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Title: Poland 1980-1982 Author: Henri Simon Date: 1985 Language: en Topics: state socialism, libertarian socialism, syndicalism, strikes, Poland, history Source: https://libcom.org/history/poland-1980-1982-class-struggle-crisis-capital-henri-simon
zone of domination
This work attempts to analyze the struggles of Polish workers from the
summer of 1980 until today. It is a collective effort of several
comrades from Echanges. It is the third in a series of texts. The first
two were; Capitalisme et lutte de classe en Pologne 1970-71 (by ICO, a
collective, 1975)* and Le 25 juin 1976 en Pologne (by Henri Simon,
1977). The development of capital in Poland and the class struggles
which accompanied it may seem to be unique to Poland. In fact, the
Poland of 1980 had very specific characteristics: a large class of
peasants who owned their land; an equal balance between Western capital
and Eastern capital in a rapidly industrializing economy; a balance of
forces which favored the workers, who could not be restrained within the
current economic and political structures; and an independent mass
organization, the Catholic Church, which was a counterpoise to the only
legal mass organization, the Communist Party. *Poland: 1970-71,
Capitalism and Class Struggle, published by Black and Red, 1977.
These specific characteristics were not found in any other country in
the Russian imperialist bloc nor in Russia itself. Like the movements of
1970-71 and 1978, the 1980 movement has apparently met with no direct
response from the working class in these countries, even though they are
linked under the same form of domination of capital. But this is in
appearance only. It is certain that in the Russian bloc there has been a
resounding echo and that workers there are very much aware of what the
Polish workers have achieved. In January 1981, a miner from the Donets
basin said: "We know everything about Poland, but what can we do? We are
for the Polish workers; but if Poland is attacked today, it will be our
turn tomorrow." (This was part of an interview published in the
Financial Times (London) on January 9, 1981 and conducted by Alexei
Nikitin who has subsequently been interned in a psychiatric hospital.)
In Russia, for more than sixty years, and in the "peoplesâ democracies"
for more than thirty years, economic development has been in the hands
of a capitalist class (a specific neo-bourgeoisie) which was openly
totalitarian and ruled through the dictatorship of the Bolshevik party.
The form of this domination corresponded to the needs of the moment:
primarily, to uproot the enormous mass of peasants in order to make
proletarians out of them, and, additionally, to protect the nascent
national capital from any foreign economic influence. After the Second
World War the same form was applied to the countries annexed by Russia,
including already industrialized ones like East Germany and
Czechoslovakia. But the problems presented themselves differently in
countries as dissimilar as, for example, the East Germany and the Poland
of 1945. Paradoxically, the same form of centralized capitalist power
was able to adapt itself to an advanced industrial structure like East
Germanyâs since it corresponded to the needs of capital, (and increased
efficiency) as well as to a backward structure like Polandâs (where it
administered the countryâs development). But behind the facade of
Russian military domination, economic realities were all-powerful and
affected the attitudes of the national Communist parties. The seemingly
identical veil of Party centralism masked social and political realities
which were strikingly different. Problems Poland encountered paralleled
ones Russia had experienced or was still experiencing. The political and
economic structures in the USSR were a hold-over from the period of
formal domination of capital; these structures were perpetuated by
certain backward sectors which maintained in a state of
semi-backwardness an economy that had already largely passed to the
stage of real domination. The problem of capital was to mass produce
consumer goods, to put into operation modern techniques of production
with high productivity, namely to have a field for the unhindered
operation of capital. All this presupposed that the system of domination
would simuItaneously be transformed into a different system, one
compatible with these developments and with changes in the structure of
classes, affecting especially peasants and those at the intermediate
level of the economic and political hierarchy (these groups bearing
resemblance to the middle classes in the Western branch of capital). The
class struggle in Poland, even if it may have specific characteristics,
clearly brings up these problems. Will the outcome of this struggle be
the beginning of a transformation of structures in the Eastern branch of
capital?
The international crisis of capital precipitated the economic crisis in
Poland. To the extent that Polandâs entire system of industrialization
was based on foreign trade â especially with the Western branch of
capital â the restriction of this trade hindered its operation. Polish
workers rebelled once again when the ruling class tried to make them
bear the burden, namely the increased rate of extortion of surplus
value. But didnât every capitalist country face the same problem in this
period of crisis? If the workersâ struggle in Poland exposed clearly and
brutally the nature of the crisis of capital in the Eastern branch, it
simuItaneously exposed the nature of world capital.
In the Western branch of capital, the "solution" to the crisis, namely,
increasing the rate of profit, was no longer seen as an intrusion of
politics into economic matters, but as a freedom to be exercised by
managers of the economy, a freedom where capital is unrestricted by
political or state control. During the preceding decades, the
development of capital in the East gave rise to a conflict within the
capitalist class itself between politicians (in control of the Party)
and technocrats (in control of the economy). This period seems to have
come to an end. No one within the capitalist class any longer denies the
urgency of economic and political reforms, even if there are
disagreements about what methods to use. One wonders if the conflict
within the ruling class in Poland and in the other countries in the
Eastern branch of capital, the conflict over economic reforms leading to
more "freedom" (namely, greater productivity of labor by means of a more
complete "bondage") may not be a specific case in the global tendencies
of international capital. Within a national framework, capital tries to
make use of the class struggle as a lever to dislodge the backward
forces in its midst (the ones opposed to its present requirements) and
to replace them with more trustworthy instruments of domination. But it
is impossible to contain the class struggle. Poland provides striking
proof that the crisis of capital, namely, the crisis of profit
interacting with the class struggle, does not spare so-called
"socialist" countries. In the East, as in the West, a free hand for
capital does not in any way mean more "freedom" for workers. Given the
magnitude of the crisis of profit and the working class reactions to it,
the structures of capital oscillate between sharing the management of
capital with the workers and repressing them most violently. In this
respect, Poland, as a national entity, is just one specific case of the
general crisis of capital. Self-management currents in Poland parallel
the same currents in other industrialized countries. The military-police
repression parallels the most brutal repressions â totalitarian in
underdeveloped or industrializing countries, selective in industrialized
countries. In fact, capital is trapped by its own development; the
modern techniques which are widely diffused through competition cannot
be entirely efficient in a totalitarian context or in a context of
manipulated poverty. Nevertheless, the crisis of profit and the class
struggle can be overcome only if capital is free to increase
exploitation. Due to the interpenetration of the economies in both
branches of capital, the failures and crises specific to one country
become the failure and crisis of capital as a whole. The situation in
Poland further accentuates the crisis which rages everywhere and further
intensifies the class struggle. The question now is not what will become
of Poland, but where will the chaos appear next in the West or in the
East?
Speaking to the Sunday Times (London), on August 31, 1989, a Polish
journalist observed: "Since the war, this country has been run by a
succession of different methods. First we had sheer Stalinist terror and
then the mobilization of idealism which was gradually dissipated under
Gomulka. When Gierek came to power, he tried a new formula â technocracy
and consumerism. But he combined it with autocracy, and the mix simply
did not work. Technocracy must be controlled and channelled by
democracy.â At that time, his account was accurate but it gave only a
superficial explanation of the Polish situation.
What the journalist failed to say was that the transition from one
method of domination to another (the next) was made under pressure from
workersâ uprisings, and that each "new system" was a response to these
uprisings. Resumption of work was the authorities short-term goal;
restoration of the complete domination of capital was the long-term
goal. The authorities were forced to make economic and political
concessions every time. And Although, over the years, they tried by
various repressive means to reimpose the yoke of exploitation on the
workers, they were not able to erase from the workersâ memories the fact
that a mass movement had caused capitalist power to back down.
In a certain sense, recent events in Poland are the direct resuIt of the
1956 insurrection. On June 28, 1956, the eruption in Poznan dramatically
revealed the Polish workers in struggle. At first, the repression was
bloody and brutal, but after Gomulka (who had been ousted under Stalin)
returned to power, the rulers skillfully managed to manipulate all
currents of "liberalization" and of "struggle" so as to use them against
both the workers and the revolutionary committees which had been set up.
The climax of this period was Gomulkas return to power in October 1956.
At that time the political class thought it wise to define what it
called "the Polish road to socialism" Gomulka legalized workers councils
only to gradually empty them of all content. Furthermore, he channelled
part of the surplus value extorted from the workers (which was then
assigned to basic industrial investments in heavy industry) into the
production of consumer goods in an attempt to raise the standard of
living. So here was a Communist Party, under pressure from the class
struggle, recognizing workersâ interests and accepting their
intervention in economic decisions, namely in the disposition of their
labor. Another of the Partyâs retreats had equally great consequences
for later events: a numerous peasantry (more than 30% of the population)
recovered their lands in the form of private property, Although with
certain restrictions.
This situation could have determined a form of capitalist democracy
which would have served the global interests of capital within the
framework of the Polish state. Progressive elimination of the peasant
class in the transition to capitalist agriculture, industrial
development with the proletarianization of the ex-peasants,
transformation of the ruling class into a pro-managerial class â all
this might have appeared as the "free and natural" development of the
system. But the Russian domination, both strategic and economic, forced
the retention of the Leninist model of Party domination, a Party
claiming to centralize all decisions and to determine the rhythm of
economic growth, which in a class society is absolutely impossible. A
fundamental conflict developed and intensified over the years: economic
constraints were liberalized, especially those which allowed enterprise
managers to make decisions appropriate to the interests of capital. But
none of this implied the restoration of Western-style political
liberties. Hence, this fundamental conflict, which became more violent
and visible as industrialization proceeded, took the form of a
confrontation within the ruling class itself. The world-wide crisis of
capital made the problems more severe and the rulersâ inability to
resolve them opened the way to the workersâ actions. Three overt worker
revolts, in 1970, 1976 and 1980, demonstrated the systemâs inability to
resolve this conflict. In addition to its own crisis, the capitalist
class had to deal with power relations which favored workers who did not
want changes in the system to be made at their expense.
The workersâ insurrection of 1970-71 has undoubtedly had the most
profound effect on the current generation of Polish workers. But it was
just as instructive for the capitalist class because it exposed the
internal contradictions of the system and gave rise to a generation of
reformists. The December 1970 insurrection did not appear out of the
blue. In their opposition to a capitalist class whose domination still
emanated from an all-powerful Party, the workers responded with
resistance on a day-to-day level which was often camouflaged but which
became increasingly open in a society where industrialization turned
enterprise managers into flaccid administrators because they had so
little power. Thus, over the years, there developed a crisis endemic to
the system â a crisis whose solution theoretically would involve
economic adjustments (in prices and wages) as well as structural ones
(internal reorganization with a different power distribution inside the
capitalist class). Such reforms were, however, constantly postponed in
order to assure social peace and also to maintain the equilibrium among
the ruling class clans who served the Party.
By the end of the 1960s, the crisis had become more acute and was
accentuated by more frequent, but locally isolated strikes, and by the
student movement of March 1968. The repression unleashed against this
revolt, which the workers had not joined, did not put an end to the
strikes. In the course of the winter of 1969-70, the strikes spread,
especially in response to attempts to make reductions in wages. The
strikes made the authorities increasingly cautious in undertaking what
was becoming increasingly urgent.
Thus, backed into a corner, in December 1970 the authorities resolved to
strike a blow; it was hatched by the same Gomulka crew which had
"settled" the 1956 crisis but the credibility this crew had enjoyed at
that time was exhausted precisely because of this settlement. The attack
was aimed against the workers alone because this seemed to be easiest,
and it was launched on two fronts: wages and prices. The attack against
wages took the form of changing the work norms. This did not have a
unifying effect on the struggles; if struggles did resuIt, they remained
localized and isolated since each factory developed its own form of
resistance. (The capitalist class undoubtedly learned from the
insurrections of East Germany in June 1953 and of Hungary in November
1956, which originated in response to extensive and abrupt changes in
work norms.) So it was not surprising that when the government announced
an adjustment in prices on December 13, 1970, there was a strike in
progress at the Gdansk naval shipyards precisely over the determination
of wages. The price hike which was to affect the entire country and a
great variety of products turned out to be the unifying element of the
struggle.
The price increases affected mainly foodstuffs of basic necessity and
were as high as 30%. This was more than enough to provoke a wave of
protests which rapidly turned into riots. After December 14, the strike
which had been under way at the Gdansk naval shipyards quickly spread to
many factories throughout Poland and became a generalized worker
rebellion which the capitalist class managed to subdue only by
repealing, in succession, all the measures which had given rise to the
rebellion.
There were three stages to the struggle, in a dialectic of the working
class versus capital. As in Poznan in 1956, the first stage was a
frontal attack against the regime. Workers came out in the streets to
emphasize their demands; since their delegates were rebuffed and even
arrested, and since the authorities refused any dialogue and resorted to
violence and deceit, workers in many places congregated outside the
local Party headquarters which they viewed as centers of power, took
them by storm and set fire to them. This is what happened in the two
large BaItic port cities, Gdansk and Gdynia, where the advance flank of
the proletariat was the shipyard workers of these cities. Here, in spite
of some continuing guerrilla urban warfare, the workers for a time
essentially took over the cities. In Gdansk, on December 15, the local
police and militia gradually drove the workers toward the naval
shipyards; the workers proceeded to occupy the shipyards, but for a
short time only because they were forced to evacuate them on December
17.
In Gdynia the strike was more confusing; as in Gdansk, a strike
committee was set up, but after December 16, the shipyards were occupied
by the army. On December 17, following an appeal broadcast on the radio
the night before by one of the local Party leaders, the workers
assembled early in the morning to resume work. They were met with a
fusillade; a massacre ensued. This was followed by widespread fighting
throughout the city and street clashes which finally ended with the
police and army resuming control of the city. More than three hundred of
the insurgents were killed. After this, in Gdynia too, the workers
withdrew to the factories. In a number of Polandâs industrial cities,
similar events took place: strikes, demonstrations, fighting, but none
of those cities experienced the violence or the tragedy of the events on
the BaItic coast. The situation which developed in the coastal cities is
hard to define: the workers, to all appearances, went back to the
shipyards and their jobs, but control over what went on seemed to lie
more with the strike committees than with the rulers. It was in another
port city, Szczecin, that the second stage would emerge. Only three days
after the Gdansk uprising and on the same day as the Gdynia massacre,
the Szczecin workers at the naval shipyards called a solidarity strike.
Having learned from experience, they first of all set up a strong
organization for struggle: a workersâ assembly and a workersâ committee
made up of elected representatives from every sector in the factory.
Together they drew up a list of twenty-two demands to be discussed with
the appropriate authorities. The refusal to hold discussions led to a
street demonstration which, like in Gdynia and Gdansk, brought the
workers to the local Party headquarters, which was set on fire. Here,
too, a sort of urban guerrilla warfare broke out in the city. One might
have thought it was a repetition of the situation in Gdansk and Gdynia.
In fact, it was almost the opposite. There was nothing impromptu here;
the resistance organization did not follow, but preceded defeat in the
streets. In this sense the fighting inside the city was simply a tactic
in a much broader approach. In order to make this clear, the workersâ
committee transformed itself into a central strike committee which took
charge, not only of the struggle and negotiations, but of the
organization of the activity of the region as well. This step in advance
created a situation which was reproduced in other industrial centers,
notably in Gdansk and Gdynia where the same organizational structures
and the same type of demands appeared. The spread of this situation
seemed to threaten the power of the capitalist class enough to warrant
ousting Gomulka and replacing him with Gierek. Though apparently
victorious in the streets, the government nevertheless had to try to
palm off this change of ruler as a "victory" for the workersâ struggle
and thus try to put an end to a situation dangerous for the system as a
whole. For the capitalist class, Gierek was the man of the technocrats
who were in opposition to the politicians of the Party; the fact that he
was reputed to be a "reformer" aroused hopes that he was also "the man
of the hour," capable of getting the workers to listen to reason and to
accept the new economic and social conditions against which they had
rebelled.
The struggle moved from the streets to the places of production; it was
this terrain that Gierek chose for the second act, when he initiated a
social repression in place of the bloody repression of the preceding
days. The curtain opened with what was mentioned earlier: the
presentation of Gierek as "the man of the workersâ rebellion." But a
Gomulka-type coup did not work a second time; the workers were not taken
in and continued their struggle. The number of walkouts increased almost
everywhere and, a week after the revolt, the strike committees were
still more or less in charge wherever they existed. They even began
setting up direct contacts throughout Poland. This situation continued
into January 1971; the Szczecin and Gdansk committees repeatedly
demanded that the head of the government, Gierek himself, come to them
to discuss the workersâ demands. This is what he and his entourage
finally did on January 24 and 25, 1971, since he was backed into a
corner. In appearance, he acquiesced to one of the workersâ central
demands. For the head of the Party which claimed to be the direct
emanation of the working class to come to the workers
and face a strike committee of more than five hundred workers delegates
(a real emanation of the workers), was more than a humiliation; it was
an acknowledgment that the Party was an institution that had no
connection whatsoever with the working class, and that it was neither
more nor less than an ordinary capitalist exploiter which ruled over
workersâ destinies. But this humiliation was a tactic which furnished
capital with a victory. Gierekâs "courage" and "understanding" in
confronting the anger of the workers cost him very little since the
police and the army had encircled the shipyards and were ready to
intervene. From this position of strength, by granting a few
concessions, he was able to obtain two crucial results: the workers
agreed to the price increases and agreed to return to work. In effect,
this agreement deprived the workers of both their weapon â the
strike-and. the principal grounds for their action â the price
increases. A few days later, the lowest wages were, in fact, raised; the
rest of the promises remained a dead letter. But, in spite of all that,
a new situation had been created. A journalist for Le Monde wrote on
February 5, 1971, "The new leader of the Polish Party created a
precedent whose extreme consequences could influence certain established
norms in this  countryâs internal relations. One of these norms
determines the form of contacts between the Party leadership and the
working class and it does not include direct dialogue between the head
of the Party and the strikers.
The rulers considered the play to be over; however, it was not. A third
act was to follow. Although most strikes were settled at little cost to
the system, during the week of February 7 â 13, a strike broke out among
the women textile workers of Lodz. The textile factories were occupied;
before long, the city was barricaded. Strikes then reappeared in other
cities, particularly in Szczecin., where the workers were becoming aware
of the nature of the governments promises. It looked like the Szczecin
scenario would be repeated; the rulers had to come to Lodz to negotiate
with an imposing workersâ delegation. But this time they had to back
down on things they had been unwilling to concede before: all the
December price hikes would be cancelled, but the wage increases granted
since December would stand.
For the entire Polish working class, this was an unprecedented success
in having its demands met, but it was no more than that. The workers saw
that by striking they were able to make the government back down, but
they reaffirmed the legitimacy of this very government when they laid
down their arms. Because of this and because of their overconfidence in
their "victory," they would experience severe repression, directly and
indirectly, in subsequent years. No ruling class would suffer such
agonies for the purpose of retaining the very substance of its class
domination without seeking to consolidate its position through a
repression combined with structural changes which could prevent such a
situation from recurring. This explains why the rulers carried out
repression with one hand while with the other they tried to initiate
changes which, in their view, would consolidate the system.
The new ruling clan â Gierek backed by the technocrats of The economy â
tried to get out of the impasse by using Western capital and technology
to embark on a modern industrial development. The new leaders obliged
the peasant class to furnish foodstuffs at low prices; they also
encouraged the growth of a middle class of small businessmen. In other
words, the Polish capitalist class sold the Polish workersâ labor power
to Western capital by subsidizing their reproduction with inexpensive
national agricultural products (or, at least it hoped to) â this in
order to invest in modern processing industries. Even this very timid
economic adjustment resulted merely in strengthening the privileged
layer of the new capitalist class. The international economic crisis
would thwart the attempt to cross the threshold of capitalist
productivity solely by means of modern technology. The workers,
restricted to the same condition of dependence and to a low living
standard, resisted daily and refused to "participate" â which led to a
very low level of productivity. Most of the peasants remained at the
level of a closed economy, with no access to modern techniques of
production for exchange, and although they produced willingly for the
market, quantities were small and prices, high.
Nevertheless, after five years of adaptations which furthered a
capitalism of consumption and links with international capital, the
capitalist class seemed to think that a new reform of the economic and
social organization would give it sufficient leverage to attempt to win
what it had not been able to win earlier. But the class struggle had not
ended; on the contrary, the attempts to modify the conditions of
exploitation of labor connected with the new economic orientation
intensified it. The new orientation again made it urgent to reform the
entire price structure. The reform measures were announced on the
evening of June 24, 1976. No one was fooled by them: they involved
taking from workers the part of the surplus value needed for the
"modern" development of capital. The strike which erupted on tune 25 all
over Poland, from Gdansk to Katowice, lasted just one day. It had its
most open expression in the Warsaw region, in the sectors of newly
established manufacturing industries; at the Ursus tractor factory, at
the Zoran auto factory in a `Warsaw suburb and in the entire city of
Radom, 130 kilometers from Warsaw. At Ursus and Zeran, factory
organizations were immediately formed and they quickly undertook actions
which affected vital interests (railroads, highways). This appropriation
of social space was a turning point in the struggles and anticipated
events of a few years later. In Radom, by contrast, there was a repeat
of what happened in Gdansk and Gdynia in December 1970; the workers
overran the city, set Party headquarters on fire and then carried on
guerrilla warfare in the streets. While in 1970-71, more than a month
and three waves of strikes were needed to revoke the price hikes, this
time one day was enough. On June 25, at 10 p.m., the government
announced that the increases were annulled. The outburst of joy which
followed was of brief duration since, this time too, repression was soon
unleashed. But capital had been transformed as well as class relations;
just as new methods of struggle had appeared, new social and political
phenomena would arise.
