💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › various-authors-poland-1982.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 14:33:22. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Poland, 1982 Author: Various Authors Date: January 10, 1982 Language: en Topics: 1980s, Poland Source: Collective Inventions, P.O. Box 24411, San Jose, CA 95154, USA Notes: Scanned from a 22 by 28 inch poster designed and folded to resemble a roadmap.
“We are now in an interim period, moving from anarchy and poverty on the
way to order and overcoming the crisis.”
— Radio Warsaw 12/18/81
“Many Western bankers privately applauded the move because they believe
the army’s action will end the political impasse that has developed
between the government and Solidarity and that has paralyzed the
economy.”
— Business Week 12/28/81
“The resistance, like the movement that led to the now-suspended
Solidarity union, has come from the workers themselves.”
— The New York Times 12/24/81
The current suppression of the Polish workers’ movement has assumed the
proportions of a global tragedy: the radical dissidence of an entire
class is being eliminated by military power. This loss is made doubly
tragic by the cynical use to which it has been put by the forces of
order everywhere. While the soldiers of General Jaruzelski impose
“normalization” at gun-point, Commander-in-Chief Reagan has mobilized
his ideological troops in an attempt to turn the defeat of Polish
workers into a victory for the “free” world, whose superiority has
supposedly been demonstrated by the army’s coming to power in Warsaw. As
if on cue, the American media intone a dirge about the descent of
“darkness” in Poland, while conveniently turning a blind eye to the
night of authoritarian domination which reigns internationally — and as
an international system.
That righteous indignation of American authorities is quite calculated:
while Reagan and Haig piously denounce the violation of human rights in
Poland, they actively assist in the murderous repression of workers and
peasants in El Salvador and Guatemala. But duplicity about the Polish
events does not end with such obvious examples. Poland has suddenly
become all things to all people, and the word “Solidarity” drops from
the lips of the most unlikely mouths, from tired AFL-CIO bureaucrats to
the power brokers of the Italian Communist Party. Ideologists more
sophisticated than the White House speech-writers decry the abuses of
authorities in both Poland and elsewhere as they attempt without any
trace of irony to link their own reformist projects to the cause of
Polish workers, a connection that conveniently ignores the truth that
these same rebellious workers often challenged Solidarity’s reformist
leadership. Other liberals find it necessary to be even more judicious:
they deplore Jaruzelski’s crackdown while also regretting the “excesses”
of Solidarity.
It is precisely the importance of what has been taking place in Poland
during the past 16 months that is lost in this loud chorus of “concern”
and “outrage.” If the silence of Polish workers, students and
intellectuals has been ensured by tanks and mass arrests, the silence
here is no less deafening about a crucial fact: Polish strikers have
been engaged in a struggle for an alternative society, one different
from both the imperial “rationality” of Western capitalism and the state
capitalism of Eastern “socialism.” The Polish movement has been an
inspiration to the extent that, however tentatively and confusedly, it
broke the conformist mold of social organization in the world. Its
defeat is a matter that involves not simply the fate of the “Polish
nation,” which showed itself to be divided like all other nations, but
the way people live everywhere. Now, as Polish workers are physically
prevented from speaking for themselves, it is not a question of speaking
on their behalf but of confronting the implications of what they have
already done. The shortcomings of the Polish movement — and the role of
Solidarity in its defeat — are no less important to analyze.
The declaration of a “state of war” on December 13^(th) only gave
official status to the social war that has been taking place in Poland
for over a year, a war fought essentially between workers and the
bureaucratic class which rules over them in their name. The military
solution now being pursued by Jaruzelski is an attempt to forcibly put
an end to this conflict and to do so on behalf of the bureaucracy, even
though the latter may have had to surrender some of its formal
authority. The present Military Council of National Salvation has made
clear what it intends to save: state power. That power will be preserved
even if it has to be reduced to the most primitive administrative
machinery, that of the state-in-arms. In an unthinking homage to
Trotsky’s concept of “war communism,” Polish Stalinists have resorted to
the militarization of society and the brutal reimposition of a command
economy.
Jaruzelski’s enforcement of a labor discipline in which workers are
presented with the alternative of work or death seeks to resolve the
twin crises of Polish state capitalism, those of social power and
economic production. The two are obviously and necessarily related: now,
as in 1980, 1976 and 1970, the real barrier to the accumulation of
capital in Poland appears as the resistance of Polish workers themselves
to austerity and authority. Moreover, as a result of the increased
integration of the Polish economy (via massive indebtedness and a
dependency on Western export markets) within world capitalism, the
Polish workers face another set of masters in the form of Western banks.
