ON
MODZELEWSKI'S AND KURON'S "OPEN LETTER"
By Pierre Frank
-LTwo political trials in Poland during the past year attracted international attention. The one involved two youths, Karol Modzelewski and Jacek Kuron; the other, three members of the prewar generation, Ludwik Hass, Romuald Smiech and Kazimierz Badowski. Hass is a Trotskyist, who openly proclaimed his convictions even after seventeen years in Stalin's labor camps. Where Modzelewski and Kuron stood has remained more obscure. It was known that they had: been condemned for circulating an "“Open.Letter" to members of the Communist party, but it was difficult to determine the trustworthiness of the various reports concerning its content.
. [Recently the French Trotskyist movement received a copy of the "Open Letter" in the form in which it was circulated among the members of the University of Warsaw sections of the Polish Communist party and the Young Socialists. The document was clearly of ‘such interest and importance that the French Trotskyists decided to make it available in a French translation to the workers movement in France.
[While the translation into French was being prepared, the Polish emigré group associated with the magazine Kultura, which has very dubious ties, printed a copy of the document in Polish. It is not known how they obtained it. From certain small discrepancies in the text, it would appear.that.it is not one of the original documents, but one that has been reproduced, undergoing slight modifications in the process. Could this copy have come. from sources interested in casting political discredit on Modzelewski and Kuron?. The two prisoners, under the conditions of their incarceration, may not even. know that Kultura printed the document. They. had previously refused to make a copy available to the emigre magazine.
‘(The French translation is now available ina mimeographed edition of 100 pages. To get a copy, send $1 or the equivalent in
{Below we are offering an English translation of Pierre Frank’ s introduction to the Franch edition of the. "Open Letter. This provides an estimate of the document from the Trotskyist point of view. ]
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_ In July 1965 and again in January 1966 Warsaw was the scene of two. trials which foreign correspondents linked together, due to the similarity of political views among the defendants, although the Polish courts did not bring out any organizational connections between them. In the first trial, the defendants were two university youths, Karol Modzelewski and Jacek Kuron. Modzelewski was the son
of a Communist leader, now dead, who served as the first Minister of Foreign Affairs when the People's Republic of Poland was established. Karol Modzelewski was one of the leaders of the youth at the University of Warsaw in October 1956. Later he was a leading participant in a discussion circle at the university where he openly expressed opinions critical of the policies of the party and the government. Kuron was likewise the son of. an old Communist cadre. Modzelewski was sentenced to three and a half years in prison, Kuron to three years.
The defendants in the second trial, Ludwik. Hass, ‘Romuald’ Smiech and Kazimierz Badowsky, belonged to the prewar generation. The lattér two, professors of history and of political economy at the universities of Warsaw and Cracow, were sentenced to three years in prison, as was Ludwik Hass. Before the second world war, Hass belonged to the Polish Trotskyist organization. When the Soviet troops entered Poland in 1939, he was arrested and deported, spending the next seventeen years in the Soviet labor camps. According to other prisoners who knew him, he conducted himself very courageously. Upon returning to Poland, he publicly announced that he was a Trotskyist. He was active in a circle of intel- : lectuals where he was noted for his exceptional contributions. He worked in the history section of the Central Committee of the Polish trade unions.
- Thus the: men who were condemned always took. public positions, publicly voiced the opinions for which they were imprisoned, although it would have been perfectly in order for them to work in an underground way. The government's subsequent attitude is proof enough of this, if justification is still needed. Since they took public positions not on passing questions but on the most general problems facing Polish society it was logical to suppose that they had made notes. A search of Modzelewski's home in November 1964 by the police brought to light an uncompleted study of 128 mimeographed pages. The existence of this document resulted in the expulsion of Modzelewski and Kuron from the party and from the youth organization, although the document was not made available to the bodies engaged in their expulsion.
Modzelewski and: Kuron were released but felt that they were’ being watched and that they would be arrested again, this time for a longer period. They wrote an "Open Letter" to those called on to ratify the expulsions. In it they: set down the opinions which they had advanced publicly. This document began to circulate clandes-'' tinely. Last spring, the organ of the Polish bourgeois emigration Kultura complained that Modzelewski and Kuron, under the influence of Marxist "dogmatism," had refused to let the "Open Letter" be sent to them. But this August, Kultura published the "Open Letter" as a pamphlet. It is doubtful that the authors of the document had changed their views concerning Kultura in the meantime. In any case, we are publishing the "Open Letter." The Polish text that reached us bore certain differences, generally small ones, from © the’ one published by Kultura.