Already in 1970, in the West as well as in Poland, observers were saying
how incredible it was that simple questions of wages and prices could
unleash movements which threatened the system to its roots; all this
could easily be avoided by estab lishing "democratic" unions. Olszowski,
a Party leader who favored "liberalization" of the economy as well as
strict political control, declared at that time: "The Polish people are
so well developed and educated, have so much culture, that the lack of
democratic structures has become a caricature which is no longer
tolerable." Further industrialization (and more industries using modern
productive techniques) created a new mentality for both workers and
managers; as the political impasse became more and more obvious, two
opposing views of theory and action emerged. Among the rank-and-file
there was a will to fight in order to maintain the standard of living
and to obtain more. Within the bureaucracy, there was growing criticism
accompanied by proposals which would allow the system to change while
preserving class distinctions.
After 1970, the growth of a protest movement incorporating diverse
elements created conditions favorable to setting up associations of
defense and coalition. A dialectical relation was established between
the two positions, largely through the mediation of intellectuals; the
class struggle sharpened the internal critiques and encouraged their
open expression; the internal critiques softened the repression and
promoted the growth of horizontal networks of association, solidarity
and exchange of information (existing institutions such as the Catholic
Church and possibly certain Party organs were able to play a role in
this development). All these associations were inextricably linked to
the direct actions of the workers. The importance of these associations
in extending, unifying and coordinating the movement is difficuIt to
ascertain; it is easier to trace how they emerged and developed from the
rankand-file movements in order to become direct auxiliaries of the
capitalist class.
These are the circumstances which, following the movement of June 25,
1976, gave rise to the KOR, Committee for Defense against Repression,
which was initially set up solely by intellectuals and after 1968, by
embryos of "free" unions which took as long-term goal the establishment
of rank-and-file associations on the model of the comisiones obreros in
Spain under Franco. (It was obviously well concealed that these
comisiones obreros, created by the rank-and-file, had been colonized by
the Spanish Communist Party which turned them into its union apparatus;
the irony is that the Polish militants â hostile to the Polish Communist
Party â undoubtedly harbored the same hopes as their adversaries of
transforming the Polish comisiones obreros, which they wanted to
stimulate in the rank-and-file, into a union which they would control.)
In April 1978, the founding charter of the underground unions of
Northern Poland contained the following totally unambiguous declaration:
"Only free unions and associations can save the state, since only
democratization can lead to the integration of the interests and the
will of the citizen with the interests and the power of the state." Lech
Walesa was among the signers of this charter. In 1979, ten Party experts
submitted a 150-page report which warned Gierek about the need to change
the countryâs official policies; they reported a growing rift between
the government and the population; they thought that a more independent
press and worker representation. worthy of its name â namely, political
reforms in conjunction with economic reforms â could help avoid the
worst. They described this "worst" as an explosion more violent than any
since the war. In Gdansk, on July 4, 1989, at a "working" meeting of the
local Party committee, Kania, a member of the Political Bureau, declared
that "the Central Committee can no longer control the economic crisis;
it is disastrous, and shortages may soon affect meat and bread." As he
spoke these words, the explosion had already begun; but no one knew that
in violence and scope it would truly exceed anything Poland had
experienced since the war.
On Monday, June 30, the government announced a "reorganization of meat
distribution". The details are unimportant; the result was an immediate
price increase of almost 60% and greater difficulty in obtaining meat.
On Tuesday, July 1, strikes broke out in factories throughout Poland:
Ursus [tractors] and Huta Warszawa [steel] near Warsaw, at Poznan
(metallurgy], at Tczew (transmissions], at Mielec (aviation], at
Swidnica [aviation], near Lublin. The Party [PUWP] defined its position
toward the strikes: no repression, negotiations at the local level with
factory managers who had authority to make concessions at their plant in
order to end the strife.
The government's plan was clear; it would avoid a generalized explosion
by settling the problems one by one, keeping the workers divided. This
plan was feasible because for some time there had been some autonomy in
enterprise management. But if the government thus effectively avoided
direct political attack and sheltered itself a bit, it furthered the
strike because each factory took up the struggle won next door. In
actual fact, these tactics resulted in the decentralization of decision-
making - not only on the part of management, but also on the workers'
side; the already discredited official unions were accustomed only to
transmit decisions from above, not to negotiate working conditions in
the factory; this situation undoubtedly encouraged the spontaneous
appearance of discussion groups and associations for collective
decision- making. By July 15, fifty strikes had already broken out or
were still going on. They often lasted only a few days; that was enough
to make management give in. In some cases, the mere threat of a strike
was sufficient. New elements were already visible: the desire to
guarantee the demands that were already granted without having
constantly to begin the struggle all over again; the continued existence
of rank-and-file committees after the struggle had ended - the
committees which the rank-and-file had elected or approved and which had
negotiated directly with management over the head of the official union.
By this time, things had already gone much further, even though it
appeared that the authorities had succeeded in extinguishing the
incipient conflagration, On July 17, the city of Lublin (population,
300,000, 100 kilometers from the USSR) was completely paralyzed; railway
workers had discovered that a train labelled "fish" was filled with meat
and headed for the Soviet Union; they shut down rail traffic by leaving
trains and engines on the tracks. Everything was on strike: buses, bread
and milk delivery, nursing, construction, water service; the meat would
have to be distributed to the population. The government sent Jagielski,
deputy Prime Minister; the Party issued an official summons to return to
work. Everything ended two days later, but the fact remained that an
entire city organized itself to go on strike; the demands did not remain
merely economic. A desire to assure the gains already won led to an
attempt to set up permanent organs of defence. Fifteen days later,
following procedures they themselves set up, the Lublin railway workers
began electing union representatives directly and other Lublin workers
followed their lead.
Such are the economic, social, political and ideological conditions
which moulded these workers' collective consciousness. This collective
consciousness would accelerate the pace of subsequent struggles and
permit new organizational structures to establish themselves. It was not
the KOR and the handful of "free unionists" which precipitated the
struggle and turned it into the tidal wave which effectively brought
down the entire regime. It was rather the ground swell which opened the
way for new structures among which the unions were one of the key
elements. The system's reformers used the ground swell as the basis for
their organizational project. The end of the strike in Lublin did not
end strikes elsewhere: strikes continued to run rampant through the
first days of August. The government seemed confident that its strategy
of partial concessions would be successful, but its weakness was shown
by the extent to which concessions granted in one i place were
immediately taken up elsewhere. The underground groups themselves
acknowledged that they played a very small part in the outbreak and
persistence of the wave of strikes. But now, suddenly, their
organizational project was transformed from a far-off ideal into a
reality close at hand, especially since their working class contacts
were carried to the forefront by the surge of the movement and hundreds
of workers, previously unknown, were turning toward them. Only a member
of an elitist and hierarchical organization could believe that all this
energy could result from the activity of a tiny minority and that if a
few individuals - supposedly leaders - were eliminated, the movement
would be abruptly broken. The government's attempt to do this had the
opposite effect from the one expected; for the rank-and-file as well as
the Western mass media (which came looking only for leaders), the
repression which now descended gave credibility to the idea that the
underground groups had played and were able to play a useful role. In
fact, the repression helped the union establish itself in the function
it had defined for itself from the beginning. Toward the end of August,
the Party found it needed to initiate a new and different approach
because its policy of conciliation had brought meagre results. After
more than six weeks, the strikes continued; arresting the militants most
committed to the "free trade union movement" was clearly not a means to
end the strikes. Nevertheless, this is what the authorities attempted.
of the Rank-and-File Movement
The first repressive measure seems to have taken place in Warsaw on
Monday, August 11; the police detained and held for nine hours Marek
Glessman, "leader" of the garbage collectors' strike. In Gdansk on
August 13, the new policy became more explicit when three Lenin Shipyard
workers who were connected with the underground independent union were
fired (among them were Anna Walentynowicz and Nowicki). Prior to this,
the Tri-city [Gdansk, Sopot and Gdynia) had largely remained outside the
struggle but now the general strike spread like wildfire and was
concentrated around the Lenin Shipyards. lf the activity of militants
was apparent in the summons to the struggles at the shipyards, the speed
with which things moved in the shipyards themselves and then in all
enterprises in Gdansk demonstrated yet again workers' spontaneity and
the rapid transformation of collective working class consciousness.
Last-minute concessions at the shipyards no longer stopped anything, A
strike committee was formed by some ten militants [among them, Lech
Walesa who had climbed over the wall as soon as he heard news about the
strike because "the situation was ripe and he should be at the
shipyards") who were quickly joined by one hundred delegates designated
by different shipyard departments. The demands no longer had any
connection with what had unleashed the strike - or rather, they had a
profound connection, being a generalization of what was inherent in the
particular repressive event which had ignited the powder barrel: along
with economic demands, there was a call for free unions, access to the
media, repeal of all repressive measures and an end to certain ruling
class privileges.
The government tried to stem the rising tide with the weak means
available at the moment; with one hand, settlements at individual
enterprises; covert repression with the other. On August 17, twenty-four
enterprises in the region were on strike; on August 18, there were 180
in a 100-kilometer area around Gdansk. The strike committee at the
shipyards transformed l itself into an inter-factory committee, the MKS,
which was composed of two delegates from each factory.
This committee controlled the entire region and resolved transportation
and food distribution problems. Although Gierek proclaimed on August 18
that "the only just path is one of dialogue and compromise? the
government ignored the MKS; its delegated official, Pyka, stated he
could meet only with representatives from individual factories; at the
same time, on August 20, twenty KOR members were arrested. In Szczecin,
the situation was the same as in Gdansk. MKS committees were set up in
other industrial regions, notably in the Silesian mines. A general
strike spread throughout Poland without anyone having issued a call for
one; rank-and-file committees sprang up on their own and managed
everyday activities in ever-larger geographical sectors. The government
had to change its policy. It apparently was influenced by two
considerations whose relative importance remains unclear: lower echelons
of the Party (including certain security forces) went over to the strike
and the army chiefs did not want to "restore order" because they lacked
confidence in their troops.
One deputy Prime Minister, Jagielski, finally came for discussions with
the Gdansk MKS while his counterpart, Barcikowski, negotiated with the
Szczecin MKS. The government seemed to capitulate, and seemed to go on
capitulating, more or less, until the signing of the "Gdansk accords"
and the call to resume work on September 1, issued by the MKS
representative, Lech Walesa. This all took place amidst appeals for
moderation circulated by the Church, the KOR and by Walesa himself:
Gdansk was to be an exemplary island in a Poland hard at work, a safety
valve where responsible people who had the situation well under control
set up structures appropriate to a modern capitalist Poland. Why has
there been so much attention given to the Gdansk accords and so little
to those of Szczecin which were signed at about the same time and had
the same provisions? At this time, the government was possibly
attempting a defensive strategy to try to limit the accords
geographically, just as it had earlier tried, unsuccessfully, to
restrict them to individual enterprises. The concentration on what
happened in Gdansk was due not only to the region's economic importance
and the strength of the strike: during the days of strikes p and
negotiations, a familiar tactic evolved which was aimed at the
resistance movement itself, namely at the workers and their will to
resist.
On the one hand, in Gdansk, an inter-factory strike committee held power
in a portion of national territory. On the other hand, and this is the
more important aspect, the negotiations in Gdansk were not discussions
between strikers and the authorities, but a meeting of reformists, some
of them Party members, the others connected with the political
opposition or with the working class rank-and-file - all of them serving
as experts seeking a satisfactory solution in order to "save the Polish
nation," namely to make the workers labour "properly" in order to
straighten out the capitalist economy. In describing these discussions
among experts, Jadwiga Staniszkis spoke of a relaxed atmosphere and
added: "One of the reasons was that the experts on both sides were more
or less from the same world in the capital. In a way, if one considered
only their political approach, their positions could have been
reversed." It was not easy to impose this "solution" on the workers,
and, in spite of appeals, strikes were still spreading on Wednesday,
August 27, especially in the industrial region of the South. This made
it urgent to come up with a statement which would save face for the
leaders on both sides. On the workers' side, a leadership, the
Presidium, made up largely of underground militants who were co-opted at
the beginning of the strike, quickly detached itself from the
rank-and-file. Many points in the negotiations were imposed either by
the experts (underground political militants or economists whose
"services" had been accepted) or by Walesa himself, who discussed
matters privately with Jagielski. The democracy practiced by those who
came, whether from near or far, to "organize the workers" had no
relation to the democratic activities of the workers. But this took
place in the euphoria of victory. On the governments side too, there
were reservations: wouldn't these new structures sweep away a lot of the
hard-won posts that many still wanted to defend by force? But those days
were past and since the ground swell had shaken up the upper echelons of
the Party as well as the economic experts, there was no other
alternative but to ride the wave and try to save the essential: class
domination. In fact, the Gdansk accords served a two-fold purpose. On
the one hand, they put an end to the strikes which threatened to spread;
on the other, they attempted to provide a structure which was
simultaneously comprehensive, indefinite and efficient, into which the
rank-and-file movement could be channelled.
On Sunday, August 31, Lech Walesa announced not only to all workers in
the Gdansk region but to all Polish workers: "The strike is over. We did
not get everything we wanted, but we did get all that was possible in
the current situation. We will win the rest later because we now have
the essential: the right to strike and independent unions." This borders
on involuntary * humour: Polish workers had been asserting their right
to strike for a long time; and since July they had been exercising their
right to independently organize and put forward their own demands. But
now that work was resumed in Gdansk, they had to renounce their own
demands and adopt the union's, they had to submerge their own
rank-and-file organizations in hierarchical structures which issued
orders and precise instructions for action; they had to go back to work
and again - labour for the prosperity of a system in which they once
more ? counted for little. Their autonomous activity, their abundant
originality, the direct defence of their own interests, all this - in
terms of the intentions of the government and the "free" union - should
serve for nothing more than to institute reforms which soften the
excessively brutal edges of exploitation. The goal of the reforms was to
eliminate revolutionary tendencies in the movement and relegate them to
the level of "provocations," and to enjoy the grandiose hollow words of
politicians and the various promises of Party leaders. In actual fact,
the accords did not serve that function, they did not succeed in
eliminating all the revolutionary thrust of the movement. But that was
the objective content of the accords. As for the original demands of the
strike, they were put to one side: pay raises would not be immediate,
only gradual, according to industrial sector and at the discretion of
the government. There would be no sliding scale but merely an adjustment
hinging on the cost of basic necessities. As for food provisions, and
meat supplies in particular, this all remained in the dark.
At the end of August a journalist for Le Monde reported that: "The
situation is uncertain enough for the MKS Presidium members to worry
that an uncontrolled rank-and-file movement might arise, have
unpredictable consequences and jeopardize such an important victory."
September 1980 was the month of great equivocation when the majority of
workers, in the euphoria over the strength of the workers' movement
which had dominated everything else for the past two months, seemed to
be satisfied with the vague words which they thought contained their
conception of protest and demands, whereas they contained the
conceptions of the democratic bourgeoisie. These same workers seemed to
have confidence in men who, because of their perseverance in the ranks
of the underground opposition during the long years of repression, were
above the slightest suspicion; they were unaware that it is the office
that makes the man and that even the most honest among them cannot
escape the pitfalls of union functions under capital. They were also
unaware that many of these new l leaders had the same elitist
conceptions as the leaders of the system they were fighting. Walesa, for
example, later stated: "I have always been the ringleader, like the
billy-goat that leads the flock, like the ox that leads the herd. People
need that ox, that billy-goat, otherwise the herd goes on its own, here
and there, wherever there is some grass to eat, and nobody follows the
right road. A flock without an animal that leads is a l senseless thing
without a future." Jadwiga Staniszkis commented about Walesa that he
"has an amazing talent for manipulating the masses."
Kuron, pre-eminent among the experts and one of the KOR leaders who was
hired right away by the new Solidarity union, was mistaken when he said:
"The unions ought to be partners in the administration and protectors of
the workers." Other Solidarity leaders already saw the unionâs role as
participating in economic decision-making at the state as well as the
factory level. They obviously ran up against the omnipotent power of
capital and of the "Party bourgeoisie" but this is precisely the
direction of capitalâs history. In difficult periods, capital resorts to
appeals for national unity and, for the required time, "calls on the
working men" (namely on their licensed organizations] to help manage the
crisis and to re-establish the conditions of "normal" exploitation.
Kuron was mistaken because he tried to see the role of the new unions in
terms of the role of unions in the Western branch of capital. The role
of the old unions in the Eastern branch was significantly different.
Whereas in the West, the role of unions is to mediate, in the East
unions are a political instrument and cannot play this roleâthe union
leaders themselves being members of the capitalist class. The role of
the new unions in the Eastern branch seems quite contradictory. During a
transitional period, namely, as long as the workersâ movement is on the
offensive, they tend to function like unions in the Western branch. But
in the political system of the Russian zone, it is impossible to
maintain this function; they l can only be transformed into instruments
of the capitalist class. This is why nothing could be stabilized; either
the political system would have to be transformed, or else the working
class j struggle would continue its autonomous movement and l
increasingly detach itself from the union which was becoming l a cog of
the system. Implacable logic would lead Solidarity to become an
instrument ever more removed from the rank- and-file and from working
class interests. This evolution would lead it first to demand and later
to try to promote, for its own purposes, the only political
transformationâdemocrati. zationâwhich would allow it to perform fully
the function which the development of capital assigns to it.
Work was resumed in both Gdansk and Szczecin on Monday, September 1, and
the two MKS committees were converted into branches of Solidarity. But
just as the Gdansk MKS had served as model, the Gdansk local became,
first in practice, then legally, a sort of superior body. just as the
Gdansk Presidium and the experts had formed a sort of central committee
during the strike and later became the administration of the Gdansk
union, so Walesa, the "natural leader," became simply 1 the leader.
During the first half of September, it was quite easy to get acceptance
of the Gdansk accords and of the transformation of MKS locals into
branches of Solidarity. This was accepted in the Silesian mines on
Wednesday, September 3. But there were already signs of discord. The
aviation factory in Mielec resumed its strike on Thursday, September 4,
and added twenty-three demands to the twenty-one points of Gdansk,
including the firing of several upper echelon administrators; in the
Tarnobrzeg sulphur mines, the working conditions took precedence over
general conditions; elsewhere, workers demanded: the firing of a local
Party chief; the cessation of the teamwork system currently practiced in
the mines; the five-day week, etc.
Although these conflicts may appear to be the tail end of the strikes of
July and August, they nonetheless anticipate what would take place later
and, in particular, they indicate that the rank-and-file movement was
guarding its autonomy. The apparent calm made the authorities hopeful
that everything was being normalized in the newly established
structures, each protagonist hoping to utilize circumstances in order to
nibble away at the otherâs power. In fact, almost the entire work force
joined the ranks of Solidarity; this emptied the official unions of all
their constituents, compelling union bureaucrats to find other jobs. By
the end of September 1980, Solidarity could claim to represent 90% of
the workers; it had its own national structure (a permanent committee of
co-ordination) and regional branches which, in principle, were
autonomous. On Tuesday, September 16, the Gdansk branch of Solidarity
issued an edict warning against wildcat strikes. For their part, the
reformist bureaucracy in the Party set about eliminating the obstacles
to the implementation of the "Gdansk program;" Gierek was replaced by
Kania; expulsions and power struggles ` would continue for a long time
to come. The newly promoted officials endeavoured to reassure both the
Russians and the West, so as to protect their posts and also to procure
without delay the vital supplies and the credits needed to avoid
strangulation of an economy heavily dependent on foreign exchange. In
this area, underneath the propaganda and posturing, Kania found nothing
but good will. For the time being, all were ready to come to Polandâs
"aid" - simultaneously brandishing self-serving offers of assistance
along with threats of force, as in every capitalist context - to "aid"
Poland in surmounting this obstacle, especially now since the accords
and the situation seemed to guarantee that things were heading toward
"normalization." Gdansk fulfilled its promises: within a month,
Solidarity had become an instrument "with which discussions are
possible," as Kania declared and, as Walesa would say later, Kania is "a
man with whom discussions are possible."
Rank-and-File Against the Gdansk Accords
Once the period of conflicts between the MKS and the government over the
new unionâs demands ended (the settlement adjusted the respective powers
of the Party and the union), another type of conflict emerged. We
already pointed out that this conflict was present in the September
strikes, when the workers realized that the Gdansk accords were unsuited
to their particular situation and that social peace was nothing to get
excited about. The new Solidarity union, with one foot in the Church,
the other in the reformist circles of the KOR, and its hand outstretched
toward the reform wing of the Party, nevertheless had to retain âits
links with the massesâ in order to preserve its credibility with the
authorities. This was not an easy task; Western unions â the apparent
model for Solidarity â had long been skilled at it, just as they had
much experience in detailing dangerous rank-and-file movements. It did
not take long for the Presidium, and Walesa in particular, to learn âhow
to end a strike.â As Walesa himself said:
"I should remain where I am in order to fight, in order to put out
useless fires like a fireman, in order to transform the movement into an
organization."