Thus, if the present conflict in Poland is most certainly a social
conflict, it is also a graphic manifestation of economic crisis.
However much the current struggle takes place — on both sides — under
nationalist banners, its global context is crucial to its outcome.
Jaruzelski’s power is clearly circumscribed by factors outside Poland,
namely, the power of his Russian superiors and Western creditors; but
the fate of the Polish workers’ movement is equally an international
question. Polish workers face a material scarcity that, in addition to
being the result of the inept policies of the bureaucracy, is concretely
related to the cycles of international capitalism. And an eventual
victory of the Polish opposition — beyond a mere reform of the existing
power structure — could only be achieved through an internationalization
of its struggle. Such a prospect, unlikely as it seems in the immediate
situation of repression, puts into question the nature of Solidarity,
the role of the Church and all the traditional characteristics of the
Polish movement.
As the battle between the Polish opposition and authority enters its
decisive phase, it is already fashionable in the Western press to lament
the fact that the workers went “too far.” This argument is contradicted
both by the actual history of the workers’ movement and by the unfolding
of the current crisis. If anything, the official actions of Solidarity,
including Walesa’s prior negotiations with Jaruzelski about a “National
Council of Understanding” and the interventions of Solidarity’s national
leadership against unsanctioned strikes, prepared the way for a defeat
of Polish workers by disarming them in the face of a state offensive
seeking to suspend the right to strike itself. This took place on both a
figurative and literal level: in words, Solidarity’s leadership promoted
an exaggerated image of the strength of the workers’ movement; in acts,
it weakened the effective force of that movement.
In the months before December 13^(th), Solidarity’s national executive
was engaged in a double maneuver involving at once the disciplining of
its own rank and file and the attempt on the part of the leadership to
achieve legitimized power for itself in relation to the party and state.
Thus, while it appeared “radical” in its ultimatums to the government,
the Solidarity leadership moved to contain any autonomous action on the
part of its members and directly opposed wildcat strikes and occupations
such as that of the women textile workers of Zyrardow in October, 1981.
If the army eventually arrives at an accommodation with a
collaborationist wing of Solidarity, it will know with whom it is
dealing.
The failure of the Polish movement cannot be attributed to a simple
“betrayal,” however; it resulted from a situation that had been
developing for a long time. The period following the mass strikes of the
Polish Summer of 1980 had already seen the development of Solidarity’s
organizational structure and the consolidation of its official
leadership. Although this phenomenon was much heralded in the West as
the emergence of a “free trade union,” behind the rise of official
Solidarity lay a significant erosion of the directly democratic power of
the workers who had initiated the entire Polish movement. In the
interval between the appearance of the first Inter-factory Strike
Committee (MKS) in August, 1980 and the ratification of Walesa’s
leadership in its September, 1981 congress, Solidarity had become an
institution with its own elite, a counter-power rivaling the weakened
party apparatus. Solidarity viewed itself as the official medium, as the
only conduit, for change in Poland and acted as such. This pretended
monopoly proved to be double-edged.
As long as Solidarity could function effectively as a trade union, i.e.,
as long as it could deliver the working class, the party was ready to
recognize Solidarity in its role of official opposition. When Solidarity
could no longer completely control its constituency, and when certain of
its leaders wanted more power vis-a-vis the state, it became expendable
in the state’s eyes. The ensuing “Operation Three Circles,” moreover,
was directed not only against Solidarity but against all those —
workers, students, intellectuals — who might contest existing authority.
Jaruzelski’s coup has been less a move against Solidarity’s trade
unionist aspirations as it has one against those in Solidarity’s rank
and file who saw it as a mass movement of social transformation.
Although the remnants of Solidarity have undoubtedly constituted the
major part of the current resistance to the military regime in Poland,
and despite the uncertain status of the actual organization itself, few
illusions should persist about official Solidarity. It can be seen as an
unstable formation which ultimately failed in its attempt to mediate
that which could not be mediated, namely the conflict between Polish
workers and the state. From the beginning, Solidarity’s project of
“renewal” presented contradictory aspects: Solidarity’s leadership in
alliance with the intellectuals of KSS-KOR sought to subsume the
workers’ rebellion under the reformist program of a “self-managed
republic” in which a democratized civil society would coexist with the
party; meanwhile, much of Solidarity’s base pursued a more radical aim —
the immediate and direct extension of an alternative social power in
Poland. As the Polish conflict deepened in the latter part of 1981,
workers proposed to administer social production themselves and
undertook action against the state on their own initiative.
