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Title: Poland: Triumphs and Defeats Author: Various Authors Date: October, 1980 Language: en Topics: 1980s, Poland, Fifth Estate, Fifth Estate #303 Source: Fifth Estate, Vol. 15, No. 2, (Whole number 303), October 20, 1980, page 1
On September 1, Lech Walesa, the worker who negotiated the end of the
recent Polish strike wave, climbed two flights of wooden stairs to the
temporary offices of the new Independent Trade Union which he heads.
Walesa carried a two-foot crucifix, a bunch of gladiolas and a pennant
from a bicycle club, all to adorn the headquarters of what he and the
Western press have hailed as a “triumph” for the strikers — the right to
organize a labor organization independent of the government-controlled,
official union federations.
The events of the previous 18 days, which had given Walesa the keys to
his new office, saw a courageous revolt of hundreds of thousands of
Polish workers, which, although it had the proportions of a general
strike, stopped short of an uprising against the state capitalist
bureaucracy. The shaken Polish communist party apparatus, facing its
third major confrontation with the country’s working class in ten years
was finally forced to give into many of the strikers’ demands rather
than see an expansion of the strike movement,
In the process, the Catholic Church stood fully exposed as willing to
prefer even the authority of an “atheist” government over the threat
contained in worker rebellion. The Church’s thoroughly duplicitous role
included the taking of confessions at Gdansk’s Lenin Shipyards from
striking workers as a show of “support,” to Cardinal Wyszynski’s
(curiously, the cousin of Stalin’s chief inquisitor during the 1930’s
Moscow purge trials) urging a return to work by the strikers, thereby
hoping to get a little larger piece of the action if he performed well
for the state bureaucrats.
All of this received such full and extensive coverage in the world media
that its details hardly need recounting here, but perhaps a few
observations can be made:
All observors (and certainly the participants) knew that the potential
consequence of the revolt was a Czech-style Soviet invasion and a
repression of the strike movement (Polish Prime Minister Babiuch warned
at the height of the strikes, “Our faithful friends are worried”). And
it is precisely this ominous threat which gave the strikes their heroic
character. Huge numbers of Poles simply-refused to continue to have
their lives manipulated by the anonymous forces of the world market and
tried as forcefully as possible to revolt against those administering
their oppression. And this was their triumph — the willingness to combat
a totalitarian police state, their inventive forms of self-organization,
the attempts to link together the struggle throughout Poland, and their
vitality as humans stemming from a sense of what true freedom is.
Their defeat was signaled by their return to wage work and the fact that
the Polish state was left intact, but this occurred because the Polish
workers were restricted to confronting only those who exercised direct
dominion over them. For the situation to have had any other outcome than
the wage hikes, a few promised civil liberties, and Walesa’s
“independent” union — a larger and generalized assault on the
international system of capital was necessary. The Spanish experience of
the 1930’s demonstrated aptly that none of the nation states —
capitalist or socialist — are going to allow a truly libertarian
revolution to survive without a vicious assault.
To have assured a victory in Poland — a victory outside of the terms of
capital — Russian workers, German workers, and American workers at a
minimum would have had to undertaken the same acts as the strikers of
Gdansk and Szczecin to protect them from invasion. However, with the
struggle failing to be generalized, it was only the Walesas and the
recuperation of the strike movement which could follow. As soon as
Walesa sat down as representative of the workers with the government
bureaucrats, all was lost. As French theorist Jacques Camatte noted in
regards to a student strike, “No-dialogue can take place between the
social order and those who are to overthrow it. If dialogue is still
seen as a possibility, then this would be an indication that the
movement is failing.”
In many ways, Walesa’s polite and officially approved “independent”
union barely rates as a recuperation given the Polish CP’s history of
successful assaults on even authentically independent worker formations.
During the 1956 working class uprisings, the Polish Party had to contend
with 5,000 workers’ councils which had sprung up in opposition to the
party, yet after less than two years of skillful maneuvering, the party
had completely destroyed the power of the councils and had effectively
regained its absolute authority. It is dubious whether Walesa’s charade
will last the year.
What underscores the movement’s defeat is that a solution was even
thought of in union terms-a desire for a greater selling price of human
labor. These demands-written by social democratic dissidents, but
supported by many of the striking workers-would create a situation where
a labor federation modeled on something akin to the UAW would represent
Polish workers to their employers-the state. This may appear as an
improvement over the reigning union model-that of the Soviet Union’s
which is currently headed by an ex-Minister of the Interior (secret
police) and is charged in its constitution with the responsibility of
meeting government production quotas — but these are simply separate
ways of controlling the sale of labor within differing national capitals
(See “Poland 1970–71,” FE April 1977). An authentic independent union
(one not confined to “economic” matters such as is Welesa’s) would
immediately find itself back on the path of confrontation that the new
union was supposed to be deflected from.
The Polish state bureaucracy’s decision to employ a soft approach this
time spared the workers the casualties and deaths at the hands of the
state security forces and the Party the humiliation of having its
headquarters attacked and burned as in previous strike waves, but its
capitulation to the workers’ demands will not solve the country’s
underlying problems. The London Economist of August 23, 1980 expressed
it this way: “Past remedies — import-led growth — to create the illusion
of prosperity-directly produced the present crisis and have been
discredited. But printing money to finance the 15–20% pay rises conceded
this time round will only fuel inflation without putting more goods in
the shops. It will therefore depress living standards still further, and
leave the party leadership juggling with even fewer ideas to stem the
next crisis.-
It is recognized in all sectors of capital that Poland is the “sick man”
of Europe and can only sink deeper into its economic problems by
refusing the “belt-tightening” demands of the state bureaucracy and its
Western creditors. The economic decisions made after the Polish worker
rebellions of 1970 have resulted in the sharp re-integration of Poland
into Western capital; thus it is now in hock to West German, Swiss and
American bankers to the tune of $20 billion. The decision ten years ago
to raise the country’s standard of living by importing Western
technology and the subsidizing of its inefficient agricultural system
initially delighted Western banks. They saw the prospect of reaping huge
profits from loans to a Poland they saw as a fairly inexhaustible
market, relatively independent of the business cycle. Silly boys.
After a wave of modernization which brought the country up to the status
of 10^(th) most industrialized nation in the world, Poland became caught
in the same economic down-turn which plagued Western capital in the
mid-1970’s. Poland now competes with Zaire as to which nation will be
the first to default on its loans and, like giving heroin to a junkie
hoping he’ll reform, the banks are forced to give more and more loans to
Poland, just so it will be able to pay its debt service, which at this
point takes 90% of its export earnings.
The current crisis was forced in the first place by the Western banks
which demanded an austerity program before any more money would be
forthcoming. The bureaucrats in Poland simply sat down with a calculator
and devised where the austerity measures would be effected and of course
it was from the workers’ standard of living. But just as in 1970 and
1976, the workers refused and took on international capital.
As we print this paper, it does not appear as though the matter is
settled by any means. The Independent Trade Union has already charged
that the Polish government has not met its end of the bargain and
sponsored a one hour work stoppage which planned carefully “not to
injure the Polish economy.” Also, reports of wildcat strikes continue to
appear in the media.
The future is unclear. The workers of the entire Eastern bloc (see
accompanying article) are restive and as the crisis of capital sweeps
that sector of the world, one can certainly expect a similar
combativeness on the part of workers from Bucharest to Moscow. We wait
expectantly for this to occur, but our ultimate joy will be when those
uprisings reach our shores and we participate in them.