Let us acknowledge him and his advisors (particularly the Church, about
which Walesa said "its help was enormous") to be first-rate tacticians.
The conflicts which broke out during the autumn and winter of 1980-81
were not, as was claimed, conflicts for the implementation of the Gdansk
accords, but were opposed to the very contents of the accords. The new
union was scarcely installed before it showed a tendency to assume its
function under Eastern capitalism: the union itself, in agreement with
the political authorities, had set limits to the direct action of the
working-class movement. These were regularly over-stepped and this
seriously called into question the unionâs power and existence as legal
intermediary with the government. Both Western and Eastern medias
pretended to see conflict only between Solidarity and the dominant
power, so this struggle went unnoticed for many months. Week after week,
new struggles arose from rank-and-file initiatives in extremely diverse
domains. These struggles shook up the union apparatus, which was itself
torn by internal conflicts â between the ex-MKS committee from Gdansk
and the Solidarity leadership, between the regional branches and this
same leadership. To contain each of these new struggles, the union
leadership and Party representatives from the government had to hold
negotiations at the highest level in order to work out a settlement.
Work was resumed in exchange for concessions that would not be too
damaging to Party authority, union credibility or economic activity (all
required for the continuity of capital). To the extent that the new
union was unable to carry out the role expected of it vis-a-vis the
working class, the threat of force became more explicit, orchestrated
each time-as if by mutual agreement-by the medias of East and West.
Capital, as much in the West as in the East, had a common interest in
keeping the Polish workersâ movement contained within very precise
boundaries, those imposed on workers everywhere. Some of the
rank-and-file initiatives which appeared during the winter months
provided dangerous examples for exploited people anywhere; and worse,
they were an unacceptable incursion of rank-and-file power into the
prerogatives of power itself. The duality of power which the leaders
referred to on these occasions was not between the union and the Party,
but between the rank-and-file workers and the leaders of both union and
government. Above and beyond the war of words in this period, the
economic interests of the West were just as important as the economic
and strategic interests of Russia: in fact, these interests were so
tightly intertwined that any political move by one side had to take into
consideration the interests of the other. In addition, the clear
determination of the rank-and-file made direct Russian intervention so
risky that no strategic benefit could be expected from it. The situation
could have been explosive for capital. Western "warnings" against direct
Russian intervention should be interpreted as stemming from a clear
understanding of its own interests rather than just another rehash of
the Cold War. It is striking to see the same pattern repeated during
these months: wildcat strikes, negotiations between Solidarity and the
government, threats of intervention, threat of a limited general strike,
concessions which ended the struggle. Then an eruption elsewhere, often
over different issues but just as explosive, continued the sequence.
This is a clear indication that in this period, the workers retained the
initiative.
This was precisely what Russia did not want. The majority of the
rank-and-file struggles grew out of specific local, apparently minor,
problems but always ended with the same political confrontation at the
summit. Would the Party (namely, capitalist power) or the rank-and-file
have the last word? This was a much more fundamental problem than the
sharing of power among already established groups (or aspirants to power
like the Solidarity leadership). The constant Russian intervention
ostensibly sought to preserve the "communist model" of Party domination,
but it was not the ideological facade of this model which mattered.
Behind the myth lay the brutal and uncompromising domination by the
military, economic and political interests of Russian imperialism. This
suggests that the political model could have been aItered as long as the
strategic interests of Russia were preserved intact. The rank-and-file
struggles frequently called into question the practical effects of this
military domination. For the rank-and-file, the struggle was for
"undivided democracy," for power over the practical details of the
workerâs everyday life; at the summit, the response was rigid and
undivided domination. At the intermediate levels the debate became
ideological again and this served to conceal the real interests of the
various protagonists. The Gdansk accords were particularly vague about
wages. Threats of strikes, especially in the South, among construction
workers, obliged Solidarity to organize a warning strike â lasting one
hour, on Friday, October 3. The strike was unanimously observed; this
can be interpreted in two ways: first, the rank-and-file followed the
unionâs call, thereby authorizing it to deal with the government; or,
second, the "organized" strike cut short the wildcat actions but the
strength of the limited strike showed that the workers were determined
to go further if nothing were done. In late October and early November
there were further wildcat actions over wage demands and this increased
the polemic over the "leadership role of the Party" in relation to the
Solidarity statutes.
The "recognition" of the Party had, in fact, been spelled out in the
Gdansk accords; it had actually been imposed on the rank-and-file by the
pro-Catholic Gdansk Presidium without being voted on by the MKS; it is
implicitly contained in the statutes themselves since they refer to the
"validity of the Constitution." The debate was more fundamental than an
ideological debate or a disagreement over words: the working class
rank-and-file, backed up by the most radical members of the union
apparatus, had a conception of rank-and-file democracy; the union
apparatus (not by chance the section linked to the Catholic Church and
the reformist wing) had an elitist, "party oriented," bourgeois
conception of democracy. Their differences took the form of a "great
ideological debate" but it was much ado about nothing: the clause in
question was inserted in an appendix to the statutes. Both sides claimed
victory.
All this turmoil hid the increasing activity of the rank-and-file. On
October 22, the Wroclaw railway workers began a hunger strike for their
wages; in Gdansk on October 27, dockers refused to load potatoes for
export and threatened to do the same for any commodity which local
markets lacked. During the debates over the statutes, wages and food
supplies were also discussed. Solidarity was divided on what action to
undertake for the statutes, but strike threats deaIt with more
down-to-earth subjects. While Walesa and Solidarity leaders celebrated
the "victory" of the statutes at the Warsaw Opera on November 10,
fifteen factories in Czestochowa went on strike, demanding the dismissal
of the regional governor. One hundred hospital workers occupied a room
in the Gdansk administration building and demanded their wages; thirty
instructors occupied another room. As Walesa declared: "These are
uncoordinated actions which weaken the movementâs cohesion."
Already by November 14, Walesa was again negotiating with Kania; the
over-zealous governor had to resign, wage agreements were settled, the
rationing of meat and butter was expected to improve the organization of
the shortages, an economic reform of the shipyards would be undertaken
with Solidarityâs cooperation.
Against this background of strikes for wages (in railways, textiles,
sugar refineries, transportation), another serious conflict erupted.
This one was over the problem of repression, which had also been left
unresolved in the Gdansk accords. This conflict was set off by a
rank-and-file initiative. A Justice Department employee leaked a
document on the governmentâs plan for repression, and a section of
Warsaw workers printed it for immediate distribution. The police seized
everything and, on November 21, arrested both the printer Narozniak and
the employee responsible for the leak, Sapielo. Strikes immediately
broke out at the Ursus tractor factory in a Warsaw suburb and the Huta
Warszawa steel works. The rank-and-file set forth their demands: reduce
the "security" budget, investigate methods used by the repressive
apparatus; punish those responsible for past repression, release the two
arrested on , November 21; wage demands were also made. In a communique,
Solidarity condemned the "irresponsible strikes" and declared that it
would repudiate strikes which were not officially sanctioned. Walesa was
brought to Warsaw by helicopter to put out the fire. Narozniak and
Sapielo were released and in exchange Walesa got work resumed at Ursus
but failed at the steelworks; here, it took Kuron until 3:30 a.m. to
persuade the workers to return. This disclosure of state secrets
demonstrated the inadequacy of Solidarity and unleashed a violent
campaign, the purpose of which was to intimidate the workers. It was the
familiar scenario of threats of Russian intervention along with Western
declarations of warning. No government could tolerate such an act (these
secrets are an essential element for maintaining peopleâs adherence to
the system of exploitation itself`), no government could allow striking
workers to prevent punishment of the "guilty." The Catholic Episcopate
felt equally threatened by such a betrayal of a secret and
straightforwardly declared on December 12:
"Every effort must be made to protect the institution of the State and
the sovereignty of the fatherland."
Walesa took up the same refrain on December 16: Any action "that could
raise the danger of a threat to the freedom and statehood of the
fatherland must be avoided," and on the 17th, he really went overboard:
"The time has come for a concerted effort to surrender the strike weapon
and negotiate a return to economic security and social peace . .
.Society needs order at this time.â
The dedication of the memorial to the Gdansk martyrs of 1970-71 on
December 16 was an appropriate symbol of the significance of the
"victory" that the Gdansk accords represented. It was a touching and
ominous demonstration of national unity: oppressors and workers, gunmen
and their prey, executioners and widows of victims, all carefully
surrounded by the new police (the security forces from the shipyard
union), all intoning the national anthem and all blessed by the Church,
by Solidarity and by the Party. A workersâ defeat was enacted here.
Whenever capital is threatened by both the class struggle and its own
problems it turns to the old, familiar ideology: national unity for the
salvation of the endangered fatherland.
The "organized" tears of emotion were not dry before another conflict
erupted, again relating to the Gdansk accords. This one was ever the
five-day work week. Solidarity made a big fuss about the
"non-application of the Gdansk accords" but here also, the contents of
the accords were at fault. Kisiel, head of the Planning Commission, was
merely applying the conditions of the Gdansk accords when he said on
December 19 that, in 1981, only one-half of the Saturdays would be free
days, and that the five-day week would be inaugurated only gradually and
in relation to the rise in productivity. In response to Point 21 of the
Gdansk workersâ demands, the accords specified:
"The principle that Saturday should be a free day should be put into
effect, or another method of providing free time should be devised. This
should be worked out by December 31, 1980. The measures should include
the increase in the number of free Saturdays from the start of 1981."
Each side had its own interpretation of these statements. The
rank-and-file wanted everything, immediately. In order to restrain the
direct action movement which sprang up everywhere (workers simply did
not report to work on Saturdays), Solidarity organized a diversionary
action to bring the struggle back under its control: another one-hour
warning strike and later the threat of a general strike. The agitation
ever free Saturdays continued throughout January and ended with a
compromise on January 30: three out of four Saturdays would be free and
the work week was set at 41 1/4 hours. In these discussions with the
government, Solidarity obtained recognition of its press and access to
radio and TV. But the real compromise lay elsewhere. While Walesa was
away paying homage to the Pope in midJanuary, there were further wildcat
actions which affected the system much mere fundamentally than the issue
of time off and media access. In exchange for Solidarityâs increased
stabilization, the union was now obliged to do its "job"not only on the
Jelenia Gora and Bielsko-Biala workers, but also on the Rzeszow
peasants; in both cases it was the vanguard of capitalist repression.
The wildcat actions which arose in many parts of Poland went well beyond
the Gdansk accords and expressed a desire for a rank-and-file democracy
which would not depend even on Solidarityâs top officials. They even
affected Party leaders; strikes or threats of strikes demanded the
dismissal of political leaders or enterprise managers. At Jelenia Gora
the demand was to fire fifteen of them; on January 10, similar demands
were made in at least ten regions of Poland. On January 27, in the
vicinity of Bielsko-Biala, more than one hundred factories were occupied
â again opposing local authorities. A regional strike committee was set
up at Jelenia Gora. On January 29, the government proclaimed that it was
compelled to maintain "law, order and discipline . . . Anarchy and chaos
are entering in the life of the country, endangering the nation and its
citizens." But in spite of the efforts of the government and the union,
strikes continued. On January 28, Solidarityâs National Coordinating
Committee asked all its regional branches to avoid any strike activity
from that day until further notice. Lech Walesa issued a clear appeal to
halt wildcat strikes:
"We have to end all strikes so that the government can say that
Solidarity has the situation under control . . . We all have to
concentrate on r-ankand-file problems. There is fire in the country."
By this time, it was clear that Solidarity had completely lost control
of the situation; when a union official was asked how many of the
strikes were authorized, he answered, "Not a single one." The Jelenia
Gora strike committee called for a general strike in three regions to
begin on January 30; the general strike in Bielsko-Biala continued and
the strike committee refused to send a delegate to Warsaw to negotiate;
. . . Let the negotiators come to Bielsko-Biala. Walesa stated at this
time that
"The situation is dangerous (for whom?). We need national unity. To
achieve it, we, government and workers (that is, the union), ought to
seek a common path: we should unite in the countryâs interest. We extend
our hand to the government."
The compromise over free Saturdays was agreed upon at this point.
Solidarity emissaries set out once again to put out the fires. They
failed in Bielsko-Biala, despite Walesaâs fancy schemes; a high Church
dignitary finally succeeded in getting work resumed on Saturday,
February 7, following the dismissal of only four local directors. In
Jelenia Gora, the strike centered on the conversion of an Interior
Ministryâs health facility into a public hospital; the government
finally gave in on February 10.
An equally serious crisis developed in the countryside during the same
period. This one affected another class, the peasantry. In 1956, the
peasants were rewarded by a return to private property and, during the
upheavals of 1970 and 1976, they made no specific demands. In fact, both
times the government was able to maintain their neutrality in its class
struggle against the workers by granting a few concessions. This time
the clash with the government was deep enough for the peasants to take
part in the conflict, but it was the basic economic situation that led
the peasants to fight as they did. Polandâs rapid industrialization
toward a modern capitalism made the government, indeed, the entire
society, press for consolidation and for techniques of profitable
production in agriculture. The rise of an autonomous workersâ movement
undoubtedly acted as catalyst for peasant discontent and the model of
union organization which grew out of it appealed to the peasants. The
Church played a coordinating role while furthering its own interests as
landowner. But it was the weakness of the central authority that opened
the dikes to other waves of demands.
The name Rural Solidarity and the support of its "sister" organization,
given directly by workers in some regions (which was facilitated by the
existence of large numbers of worker-peasants) should not give rise to
illusions: the peasants pursued their own class struggle and their own
specific objectives; unlike the workers, they clearly confronted the
power of the ruling capitalist class, but their interests nevertheless
diverged from those of their temporary allies in this struggle against a
common enemy. It all began on January 2 as a wildcat action in Rzeszow,
in south eastern Poland, where six hundred peasants and workers occupied
the former union headquarters and demanded that it be turned over to
them for their organization. In the same region, a newly created
"Federation of Workers and Peasants of the Bieszczady Mountains"
demanded the return to public access of the game reserve which had been
confiscated by Gierek for exclusive use by Party dignitaries. On
Saturday, January 10, again in Rzeszow, a national peasant strike
committee was formed which called for, among its eleven demands, local
self-government, freedom to sell the land and access to modern
agricultural techniques. The growing movement called for a peasant
union, âRural Solidarity," to which Party leaders were, at that time,
resolutely opposed. Things remained dormant until the end of January.
Walesa agreed to serve as mediator with the peasants in order to end the
wildcat action. Here, too, the Church would play a major role.
The activities of the peasants were just as troublesome to the state
capitalist system as the workersâ activities. An entire movement seemed
to come to life in the defense of the right to private property and in
claims on state property, reminiscent of old "Land to the Peasants"
slogans of the 1789 French bourgeois revolution and the 1917 Russian
revolution. In spite of collective ownership of the land, this movement
also exists in Russia. Possibly more than the workersâ movement, the
peasant movement directly threatens the basic foundation of ruling class
power: the privileged utilization of the means of production. It is more
difficult to control and make a collaborator out of a peasant union
which seeks to appropriate a means of production, the land, than it is
to control a workersâ union. But another consideration was that the
peasants fed Poland. In the current situation, a head-on collision with
them would mean empty shelves in the stores and would leave the
authorities facing the already unruly workers.
The immediate problem was a more serious political one. The capitalist
class can maintain its domination only by dividing the various classes
and controlling them separately by means of settlements appropriate to
their divergent interests. In periods of crisis, rulers can cope with
the turbulence of one class only if the others remain quiet. This is
what happened earlier in Poland. As long as the peasants and those who
can be considered the middle class stayed inactive, the working class
offensive could be more or less contained. The entry of the peasants
into this struggle radically changed the political situation. The
peasants make up more than a third of the population and have numerous
links with other social classes and groups. Faced with a potential
coalition between peasants and workers, the capitalist class had to
modify its political approach. It is ironic that, unable to curtail the
peasant movement at its origins, the government sent Walesa, thus
sanctioning the momentary alliance and further aggravating the political
crisis. And at this point the crisis became yet more acute: the
universities demanded their autonomy, and the Party itself was shaken by
reformist currents within its ranks. The crisis was threatening to
become total and, aside from force, the system had only one recourse
left: the army.
It is instructive to quote Walesaâs comments on General Jaruzelski,
Minister of Defense who became head of the government on February 9,
1981:
"Poland needs a strong government, a government capable of governing and
Jaruzelski can do it. Because he is a soldier, a general, therefore used
to giving orders and to imposing discipline on others and on himself. As
a soldier, he also should have the clean hands which are necessary to
clear the country out of bastards with dirty hands. We must let him
work."
Walesaâs naivete and illusions are astonishing, or perhaps it is his
political skill. This statement clearly shows what was expected from
Jaruzelskiâs investiture at this precise moment; what Walesa said is
exactly what the rulers had hoped "the man in the street" would feel and
say. The General was the New Man, an almost providential savior. It
might be tempting to conclude that, as in so many other places, the army
became the arbiter in a situation where no other structure of domination
retained any real hold over the subordinate classes. But Poland was not
Bolivia or South Korea. In the Russian bloc, appointing a general to be
Prime Minister is quite exceptional. Jaruzelski had always been a
distinguished member of the capitalist class. Prom a strictly capitalist
viewpoint, Walesaâs words on Jaruzelski indicate that the reputation of
the army was still intact (something that could not be said for the
other sectors of the capitalist class); this situation significantly
enhanced the authority of the army within the capitalist class itself.
In fact, the General was considered to have remained somewhat aloof from
political circles and to have opposed those who advocated violence to
quell the movement; he was undoubtedly a realist in whom the Russians
had confidence. The General proposed a three-month truce in order to
institute economic measures; he created a permanent committee of
coordination with the unions and appointed another "liberal" Party
member, Rakowski, to this committee.
This was nothing less than an attempt to divorce the workersâ movement
from the peasantâs movement. Solidarity responded favorably to the truce
proposal, provided that all the unresolved problems would be discussed,
especially those dealing with official recognition of Solidarity (laws
concerning legal unions) and access to instruments of power (laws
concerning censorship). This was the beginning of generalized haggling;
Modzelewski, a KOR member who was given access to the columns of
Warsawâs official daily newspaper, offered the following:
"Implementation of the Gdansk accords has been largely inadequate. The
principles formulated by the Prime Minister as well as the composition
of his government create a real chance to get out of the dangerous
situation of recent weeks.. . The only role to which Solidarity aspires
is to be a recognized and respected social partner."
In actual fact, Jaruzelski was hardly enthroned before agreements were
reached in many sectors. Settlement with the students was reached on
February 20: they would have access to faculty committees; admission
requirements would be revised; course programs modified; and the
independent union recognized. Agreement on the five-day work week was
published on the same day and provided a wide choice between different
formulas. Solidarity and the Minister of Commerce reached an agreement
on meat and sugar rationing. The government was negotiating at the local
level with Rural Solidarityâs strike committee in both Rzeszow and
Ustrzyki DoIne; legislation would recognize the right of individual
farmers to ownership of their land. At the same time, there was an
agreement with France for cooperation in improving agricultural
techniques on the small family farm. The Rzeszow local of Solidarity was
granted most of the belongings of the former official union. This period
of relative calm coincided with the Twenty-second Congress of the
Russian Communist Party which opened in Moscow at the end of February
and also with the acrimonious discussions in Paris between all Polandâs
Western partners over revising the conditions for economic and financial
exchange. It was equally important to each branch of capital that the
social peace provide guarantees that the new system of social relations
would bring the most effective domination of the exploited and improve
the productivity of labor in present-day conditions of industrial
development.
Once again, the attempt to stop the rank-and-file movements backfired.
Beginning in March 1981, autonomous actions began to spread in the most
diverse domains. In Majdow, on March 14, peasants demanded â and
obtained â the construction of a school. On the same day in Radom, two
hundred enterprise delegates presented twenty demands including the
punishment of those responsible for the 1976 repression, and the social
use of militia buildings. These delegates threatened a general strike if
negotiations did not begin immediately. Walesa arrived in Radom on March
16:
"We must put a stop to this. We must not annihilate ourselves. We have
got a reasonable government. We cannot go on striking. I think this
government will sit down at the table and cooperate with us . . . The
robbers have robbed, itâs finished. Now, it is up to us to work since we
want to live better and this depends on us."
With the assistance of the parish priest, the defense lawyer for the
1976 victims and Kuron, the strike was avoided. "What happened at Radom
is a formula," Walesa declared.
"Dates had been set for a two-hour warning strike, to be followed by a
general strike. I went there and I convinced the people they had to
abandon this program since negotiations with the authorities were
scheduled to begin the next day. . . The past weighs heavy and this
tendency to want to obtain everything right away always exists in
society. But what we have succeeded in obtaining is already good. Today,
we have to say âenough.â We have to learn to delegate the decisions.â
These are ominous words in the light of future developments.
While several hundred peasants occupied the offices of the official
peasant party in order to gain recognition of the peasant union, a local
Solidarity delegation tried unsuccessfully for three days to intervene
on their behalf at police headquarters and they refused to leave the
premises. For the first time since July 1980, the militia intervened
directly and seriously wounded several delegates. This took place on
March 19, in Bydgoszcz, in the very center of Poland.