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Modzelewski's and Kuron's "Open Letter" was written at the beginning of 1965. Its exceptional interest cannot fail to impress everyone who reads it. To begin with it is the first revolutionary |. Marxist document to appear in any workers state since the physical: annihilation of the Left Opposition and the assassination of Trotsky. This alone suffices to give the document great historic interest. But it reveals, in addition, the very high level of Marxist culture of its authors and their capacity to undertake a rigorous analysis of Polish society and to formulate, under the | difficult conditions under which they lived, a valid program for a genuine revolutionary party of the Polish working class.
‘On the basis of official statistics, they draw a faithful picture of the living conditions of the workers, the peasants, technicians, etc., since the establishment of the new Poland. It is not necessary in this introduction to dwell on this very important part of the document. We will mention only that the authors | strongly underline the fact that the stabilization that came rather soon after the Polish October of 1956 was made possible by economic reserves accumulated in preceding years, that the effect of the modifications secured through the October 1956 movement has now worn off and that new reforms will have little efficacy. On this point, their conclusions coincide with those reached by the Fourth International in drawing up a balance sheet of the "de- Stalinization" following the twenty-third congress of the Communist Party of the _ Soviet Union.
The authors of the "Open Letter" show the power of their thought not only in their analysis of the situation since the establishment of the new Poland but also in their formulation of a program that would enable the working class to lead Polish society out of the crisis in which it has been landed by. bureaucratic ~ management and toward socialism. This program offers not only measures for the immediate improvement of living conditions for the workers and measures to end the stagnation in agriculture. It likewise offers an entire solidly reasoned section dealing with the structure of the country that condemns without reservation any retreat ina rightist direction and places complete confidence in | the working class -~ calling for the formation of Workers Councils and a Central Council. of workers delegates, election and recall of . delegates, plurality of parties (specified as political groups . _ recognized by the working class), independence of the unions from’ the state, recognition of the right to strike, education of the i workers on general economic problems, suppression of the political ° police, suppression of the standing army, arming of the working | class. The program also offers a section on foreign policy that denounces the nationalism of the bureaucracy and expresses unyielding confidence in the potentialities of genuine proletarian internationalism in assuring solidarity with respect to every working-class movement directed against imperialism or against a ruling bureaucracy.
Modzelewski and Kuron present this program for an antibureaucratic proletarian revolution which they conceive as part of the
revolutionary struggle for socialism on a world scale. The program as a whole is reminiscent in concept and often even in its formu- _ lations of the program of political revolution outlined for the USSR by Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed.
The power of the thinking shown in this document cannot be stressed too much. Modzelewski and Kuron do not hesitate to make © an acute criticism of the policies followed by those whom they call the "October left." By this they refer to those elements (to whom they belonged) who, in October 1956, in the movement that brought Gomulka to power, instinctively sought the restoration of workers democracy. They accuse the left of that time of failing to formulate a clear program and of failing to differentiate themselves from the liberal currents in the bureaucracy. Having participated in the October 1956 movement with the legitimate hopes of young Communists and having seen that movement then disintegrate, they _ developed their reflections with admirable consistency, expressing them without concern for their personal fate.
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This program, in our opinion, was inspired by the same considerations underlying the program of political revolution advanced by Trotsky and the Fourth International for the Soviet Union and comes very close to it. Nevertheless it would not be right to pass by in silence an important theoretical difference between Modzelewski's and Kuron's document on the one hand and the position of Trotsky and the Fourth International on the other. It is well known that the Trotskyist movement has characterized the Soviet Union and the other states having the same social structure as workers states, bureaucratically degenerated or deformed as the case may be, and that they have combatted without quarter any idea suggesting that they are "state capitalist," or a new form of exploitive society in which the bureaucracy is depicted as a "new exploiting class" (Burnham's "managers," Djilas's "new class," etc.). The theory advanced by Modzelewski and Kuron is very specific. The label of exploiting class is generally applied to the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and the other comparable states; they are not in accord. with this. They see a difference between the technicians on the one hand and the central political bureaucracy on the other; and it is only the latter social layer -- a very thin one according to the authors themselves -- which they characterize as a ruling class in the new society where it collectively owns the means of production and management of the state, as they put it. On the basis of this concept, Modzelewski and Kuron distinguish between a bureaucratic social system and a technocratic social system, the model of which, according to them, is provided at present by Yugoslavia. In connection with this, they offer a searching criticism of "workers self-management" of the kind to be seen in Yugoslavia -- lacking democracy on a national scale. Their document presents an illu- . minating demonstration of the fact that the "self-management" which Liberman and other reformers seek at present in Soviet society, constitutes the program of the technicians who are demanding a . higher standard of living and increased privileges in order to
assure: a more favorable growth in ‘production.
