, a French-language fortnightly published in Paris. It also appeared in a special preliminary issue of International Viewpoint, an English-language fortnightly review published in Paris, under the auspices of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. The translation is based on the one in International Viewpoint.]
The rapid reaction to the news of the December 13 coup d'etat in Poland showed the tremendous feeling that existed inside the working class of the Western countries for the struggle of the Polish workers. All those people who, for sixteen months, had seen in Solidarity a hope and example for the proletariat the world over, took to the streets to express their indignation and show their support for the emerging resistance movement.
After the spontaneous demonstration that brought out thousands of workers immediately on Sunday, December 13, in most of the big European towns, as well as on other continents, the mobilization continued in an intensive way during the whole of the following week.
There were more than 50,000 at the Paris demonstration called by the big trade-union confederations, with the exception of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT). Twenty thousand in Rome in response to a call from all the trade-union leaderships; 10,000 in Stockholm on December 17, where the Stockholm regional leadership of the National Federation of Trade Unions (LD) jointly organized the demonstration with the Polish solidarity committee; 2,500 in Vienna and 2,000 in Copenhagen on December 14; and 1,000 in Lisbon the day after, completes the list of the main actions.
The breadth of mobilizations was generally in direct proportion to the extent of decisive support given by the leaderships of the workers movement to these initiatives. With the exception of the United States and Britain, where the mass character of the demonstrations (15,000) was due to a high participation from the Polish communities and where an anticommunist tone was undeniably struck, it is important to point out the class character and above all the working-class composition of these mobilizations.
The Communist parties and the putsch
The brutal repression meted out by the military dictatorship and the intolerable violation of democratic rights represented by the outlawing of Solidarity inevitably drew a gut response from most workers and has caused unprecedented divisions inside the workers movement.
This was the case not only in France (see box), where the Polish events are at the origin of deep divergences inside the CGT and French CP. Also in Portugal where, despite the violent declarations of the CP fully supporting Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, several national trade-union leaderships within the General Confederation of Portuguese Workers (CGTP), the confederation closely linked to the CP. have declared their support for Solidarity and passed resolutions in total contradiction to the confederation's positions. Under the pressure of this movement the CGTP leadership had furthermore to modify its attitude, shifting from statements that justitied the coup to a more nuanced position affirming its attachment to trade-union liberties.
Also in Italy, after the very mild declarations of the CP leadership, "very alarmed by the measures taken by the Polish government but denouncing at the same time the positions of the extremists in each camp and preaching the need for national unity, Luciano Lama, Italian General Confederation of Labor (CGIL) leader and Political Bureau member of the CP, gave a speech at the central demonstration in Rome that showed that there was far from unity in the highest bodies of the party on the attitude to adopt. These were his final words in front of 20,000 workers gathered at the square:
"I want to address the last part of my speech to my CP comrades, those comrades who did not have the courage to unequivocally and unreservedly condemn the coup d'etat in Poland — which is clearly equivalent to an external invasion. One cannot put an equals sign between the possible errors made by Solidarity and a coup d'etat... What type of socialism can defend a regime that outlaws 9 million workers? We do not want a regime of this sort."
The editorial in /'Unita, daily newspaper of the CP. on December 14 stated for its part that this coup d'etat represented the unmitigated failure of the Polish United Workers Party (PUWP) leadership, demonstrating its incapacity of correctly carrying out its policy of "renewal." It added in a sentence that is too subtle by half:
"If the ruling group of the East European countries do not understand the workers" aspirations for democracy, renewal processes and emancipation - especially in these highly developed countries - they will inevitably end up coming into conflict with the very reality of socialism as it actually exists."
In one fell swoop Enrico Berlinguer adopted a tougher tone toward the PUWP during his appearance on television, the evening of the demonstration, stating that there was no longer any hope for socialism coming from the East and that it was necessary to look elsewhere for other truly democratic forms.
The Polish revolution opened a new chapter in the history of the crisis of the Western Communist parties. The fissures and ruptures appearing inside the highest levels of these parties and the trade unions they control express the refusal of an ever-greater number of rankand-file militants to follow these leaderships betrayal of the interests of the proletariat. Social democrats and Poland
As for the social-democratic leaderships, if they came out of the affair better due to the demagogy flaunted by most of them, they do not escape the criticisms of their rank and file, who become impatient when they see the thunderous declarations of the first days followed by slight effect in practice.
In West Germany, for instance, the leadership of the powerful German Trade Union Federation (DGB), the confederation under SP hegemony, declared its sympathy for the independent trade union Solidarity right from December 14 (while nevertheless pointing out that the resolution of the crisis was the business of the Polish people). However, it took the activity of the committees in "solidarity with Solidarity," which mobilized the first demonstrations, and calls on the confederations to organize actions and support those already planned by national (such as IG Metall) or regional leaderships (as in Frankfurt), for Vetter, the president of the trade-union confederation, to issue a declaration — which did not commit itself to very much and was only fifteen days behind events — announcing the establishment of a "committee to support the Polish people."