It is an irony of history that Walesa now had to revive the
anti-repression movement which he had defused in Radom a few days
earlier â not only because Solidarity delegates had been direct victims
but because all Polish workers were ready to rise up over what they
rightly considered a return to the oppressive system with which they
were fed up. For them, the attack was proof that they had not gained
much since July 1980, despite Walesaâs reassuring declarations. Once
more Solidarity had to resort to its customary diversionary action. But
this time the entire rank-and-file was preparing for a serious conflict.
Rank-and-file organizations gathered in factories and planned their
strategy. First on their list of demands was the firing of those
responsible for the March 19 attacks; they also called for recognition
of Rural Solidarity and guarantees against repression of all sorts. The
collaboration between workers and peasants which Jaruzelskiâs nomination
was supposed to have cut short thus grew more intense; a strike lasting
two hours took place on March 27 and, since it looked like the
government was not inclined to yield, the workers proceeded feverishly
with plans for a general strike on March 31; this one would have no time
limit.
Leaders versus the Rank-and-File
"For years Iâve waited for that moment, and now they ruined everything."
With these bitter words, a Polish worker greeted Walesaâs announcement
that, after seven hours of negotiation with the government, the strike
was called off and an agreement was signed without even consulting the
unionâs National Committee. "Violating all democratic procedures and
facing inevitable recrimination, they (Walesa and a few experts) signed
an agreement which contained only promises and then ran to the TV to
call off the strike without asking anyoneâs advice." This was the Walesa
Edict as described by a reporter in Le Monde. Walesa tried to justify
this edict by claiming that "70% of the demands were granted" (in fact,
the agricultural union was recognized and a few over-zealous officials
were transferred), but two victims of Bydgoszcz gave voice to the
general dismay when they condemned Walesaâs betrayal of all their
ideals: "Walesa has bungled. We can compromise on supplies of onions,
but not over spilt blood."
At this point it became obvious to all workers that the union fit the
description made by Dymarski, president of the Gdansk local;
"Solidarity has become a different union from the one we joined in
September. Anti-democratic practices which are encouraged by Walesaâs
paranoid behavior are beginning to pervade the unions."
The capitalist class, on the other hand, was euphoric. Rakowski praised
the positive role of the experts who "gave their utmost to find
compromise solutions." Two subordinate police officers from Bydgoszcz
were transferred in early April. Finally, on May 11, Rural Solidarity
was registered and this event was followed by a large demonstration in
which the Churchâs control was so obvious that the capitalist class must
have been reassured that the Church would serve as the best guarantee
against the risks of such a union. Workers undoubtedly viewed March 30
as the definitive rupture between the rank-and-file and the entire
bureaucracy of Solidarity; this rupture would have serious consequences
in the period which followed.
For all practical purposes, none of the rank-and-file problems which had
prompted wildcat actions during recent months had been resolved.
Solidarityâs role at the end of these conflicts gave it respectability
in the eyes of the Party; the regimentation of union locals was the
counterpart to daily participation in making economic and political
decisions. The Party congress in July and Solidarityâs congress in
August were not the only stimuli for the great reformist upsurge in both
organizations which were now attempting to accommodate each other, one
purging on its right, the other on its left. Party "liberalization"
apparently went in the direction desired by the rank-and-file; but the
Party remained the Party and the union tried to become the union. The
significant events of the summer of 1981, one year after the great
anticipation of workersâ democracy, were not so much the publicized
decisions on various "liberties," but rather, the attempts to set up
economic reforms at the enterprise level. The few documents available
show that Solidarity was already functioning as a partner in efficient
management. Polish workers were increasingly aware that the class
struggle is unending and each struggle is just one more stage as long as
capital endures.
The events of March 30, 1981, led the leaders to conclude that capital
was now in a position to work out its problems without considering
rank-and-file opinion and without provoking widespread, spontaneous
responses. The old class organs, Party, Church, army, and the economic
establishment had reason to believe that the new arrival in their midst,
Solidarity, was able to control the workers and make them accept the
solutions of capital. None of them had reason to believe that the
workers could possibly proceed to another stage of organization.
There were many new faces at the Party congress in mid-July 1981, and a
new Central Committee as well as a new Politburo were elected. But the
Party remained the Party, weak in numbers (three million members
compared to the Churchâs faithful millions or to Solidarityâs ten
million members) but powerful because of the backing (armies and police,
always and everywhere ready to restore and maintain capitalist order) of
Russian and Western capitalism. The Party was weak not so much because
of its numbers but because the workers, conscious of their own power,
were no longer afraid of it. Could Solidarity become the needed and
official link in restoring the "normal" functioning of capital, namely,
could it manage the workers and impose decisions on them?
The Solidarity congress opened with two sessions: September 5-11, and
September 26 â October 16, 1981. Between the two sessions, Walesa, Kuron
and two other leaders from Solidarityâs national office reached an
agreement on selfmanagement with the Parliamentary legislative
committee; this agreement conflicted with a resolution passed
unanimously at the congress a few days earlier. "We are heading for a
tough fight and we need some generals," Walesa stated in order to
justify himself, and Kuron added;
"Solidarity must continue to work for an institutionalized relation
between the governors and the governed."
Just as the cancellation of the March 31 strike had shown that the union
leadership could openly act against the rank-and-file, the September 26
compromise on self-management showed that a few leaders could even
ignore the wishes of their organization. The union functioned like the
Party and like every other hierarchical capitalist apparatus; this is
the proper context for Walesaâs remark. From this point on, neither
debates at the congress nor election proceedings would have much
significance. The only thing that mattered was increased participation
in capitalist power. One militant, Gwiazda, commented,
"in the last six months, union representatives no longer speak the
membersâ language but the governments That language is not understood."
Twice in six months the Solidarity leadership exhibited in practice, and
on a national scale-namely, at a "political" level â its scorn for the
rank-and-file: first, in March, when the general strike was called off
and then, in August, with the self-management compromise. Both times,
the attitude of the Solidarity leadership revealed a profound breach not
only between the top and bottom but at the very heart of the
organization. The problem is not merely to ascertain that workersâ
democracy had been repudiated â Walesa and his circle knew that better
than anyone-the problem is to understand what caused the leaders to act
as they did, and, in spite of their grand words, to develop tendencies
which had already been visible in the August 1980 Gdansk discussions.
In the October 3, 1981 Le Monde, Bernard Guetta reported on the
Solidarity congress debates, and commented:
"The union cadres are now formed and have begun to prowl around the
political machinery; from now on, they will more readily delegate their
power."
Like every union in a capitalist system, Solidarity could have a legal
existence only by functioning as mediator; in order to carry out this
function, given the contradictions and factional struggles within the
governing bodies, it had to propose political solutions. At the end of
August 1981, Kuron explained this to striking printers who opposed
calling off their strike:
"The union now has other things to do besides firing directors and
political functionaries . . .There are more important problems for all
of Poland."
For him, the solution was essentially political; a government of
national unity was needed to carry it out. Walesa and many other experts
had the same approach. But in order to perform its function effectively,
a union cannot cut itself off from "its" rank-and-file; it should be the
mouthpiece of those who support it and should articulate at least some
of their grievances. From the beginning, Solidarity was plagued by this
contradiction. At this time, its legal existence depended entirely on
the strength of its rank-and-file support and this made it difficult to
maintain the fundamental dualism while trying to retain its recognition
by the capitalist rulers. Thus in one organization, two tendencies
existed in a dialectical relationship which was accentuated by the
ambiguity of the struggles--tendencies toward integration among the
leaders and toward autonomy among the rank-and-file.
At the congress, Gwiazda warned the delegates: "Everyone wants to change
the world, but no one knows how to help the workers in their daily
struggle." Marian Jurczyk expressed it even better: "Every union
militant must preserve his links with the workers." In a period of
economic upswing, this dialectical relationship can be contained fairly
well within the framework of the organization, since capital can concede
some things to the constant pressure of the rank-and-file movement. The
union justifies its efficiency, its usefulness, by pointing to
protracted worker actions. But in a period of crisis, a rift appears
because capital needs everything for its recovery and has nothing to
give; then the unionâs fundamental role as capitalâs cop becomes
obvious. Walesa himself said he was "the flying fireman" and in his
final speech on the night of December 12-13, 1981, when he already knew
that the army was approaching, he described his function:
"The economic crisis would have taken place in any case .... The crisis
would have been a lot worse and the beatings even more numerous if
Solidarity hadnât existed. We negotiated with the authorities so that no
one would be laid off and no one would shoot. The crisis would have been
a lot worse without us. People would have looted the stores, a lot of
things would have been destroyed. The authorities knew this and even
authorized our formation... since they realized that Solidarity would
play a role of shock-absorber, reasonable and serious, that it would not
liquidate the Party. . ."
During the last six months of 1981, the growing rift between the
leadership and the rank-and-file polarized Solidarity. One side
increasingly looked toward support from the capitalist government,
provided that the unionâs position would be assured; the other side
tried to express the aspirations of the rank-and-file movement, some,
like Gwiazda, favoring strict worker control over decisions, others,
like the regional leaders from Lodz and Lublin, going further with their
proposals for active strikes and for control of the economy by means of
horizontal links. Failure to understand this situation led to the
misconception, reinforced by the medias on both sides of the Iron
Curtain, that whatever happened in Poland was initiated by Solidarity.
To understand subsequent events, two distinct responses should not be
confused: while the leadership increasingly elaborated political
solutions in a sort of anticipated retreat, the rank-and-file
increasingly used the organization for its own ends. The union apparatus
was no threat to capitalist domination (as Walesa made clear when
expressing his determination not to "liquidate the Party"); the threat
came from the rank-and-file using the apparatus for its own ends. At the
end of 1981, 16,000 of the 19,600 workers at the Katowice steelworks
belonged to Solidarity; Party membership fell from four thousand to
twenty in December 1981 and it was only natural that the Party should
give up its premises when they were "requisitioned" by the rank-and-file
organization. When Gwiazda said that the language of Solidarity was not
understood, he was obviously referring to the language of the leaders.
Other leaders, however, recognized it as their own language, just as
workers saw that it wasnât theirs.
During the summer and fall of 1981, a new wave of strikes broke out over
highly diverse issues but largely over the very material issue of food
supplies. On November 18, 1981, after a discussion between Party
personalities and their English counterparts, the latter reported an
almost total disappearance of Party and union authority (Solidarityâs
authority, too, one might add); the basic characteristic of the
situation was rankand-file determination to discuss openly whatever
might affect workers. From what we know about these struggles, their
scope was so vast that they deserve to be classified as expressions of
the workersâ own interests.
The question of self-management also exposed the rift between the
leadership and the rank-and-file. The little that is known about what
went on inside the enterprises suggests that, in the wake of the
apparent victory of the Gdansk accords, there was strong rank-and-file
impetus toward decision making as well as monitoring. This "wildcat"
movement for rank-and-file control more or less coincided with the rise
within Solidarity (but nevertheless somewhat on its fringes since the
chief authorities did not "recognize" it for some time) of a
"self-management" faction which called itself "the network" and which we
will mention later. This faction wanted to set up a framework for
self-management at the enterprise level in which the local union and
management would work together, with a certain measure of rank-and-file
control, in order to achieve a "smooth functioning" enterprise. This was
an early attempt to channel the rank-and-file movement, but it contained
two sources of conflict: with the administrators of capital, since the
program advocated the complete autonomy of the enterprise from
centralized decision-making; with the rank-and-file who might not
conceive of this neo-management as sel-fmanagement. We know very little
about the second source of conflict, but about the first, we know that
Solidarity included self-management in its platform and that it
participated in high-level discussions with the government when
legislation on self-management was being considered by Parliament. In a
reverse dialectic, these many debates on self-management at various
levels undoubtedly led many workers not only to theorize about, but also
to extend, their practice, taking literally whatever could be said on
the subject. The movement was clearly extensive enough to require
co-optive legislation, which incorporated the compromise mentioned
earlier between Walesa and the deputies. Below, we will give a Lodz
unionistâs account of the potential links among the self-organized
within the enterprises and neighborhoods. From the little we know about
activity elsewhere, we can see that workers were not revolving around
principles but around actions, they were putting into practice what they
understood as workersâ control. It may seem purely symbolic that the
Party-imposed managers at the national airlines, LOT, and at the
Katowice steelworks were ousted and others elected in their place, but
it shows how things had changed within the enterprises. Gdansk and
Gdynia dockers exercised control over the export of foodstuffs. At
Radom, as a result of constant strikes, the workers demanded the
punishment of those responsible for the 1976 massacres; in Olsztyn, some
print shop workers got a lie on television retracted by means of a
strike; on September 9, 1981, 150 prisoners escaped from the Bydgoszcz
jail, assisted by local inhabitants; at the Tarnobrzeg sulphur mine
there was a shut-down strike with occupation in order to get improved
working conditions. At the beginning of October 1981, more than 250,000
workers were 0n strike at Zielona Gora, Tarnobrzeg and Zyrardow (textile
mills). On October 20, 1981, several thousand workers attacked a
Katowice police station following the arrest of some militants; almost
everywhere, there was threat of other conflicts: at Wroclaw, at
Sandomierz, etc. Walesa no longer knew what to do to restrain the
movement.
At the end of July 1981, there was a new form of protest: street
demonstrations which, until then, Solidarity had always avoided because
they could take on an openly political character (not because Solidarity
wanted to avoid provocations, as the leaders claimed). The union thought
it was strong enough to channel this movement. But in August the
movement spread to all parts of Poland and could not easily be
restrained. The demonstration in Warsaw nearly paralyzed the city for
several days. At the end of October, Solidarity again tried to use a
one-hour general strike to stop the movement and Walesa said that he
"hoped that this would be the last one." It was obvious that Solidarity
could not "command obedience" and that something else would have to be
found in order to dominate the workers.
Like every capitalist class, the Polish rulers counted on the
exhaustion, the deterioration of the autonomous rank-and-file movement.
But in spite of the governmentâs co-opting maneuvers, promises and
manipulation of resources, the movement not only persisted but continued
to develop while the existing bureaucracies defaulted on providing basic
necessities. The response of the capitalist class was a function of its
national interests and of its links with international capital. It was
no coincidence that on October 18, just after Solidarityâs congress,
General Jaruzelski replaced Kania as Party chief and thus occupied every
ruling office in Poland â including the office of head of the repressive
apparatus. The wave of strikes had left powerless not only the
capitalist class but also Solidarity (in which some Party leaders had
placed their hopes). Fluctuations between policies of force and policies
of reform paralleled Solidarityâs fluctuations between peacefully
sharing capitalist power (with repressive manipulation of the
rank-and-file movement) and confronting the established clique in order
to become capitalâs manager by making use of the radicalism of this same
rank-and-file movement (to more effectively repress it later). At the
beginning of December 1981, there really existed only two of the former
institutions of the Polish state; the army and the Church. Both retained
some authority and their reputations were more or less intact since
(with rare exceptions for the Church), they had not intervened in recent
events.
The role of institutions such as the army and the Church was to
guarantee the stability of Polish capitalism for the benefit of this
capitalism itself, for the capitalist class and for the benefit of
capital in its entirety (Western and Eastern branches). But these
institutions also acted in their own interests; these interests were
not, however, guaranteed within the system except when they coincided
with the general interests of capital and with the specific interests of
the various capitalist cliques. To the extent that the two imperialisms
peaceably divide up the world, these institutions function to defend
common interests. We can note some privileged links with one of the
imperialisms: the Polish army and the entire police apparatus may seem
to be an integral part of the repressive system dominated by Russian
capitalism; the Church might seem to be an integral part (at least in
theory) of another capitalism, that of the Western branch of capital.
Admittedly, compared to its "big Russian brother," Poland appears to be
relatively powerless. But in a state which ranks eleventh among world
powers, the development of Polish capital within a national framework
tended to promote an independent defense of specific interests which did
not necessarily coincide with the defense of the interests of the other
imperialists, even of the dominant imperialism. (The same thing can be
observed in the countries of Western Europe in relation to the USA.) It
was not accidental that the institutions of control and co-optation had
as common denominator the vehement affirmation of Polish nationalism,
namely support for a capitalism within a state framework. Each faction
of the capitalist class may express preferences for one imperialism or
the other and preferences for one or another apparatus for dominating
the workers. In its role as capitalâs manager, Solidarity reflected this
national dichotomy. One faction of the leadership gravitated toward the
Church and its links with the West, another faction was Party-oriented
and inclined to come to an agreement with a reformed Party still linked
to the USSR. This dual approach to serving the "national interest" can
be seen in Solidarityâs sending a delegate to Washington to negotiate an
extension in Polandâs debt repayment while simultaneously discussing
sending a delegate to Moscow in order to work out a political formula
appropriate to Polish capital.
Solidarityâs orientation toward national and international political
spheres grew more explicit as its bonds with the rankand-file decreased.
The more it distanced itself from the workers, the more it tended to
become the manager of national capital, and the more it sought to
recover its lost power by making . explicitly political demands and by
supporting capitalist interests different from those of rival governing
cliques. Capitals policies are essentially pragmatic; one methodâs
success-namely, its efficacy in protecting capitalâs interests â
temporarily eliminates all others. Failure opens the door to another
method, even one that is contrary to the one previously followed. There
is no doubt that both approaches to the Polish crisis, the reformist and
the repressive, were studied and prepared simultaneously. At the Party
congress in July 1981, Rakowski stated that a new positive formula for a
front of â national understanding had to be found,
"This front should grow into a rational alliance which embraces the
various social groupings and movements."
At the end of October, Jaruzelski tried to put this recommendation into
practice by holding talks with Walesa and the Churchâs Polish primate,
Glemp, in order to try to define the foundations of a new structure for
capitalist power. Jaruzelskiâs Machiavellianism has been widely
censured; he is accused of using his procrastination skills and of
dissimulating during discussions held until the very last minute, all
the while secretly preparing military intervention. A spokesman from
WRON, the Military Council for National Salvation, stated on February 4,
1982:
"What happened on the night of the 12th and 13th was a well-planned and
well-conceived military attack."
But other members of the ruling circle spoke openly of "a political
defeat." On December 1, Jaruzelski asserted,
"The process of decomposition has to end, or it will lead to
confrontation, to a sort of state of war."
From the standpoint of a capitalist ruler, he was right; below, we will
examine the economic collapse and the near-disappearance of the state.
In 1968, in France, DeGaulle did not wait eighteen months before
preparing the "military" alternative for saving capital, should it be
needed. The single problem, "how to end the strikes and make the economy
function" appears constantly, as a leitmotif. Jaruzelski stated on
December 25, "Until the last minute we remained hopeful that emergency
measures would not be necessary.â It is very likely that he continued to
look for a less risky alternative. Even if the army and police are
always available to carry out their tasks, a commander-in-chief,
promoted to the rank of politician, cannot disregard political
solutions; if a political decision is possible in a situation which
involves all participants in the production process, it should be taken.
The important question is to know why the political negotiations failed
and why this failure made the capitalist class act as it did in Poland.
The proposals from both the government and the union all seemed to run
into what the media called the "incomprehension" either of the union or
of the Party. But this is not why they were unsuccessful. The
negotiations failed because the rank-and-file movement was still intact
and because it continually exposed Solidarityâs inability to assure the
support and allegience of its "troops," the fundamental condition for
its admission into an alliance of power. The "front of national
understanding" foundered, not because Solidarity risked losing its
virtue (which, in any case, it no longer had), but because it was clear
by this time that Solidarity had lost its power and thus was of no
further use to the capitalist rulers. In fact, Solidarityâs existence
had become a hindrance since it tended to look elsewhere for power and
this "elsewhere" went out of bounds and landed in competition between
imperialisms; this, in the Polish context, warranted an immediate death
sentence. In mid-November, there were more than 400,000 strikers â
wildcat strikers â throughout Poland; the strikes ranged from an
unlimited one by 1700 Krosno refinery workers demanding direct
self-management, to a strike by commercial employees who were fed up
with being accused of fostering shortages. On November 9, Newsweek
observed, "The biggest obstacle to improving the countryâs prospects is
now the unionâs own rebellious members." When Walesa was in France, he
held a secret interview in Roissy with a group of important American
businessmen who asked him, among other things, "If your government
listened to you, would you be able to control the protest movement?"
This was on October 18, 1981. We do not know Walesaâs response, but the
question sounds like a condemnation by capitalâs representatives.
Solidarity leaders multiplied their efforts to show their good will.
After appealing to the miners to give up their free Saturdays, they
proposed the "active strike" as "a new method of struggle," and then the
National Committee considered disciplinary measures "against wildcat
strikes which threaten to destroy the union." Walesa added:
"Strikes should be used in a thoughtful and planned manner, otherwise
the name Solidarity becomes an empty slogan."
There is no better way of saying that the union is nothing without the
"discipline" of its members, namely, the discipline of capital over its
members. This is the point at which Jaruzelski must have definitively
chosen another approach for imposing this discipline. On November 27, he
introduced in Parliament legislation to prohibit strikes. By this time,
Solidarityâs staff was in general disorder. The often contradictory
proposals for dealing with the situation can briefly be summarized: How
to recover the lost power. There was great temptation to try to co-opt
the vigor of the autonomous movement by means of demagogic radicalism in
the hope of restoring the situation of August 1980. Solidarityâs
congress in September-October had already distinguished itself along
these lines. This demagogy could follow either an economic or a
political path. The economic path meant restoring power to the
rank-and-file and fragmenting the unionâs power even more. This is why
restrictions to preserve the organizationâs power were attached to every
proposal: "We ought to think not as unionists, but as Poles." Archbishop
Glemp expressed
it as: "Letâs get to work! We should do everything for the well being of
the Fatherland. Only at that moment will God intervene and produce a
miracle."