The difference between. Modzelewski ! s and Kuron' Ss. theory and the multiple theories about a new exploiting class lies. less. in the assertion of a difference between the ruling political ._... bureaucracy and the technicians -- which testifies more to the subtlety of the argument -- than in-a fundamental difference: they stand on a completely different class level than most of those who: have been! fought by Trotsky and the Fourth. International. Among almost all the theoreticians of a new class, the revolt against. Stalin and the post-Stalinists has ended in denial of the © validity of Marxism, in skepticism toward the working class and socialisn, in adulation of bourgeois democracy. Denunciation of the crimes of the Kremlin has brought many of them into the wake of Washington. There is absolutely nothing of this in Modzelewski and Kuron. They denounce capitalism, particularly bourgeois democracy. They have: confidence in the capacity of the proletariat to accomplish its. historic mission. They support Marxism without reserve and strike strong blows to remove the Stalinist encrustation that has _ disfigured it: for so long. That is why we think that the difference between: them and the Trotskyist movement is _ terminological rather than political in nature.
In his polemics on the class nature of the Soviet Union, Trotsky indicated that. such cases do arise. We cannot do better than cite what he. wrote during the last. great controversy which he engaged in immediately. after the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed, during the’ first month of the. second world war:
"Let us ‘begin by posing the question of the nature of the. . Soviet state not on the abstract sociological plane but on the plane of concrete political tasks. Let us concede for the moment that the bureaucracy is a new 'class' and that the present regime in-the USSR is a special system of class exploitation. What new political conclusions follow for us from these definitions? The Fourth International long ago recognized the necessity of overthrowing the bureaucracy by means of a revolutionary uprising of the toilers. Nothing else is proposed or can be proposed by those who proclaim the bureaucracy to be an exploiting 'class.'-The goal to be attained by the overthrow of the bureaucracy is the reestablishmént of the rule of the.soviets, expelling from them the present bureaucracy. Nothing different can be proposed or is proposed by ‘the leftist critics. It is the task of the regenerated soviets to collaborate with the world revolution and building of a socialist society. The overthrow of the bureaucracy therefore presupposes the preservation of state property and of planned economy. Herein. is the nub of the whole problem.
"Needless to say,: ‘the ‘distribution of productive forces among the various branches of economy. and: generally the entire content of the plan will be drastically changed when this plan is determined by the interests not of the bureaucracy but of the producers themselves. But inasmuch as the question of overthrowing the parasitic oligarchy still remains linked with that. of preserving the national-
ized (state) property, we called the future revolution political. Certain of our critics (Ciliga, Bruno and others) want, come what may, to call the future revolution social. Let us grant this definition. What does it alter in essence? To those tasks of the. revolution which we have enumerated it adds nothing whatsoever.
"Our critics as a rule take. the facts as we long ago established them. They add absolutely nothing essential to the appraisal either of the position of the bureaucracy and the toilers, or of. the role'of the Kremlin on the international arena. In all these spheres, not only do they fail to challenge our analysis, but on the contrary they base themselves completely upon it and even restrict themselves entirely to it. The sole accusation they bring against us is that we do not draw the necessary ‘conclusions. ' Upon analysis it turns out, however, that these conclusions are of a purely terminological character. Our critics refuse to call the degenerated workers' state -- a workers' state. They demand that the totalitarian bureaucracy be: called a ruling class. The revolution against this bureaucracy they propose to consider not political but social. Were we to make them these terminological concessions, we would place our critics in a very difficult position, inasmuch as they themselves would not know what to do with their purely verbal victory.
"It would therefore be a piece of monstrous nonsense. to split with comrades who on the question of the sociological nature of the USSR have an opinion different from ours, insofar as they solidarize with us in regard to the political tasks." ("The USSR in War," September 25, 1939.) [See Leon Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism, Pioneer Publishers, New York. pp. 4-5.]
With Trotsky it was not a matter of abstract speculation, or even of innovation, properly speaking. In the course of the | struggle against rising Stalinism in 1926-27, the Left Opposition was made up not only of a bloc between Trotsky's faction and Zinoviev's faction. The faction of so-called democratic centralism (the "Decemists" of V. Smirnov, Sapronov, etc.), who denied that the Soviet state was a workers' state, signed the platform of the Left Opposition submitted at the fifteenth congress. In the case: of the young Polish revolutionists, now imprisoned, we must take into account the fact that the bureaucracy in power has deprived them of documentary sources of the history of the Left Cpposition and of the possibility of exchanging views on an international level. Thus the nearness of the "Open Letter" to the positions of our movement is infinitely more important to us than the difference in question.