The passivity of the trade-union leadership in countries where the workers movement is dominated by social democracy explains why the latter is seen as a minority in the present campaigns. This is the case in West Germany, where the activity of the churches, right-wing organizations, and the anticommunist Polish émigrés occupies an increasing place in mass media coverage.
In the same way in Britain, the absence of the Labour Party and trade unions from the demonstration organized just after the coup (they contented themselves with sending a spokesperson left the field open for the right wing. Consequently, with the exception of the far-left contingents, the socialist current appeared very much as a minority in the mobilization.
As for the Belgian bureaucrats of the General Federation of Belgian Workers (FGTB), they salved their conscience by calling a onehour strike throughout the country on December 18. But the timing — at 4:00 p.m. and just before the weekend — as well as the cynicism of the leadership who did nothing to mobilize for it, explains why the regional demonstrations that were to be the climax of the onehour stoppage did not draw more than 5,000 people throughout the country. Hardly more than the first actions called at the initiative of the May 1 committees on December 13.
Example of Arhus Dockers
Consequently, it is not at all surprising that the number of concrete initiatives taken up to now inside the working class to support the Polish workers' resistance has been so limited.
For the moment, the example of the Århus dockers in Denmark is an exception. The latter in fact went on strike for four days to protest against the arrival in their port of a Polish boat that was loaded in Poland by workers who had a rifle stuck in their backs. The Århus dockers specifically demanded that the national leadership of their trade unions take the lead in this mobilization.
Their action has had some effect to the extent that the Danish workers movement is tending to impose itself more clearly in a campaign that at the beginning was above all characterized by the initiative of the humanitarian organizations. Today the trade-union leaderships are not just protesting against the coup d'etat but criticize these same humanitarian associations, which organize food convoys for Poland without troubling to find out if they will be really distributed to the working population.
The first task: information
However, the passivity of the trade-union leaderships is not the only obstacle to overcome in order for a mass mobilization to be developed in the Western countries. One of the essential tasks of those who are at the head of the Solidarity movement with the Polish workers must be to inform the working class in their countries of the real nature of the Solidarity trade union and the struggle it has led since August 1980.
For the "misinformation" systematically carried out by the press of the Communist parties throughout this period has left some traces in the minds of working people. There is evidence of this in Italy in particular where the modest size of the regional demonstrations — even though organized in a unitary way by the trade unions — is related to the mistrust a lot of Italian workers have of a trade union they consider manipulated by the Catholic church and to the doubts they have that it struggles for class objectives.
One of the elements that explains the almost total absence of reaction not only from the leadership of the Workers Commissions (CCOO) in Spain but from the rank and file of the trade unions also arises from a gut anticlerical reaction that must be answered by counterinformation on the real nature and objectives of Solidarity.
For unity of action
In a more general way, mobilizations in support of the Polish workers resistance makes the battle for unity in action of the various forces of the workers movement a priority — whether actions organized for food aid and financial support for Solidarity or commissions of inquiry and sponsorship schemes aiming to establish direct links with the Polish workers of such and such a town, sector, or workplace. The very example of Solidarity - a unitary trade union organizing 10 million workers — is a powerful lever in the struggle against the division and dispersal of forces and for answering the demands for aid made to the Western workers movement by Solidarity representatives outside Poland.
Role of solidarity committees
In this sense the committees in "solidarity with Solidarity" - whatever their names - have an essential role to play: Not in substituting for trade-union forces — who alone can build mobilizations of a real mass character — but as structures whose initiatives are capable of weakening the reticence of the leaderships of the workers movement and encouraging them to commit themselves to action. They can give a concrete example of what can be done today to support the resistance movement in Poland.
These committees have furthermore gone through a spectacular development since the December 13 coup d'etat. In France, where there were less than a dozen before that date, there now exist committees in most important towns — fifty have been counted just in the Paris region - neighborhood, workplace, university, and school-based committees.
Also in Belgium, such committees have been set up in the main towns and they envisage holding a central meeting in the third month of January. It is the same in West Germany, where the national coordination of committees, which had been set up just before the coup d'etat, will organize a week of action with Solidarity in mid-January and is at the moment leading an offensive in the trade unions to get them to organize a sponsorship campaign that would aim to collect maximum information on the situation of imprisoned or interned workers and to force the ruling military to free them.