Walesa urged the miners: go to work and you will see. Jaworski continued
the same theme on November 13:
"Today, the time for work has come and even if we should organize new
strikes, they will be active ones so work doesnât stop. We are going to
take the enterprises under our authority and in this way save the
Fatherland and safeguard the existence of our fellow citizens."
Nevertheless, the political path increasingly took precedence over the
economic path in Solidarityâs demands. This was a response to the
governmentâs proposals, but this was also a clear demand for a share of
capitalâs power within a revamped political system. While preparations
were being made for the restoration of the capitalist class,
Solidarityâs National Committee had nothing other to propose than
setting up an alternative political power: a "technocratic" interim
government, a commission for the national economy, and the organization
of a referendum to decide on free elections.
To set oneself up as a direct political competitor of the ruling
capitalist class is to ask for trouble, especially in the Polish
context. The ruling cliqueâs response was all the more violent because
the political call for Western-type democracy was not only incompatible
with the structures imposed by the dominant Russian imperialism, but
also because it inserted itself in the inter-imperialist rivalry. With
the exception of Hungarian unions, all Eastern bloc countries avoided
any contact with Solidarity. Due to the force of circumstances,
Solidarityâs overtures to the West seemed to confirm it as an agent of
pro-Western interests within Polish capital. From among the diverse
contacts with the West (an American bishop saying the opening mass at a
Solidarity congress, Walesaâs travels in Western Europe, contacts with
various unions, etc.), the medias chose the spectacular ones which were
suitable to the contest between propagandas. These spectacular contacts
concealed more concrete links such as those established with banks,
particularly German ones. But although Solidarity was in pursuit of
power, it did not hold any real power. Competition with the other
existing institutions of Polish capital centered around a single
question (which is the only real problem for every capitalism): Who
could, at present, control the class struggle? At the end of 1981, it
was very clear that the Party could not do it; hence, the repressive
apparatus came into renewed prominence and became the mouthpiece of the
totality of capitalâs interests, in a sort of merger with what remained
of the Party. Solidarityâs weakness can be seen in the fact that it had
to share the stage with a third protagonist, the Church. The
relationship of forces between these "institutions" can be summarized
with a comparison: In August 1980, it was the government ministers who
journeyed to Gdansk in order to suppress the workersâ movement; in
November 1981, it was Walesa and Glemp who were in Warsaw seeking
interviews with the single representative of the entire capitalist
class. The situation was inverted: Solidarity no longer had any social
force behind it. Summarizing the situation in Poland in November 1981,
we see that:
- The class struggle was blocking all attempts to co-opt the autonomous
rank-and-file movement.
- Both the Party and the old union had lost all their authority.
- Fierce factional struggles were shaking up the Party, and the
struggles were made more acute by the prospect of reforms and of more
direct management procedures which would eliminate a fair number of
Party members from the avenues of power; if some of them feared for
their skins, others foresaw prospects for careers in a renovated state.
- The new union, Solidarity, had lost practically all its authority with
the workers whenever it tried to fulfil the function for which it
existed. In attempting to create conditions favorable to the exercise of
this function, the leaders proposed political changes. This led to
divisions within the union, cut it off yet more from the rank-and-file,
and determined the terms of the conflict against and within the Party.
- The chaos of the economy became more pronounced as a result of
accumulated causes and effects, of economic, social and political
interactions which strengthened the structures of the rank-and-file
movement but at the same time exacerbated the radicalisms, both
reactionary and reformist.
- Capitalists in East and West had cause for concern in three areas: 1)
Economic: the loans had not been paid back; deliveries of raw materials
were considerably reduced; and in order to avoid worse problems,
capitalists had to furnish aid from their own output; 2) Social: there
was fear that the union movement would spread to other places in the
Eastern branch; there was fear that the rank-and-file movement in the
West would be radicalized; 3) Political: there was fear that a
disturbance growing out of the inability to control the situation in
Poland would bring about instability harmful to capitalâs interests.
This situation required that something be done. It pushed the capitalist
class to find political solutions (a coalition between Solidarity,
Church, Party), and if they failed, to turn to military intervention.
Everything was oriented toward political change; the capitalist class
did not categorically reject a political transformation but in order to
accomplish it, while preserving capitalâs interests, it needed a
powerful authority.
Solidarity had demonstrated, daily, that this union was not the powerful
authority that capital was looking for. To the capitalist class, any
political transformation sponsored by Solidarity was a gloomy prospect
indeed. Such a political transformation would encourage yet more
rank-and-file activities, whereas what was needed was to curtail them,
to control them, to crush them. The capitalist class was undoubtedly
aware of the risks of military intervention when it decided on this
course. In the capitalist context, it was not difficult to choose
between an attempt to restore capitalist order and the certainty of even
greater chaos.
13, 1981)
Can the military intervention be seen as the execution of an order
coming from Moscow, which was annoyed by all of Jaruzelskiâs
equivocating and, on December 11, had sent highranking ambassadors
(among them, Koulisky, head of the Warsaw Pact armies) with an
ultimatum: "lf you donât do anything, we will"? Can the slow but sure
promotion of Jaruzelski be seen as the setting up of a military system?
Didnât the legend of Jaruzelski (and of the army) â a legend propagated
by Solidarity and by Walesa himself â ignore the fact that he was above
all a military man with Russian training? At the crucial moment, would
Jaruzelski not be the ideal person to carry out Moscowâs commands in
order to preserve Russiaâs strategic interests? It now appears that
extensive precautions had been taken (in collaboration with the
Russians) to avoid any leaks: for example, the printing, in Russia, of
the proclamations of the state of siege, the use of the Warsaw Pact
communications network for the preparations, the arrival of Russian
soldiers in Polish uniforms. But it is difficult to verify all these
assertions. It is more certain that by the end of the summer enough
arrangements were being made to suggest that something was afoot.
Brigadier General Leon Dubicki, who defected to the West, warned the
leaders of Solidarity already in November 1980. He later remarked: "They
minimized the whole problem. They knew and they didnât act." Others said
that in February 1981, Jaruzelski began choosing units he could depend
on.
Nevertheless, even after December 1981, there still was no proof that
the Polish army could unleash a bloody repression of Polish workers like
the one the Russian army had perpetrated against East German workers in
1953 or in Hungary in 1956. By tradition and by political position, the
Polish army was loyal to a Polish nationalism which excludes total
submission to Russian interests. The Warsaw Pact is not a monolithic
bloc without contradictions or rifts. The massive and direct presence of
the Russian army and secret service in all countries in the Eastern
branch of capital simultaneously serves a strategic function and is an
element of social control; in both cases, it serves to protect Russian
military interests. Could it be that the intervention of the Polish army
guaranteed a strictly Polish capitalist, and in a way, anti-Soviet,
solution?
As we will analyze below when we discuss Polish capitalâs links with
international capital (Eastern and Western branches), at this time
Russia, because of its own problems, had no interest in direct
intervention in Poland. Russiaâs well defined strategic military
interests and its economic-political domination were preserved through
"peacefully" subduing the Polish conflagration. (The expression "state
of war" should be understood for what it is: war against the workers and
against their revolutionary activities.) Of course in the geographic
distribution of capitalâs repressive tasks, Russiaâs position in Poland
led it to furnish visible material support to the national repressive
forces (if only to maintain an army in the field with provisions which
the mistrustful Russians apparently limited to a one-week supply) and to
organize a propaganda campaign which served as a warning to its own
proletariat.
The two positions described in the preceding paragraphs reflect the
difference of opinion over the role that Russia played â indirectly â in
repressing the Polish workers. Before the "coup" on the night of
December 12-13, the Polish army had increasingly "mixed" in the daily
life of the country and it is clear that only the Polish army could have
carried out the coup in this way. Military patrols were put on the
streets at the beginning of October; more than 2,000 cities lodged
military units whose function it was to supervise administrative and
economic activity. This was undoubtedly essential for capital and for
the two imperialisms, given the deficiencies of the completely
discredited Party and the relief measures undertaken by a self-organized
rank-and-file. Stationing the army around the country was officially
designed for distributing foodstuffs, ensuring deliveries and resolving
"local conflicts." A lieutenant-colonel even claimed: "People expect
from the men in uniform protection against the stupidity and license of
local bureaucrats and an end to the scandalous mess and favoritism."
This installation of the military filled a power vacuum. It was directed
more against the "uncontrolled rank-and-file" than against the Party or
Solidarity, both organizations revealing their powerlessness at this
time. Its purpose was to prevent the spread of the spontaneous
organization network which had begun to appear both within enterprises
and in distribution , projects. But behind its real and visible mission,
this military grid provided an efficient information network and a
capability for swift repressive action.
By November, even the authorities stopped concealing I their intentions.
The November 9 Newsweek cited Jaruzelski suggesting that the only way
out of the situation was martial law and a ban on strikes. The
legislation introduced in Parliament at the end of November concerned
not only strikes; it was a complete panoply of repressive proposals:
prohibition of strikes and of all non-religious gatherings, restrictions
on travel in Poland and abroad, proposals dealing with commodity
distribution, with telecommunications, postponement of elections, draft
of a law on unions, strengthening enterprise managersâ control over
communication and printing facilities. Jerzy Wiatr, director of the
Central Committeeâs Institute of Marxism-Leninism, analyzed the Polish
situation and perceived four possible courses, one of which was the
setting up of a military government that would be acceptable to a large
part of the population and which would require suspension of political
liberties: "This power would base itself on the peasantry and the white
collars . . . Very efficient and combined with profound economic reform,
it should last several years, and possibly more than a decade." Lasting
this long would make it close to the "interim technocratic" government
that a Solidarity leader, Rulewski, was advocating on December 11.
The Polish Chaos is Contrary to the Interests of the Two Dominant
Imperialisms: West and East Agree to Destroy a Dangerous Revolutionary
Ferment
"Donât you know with whom you are dealing?" Kadar asked Dubcek a few
days before the 1968 Russian intervention in Czechoslovakia. The same
question immediately comes to mind when one observes the incredible
naivete combined with equally incredible pretensions displayed during
Solidarityâs internal debates in December 1981 â from the Radom events
(when the discussions were secretly taped by a police informer), to the
session of the National Committee in Gdansk on December 11-12. Even
though telex communiques from all parts of Poland kept arriving
throughout the afternoon and reported troop movements and the calling up
of reservists, the discourse on a referendum for free elections, on
defending union rights by the "active strike," on setting up an
alternative government, continued until 1 a.m. On this evening when
telephones and transportation were not yet cut off, when the entire
Solidarity apparatus was still intact, the delegates returned peacefully
to their hotels, to be rounded up a few hours later by the hundreds, by
the thousands, from their beds. In a few places, however, preparations
for a confrontation had been made by the rank-and-file; underground
factory committees were formed in Poznan, first-aid supplies were
stockpiled in Olsztyn, food supplies elsewhere. As mentioned earlier,
the situation was the reverse of the one in August 1980; now an
organization was calling for strike action as a political solution to
ensuring its survival, whereas in 1980 an entire spontaneous movement
with material grievances had permitted an organization to establish
itself and act as intermediary between it and capital. What is more, in
eighteen months of discussions with capitalâs representatives, the union
leaders had become so accustomed to using their only force, the threat
of closing down the vital industrial sectors (but only if this threat
were wielded by them, and not by one of the wildcat movements they had
so often repressed), that they overlooked the crucial fact that now it
was the army taking action and that this institution was organized to
act in an autonomous fashion without any support from civil society
(responding, rather, to its own communications network). Even if this
army did not have long-term supplies, Russia would furnish them.
Moreover, a general strike had been threatened so many times without
ever being called that the threats gave Party and police spies ample
opportunities to study Solidarityâs mobilization techniques, and the
rank-and-file finally recognized these threats for what they were:
instruments of negotiation, and nothing more. Under the circumstances, a
general strike would make sense only if it were insurrectionary and
would proceed to set up its own organization to counter the repressive
organization. In the face of this predicament, the leaders appeared
defenseless; they could only make appeals, many of which were
self-contradictory and in conflict with the leadersâ own recent
restriction of rank-and-file movements. These appeals, first for a
"passive" strike (work stoppage), then for an "active" strike (work with
control over disposition of the products), then, finally, for
submission, sounded like "recipes" designed to promote a policy which
the rank-and-file movement had obviously rejected. The final call for
submission was openly supported by the Church, which was concerned to
preserve its gains, including those achieved as a result of the workersâ
struggles. As mentioned earlier, Solidarity made no appeals while time
still remained. Throughout its brief existence, Solidarity attempted to
build a power apparatus by using the power of the rank-and-file and by
acting against it; its repression was aimed at the autonomous groupings
which tended to form in all the wildcat strikes which erupted one after
another. Although these maneuvers of Solidarity were unsuccessful, since
other strikes broke out, they objectively paved the way for the
repression by capitalâs armies. The December 3, 1981, militia raid on
the Firefightersâ Academy, which had been occupied by students resisting
a military statute, was more than a rehearsal and a test of public
reaction. It was a rehearsal, because a few hours earlier, telephone and
telex lines had been cut in all Warsaw Solidarity headquarters and
enterprise branches, and because it was accomplished without fuss in
mid-day, in the very center of Warsaw, despite crowds of protestors in
front of the building. It was a test of public reaction, because there
was no immediate spontaneous response from the factories to this raid,
carefully chosen as a situation that did not involve workers. And it was
more than these, because one could not help comparing this event to
Bydgoszcz at the end of March 1981. Solidarity leaders had then
responded by calling for a general strike (and everyone was prepared to
carry it out); now, too, they declared an extreme emergency-but banned
any action which did not have specific instructions from the "central
leadership." A few days later, for the second time since the hunger
marches of the summer of 1981, Solidarity leaders, in launching their
political demands, issued a call for mass demonstrations in Warsaw and
in other cities on December 17 "against the use of force to resolve
conflicts.â But there would be no December 17, since the outcome of
Solidarityâs entire eighteen-month history was that it could no longer
resort to the weapon of the workers: the general strike, the weapon
which all workers had used in July â August 1980, but which the union
had gradually blunted. We will not dwell on the military-police
intervention on the night of December 12-13. (The necessity of
selectively joining the two forces demonstrates the extent of the
rank-and-file movement and the relative weakness of the front line of
the repressive apparatus â the police â even though its "reliability"
made it the spearhead of the repression and the instrument of control
over the army.) What happened was that one section of the army of the
Eastern branch of capital intervened in Poland (because this was its
designated operational zone) on behalf of the consolidated imperialisms
and it destroyed some of the economic-political structures (or what
remained or was expected of them) in order to try to rebuild a system
which would preserve the interests of the dominant imperialism better
than the former system did. Whatever the consequences, unified capital
had to destroy this revolutionary conflagration whose existence was a
constant threat. The Military Council for National Salvation, composed
of generals and admirals, was, according to Jaruzelski, "the last chance
before the collapse of the State," He was right, but arresting tens of
thousands of members of a substitute bureaucracy only eliminated an
apparatus which was taken by surprise because of its illusions and its
intoxication with power. In France, economist Aleksander Smolar, KOR
representative to the Socialist International, accurately wrote; "The
authorities are largely mistaken about their enemies. The real radicals
are not Solidarityâs leadership. The real radicals are the Polish
people, the Polish workers." But he should have added that, despite
appearances, the armyâs repression was directed primarily against Polish
workers and that if the union apparatus was swept away at the same time,
it was to attack more effectively the rank-and-file movement and to
deprive it of an instrument which it might have made use of.
Thus, as in all major workersâ struggles, at the critical moment the
circumstances and the logic of events eliminated the intermediaries,
both political and unionist, and the working class found itself-almost
empty-handed â facing capitalâs ultimate bulwark: the armed forces. The
military leaders were well aware that they were creating economic chaos.
Jaruzelski acknowledged: "In an extraordinary situation, extraordinary
methods are essential. The rebellion must be put down.â To an army
chief, it is clear what that means.
While deliveries, mail service, radios, telephones, newspapers, air and
automobile traffic were reduced to minimal levels, it was easy to
announce that "the situation is returning to normal." By completely
blocking all systems of communication, thus paralyzing the state as well
as the economy, the military killed two birds with one stone; they made
it extremely difficult to coordinate a resistance movement and they also
made it difficult to determine the extent of the resistance to the
military coup; not only was information unavailable, but it was
impossible to assess how the resistance affected the functioning of the
system.
But this was not the case for the factories and mines. We know that from
Monday, December 14, practically all factories were paralyzed. In the
seven principal industrial regions, all the large factories were
occupied by the workers. The repressive tactics seem to have been the
same everywhere: army tanks broke down the gates, some of which had been
soldered shut. Then the militia entered the factory and "persuaded" the
workers to leave. Those who resisted were arrested and treated as
criminals. (We should take note of the difference in treatment meted out
to union functionaries â not to speak of Walesa himself â under
preventive arrest, and to those arrested in the thick of the struggle;
moreover, this discrimination increased in the days that followed.)
Censorship and the blackout of all communications has prevented us from
learning the details about this first period of spontaneous struggle
against the militarization of labor, the period between December 13 and
31, 1981. Could it be that there actually was a general strike? The
Solidarity leadership had called for one in response to the governmental
coup which they sensed was coming but which they considered improbable.
Moscow reported on December 23 that ten days after intervention, 20% of
Polish workers were still on strike. Little is known about Poland in
general, paralyzed as it was by the disruption of communications, but
something is known about the resistance in a few regions of heavy
industrial concentration. On December 16 and 17, a veritable pitched
battle took place in Gdansk, first at the shipyards, then at the railway
station. People were killed and more than four hundred were wounded. The
army was probably relieved by the militia. The shipyards were eventually
cleared by force and were reopened on January 4 â after new
identification badges were issued. The Szczecin shipyards, cleared by
force, were again occupied on Friday the 18th by workers armed with
rifles and supplied with enough food for several weeks; the outcome here
is not known.
On December 23, the Ursus tractor factory was finally "pacified." Night
after night, the militia had entered the occupied plant and proceeded to
beat and arrest whomever they found there. The Pafawag railway car
factory in Wroclaw was taken by storm with armored cars; fifteen people
were killed. In Lublin, some militiamen were taken as hostages in a
helicopter factory. But it was in the SilesJan mines that the
insurrection of the workers posed the greatest threat to the
authorities. On December 23, thirty shafts were still occupied. At the
Ziemowit mine, 1300 miners shut themselves in after blowing up one of
the entrances and mining the other. At the Piast mine, 1740 men were at
the bottom of the mine; women and children also went down. At Huta
Katowice, 8000 workers barricaded themselves in the steel plant. They
shut down the blast furnaces and threatened to blow them up with
acetylene and oxygen. This region also reported disturbances in the army
(mutinies, arrests, executions).
The security units gradually took over the repression and relegated the
army to the background. These reliable troops overcame one by one the
bastions of worker insurrection. The militia took Huta Katowice by storm
on December 23. There were fourteen killed at the Manifest Lipcowy Mine
and violent confrontations at the Anna and Salsk Mines. At Ziemowit and
Piast, the miners shut themselves in the mine and threatened to blow up
everything, including themselves. The Piast miners did not come up again
until December 28. At the Wujek Mine, 2000 miners remained below on
December 13, but were dislodged three days later, following a ferocious
battle with the militia who literally took the mine by storm. Eleven
were killed, eighty wounded. At Radom, more than two thousand were
arrested. The list of dead and wounded grew longer. An armed peace was
imposed on Poland.
In addition to eliminating intermediaries in the class struggle against
capital, the military intervention had other consequences. The struggle
was once again confined to the production plant, since the web of
contacts permitting the struggle to spread quickly had been destroyed.
But, paradoxically, the repression re-established those conditions for
the future; the unity of the repression and the new conditions of
exploitation (militarization of enterprises, new working conditions,
price hikes) restored the unity of the rank-and-file movement that had
been broken when Solidarity was politicized. In certain sectors, the
rank-and-file movement had been in a position to do what it wanted to do
and when it wanted to do it. This was intolerable for capital and the
repressive action was first of all concentrated against this. As in
every capitalist country, East and West, this repressive action again
confined rank-and-file movements to the authorized framework of
exploitation by defining the limits which may not be exceeded without
provoking-ultimately-armed intervention, This is what happened in Poland
and what happens daily everywhere in the world.
The authorities were able to militarize vital enterprises, make workers
sign no-strike pledges and renounce Solidarity, increase the work week
to forty-eight hours, revoke free Saturdays, and decree compulsory
employment between the ages of 18 and 45, when the workers seemed to be
defeated militarily, while army and militia were still mobilized,
weapons in hand, and while Party supervision in the factories was
reinforced with direct military supervision. Under these conditions it
was possible for WRON (the ruling military-civilian council) to state
that Poland experienced "the first day in fifteen months without a
strike." They then proceeded to open the naval shipyards, schools and
universities and left the "disruptive elements" out in the cold. And one
month later they could authorize price increases of between 100% and
200% amidst impressive demonstrations of force. This did not change the
shortages and every worker understood that the "reorganization of the
economy" would be achieved primarily through a much larger extortion of
surplus value. The Polish workers had been fighting openly against this
for more than ten years and militarization was a logical step in
capitalâs response to their continuing struggle. Whatever institutional
reforms were undertaken, whether by peaceful means or by using force,
the apportionment of surplus value remained the fundamental issue.