In Trotsky's view, however, agreement on political tasks could not be permitted to shunt aside discussions on theoretical or even terminological differences. In the article cited above, he likewise said: De ot
"But on the other hand, it would. be blindness on our part. to ignore purely theoretical and even terminological differences, because in the course of further development they may acquire
flesh and blood and lead to diametrically opposite political . conclusions.
This introduction is not ‘the place to. conduct such. a debate; here we will make only a few brief observations. Modzelewski's and Kuron's théoretical generalization is based on a real fact..--: the omnipotence of the certral political bureaucracy in states. like. Poland. But. this omnipotence does not make: it. a collective owner. The authors of the "Open Letter" recognize that in these countries there is no market in the means of production (outside of the . a labor power of the workers), the bureaucracy does not itself buy the means of production which it disposes of as it wishes. It disposes of them -- the term is an excellent one. State property and planning are not sufficient to characterize .a society as socialist, but neither do they convert such a restricted group as a central political bureaucracy into. the owner of the means of production in a period when, for specific passing reasons, it disposes of them almost without control. In our opinion, Modzelewski and Kuron fall into a confusion similar-to. that, mutatis mutandis, of the theoreticians who present the managers of monopoly capitalism as a class opposed to the stockholders. The management function is | dissociated from that of ownership, it is not suppressed. The managers are capitalists quite as much as the stockholders. Analogously the central political bureaucracy cannot be opposed socially to the technicians. In the Soviet Union and in the East... European states, it should likewise be noted that the technicians do not’call for any profound political overturn, for any social rearrangement ; their program calls for an adjustment of the economy to increase their benefits and guarantee their status. From Stalin, the most omnipotent of ithe "political bureaucrats," to Kosygin, an eminent technician, ‘there has. ‘been no break .in continuity.
In their document, Modzelewski. and Kuron declare that the regime of the central ‘political bureaucracy was "objectively useful" for a-certain period when Poland, following. the war, began economic construction, but that in less than ten years it became pernicious to the development. of the productive forces, the. interests of the political bureaucracy being contrary to those of the immense majority of tthe population. History has never provided an example of a ruling class becoming a brake or an obstacle to,the . development of the productive forces: within a few years. What. is involved is a social layer brought to power under exceptional, circumstances and: éxercizing because of this an economic and. political dictatorship that has no historical legitimacy and whose temporary "utility" is very questionable. bes
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As we were writing these lines, we learned that Ludwik Hass had been freed at the end of August or beginning of September. But the others are still in prison.
The arrests and sentences were strongly resented among the Polish intellectuals and university youth. Foreign correspondents
in Warsaw have noted this. At Modzelewski's and Kuron's trial, some eminent figures, the physicist Infeld, the philosopher Kolakovski, the critic Slonimski and others served as character witnesses: for. ‘the: defendants.
‘Outside of Poland; ‘one of the first protests ‘came from the Vietnam Day Committee at. the University of California in Berkeley. These youth who stand in the front line of the struggle in the... United States against the imperialist aggression in Vietnam sent a protest: .
"We the undersigned, who have protested and will continue .. to protest violations of freedom in our own country, and who are engaged even now in defending the civil liberties of American dissidents such‘as the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs and others who have come under government attack, are appalled that Polish citizens Hass, Modzelewski, Smiech, Badowski and Kuron have been sentenced. to imprisonment for the exercise of political rights which we regard as: elementary. We protest this repression of freedom. We demand that the defendants be released and that their political rights, including their rights to distribute literature of protest and organize political opposition, be affirmed.."..
We quote from a letter of. protest: sent by - Isaac Deutscher April | en to Gomulka . and the: Central Committee. of the Polish party:
“"Y9u have not, as far as I: ‘know, jailed and put. in chains any of your all too numerous and virulent anti-Communist. opponents; and you deserve credit. for the moderation with which you treat them. But why.do you deny such treatment. to your critics on the Left? Hass, Modzelewski and their friends have been brought to the Courtrooms hand-cuffed and under heavy guards. Eye-witness accounts say that they raised their chained fists in the old Communist salute and sang the Internationale. This detail speaks eloquently . about their political characters and loyalties.’ How-many of your dignitaries, Wladyslaw Gomulka, would nowadays intone the Internationale of their own free will and choice?"
The political, intellectual and moral courage. of these prisoners measures up to the best revolutionary tradition, measures up to those victims of Stalin whom they claim as their own -- the old Polish Communist:party formed by Rosa Luxemburg and the Soviet Left Opposition organized by Leon Trotsky. The publication of this pamphlet is for us more than a task of providing political information; it is above all an appeal for international solidarity to help win their freedom.
September 24, 1966