Today in Sweden fifteen committees exist in various towns and the Stockholm one has had to subdivide into eight more local ones in order to cope with the number of people wanting to get involved. In Portugal the committees have chosen January 29 and 30 as the first culminating point of their campaign. Finally, in Spain, where the campaign is only getting under way, the evident importance of the initiatives taken by such committees can be seen with the first significant meeting (400 people that was held in Barcelona on December 23 organized by the Solidarity with Solidarity Committee, intellectuals, and some far-left organizations.
Through the propaganda and information work they carry out - most of them put out regular bulletins — these committees can be a useful tool for trade-union militants who seek to generate debate in their organizations and who need to be able to work around concrete proposals for action in order to fight for the establishment of inter-trade-union committees for Poland in their workplaces.
Even if the international coordinating meeting of the committees that was held on December 20 in Paris was not very representative, at least the three mobilizing focuses agreed by all people at the meeting can be taken up in all countries. This coordinating meeting was in favor of the following:
• an increase in food and medical aid to the Polish people, to be distributed by Solidarity and by the only legal organization independent of the regime, the church, or any other organization acceptable to the coordinating committee of Solidarity representatives in Europe;
• financial aid to the Polish workers' resistance, which will be managed by Solidarity representatives outside Poland until the right to the existence and activity of Solidarity is restored in Poland;
• immediate freedom for all political prisoners and information on the fate of all elected officers of Solidarity.
The coordinating meeting of European committees therefore proposed: "to maintain already existing links with Polish workers. One of the most effective means of doing this is the "twinning," or sponsorship, of the membership structures of the respective countries (trade unions, committees, workplace branches, etc.) with corresponding structures currently being repressed in Poland."
The essential thing for the campaign is to defend Solidarity's right to exist and organize against the brutal repression of the ruling military, to aim to create the maximum number of links with the Polish workers. The immediate task of the solidarity movement is certainly to denounce and isolate the military dictatorship, but it is above all to break the wall of silence that the latter is trying to impose on the resistance movement inside the country.
Against any economic boycott
It follows that we should oppose the proposals for an economic boycott by a part of the left in the West. Such a measure, far from helping to break the present "cordon" imposed by the Polish military council, would only cut off the Polish workers from their class brothers and sisters in the West a little more. Above all its negative effects could only fall on the backs of the Polish workers themselves at a time when the military junta wants to impose obligatory work, a six-day workweek, and a twelve-hour day. It would only aid the regime in carrying out the austerity plan it has been trying to introduce without success for months.
In addition, it provides grist for the mill of the imperialist governments, such as that of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, which proposes an economic embargo and intends to use the pretext of Soviet intervention to justify its aid to the Central American dictatorships today, its direct intervention in Central America tomorrow, and more generally a deepening of its remilitarization drive.
These imperialist governments do not give a fig about what happens to workers — whether Polish workers or those from their own coun try. What they are interested in is blackening the idea of socialism in the eyes of the workers in an attempt to prevent the mobilization of the working class in their own countries.
Whatever may be the tactical differences they might have on the question of economic sanctions (the refusal of Helmut Schmidt to follow Ronald Reagan along the boycott path obviously is due to the enormous interests this would put at risk in their East-West trade, particularly West Germany's commerce with Poland), they are nevertheless all agreed on one point: to declare that the responsibility of the coup d'etat also falls on Solidarity, or at least its radical wing. An editorial in the London Economist on December 19 expresses very well the tone of the bourgeois press in general:
"Before Sunday, the radicals in Solidarity, confident that they had the nation at their back, had used the union's industrial muscle — the right to strike — to chip away mercilessly at the party's authority. By doing so they had gradually pushed their leader, Mr. Lech Walesa, into a position that he would have preferred to avoid. Their latest demands - for free elections and a national referendum on whether the Communist party was fit to govern Poland - threatened the party with political extinction. That went too far: Poland's geography requires a modicum of respect for the party, because the Russians insist on it."
In other words, it was indeed necessary to restore order. Behind the protests of bourgeois governments against the attacks on democratic rights and the crocodile tears they shed on the fate of the Polish workers, what clearly comes through is their common appreciation that one must not go too far." It is a judgment that flows from a common policy, that of trying to impose austerity programs on their respective working classes by doing everything to limit the direct and indirect incomes of working people, as well as by unleashing systematic attacks against trade-union rights outlawing strike pickets, etc.) and putting into question all the gains won by the working class over the last ten years.
Confronted with this, only the active support of the workers movement is equal to the needs of the Polish workers in struggle, and not some sort of boycott measures taken by imperialist governments. The solidarity developed since August 1980 in response to the unfolding Polish revolution has led to links being forged between Polish workers and the Western proletariat.