One battle had been lost, but the working class was far from defeated.
From the beginning, the militarized society could not prevent the rise
of new and overt forms of resistance. In Gdansk on January 30, two
hundred were arrested after large-scale demonstrations; in Poznan, 114
were arrested; there were overt go-slow strikes for specified periods in
Wroclaw, Ursus, Lodz. The "leaders" of this open class warfare were
rewarded with long years in prison, usually three to ten years. On
February 18, an enormous round-up added 3500 to the thousands arrested
since December 13. But at the same time the military government had to
undertake some "adjustments," reduce certain prices, shorten working
hours, grant three free Saturdays out of four, restore certain holidays.
It had to set up "special factory committees" to deal with pressing
social tasks (housing, emergency aid, etc.). All this indicates that the
government, faced with large-scale resistance, had to make concessions.
In spite of the terror, the resistance continued, though altered in
form. It did not consist mainly of the underground terrorist movements
which were beginning to operate and which, ultimately, led to the same
abyss as political activity, but, rather, of working class resistance in
areas of capitalist production where it revived the everyday techniques
acquired through years of struggle but less used since July 1980. One
phase of the struggle had ended and a new one was beginning. This one
was much less susceptible to the repression but was just as detrimental
to capitalist exploitation; this is the very heart of worker resistance
in the East as in the West. Another phase was beginning, the phase of
passive resistance: absenteeism, slow-downs, sabotage, etc. In Szczecin,
forty ships waited to be unloaded because the dockers were "working to
rule." Martial law had created an administrative vacuum in which passive
resistance could be practiced. It is hard to describe the vicious circle
in which all industrial activity found itself due to the lack of raw
materials and spare parts, the communications breakdown, the absence of
decisionmaking on all levels, and the various forms of worker sabotage.
In one week, the Ursus factory produced only one tractor. At the FSO
auto plant near Warsaw, the workers altered the tolerance levels of the
machine-tooled components so that the parts no longer fit together on
the assembly line. In Gdansk, some dockers loaded and unloaded the same
cargo. In Silesia, under the auspices of the Solidarity local, the
following "rank-and-file rules for passive resistance" were circulated:
1. During a strike, stay with the workers; do not establish strike
committees; there should be no leaders.
2. In contacts with the police or the military you should be uninformed,
you know nothing, you have heard nothing.
3. In every place of work, Solidarity members must be present
physically. Do not risk arrest by foolhardy acts.
4. Do not take revenge on your neighbor. Your enemies are the policeman,
the over-eager employee, the informer.
5. Work slowly; complain about the mess and incompetence of your
supervisors. Shove all decisions into the lap of commissars and
informers. Flood them with questions and doubts. Donât do their thinking
for them. Pretend you are a moron.
6. Do not anticipate the decisions of commissars and informers with a
servile attitude. They should do all the dirty work themselves. In this
way you create a void around the bastards, and by flooding them with the
most trivial matters you will cause the disintegration of the
military-police apparatus.
7. Eagerly carry out even the most idiotic orders. Do not solve problems
on your own. Leave that to the commissars and informers. Ridiculous
rules are your allies. Always remember , to help your friends and
neighbors regardless of the rules.
8. If some bastard instructs you to break a rule, demand written orders.
Complain. Try to prolong such games as long as possible. Sooner or later
the military commissar will want to be left in peace. This will mark the
beginning of the end of the dictatorship.
9. As often as possible take sick leave or days off to take care of your
children.
10. Openly shun the company of informers and bastards.
11. Help the families of the arrested, wounded and all victims.
12. Collect money for social self-help funds in your enterprise.
13. Take active part in the campaign to counter official propaganda,
spread any information you have about the situation in the country and
acts of resistance.
14. Paint slogans, hang posters on walls and distribute leaflets. Pass
on independent publications. But always be cautious!
15. In any organizational activity, always keep in mind two principles:
I know only what I need to know, and today there is nothing more
important than the struggle for national liberation, the lifting of the
State of War, respect for civil liberties and union rights. (Le Monde,
December 31, 1981)
Such counsels are the daily practice of workers throughout the
capitalist world. Was it necessary to recall these counsels in the form
of union orders while combining them with old slogans about "national
liberation" and "rights" and "liberties"? When chaos reigns as a result
of confusion produced by the authorities themselves, it is much easier
to push things a little further by making use of the chaos and
contributing something to it. But workers know this better than anyone
and they do not need "guides" to instruct them; in such circumstances,
workers can find individual and collective responses appropriate to the
situation in their plant. The January 18, 1982 Newsweek reported that
most factories were operating at only 50% of their capacity. It is hard
to say to what extent the class struggle â both direct actions and their
cumulative effects â contributed to this statistic. As the (London)
Times emphasized on December 28, 1981, "In any case, it is impossible to
run a complex modern economy by terror." The Dutch weekly, Vrij
Nederland, (in December 1981) was more explicit: "Whatever they try to
construct in Poland without the workers is doomed to failure."
Intervention had made this vividly apparent. The two classes were once
again confronting each other. A Polish sociologist was quoted in the
(London) Sunday Times of January 3, 1982: "The trouble with the
authorities is that they simply didnât expect such a reaction. They see
the social world as they see their own party. So they thought that by
arresting the top leaders that would finish it. They have no way of
understanding the nature of a mass movement. Nothing in their background
and training equips them to understand.â
As good strategists, the military men and super-technocrats thought they
could even plan out the consequences of their brutal intervention. They
believed that in the next three or four years, with the population under
control once more and living conditions sufficiently improved through
economic reforms, all discontent could be easily channelled. This was,
to some extent, tactical warfare on their part, a follow-up to open
warfare. The first task was to restrict Polish workers to the confines
of their exploited situation (to which they had just been brutally
returned) and to make them accept working conditions like those imposed
on them in the wake of the repression.
The class struggle did not end, but its real character was not
immediately apparent. There was a great deal of uncertainty; the defeat
of the working class and Solidarityâs dislocation masked the actual
activities of the proletariat; the apparent monolithic nature of the
army and its military methods hid the weaknesses of a system which was
shaken by rivalries within the ruling circle and by convulsions of an
economy out of control.
In 1982 and 1983, working class activity took place largely in the
streets and in the enterprises; it is sometimes hard to distinguish the
social struggles from the specifically political ones. We have seen that
months before the December 1981 coup, rank-and-file actions became
dissociated from Solidarityâs increasingly political activity â a result
of the capital-labor dialectic. The repression, which appeared to be
directed equally against Solidarityâs organization and the workersâ
December actions (although the punishments differed greatly in degree),
made it seem that the union apparatus and the rank-and-file were once
again united in a common struggle ` where the specific interests of the
workers coincided with those of the dismantled union apparatus. For a
time, the underground organization tried to reconstitute itself and to
assert its power and credibility. It could do this only by making use of
the rank-and-file movement and by trying to involve it in factory
struggles or street demonstrations which had objectives useful to
Solidarityâs survival as organization but which also could appear to be
defending workersâ gains since July 1980. From this point on, the
program of those who set themselves up as provisional underground
administrators was clearly geared toward acquisition of authority
(liberation of prisoners and amnesty, reinstatement of Solidarity and
dialogue with the government), while rank-and-file actions continued to
be motivated by conditions of exploitation. By the beginning of 1982, it
was obvious that the mass of workers was reviving a rank-and-file
organization, the one which had existed before the December coup, and
that the underground committees, attempting to coordinate the struggle,
thought they had recovered their faithful followers. These committees
thus understandably hoped they would be followed when they gave an
obvious political cast to the demonstrations, factory actions and
strikes which they organized at regular intervals and which had as their
principal goal the recognition of Solidarity as spokesman for the reform
of the capitalist economy. But the situation was radically different
from the one in the summer of 1980. Then, a mass movement had brought
Solidarity to life; now Solidarity wanted to create a mass movement in
order to resurrect itself.
It would be tedious to list all the actions which took place prior to
the autumn of 1983. Every month, if not every week, demonstrations which
often encountered brutal repression took place in the major cities;
sometimes people were killed; hundreds and even thousands were arrested,
then given relatively light punishment, and released. Anything could
serve as pretext, but the underground committeesâ political objectives
were invariably repeated. Sometimes the actions consisted of workers
coming out of their factories, but usually they were gatherings of a
cross-section of the population in churches or in the street under the
pretext of a religious or nationalistic observance. The frequency of the
actions and the number of demonstrators taking part in them may seem
impressive but compared to the mass demonstrations in the summer of 1980
and even during 1981, they involved only the active minority. One might
consider the repression responsible for both limiting the extent of
these actions and for their progressive decline at the end of 1983.
However, this repression was not more severe than in 1970, 1976 or 1980;
it may have been less violent and some of the demonstrations remained
peaceful and even had a sort of tacit authorization. If this type of
guerrilla activity against the government ran out of steam, it was
because this form of action gradually lost the support of the
rank-and-file of the workers and because the workers more and more
openly showed that they were not inclined to follow the political calls
of the underground Solidarity committees. (The regional committees had
been replaced by a national committee, the TKK.)
Realizing that their sphere of action lay more in the enterprises than
in the streets, the committees tried to launch strike movements by
getting the support of active rank-and-file workers who were operating
more or less autonomously. Most of these efforts were woefully
unsuccessful. The most important failure was the strike called for
October 11, 1982, opposing the new legislation on unions which put an
end to Solidarity. In spite of the significant deterioration in the
standard of living and the resulting discontent, the strike objectives
were exclusively political: restoration of Solidarity, release of Walesa
and amnesty. Only one crew from the Gdansk Lenin Shipyards went on
strike; they set up a strike committee which called for a general
strike. Here, too, there was an attempt to achieve from above, for the
benefit of Solidarity alone, what the rank-and-file had done in August
1980 for the benefit of the workers. Two days later, there was nothing
left; a few cities had some demonstrations but nothing out of the
ordinary. One can blame the militarization of the factories, the
isolation, etc., as certain discouraged workers hastened to do; but the
failure was due simply to the fact that the great majority of workers
were not inclined to follow. When one of them declared, "Itâs finished
now. We are losing . . . We are alone," he was not referring, as he
thought he was, to the totality of the workers, but to the handful who
thought that an exclusively political action was sufficient to put
pressure on the government.
This situation made it clear to the authorities that the Solidarity
apparatus had become harmless. The repression was certainly partly
responsible for this but, objectively, the approach Solidarity leaders
adopted to recover their following was most to blame. As prisoners of
their theories, the leaders were led to expose to the repression their
contacts in the factories who had the closest links with the
rank-and-file; these contacts were then lost to them. In fact, the only
consequence of the unsuccessful strikes, a serious one for the
apparatus, was to empty the enterprises-through dismissals-of the
rankand-file Solidarity militants who had escaped the December
round-ups. The freeing of almost all the Solidarity union militants at
the end of 1982 was only one aspect of the normalization of the
repression, of the return to the minimal freedom a modern economy needs
in order to function, of incorporation into the system of special laws
permitting military intervention. The Church contributed a great deal to
this normalization and from the spring of 1982 on, made appeals for
"order and calm" and expressed its "hopes for stabilization and for
bringing about a renewal. " For the workers and peasants, the Church
played the ambiguous role of being a substitute for Solidarity because
it was the only existing legal organization besides the army and the
Party.
This role had its limitations, however, especially in regard to the
workers. The attempts by the technocratic-military alliance to
reconstruct a viable apparatus for managing the capitalist economy ran
into insurmountable obstacles; aside from the army, no organized
structure â neither the Party nor the new unions-was able to manage a
system which required minimal participation in order to function. (In
December 1983, the army again had to send special emissaries around the
country to find out the real state of things in Poland.) At every level
of society, the forces of direct repression, capitalâs ultimate bulwark
(which had been obliged to take the place of the customary
intermediaries) was confronting labor which was once again carrying on
the struggle in its own way, using the means it had available at the
time, Although few of these means are known, since very little of what
actually happens in the enterprises filters through, the fact that the
significant price increases slated for the beginning of 1984 were
postponed and considerably reduced in the face of expressions of
discontent, gives an idea of the governmentâs fear of another explosion
similar to the ones in Polandâs recent past. It is important to note
that this happened just when the local union organizations were visibly
weakened and reduced to ideological groups and when there was no move
either to impose measures necessary for economic recovery or to counter
attempts to further lower the standard of living. The vacillations of
the authorities are evidence of the workersâ resistance. One might think
that this was a return to the pre-1980 situation but, in fact,
everything is much further along. Between the two sides, capital and
labor, there is no longer an opportunity for intermediaries to prevent
direct confrontation.
âStriking Polish workers have no class consciousness,â declared
Lukaszewicz, propaganda minister under Gierek, on August 25, 1980.
âAnd you, there, in France, do you realize that a revolution is underway
in Poland? A revolution that will not stop as in Portugal after the
flowers but which will go further, go to the end, until we have complete
democracy.â This is a statement by a Polish worker following the
Bielsko-Biala strike on February 6, 1981.
Where, given these two evaluations of the workersâ actions, should the
autonomous Polish movement be located? There are a few first-hand
reports on the July and August 1980 spontaneous strike eruptions. At the
Ursus tractor plant in early July and in Gdansk in mid-August, in a
matter of hours, the actions of a few were transformed into a powerful
irreversible movement which organized itself as it proceeded. But it was
the earlier struggles, those of 1970-71, of 1976, and all the daily
confrontations since 1970 which shaped the forms of the workersâ
actions. A reporter for the (London) Financial Times summarized;
"This shows a working class which is learning the rules of industrial
disputes fast. They are younger and more ambitious than before. Surveys
carried out a few years ago show that they are well aware of the lack of
democracy at their work place and the failing of the official trade
unions in defending their interests. There is also an acute awareness of
inequalities in society."
In fact, there was much more than this. Here was an entire class with
years of experience in outwitting the authorities inside and outside the
factory on a daily basis, seeking escapes wherever it could since
conditions for a frontal attack were lacking. These everyday practices
should not be judged in terms of bourgeois morality or of
"revolutionary" ethics but in terms of what they represented within the
capitalist production apparatus to those who undertook them. The act of
stealing has opposite meanings for an owner and a worker: for one, it is
an increase in his share of the surplus value extorted from the workers,
for the other, it is a decrease.
Finally the conditions were there and everything was coming apart but,
in spite of appearances, there was no discontinuity in what the workers
had been earlier; they simply understood that they could now assert
their refusal differently and could win something that would allow them
to change their former life. It was their life of misery and cunning
which had shaped their present class consciousness in which yesterdayâs
negative aspects now appeared as positive. The early confrontations were
provoked by the increase in meat prices but they already indicated the
direction the entire movement would follow. The original goal may have
been to "make the authorities back down," but this goal was no longer
acceptable, as it had been in the past. Now there was concern about
guarantees that concessions won would not be immediately neutralized;
there was concern about maintaining the organizations of struggle â in
Lublin, by electing delegates who would meet in case of emergency; or at
the Ursus plant, by retaining the strike committee after conclusion of
the strike. There was concern to guard against repression: negotiating
delegates were never the same (One of the repressive acts in Gdansk was
for government negotiators to get the police files on worker delegates
in order to manipulate the workers more effectively by knowing their
weaknesses and something of their psychological make-up). One worker
stated on August 28, 1980:
"Weâve learnt some important lessons from 1970. Then the workers staged
a public demonstration in the streets which gave the authorities an
excuse for using force. This time weâre better organized, weâve stayed
in the factories and there are more of us."
Another worker, on August 31, summarized this development in worker
mentality:
"Weâve been promised reforms in the past-and were later disappointed, as
they were first granted and then taken away. This time weâre not so
stupid as we once were. Weâre willing to give the government time to
clear the mess up. But we also want our own interests to be permanently
represented. . .Itâs we who have changed most. We know this, because we
are strong and we have regained our self-respect. The Russians? Itâs not
we who are afraid of them, but they who are afraid of us. The worker is
not what he used to be 35 years ago. We are better educated now, more
aware of what is going on around us."
Looking at the many struggles which took place almost uninterruptedly
after July 1980, we find that the objectives underwent noticeable
development, but the autonomous organizing remained constant. At first
sight the specific demands seem to have been a fundamental part of the
struggle since they provoked direct confrontations with the political
power. They often served the function of "making the authorities back
down" on very concrete and limited issues. The most significant change
in the evolution of goals, even if they remained within specific and
often local programs, was their transition from a defensive program (for
example, repeal of measures just adopted) to an offensive program (for
example, demanding the recall of a high official or allocation of a
police hospital to community use). On the other hand, the strike
organization itself, which seemed to be only a means for achieving a
limited objective, became, for the periods of time ranging from a few
days to several weeks, the actual organizer of social life at the
enterprise, city, regional or extended regional level, and totally
circumvented the structures of domination. From Lublin to Gdansk to
Bielsko-Biala, the same pattern was followed every time. In the period
before the Gdansk accords, the strike organization tended to become a
union organization which demanded to be recognized. Conflicts between
the rank-and-file movement and the union, which established itself in
the course of the struggles (and was already carrying out its capitalist
function), are not generally known (except for the one in Gdansk, and
this one concerned only the negotiating and the signing of the accords
which put an end to the strike). Very little is known about the
self-organization of the strike itself, how the essential services were
kept functioning, or how liaisons, security and defenses against covert
repression were maintained. This self-organization had a wide scope due
largely to spontaneous initiatives, but in the official discussions,
this crucial aspect of the struggle was ignored. The extent of its
activities is nevertheless indicated by the workersâ appropriation of
the means of communication (installed to ensure control at every level)
in order to use them for a special liaison network and to permit
rank-and-file control over the union administration. Using the Gdansk
shipyardsâ network of loudspeakers to broadcast "live" the MKS committee
debates is a well-known example (which nevertheless did not prevent
bureaucratic maneuvers since the expertsâ meetings were not broadcast).
Less well known is the use made of the telephone network to let people
at a greater distance follow the debates, or the use of computer
terminals which Gierek had set up to transmit his orders from Warsaw and
which had been used for horizontal liaison by the Party. On August 21,
1981, when Walesa tried to persuade the miners to work on Saturdays (in
doing this, he was paving the way for Jaruzelski), workers at the
Debienko mine responded by saying that they had organized themselves and
that they could make their production quotas without working Saturdays.
At the August 9 Warsaw demonstration organized by Solidarity to protest
shortages, the union advocated giving flowers and fruits to the cops;
the people gave them to striking workers. When the "responsible"
demonstration was blocked by the cops, it quickly turned into a sort of
"happening," a spontaneous street celebration.
Other examples show that in August 1980 the rankand-file movement was
very erratic. Jadwiga Staniszkis reported that "in many enterprises no
one was authorized to leave the occupied factory, and there often was a
shortage of food, lack of news about what was going on elsewhere,
boredom and uncertainty. At the same time there was great determination,
no preaching and, sometimes, the feeling of taking part in something
important.â
But after the Gdansk accords, when the union was set up and began
asserting its authority in its officially recognized and government
protected function, the rupture between the union and the autonomous
movement became apparent. We have seen that when the Solidarity
leadership was making great . efforts to arrange summit meetings to
discuss general problems, the rank-and-file movement put forward very
specific demands and undertook practical actions. When the union
Solidarity was established as an organ of control from above and, as
such, was accepted by the Party â everything was reversed. By way of the
locals which furnished the unionâs administrative staff, the
rank-and-file pushed for its own objectives and actions, thus relegating
the union to being an intermediary whose recommendations were not always
followed. Bernard Guetta wrote in the February 10, 1981 Le Monde that
this provided conditions for "tremendous political radicalization." An
apt summary of this situation can be found in the response of a striking
Olsztyn printer to Solidarity leaders Jacek Kuron and Bogdan Lis who had
"come down" to urge workers to go back to work:
"These con-men who just arrived arenât going to make the laws. . . For a
long time, weâve been lied to. I donât know whatâs true and then you and
the others arrived. And then, shit! something became clear in my head.
Shitty motherfucker, I understood that we have to resist and here you
come to tell me to give in."
This political radicalization affected workersâ attitudes more than it
affected their demands or the organization of their autonomous actions.
It evolved out of the struggle, out of the clash with earlier beliefs,
among people carried to the forefront of the struggle by circumstances
and by structures set up because of the struggleâs requirements. The
same people who, one day, supported the union, demonstrated behind the
Polish flag and piously took communion in front of factories during a
strike, were shamelessly robbing the state and were constantly scheming
against the system of exploitation on an earlier day, and will abandon
the union, will burn flags and churches, in the fight for their own
interests, on the day when they find the organized force of union, army
or church in their way; and they will probably still believe in them
while they do it. The Gdansk workers let the KOR and other "experts"
insert themselves in their strike. The observation that Jan Litynski,
KOR militant and expert working with the new union at the Wazbrzych
mines, made on September 9, 1980, undoubtedly corresponds to what was
going on everywhere in Poland at that time:
"People have no idea what self-management is. And very often they
approach the founding committee of the new union as they would a new
authority from which they expect orders and protection."
But he immediately went on to say:
"We donât know what will become of this movement but one thing is
certain, itâs impossible to stop it."