Even at its most radical, however, there were severe limitations to this
movement: the real influence of Catholic and nationalist ideology
allowed a genuinely right-wing element (associated with the
Confederation for Independent Poland, KPN) to flourish within the
confusion of Solidarity. In the aftermath of the events of December
13^(th), such Catholic and nationalist components seem ironic. Not only
was the counterrevolution conducted by a Polish army and its general,
who until then had appeared as a “patriot” in the view of Solidarity,
the Church was the first to counsel appeasement and compromise in the
face of the military occupation it rhetorically condemned.
In view of the present forced conscription of the Polish workforce,
Jaruzelski’s assurances about the continuation of “renewal” acquire a
different significance. What is being renewed in Poland is a violent,
direct form of class conflict. While the possibility of an eventual
understanding between a rehabilitated Solidarity and a demilitarized
government cannot be ruled out, and Jaruzelski may yet borrow from the
repression-and-reform school of Tito and Kadar and indeed create a “new
model” in Poland, such an outcome depends on a semblance of popular
legitimacy for state power, a credibility which would appear to be
forfeited at present. Rather, the imposition of “normalcy” in Poland
more resembles the “sanitizing” operations conducted by other military
regimes from Argentina to Turkey, and the shouts of “Gestapo!” which
greeted security forces seem all the more appropriate given the
government’s crude use of anti-Semitic themes against its opponents. The
desperation of the authorities is such that among the ruins in
contemporary Poland can be found not only the collapse of the economy
but the complete disintegration of official ideology. It is the argument
of force — and not the force of argument — which is persuasive in Poland
today.
Jaruzelski’s stabilization measures also reveal something of the general
methods of state power in the present era and the possibilities of
opposing them. The relative speed with which the Polish military secured
its initial objectives showed the fatal consequences which await a
revolutionary movement which is unarmed and demobilized on a practical
level, being incapable of organizing and coordinating its own defense
because it has ceded power to its so-called “representatives.” At the
same time, the resistance of workers and students in Gdansk, of miners
in Silesia, and the generalized sabotage conducted against military rule
are evidence of an equally instructive refusal to submit to authority.
This resistance is no more due to the “Polish spirit” than the conflict
itself can be said to concern only Poles.
If the struggle which has been taking place in Polish factories, mines
and shipyards has yet to find an echo in Eastern Europe and the USSR —
where authorities have successfully turned Polish nationalism against
itself — the international repercussions of this movement have not
ended. Polish workers themselves refer to their go-slow disruptions of
production as “Italian strikes,” showing an implicitly internationalist
recognition of forms of rebellion elsewhere. Others may come to emulate
Polish workers and not simply in terms of tactics. Even in. the U.S.,
where events in Poland have been viewed by many as those involving a
remote place of poverty and hardship, Polish-style realities and
aspirations may be brought closer to home.
As Polish workers contradict Jaruzelski’s announcement of a glorious
“return to work,” the ideas and experience of their movement have become
a force in the world. However much interpreters elsewhere attempt to
discredit or manipulate the legacy of the Polish rebellion, its content
cannot be entirely repressed and its issues and conflicts remain at the
center of social history everywhere. It is fitting that there is
similarity in the views on Poland advanced by leaders East and West:
Brezhnev accuses the Polish workers of wanting to “restore capitalism”;
Reagan seeks to reduce their movement to the level of a militant Junior
Chamber of Commerce, declaring “their cause is ours.” In both cases, the
antiauthoritarian dimensions of the Polish movement are deliberately
censored. Yet, in their actions, in their expression of a desire to
assume direct control over the social world that dominates them, the
participants in this rebellion challenged capitalism, both corporate and
bureaucratic. It was not simply Leninism which was buried by the workers
of the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk. The assertion by Polish workers of
their collective power was also the explicit negation of private
enterprise.
The immediate conditions of life in Poland today — material privation
and powerlessness — are reproduced in varying degrees throughout the
world. As the current crisis of advanced capitalist economies
intensifies and is internationalized, austerity and discipline will be
the order of the day, arid will inaugurate the day of order, everywhere.
In the face of this, the “Polish experiment” should inspire further
experiments — experiments in going beyond the existing framework of
things, beyond the domination of things and those who administer their
production. A genuine renewal of social possibilities cannot occur
within only one country; it requires international perspectives and
actions. In the meantime, it is not a question of lighting candles but
of setting fire to the structures, routines and authority which imprison
contemporary life.
— January 10, 1982