The combination of the crisis of Stalinism and the crisis of capitalism has brought with it the beginning of a consciousness of the unity of the workers movement in the East and West. The workers of Western countries have realized that they have everything to learn from a movement that struggles in unity for its independence and for a truly democratic socialist system. Polish workers who had seen capitalism in terms of well-stocked shops and now had the opportunity, often for the first time, to go outside their country, have often reacted violently to the unemployment and inequality in wealth.
These first steps toward a recognition of the identity of objectives fought for by one and the other explains the breadth of the spontaneous mobilization on December 13 in response to a military operation aiming to crush a movement that represented an immense hope for workers throughout the world.
It is on this basis and in the willingness to maintain and extend the links that had begun to be forged that we should build and extend the solidarity movement. The mass character of the mobilizations of the last week has produced enough pressure for the Socialist International — in spite of its deep divisions on the attitude to take to the Polish government, both on the diplomatic and economic levels — to finally decide to make a declaration defending democratic rights and national independence, whether in Poland, Turkey, Afghanistan, or El Salvador. It further stated: "systematic violations of human rights and trade-union rights concern us all."
The social democratic leaders should be taken up on this statement. We must demand that they do everything to force the Polish military dictatorship to lift the state of siege and to liberate the political prisoners.
Break the silence, demand an account of what has happened to all the imprisoned and interned Polish workers, send in commissions for on-the-spot inquiries, and get the voice of our solidarity heard inside Poland itself. These are the tasks of the hour for the workers movement of the whole world and for all those who struggle for democratic rights.
January 2, 1982
The response in France
There is no doubt that the most massive solidarity campaign in Europe since the military coup d'etat has developed in France. This certainly has to do with the favorable situation — the positions taken by the Mitterrand-Mauroy government, whose declarations, however formal they might be and outside of the clangers dropped by various ministers, is an encouragement to the mobilization of the working class. This is contrary to what has happened in West Germany, for example, where Chancellor Helmut Schmidt had decided once and for all that it is a Polish domestic question and that above all it is necessary not to get mixed up in it.
But the breadth of the mobilization is especially due to the development of the solidarity movement even before the coup d'etat. The very large number of trade-union or workplace delegations that went to Poland since August 1980, in general at the initiative of the most militant activists in the trade unions, was a lever in building the fightback and displayed — often in a united front way — the support of French workers for the Polish workers.
The advanced positions adopted by the leadership of the CFDT and the unity achieved between the main trade-union federations (with the exception of the CGT) for several initiatives are also the result of pressure exerted by the spontaneous demonstrations that were organized more or less everywhere directly after the news of the coup on December 13.
Since then we have seen the emergence in the majority of towns of local committees or inter-trade-union collectives in solidarity with the Polish people. They have set up meetings and gatherings, organized sales of posters, and collected funds in order to aid the resistance movement inside and outside the country. Students have often been in the front line of the street demonstrations, not only in Paris, but also in medium-sized towns such as Meaux, Melun, etc,
Ad hoc committees have been set up in various sectors — such as the jurists drawing together members from all the left organizations (including the CP) as well as the representatives of the lawyers trade union (SAF) and the magistrates trade union (SM), which has set itself the task of forming judicial commissions capable of coming to the aid of all those who are victims of trials in Poland.
One of the decisive aspects of this mobilization is the position adopted — in opposition to the leadership of the CGT — by several national federations of the CGT and by an impressive number of regional and local trade-union structures.
The national leaderships of the Finance Ministry, seamen, officers and captains of the merchant navy, theater, journalists, police and prison staff unions have taken a stand. These were the unions that have been marked by an opposition to the Georges Seguy (CGT leader) line in the past, in particular on the question of SP-CP unity during presidential elections.
But they were joined this time by other trade-union structures such as the regional federation of the iron and salt miners of the Lorraine, the metalworkers union in Angers, the national inter-trade-union committee of Elf France, the St. Nazaire dockers and the La Mede oil refinery workers, as well as the leaders of twenty factories in the Longwy steel area, whose attitude up to today has always been to slavishly follow the confederation line. It must be further pointed out that the big number of workplaces from the chemical and engineering sectors (various Renault, Shell, Thompson, Pechiney-Ugine-Kuhlman factories) represent a new phenomenon that is evidence of the depth of the crisis in the ranks of the CP and the CGT.
The participation of a big number of CGT contingents in the massive December 14 demonstration in Paris and in other towns, as well as the meeting scheduled for January 12 at the Bourse de Travail at Paris called by the trade union coordinating committee ("CT members for Solidarity") expresses the refusal of innumerable members of this trade union to follow their leadership at a time when the latter, by its silence and lies, tries to deny the real dimension of the Polish workers" struggle, which for more than a year has shown they were fighting for a socialist, self-managed, and democratic system.
— Jacqueline Allio