What the expert did not understand was that people knew very well what
they did not want; they were looking for instruments to change things
and if the ones they found resembled what they did not want, they would
reject them as soon as they realized it. A Frankfurter Zeitung reporter
wrote about this on August 30, 1980:
"The workers do not do what their leaders say. They are good Catholics,
but they reject Wyszynskiâs appeals for calm and continue their fight.
In talking with them, it is obvious that they do not trust anyone but
themselves? Another reporter, from Die Welt, wrote, on the same day: "As
always in a revolutionary situation, and in Poland this is what we have,
things start to develop independently of anyone."
A reporter for the (London) Sunday Times also summarized this on August
31, 1980:
"The most significant change was that the workers themselves were daily
becoming more politically conscious.â
This is what prompted Balcerek, one of the reformers, in a speech to the
University of Warsawâs Sigma Club, to assert that:
"This was not a liberation movement of the working class. By insisting
that they wanted to have control over management, the workers thus
accepted its existence as well as the Stalinist and bureaucratic
formulas of the social system. They were not revolutionaries, they did
not want to abolish the division of labor. They accepted their own role
as workers and hoped only to make their work easier."
This may be true if one focuses on the formal and superficial aspects of
the events, but this analysis assumes revolutionary workers of the
bourgeois type â Jacobin, Leninist, or Maoist â who believe that the
first step in achieving communism is seizing the state. Balcerek
completely misses the point of what is revolutionary. To do, and not
just think about, something that makes oneâs work and life easier, is
acting in oneâs class interest and undermining the foundations of the
capitalist system.
The strike which broke out in the Machow (Tarnobrzeg) sulphur mines in
mid-September 1980 received little attention. No outside expert served
on its strike committee, the workers adopted the twenty-one points from
Gdansk but added twenty-seven of their own which affected their own
situation. The strike "leader," a Party member, stated,
"But now the volcano has erupted as the workers here see they are
exploited. This strike has nothing to do with being a member of the
Party or not..., we all have roughly the same sized stomachs. It is not
important who governs but how we are governed. It all depends on whether
the new union will get money or not."
These few simple sentences expressed the determination to carry the
struggle beyond its present achievements and they also expressed a sharp
sense of what a Gdansk worker summarized on August 26, after Gierekâs
speech:
"Today I have confidence in no one but ourselves, in our own power."
On August 19, 1980, a Frankfurter Rundschau reporter observed:
"The strikers do not want to abolish socialism, they want to finally
achieve it."
Thus, already in August 1980, the breach became apparent â the breach
between the workersâ own movement and those who, in varying degrees,
because they were âorganizedâ, were immediately concerned about managing
societyâs â really capitalâs â institutions with all the complications
of Polandâs situation. In mid-August 1980, Kuron, leader of the
organized opposition, expressed this:
âThe unfolding of events in Poland is beyond the control of the
organized opposition. The extreme wage increases demanded by the
strikers and granted by factory managers are not very sensible from an
economic point of view. More and more it seems to me that the central
leadership of the strike in Gdansk is under pressure from a militant
rank-and-file.â
A correspondent for Tageszeitung wrote on August 6, 1980, âThe higher
one goes in opposition circles, the more one finds willingness to
compromise.â On
November 21, 1980, a sociologist stated in the (London) Financial Times,
âYet the very fact that the country found itself on the brink of a
serious conflict with the authorities ready to use force against a
virtual general strike so suddenly and over so slight an issue shows how
near the dangers are ⊠The next time it could be over the fact that a
train derailed or anything ⊠The forces that were aiming at a
confrontation are still there and they could try again.â
In fact, after October 1980, extensive movements encompassing several
regions spontaneously grew out of seemingly minor rank-and-file
concerns: the arrest of two men who stole state secrets, the dismissal
of two local directors, the transfer of a police hospital to the
community, the firing of four union delegates, the appropriation of a
former unionâs possessions, etc. From these examples which are know
because they had wide repercussions, one can infer that there were
innumerable conflicts which never broke through the media curtain but
which were definitely a part of Polish reality at the enterprise level
for more than a year. Here we can see the boundary between classes:
although they did not express it openly, the workers showed by their
actions that they had no confidence in any of the leaders, that the
accords and debates were useless if they required âwaitingâ, and that
for matters considered important and urgent, matters concerning the
everyday situation, only workers; direct action counted. Let others do
the sorting out, let them find an acceptable solution (what the expert
quoted above saw as âexpecting orders and protectionâ). Everyone in
Poland was talking about democracy, but the democracy of those who
gravitate around state power is bourgeois democracy (and is already
incorporated in the Polish capitalist state according to class
divisions): for the workers, it is something completely different: the
right to intervene directly in any decisions made over their heads.
Self-organization of the struggle grew out of this direct action of the
workers and was responsible for the effectiveness of the movements which
developed after July1980. The spread of the strike to encompass all of
Poland was not due to a handful of opposition militants. Jan Litynski,
one of the founders of KOR, himself declared: "During the strike, their
role (that of KOR and independent union militants) was minimal." The
rank-and-file was responsible for the continuation of the movements
after October 1980, and probably made use of the new local union
structures, but not at all in the way anticipated by the new union
bureaucracy. In so many of the rank-and-file initiatives, the workers
used what was available to them but diverted it from its original
purpose to serve their own specific interests. And the new union was no
more privileged than the state or the Party. Workers proceeded to use
the union apparatus, the premises of the former union, factory
organizations, telephones, telex and computer networks, systems of
transportation and food distribution. Little by little, depending on
requirements of the struggle, society began functioning quite naturally
on a new basis, following the initiative of the people who were used to
doing the work.
In these situations, what had appeared to be a common language shared by
the organizations and the workers disintegrated, and the breach between
the rank-and-file and the organizations was revealed. At this point, the
union and the Party quickly came to an agreement to put out the fire,
since union demands were less dangerous than the forms which the
struggle was beginning to take. One good example of what was happening
took place in Gdansk where the dockers one fine day decided that the
potatoes they were loading for export should not be shipped since there
were no potatoes in the local stores. Another example took place in
Silesia where miners who were already accustomed to having their
Saturdays free (having taken Saturdays off before they were officially
granted), refused well-paid overtime work, even though coal was the only
export which the capitalist state could use to fulfil its obligations
and obtain the necessary foreign currency for development. This was when
the Solidarity leadership demanded and was finally allowed to
"participate" in making economic decisions at all levels. The workers
did not participate; they took action when they considered it to be in
their own interest to do so, and this brought much greater results than
all the discussions with the authorities. A striker in Bielsko-Biala who
was active in the fight to transfer the police hospital to the local
population, gave this answer to the question as to whether the strike
was âpoliticalâ: âIf the authorities consider an honest demand like this
one to be political, then, sure, this is a political strike.â
It should be noted that while carrying out these actions, the workers
did not have the slightest notion of constructing a new society (and
this is sometimes used to prove that the workers lacked
"consciousness"). In fact, they left it to the authorities to grant what
they were asking for, and once they obtained it, they abandoned the
unique forms of their struggle which were simply means for achieving the
immediate goal. It was the authorities who understood that these means
represented a potential, if not immediate, threat to their power. In
fact, while maintaining its position and (presumably) preserving intact
its repressive apparatus, capital had essentially lost all real power.
Even the new union Solidarity, model for a new apparatus of domination
over the workers and grudgingly accepted by the capitalist class only
under threat of a general strike, was already, even before functioning
as an apparatus, reduced to the same role as the pre-July1980
institutions. The workersâ attitude can be seen as a continuation of the
day-to-day struggles of the past; the economic and repressive apparatus
did not manage to achieve even minimal efficiency because of the
unceasing class struggle, which had been intensified during the
large-scale revolts of 1970 and 1976 when the authorities had brutally
tried to keep the power relations within acceptable bounds. In 1980, the
same practical responses to the oppressive authority were causing a
shift away from individual struggles for survival toward collective
efforts. In whatever affected him directly, the worker put forward his
own conception of how society functions in practice. This was not an
ethical question but simply one of keeping track of what was done with
his labor â and this was actually much more revolutionary.
Jadwiga Staniszkis reported that in 1980 "the workers did not want to
take part in decision-making at the enterprise level." They undoubtedly
were well aware of the accuracy of Walesaâs statement in favor of
self-management: "a truly selfmanaged enterprise will not go on strike
because it would harm its own interests at the same time." Staniszkis
also observed that "angry rank-and-file workers are the most radical,
the most opposed to the authorities and the least inclined to make
concessions."
The Polish workersâ real gains were neither the renovated institutions,
nor the reformed system, nor the self-managed enterprises more or less
freed from the centralized authority only to fall directly under the
imperatives of capital. Even if they once believed in these things, and
continued to believe in them to some degree, they could see that, in
practice, these reforms did not at all correspond to their interests.
Their real gains could not be expressed in organizational terms even if
the conditions created by their struggle came to be recognized,
legalized and regulated. Their gains lay in the enormous leap forward in
their own consciousness of their reality as workers and of their power
in society. This consciousness, which they shared with all those who
were equally exploited, gave them the straightforward, confident and
steady force to directly and fearlessly confront all situations, even if
the outcome was unpredictable. For them, this consciousness was the best
guarantee that the material benefits they had won could not easily be
taken away. They now knew that what mattered was what they themselves
took and not what was given or promised them. In this, they were true to
themselves. Their fight could still take other forms and move in new
directions. The summer of 1981 brought new developments: disruption of
the economy, decline of both the Party and the union Solidarity. The
rank-and-file struggles continued unabated. The shortage of basic
necessities brought about by the economic chaos and by the maneuvers of
the Party and of Russia gave rise to the conviction that something had
to be done. But the response differed according to social class. Later
we will discuss the attempts at self-management; they were undoubtedly
initiated by intermediate level personnel in the enterprises, by people
who were concerned about economic efficiency. But it is also likely that
these informal and flexible structures were responses to a potentially
much more radical rank-and-file movement. Shortages, whether real or
contrived, pushed workers to organize themselves at the places of
production as well as in the places of consumption. When the most
elementary needs were no longer satisfied by the established social
order, people tried to satisfy them in their own way. We can get some
idea of what was happening in August 1981, both in the enterprises and
in distribution. Spontaneous "ad-hoc committees" took charge of
restoring some order in the public distribution of consumer goods. Not
much information is available about them but we know that they tried to
verify whether merchandise delivered to stores was actually sold and
they delegated individuals to monitor peopleâs place in line. Similarly,
dockers and railway workers kept track of and sometimes stopped
foodstuffs being exported. It is difficult to say how these two
autonomous organizational currents developed. We do know that structures
of a new society always grow out of such needs. Could the least known
events from the last half of 1981 have brought the movement to a new
stage? This stage would necessarily have involved coordination of local
initiatives and it would have meant a far greater threat to the
capitalist system.
The following description of plans and concerns for the Lodz region
gives an idea of the situation in this period. It is reported by
Zbigniew Kowalewski, a regional militant of Solidarity, who escaped the
repression because he happened to be travelling in France at the time.
For the regional branch of Solidarity, the most urgent problem was the
struggle to supply the population with food. For several months, the
city of Lodz, comprising a large industrial complex, was threatened with
starvation. Since July, when the union had organized the well-publicized
hunger march of thirty thousand women, the rationing system for basic
necessities had broken down about every two months. We were not
satisfied with just protest activities. After studying how the rationing
system operated, we became convinced that it was in absolutely
scandalous disorder. The provincial administration was not able to
determine the exact number of people who should receive rationing cards.
Cards had been secretly distributed to people belonging to a group which
was connected to the government apparatus. The disposal of used
rationing cards was not supervised, and some of them returned to
circulation. The result was that to obtain something in exchange for
these cards, people had to stand in line for an entire day, sometimes
even two or three days. For workers, in particular, the situation was
tragic.
In October, the Lodz local of Solidarity demanded that the printing of
rationing cards for our region be decentralized. Social tensions in the
city and the likelihood of strikes were such that the city
administration got the central authorities to authorize this. Our region
is the only one in the country where rationing cards, from that time on,
were printed by Solidarity according to a system which we set up and
which was supervised by a joint commission made up of representatives
from the union and City Hall. The number of cards printed finally
corresponded to the number needed, which had been determined precisely.
We also controlled the distribution of the cards and this made it
possible to put an end to the privileges. And we succeeded in another
way. The central authorities had denied Solidarityâs right to monitor
the distribution of basic foodstuffs, arguing that this was interference
in government prerogatives. (As deputy Prime Minister Rakowski said to
Lech Walesa, "In this country, whoever gains control over food
distribution, holds the power.â)
Now, in our region, we had gained this control! The Lodz mayor had
authorized it. Special teams of union members supervised the situation
at rural collection depots, in slaughterhouses, in warehouses and in
wholesale and retail stores. The union had not been authorized to
supervise warehouses containing government-owned goods. But this did not
prevent us from knowing exactly the quantities and type of goods stored
there. In this way, we were able to report information to the mayor
which he said that even he didnât know. Solidarityâs presence was
everywhere and the authorities found it increasingly difficult to
prevent us from gathering information on the state of the economic
situation. As a result of our activity, there was improvement in food
distribution and shorter lines. We were already preparing a plan for
supervising industrial production in the region.
Kowalewski then described how his union pressured enterprises to respond
to needs of the peasantry, and he also discussed a plan for energy
distribution. He added:
The Solidarity union in Lodz was the first one in Poland to
energetically support the idea of worker self-management, starting in
January 1981, and to advocate workersâ power in the enterprises. We
supported the creation of regional committees to coordinate workersâ
councils â they already existed in twenty-six regions-as well as the
activities of the National Federation of Self-Management Bodies which
was founded last October.
Kowalewski described the governmentâs postponement of plans for economic
reform at the end of 1981:
The governmentâs decision caused agitation and extreme dissatisfaction
in the factories: "We will have to institute the economic reforms
ourselves, without the authorities and in spite of them, if necessary."
This was the view more and more widely expressed by Lodz workers at
enterprise meetings and by militants at regional discussions of the
movement for self-management.
This project ran into violent opposition from the government as well as
hostility from a section of Solidarityâs National Committee.
On December 9th, six central committee members from the regional Lodz
leadership met with workers from the cityâs twelve principal enterprises
at a mass meeting. They held discussions about the active strike,
formation of a workersâ security guard and measures to combat sabotage
of production. The great majority of workers declared themselves in
favor of these forms of activity.
That same evening, we met with Solidarity representatives from
neighboring regions at a location outside the regional headquarters
because we feared that our discussions would be bugged. We informed them
that our region would probably begin an active strike on a very large
scale on December 21st and we asked them to support our action,
especially by guaranteeing that food supplies reached the Lodz
population. It was only as a last resort, when faced with threats from
the government and lacking any other form of struggle, that Solidarityâs
national leadership considered the active strike.
This text clearly shows the interaction between the rank-and-file
movement and local Solidarity officials in responding to concrete
situations. In the Polish context, taking over the economy would have
been a revolutionary undertaking because the workers would have made it
their own project even if certain leaders viewed it as an exercise of
union authority. But on this point, neither Solidarityâs national
leadership nor the rest of the capitalist system were deceived.
There were undoubtedly great differences between regions in Poland but
if the productive apparatus in one region had been taken over along the
lines sketched above for the Lodz region, takeovers would have spread
like wildfire. Here again, the union apparatus was lagging far behind
the real movement and it served only belatedly as a tactical instrument;
it was not at the forefront of the fight because its interests were
completely different from the immediate material needs that the workers
wanted to satisfy by themselves, without concerning themselves with
power relations.
The principal function of the military units which Jaruzelski stationed
throughout the country at the end of the summer of 1981 was to thwart
the development of selforganization of social life, both in production
and in consumption. It is obvious that such a situation would be
intolerable for capital as a whole. The repressive action was designed
to break up a whole series of activities that no capitalist state could
permit. It is significant that prior to direct repression, efforts were
made to totally disrupt all means of communication precisely in order to
prevent coordination of rankand-file groups. We do not yet know what
forms the workersâ autonomous actions took during the struggles â at
first open, later, underground-against the repressive apparatus after
the military coup dâetat. But the new forms of struggle undoubtedly gave
rise to new forms of organization which were adapted to the new
reorganization of capital in Poland.
Capital and its repressive apparatus involuntarily demonstrated that a
union apparatus is nothing and autonomous movement is all. Just about
everyone belonging to the bureaucratic apparatus, from the highest to
the lowest level, was in prison and nevertheless the Polish workers
without hesitation directly confronted army and police for fifteen days.
The unity of the struggle had no need of telephones. On the defensive,
shut inside the fortresses of their enterprises, the workers once again
knew how to confront the class enemy by using means provided them by
their position in the productive apparatus. We have already mentioned
the reported episodes; there were undoubtedly many others and the
self-organization of the struggle no doubt determined the extent of the
resistance. In this long battle which is the class struggle, after an
episode which some call a defeat, the existence of this
self-organization assures continuity of the struggle in other forms,
since the repression now prevents using direct methods. Some accounts
suggest that everything had returned to the situation prior to December
1970. This is only in appearance. Just as the rebellion of July-August
1980 grew out of previous struggles and from the experience of daily
resistance, the frontal attack by capitalâs mercenaries gives a new
dimension to this forced return to other forms of struggle. Any
illusions remaining after the months of governmental excuses and delays
vanished with the direct confrontation; the reformist road opened by the
June 1976 uprisings has been closed to the workers too, and this is what
counts. It is not so much the will or experience of the workers which
makes them take another path, but the level of economic development and
the forms of repression, which are also modified on the basis of past
experience.
There is no need to dwell on the workersâ hostility toward the new power
which robbed them of some of their gains by resorting to blood and
violence against those who opposed it. Any or all of them could have
made the scathing response given in Gdansk by a Lenin Shipyard worker to
Rakowski, Jaruzelskiâs right-hand man, who spoke to a few thousand
workers on August 25, 1983. The representative of capital started off
with the old hackneyed formula: "We are here among ourselves, like a
family," when the brutal and unequivocal response came from an anonymous
worker; "Except for you." The authorities know this even if they always
profess the opposite. And even the hand-picked moderates express this
whenever officials try to renew contacts with or make advances to the
rank-and-file.
"We are a state where the working class is in power and this class lives
in the worst conditions. It is time for a change," a Lodz textile worker
declared on April 2, 1983. A Polish worker quoted by Newsweek was more
explicit; "I would be willing to sacrifice if I felt there was something
to look forward to. But I donât see any prospects for the future in
Poland." In response, the authorities have had to acknowledge their
inadequacy in dealing with this: "The Polish government is facing an
agonizing problem: the need to create work incentives when there are no
material rewards to distribute." Or, in a more precise formulation,
"Problems of controlling Polandâs working class would be greatly eased
if peopleâs everyday needs could be satisfied and shortages reduced."
The response of workers to this situation was; "In spite of the wage
increases in our foundry, our families live worse and worse" (a Katowice
machine operator). "The increase in the cost of living, uncertainty
about the future, failure to consult workers about important decisions,
all have an effect on attitudes and on the atmosphere at work" (a
Rzeszow worker).
What place did organizations have in the variegated movement over which
repression as well as corruption hovered? On July 18, 1982, a Financial
Times reporter wrote that, "it is not difficult to get a crowd of
several thousand out in the streets demonstrating, particularly among
the young who are almost uniformly hostile to the system," but that
"soundings in factories have shown that rank-and-file workers are not
ready to confront the Government openly." "Are not ready" is incorrect
and does not correspond to what agents of the state were saying at the
same time. What workers were not ready to do was to follow appeals
issued by the underground Solidarity leadership. Enormous rank-and-file
activity in the enterprises was shown by the daily attitudes mentioned
above, as well as by the 2,000 underground leaflets and bulletins which
were put out in factories under the title of Solidarity. But at the same
time, in April 1982, an underground leader had to leave a Warsaw textile
plant after a serious run-in with activists in the plant who were
irritated by the totally unrealistic strike proposals. A woman shouted,
"Why should we listen to anything you say when it is clear you leaders
donât know what you are doing'?" The rank-and-file movement was
following its own course.
Le Monde reported on September 18, 1982, during the unrest in Lower
Silesia: "One can observe a growing obstinacy over which the underground
Solidarity leaders seem to have less and less control, since they have
asked their followers to avoid all demonstrations except those they
themselves call."
The appearance and development of an "independent" union in the Eastern
branch of capitalism demonstrated both the importance of the autonomous
rank-and-file movement and capitalâs need to impose limits on it. In
Poland, where the diverse interests express themselves through
Party-controlled institutions, within the framework of the economic and
military imperatives of the dominant imperialism, the movementâs
dynamism pushed back the boundary between capital and labor. The
enormous hopes carried by this movement in July and August 1980 inspired
the creation of spontaneous organs of struggle, but six months later,
the movement had to endeavor to define the boundary between itself and
these organs, which had become permanent and recognized by the
government. In doing this, the movement had to redefine the form and
content of its struggle. This is how the class struggle proceeds.
We have already mentioned the judgment expressed more and more
frequently in both branches of capital (especially in 1970 and in 1976)
that if capitalist Poland hoped to avoid these periodic direct
confrontations between the workers and the political power, it would
have to find a regulating mechanism, an instrument analogous to the
union in Western countries. This led to the recognition that the
machinery of the Polish capitalist class was not adequate (if it ever
had been); on one side a "Western-type democratic" current advocated
modifying state power in order to achieve an equilibrium between the
various classes which actually existed in Polish society, an equilibrium
favoring the capitalist class, to be sure; on the other side a current
advocating economic more than political democracy thought it impossible
to set up the Western democratic form (especially at the union level)
because of Polandâs position in the Eastern capitalist bloc and because
of the general tendencies of international capital, and this current
emerged with formulas of participation and self-management. In the
absence of any institutions of mediation (neither the Party nor the
official union could begin to play such a role), other authorized or
tolerated organizations stepped forward to fill the void even though
mediation was not one of their original functions.
One of these organizations was the Catholic Church, which can be seen to
have played a similar role to the one it played in Spain, under Franco,
in the 1960s. Referring to this role, a Polish dissident, A. Smolar,
observed as early as August 1980: "In a situation of bitter conflict, it
(the Church) will become a major factor in social peace." Walesa
confirmed this much later (March 1981) when speaking of Cardinal
Wyszynski, "Without his intervention, I would never have been able to
end those strikes."
Another organization was the KOR. A group of intellectuals, encouraged
by the workersâ actions in 1976, formed defense committees which, in
spite of the repression, in five years developed into unions in embryo.
In 1980, only a handful of militants was involved with these committees;
intellectuals put out the newspaper Robotnik which attempted to serve as
coordinator. Kuron, one of the KOR leaders, said in 1980, "We have some
influence among the workers and we can increase it because they need
assistance, information and advice. It is our responsibility to help
workers organize themselves into independent, institutional groups,
either workersâ commissions or unions, or to take over the state-run
unions." Robotnik proposed an initial formula; workersâ commissions
modeled on the ones in Spain. At the beginning of 1980, Walesa attempted
to set one up at the Electro Montaz factory where he was threatened with
dismissal. He failed. This is probably what made him say on August 22,
1980, "The events came too soon, we were not prepared."
This brief sentence says a great deal: by "the events" he means the
autonomous working class actions, the "we" refers to the Polish
political opposition, a few hundred members of KOR (including thirty or
so activists) ranging from Catholics to more or less Leninist Marxists
who wanted to reform the Polish Party. "The events," namely the
autonomous activity of the Polish working class, were "the beginning of
a relentless battle for the opposition, who sensed that here was a
unique opportunity to win permanent political concessions â especially
union rights-and who did not want to miss out." (B. Guetta in Le Monde,
August 19, 1980).
But regardless of intentions, the KOR and the embryonic union were
instruments accessible to the workers in their struggle; the workers
used them and, for a time, made them their own. As soon as a new strike
broke out, the strikers immediately notified the KOR, with the result
that, due to all the Western medias that could be reached in Poland and
to the already established network which was growing rapidly, no
struggle would henceforth remain isolated, everyone heard about each
action. Through news reports and by example, working class cohesion was
shaped for a new advance.
This leap to a higher level occurred in July and August 1980, when the
spreading strike grew to such a point that it created its own broad
organization and reduced the intermediaries of the earlier period to the
role of advisors. Baluka, former president of the 1970 Szczecin strike
committee, was correct in his assessment; "The current wave is much more
mature than anything we have known in the past. This is no longer a
spontaneous and local uprising. This is a determined resistance which
draws on the valuable experience of previous years and on the existing
oppositionâs organizational activities. it is not by chance that such an
event occurred in the decade of 1970-80. Gierek had hoped to preserve
the power of the Party and the capitalist class by pushing
industrialization-copying what had been done in Western European
countries in the 1950s. But by preserving (for good reasons) the same
economic, social and political structures, even after the warnings of
1976, he only compounded the difficuIties which he claimed to be
surmounting. As industrialization proceeded, a different method of
domination became more and more necessary; growing awareness of this
situation created a latent crisis and caused splits in the capitalist
class itself, namely in the economic bureaucracy and Party ranks. Thus,
there was some common ground between the attempts of the rank-and-file
organization which was responding to the requirements of the struggle
and the tendencies toward structural reform which came from the
apparatus of domination itself. Even before 1980, recommendations from
increasingly numerous groups of economists, enterprise managers,
intellectuals and politicians had resembled criticism voiced by the
opposition. As the class struggle grew more intense, there was increased
polarization within the ruling class.
What happened at the Ursus tractor factory in a Warsaw suburb can serve
as an example of the chain of events which led to the birth of the
union. In 1976, Ursus was one of the centers of spontaneous activity.
Again this time, it was one of the first plants to join the resistance
to the July 1, 1980, increase in meat prices. A KOR militant of
three-months standing who was a member of the official union had been
elected one of the 15% uncommitted delegates and took the initiative to
go from crew to crew calling for an assembly. Everyone came and agreed
about saying no to the price hikes and yes to the strike. A strike
committee was elected which, immediately after the strike, transformed
itself into a permanent workersâ commission. Later this would be the
core of the new union. Baluka described this development:
"In general, the strike originates in one specific shop or in a plant
which is part of a specific industrial complex and it very quickly
spreads to all the others. Workers shut off the machines and gather in
the halls to have discussions. The atmosphere is calm and the occasional
proposals to take to the streets are rejected; the workers want to talk
with management. At Ursus, an official of the Partyâs rank-and-file
organization wanted workers who were Party members to go back to work.
Not only did they refuse, but they even organized themselves, ruling out
any possibility of being used as strike breakers."
But after this admirable description of the rank-and-file movement, he
added,
"What we need above all is a solid, permanent liaison between the
various enterprises, comprised of representatives elected by the
permanent workersâ commissions or of militants from the independent
unions. Such groups exist only in Katowice, Gdansk and Szczecin and, at
present, they do not have many contacts. One of the most important
achievements of the recent strikes is that the Ursus workers elected a
workersâ commission which did not dissolve itself but continues to act
in the name of the workers."
The language he used reveals what the political opposition expected from
the class struggle. Baluka was even more explicit in another article;
very similar language is used by other "leaders." Stating that most of
the strike committees were net dissolving once the strikes were over, he
emphasized that, "the future of Poland depends on whether or not we will
succeed in securing fundamental changes. The first step in this
direction should be the establishment of independent unions. The current
negotiations with the authorities are an excellent opportunity to select
representatives who will later become union personnel." This is exactly
what happened during the course of events in August 1980. In two areas
the strike in Lublin had already gone beyond the movement which until
then had been limited to individual factories; organization was on a
city-wide scale and an elected delegation negotiated with national
leaders rather than with local enterprise or political leaders.
Balukaâs "we" parallels that of Walesa. His assertion that liaisons were
almost non-existent at the end of July 1980 parallels Walesaâs assertion
that "We were not prepared." In Gdansk, where nothing happened until
mid-August, it appears that "union militants" did not attempt to launch
any response to the outbursts elsewhere in Poland. In fact, the
government itself, by its change in policy, provoked the explosion in
Gdansk-a pattern identical to the outbreak of the Ursus strike. The
spread of the strike locally was also identical to what happened in
Lublin but the two earlier situations were surpassed both in the scope
of the demands and the geographic extent of the Gdansk strike. Although
the spread of the strike was undoubtedly due to the spontaneity of the
struggle as well as to the setting up of rank-and-file organizations
(the factory strike committees), the central control which everyone
accepted for obvious tactical reasons was gradually lost by the
rank-and-file and transferred to the political opposition. From this
vantage point, we can see the previously mentioned convergence between
the two currents â one inside and the other outside the Party â both
committed to reforming the system. The entire autonomous movement
converged here with a confrontation between two currents of the
capitalist class.
For the great majority of the workers, it is certain that the creation
of an independent union corresponded, consciously or not, to what they
hoped to achieve through their strike: a permanent structure where they
could express their wishes and which they could control. A foreman at
the shipyards expressed this on August 18, 1980:
"The main thing at the moment is to start building an officially
tolerated independent union movement here; if we get that out of these
strikes, then weâll have gained a lot. As for our other demands, weâll
work for them in the future" (Financial Times (London), August 19,
1980).
These efforts of the proletariat to set up unions have frequently been
compared to efforts by the proletariat in already industrialized
countries in the second half of the nineteenth century. As far as Poland
is concerned, the comparison is valid if one compares the relative
importance of the various social classes: peasantry, proletariat, middle
classes, ruling class. There seems to have been an attraction to
bourgeois democracy; the subordinate classes more or less believed in
the fiction of parliamentarism. But in Poland, the real tendency was to
completely destroy bourgeois democracy. When Walesa declared that
"politics didnât interest him," he was expressing the workersâ critique
of parliamentarism. As modernization got underway in Poland,
parliamentary inclinations were attacked by the advent of the real
domination of capital, by production techniques and by methods of
domination which were those of a modern society.
By the time the Gdansk accords legally recognized the independent union,
it had already existed for weeks. But already conflicts between the
newly constituted apparatus and the rank-and-file began to be seen. The
class collaboration between opposition "experts" and Party "liberals"
became more apparent. The nascent union bureaucracy tried to impose
"its" rule over the rank-and-file so that authorized strikes would
exhibit its real power. We mentioned earlier the restrictions imposed on
the wildcat strikes which broke out in Gdansk after September 1980. As
in industrialized countries, union collaboration with capitalist power
expressed itself in . economic rather than political terms. When Walesa
insisted once again: "l am a unionist, I am not a politician," he could
not have said it better. What he was doing was exactly what mattered to
a union in a modern economy. On August 25, 1980, he proclaimed, "Strikes
are the most expensive means of negotiation. An independent union is the
only possible way to insure the efficiency of the economy," and he added
on August 31, after signing the accords:
"Throughout the entire strike we have thought about the interests of the
Nation and it is these we are thinking of as we return to work tomorrow,
September 1st. The strike is over."
Here we can recall the remark quoted above that at this point "things
start to develop independently of anyone." The legal existence of an
institution in capitalist society implied that its power stemmed not so
much from its determination to carry on the struggle which had led to
its creation, but rather from the authority which the capitalist class
assigned it by "recognizing" it as negotiator, and, what is more, as
sole negotiator.
This attribute of the institution became at least as important as the
matters it would discuss and resolve for the benefit of capital. The
ideal model of a western-style union bargaining over the price of the
work force quickly gave way to increasingly open intervention in order
to maintain social peace and economic efficiency. To a great extent, the
union sought to preserve and consolidate the legal power to do this. All
the debates on legislation, on media access, on protection of the
experts, on the distribution of the old unionâs property, were a defense
of an institution more than anything else. It seems paradoxical that a
movement which grew to prominence in the underground and which succeeded
in creating a network of contacts and newspapers should seek
"guarantees" from the state at a time when the much more favorable
relationship of forces would have permitted it to continue along its
original path.
In an interview in the September 8, 1980, German magazine Der Spiegel,
Rakowski (who later served as government liaison with the unions) gave a
good summary of this situation:
"It is very true that the existence of independent unions is
inconsistent with structures which exist at present, but, as for me, for
several years I have supported the view that our socialist system in
Poland should be changed. . . I am not at all sure that the existence of
two unions can continue in the long run. We will see from experience.
These recent events have shown us the way. . . Moreover, I believe that
the slogan for independent unions is a peculiar and temporary one. When
I look around me in the world, nowhere do I see unions that defend
workersâ interests to the very end. . . For my part, I would very much
like to see this new type of union leader who, as soon as he sees the
accounting records, compares capacities and productivities and
recognizes that his appeals to the workers are not always followed. At
that point we shall see the real character and goals of the new unions
and to what extent they take responsibility for production?"
Litynski, a KOR representative, referring to the agreements reached in
the mines in early September, 1980, stated,
"The agreements reached are very progressive. At the mine, the new union
even got management to agree to as many paid delegates as for the
official union. The situation is quite unusual because the president and
vice-president of the committee are Party members. The union president
is characteristic of a type quite common among young people. He does not
know what collective activity is. Spontaneously, he seems to conduct
himself more like certain Western union men."
Although they jumped on the bandwagon after things were already
underway, these opposition militants and activists as well as the
establishment reformers in the official union or the Party nonetheless
joined, hoping for a transformation and seemingly sharing the hopes of
the workers. This is why they were so quickly accepted at the beginning
of the struggles. Their hopes were, however, quite different. In October
1980, Staniszkis observed that the rank-and-file movement was for direct
democracy, "against all institutions and all hierarchy. . . for minimal
hierarchy. . . for participation in the decisions." For the most part,
the "militants" wanted to set up an organization in which they would
have tight control over policies. Staniszkis stressed that "in their
activity in the illegal unions, they evolved a veritable party mentality
and they did not want to share what they had acquired." This attitude
does not explain everything. In contemporary Poland, the creation of the
union and its effective growth in the strike committees had transferred
to these organizations political militants who had earlier been active
in the Catholic Church, in working groups among intellectuals or in the
Party, in underground associations like the KOR or an embryonic union.
By its very existence, the "independent union" became a sort of party,
that is, an organization prepared to furnish leadership to the extent
that the Communist Party was in relative decline (and to the extent that
the Party could not be fundamentally reformed).
It is difficult to determine what the structure of the strike committees
had been, but it seems that in many places, as in Gdansk, they had been
adopted and accepted without opposition in the initial enthusiasm of the
struggle. We do know how the unionâs final formation came about, and
that it happened mainly in Gdansk. The nucleus of the union originated
as the Gdansk Presidium, which was self-appointed while there were only
thirty-two striking enterprises represented in the MKS. There were
subsequently four hundred of them but no one else was elected or added
to the Presidium. This body became the Presidium of the Gdansk union
and, in fact, of Solidarity itself, but it included only two workers
among its fifteen or so members. Intellectuals played a decisive role in
it (a shipyard engineer and the president of the Gdansk student
organization, among others). From the beginning there was a hierarchical
relationship between the Plenum of delegates and the Presidium.
Alongside the Presidium, there were "experts" (whom, at one point, the
Gdansk workers had wanted to expel) who managed to function as a still
more decisive secret committee. Furthermore, certain ticklish problems
(the resolution of which even the narrow base of the Presidium or the
Plenum would not have accepted) were settled in private meetings between
Walesa and Jagielski and then presented as accomplished fact. General
assemblies of workers deciding between different positions were never
held; there were only meetings at which the workers were presented with
"achieved results."
Staniszkis revealed that in Gdansk, at the very time when the "elites"
(prior to becoming unionists) were discussing censorship and other
issues with the government authorities, there were covert discussions
among the Presidium members about the need to censor the shipyardâs
daily bulletin, which had remained independent of direct control by the
MKS. From the very beginning of negotiations, the MKS policy of holding
two daily meetings was discarded and even in the Presidium itself, there
was practically no voting.
This way of operating would be transposed to the Solidarity union with
changes in name only. Statutes adopted in Gdansk in mid-September called
for election of union officials within three months; elections were not
held until July 1981 and there was noticeable reluctance on the part of
the rank-and-file to burden themselves with administrative machinery.
The congress was held in September 1981. It was marked by the same kinds
of conflict which are prevalent in a Western union organization: between
advocates of a locally-based structure with regional federation and
advocates of a vertical structure based on industrial sectors. Wildcat
strikes up to this point had displayed a violent opposition between the
local rank-and-files and the national coordinators of the Gdansk
Presidium. In the statutes, the lionâs share went to those who were
already established: one-half of the National Executive Committee was
made up of self-appointed representatives and only one-half consisted of
representatives elected by the Congress of delegates, and these, for a
three-year term.
As we said before, all this was not a result of chance. Individuals
promote these conceptions but these individuals see themselves
exercising a particular function in this capitalist society. Kuron, who
had a very centralist conception of the union (as opposed to Walesa,
more a tactician, who sought to preserve the positions of the Catholic
faction without definitively committing himself to a single approach),
defined in the January 9, 1981 Le Monde what he saw as the unionâs
function:
"I am sincerely convinced that anarchy and disintegration of the State
are inevitable unless the powerful social movements clearly and
unambiguously say what they want, what their expectations are and within
what limits they are operating. . . if we want to convince the millions
of our fellow compatriots and have them accept the restrictions which we
consider necessary, we have to clearly tell them the reasons and the
objectives".
"Have them accept the restrictions" really is a very good description of
capitalâs conception of the function of union activity. This is
reflected at every level of power. The political level gets more
attention, but the impact is greater at the economic level because this
is where workers have to "accept the restrictions" not merely as words
but in their experience of daily exploitation. The Guardian (London)
commented on November 6, 1980, that Walesa sometimes spoke more like a
prime minister than like a rebellious union leader and quoted him;
"We need technological aid from abroad in areas like agriculture,
engineering and building. We need foreign experts to come in and point
out our mistakes and advise us how to solve our problems. . .
(Solidarity) hopes to represent the direct interests of the workers and
also to involve itself actively in the search for better management,
higher productivity and improved output... "
But all this was made obsolete by the unionist role which Solidarity was
to play in the capitalist Poland of today. This role required the
unionâs integration at the level of the shop floor and-at the other
extreme-its integration as a political organ at the national level of
political decision making.
At the other end of the social spectrum, at the Ursus plant in January
1981, six months after the events mentioned earlier in this chapter, 83%
of the factory workers were Solidarity members, 7% belonged to the
official union and 10% were unaffiliated. One of the Solidarity
representatives, a foundry engineer, declared, "It is our policy to
cooperate with the factory management.â In fact, when the Party
organization wanted to replace the director, the Solidarity local came
to his support and he remained at his post; the secretary of the Party
organization in the factory was replaced instead. The six Ursus
factories employ 17,000 workers; every day their grievances were brought
to one of the fifty Solidarity delegates. They ranged from problems of
money and assistance to demands regarding working conditions. Ursus
served as a test for a new attempt at "worker self-management." A
hundred-member council made up of representatives of Solidarity, of the
official union and of the Party was set up on March 10, 1981. Solidarity
wanted to supervise the decisions involving production. This council was
to be "a consultative organ of experts which would supervise the
distribution of funds and assist in improving working conditions but
which would not assume the functions of the director or the managerial
staff." It was more an organization of co-management than anything else.
We are familiar with the functioning of such organizations in various
European countries (France and West Germany).
On July 8, 1981, the first national conference of the Movement for
Workersâ Self-management in Poland was held at the Lenin Shipyards in
Gdansk. This movement involved 150 of Polandâs largest enterprises. The
delegates that met in Gdansk came from seventeen industrial groups which
had some form of council for worker management similar to the model at
the Ursus plant (described above). Thus, inside the new locals, but on
their margins, pressure groups were set up which assembled only union
representatives from the large factories (between 17,000 and 30,000
workers). These groups were organized early in 1981 and by the end of
April had advanced a number of positions which they considered desirable
for the effective functioning of the economy (capitals economy, to be
sure):
-suspension of strikes and efforts to avoid them; no proposals for
increase of wages;
-exchange of information and of recommendations with the administration
and the Party;
-access to the media.
Propositions discussed at the July 8 conference went further; they aimed
at making enterprises completely "independent"; control would be
administered through financial instruments: credit, taxes and interest
rates. We will discuss later this "economic reform," which had support
among some reformers in the Party.
This movement, dubbed "the Network," quickly spread to more than 3,000
enterprises. The Solidarity leaders could not long ignore this
rank-and-file movement and were obliged to demand a co-management role
with very extensive responsibilities. The demand for
self-management--appointing enterprise managers, participating in
decision-making â probably developed in response to pressure from
rank-and-file workers (who wanted accountability) and from supervisory
personnel. At the Ursus plant, it was the intermediate level unionists
who supported such proposals. Few details are available. The only
documented cases are Ursus and the Debienko mines; in addition, there
was visible cooperation between the local Solidarity leaders and
reformers from the Party at the naval shipyards and large factories in
Gdansk. Some sources report that more than one thousand factories
established "workersâ councils" and that many of them chose to select
managers according to "competence" rather than according to their
devotion to the Party. Parliament passed a law on self-management
according to which politicians and unionists were to occupy different
posts: some positions would remain under the control of the Party and
some would be "fully selfmanaged." It seems likely that the legislation
was aimed at regularizing a situation that had developed without either
Solidarity or the Party being aware of it. Military intervention put an
abrupt end to this attempt to change the structures of capitalist
management.
The conflict within Solidarity stemmed from the impossibility of
reconciling its position as a Western-type union (a mediator between the
rank-and-file and the capitalist power) with its tendency to integrate
itself totally within the system. The "self-management group"
concentrated on bringing about this integration at the most basic level
of capitalist production and power, the enterprise. In practice,
economic reformers and reformers from the union collaborated to promote
the "independent" status of the enterprise, and at this level there were
almost no political problems which would have hindered the integration
of the union within the state. In fact, the "independence of the
enterprise" (namely, greater freedom for capital to establish flexible
laws for the exploitation of labor) was put forward in opposition to one
sector of the capitalist class â the centralist sector concentrated in
the Party.
In Poland, as in every capitalist system, the crucial problem was to
obtain, by any methods, the greatest amount from wage labor. In one form
or another, the new union quickly found the place assigned it by the
development of capital. In Western countries, the differences between
the union organizations and the autonomous movement are often partially,
and sometimes largely, disguised by the fact that in the post-war period
of capitalâs expansion â and even today-capital could keep the system
functioning by granting a certain number of concessions which were
channelled through the union and which assured minimal but necessary
participation. In Poland, the class struggle and the rulersâ attempt to
resolve the resulting total crisis of the system made it urgent to
establish more elaborate structures permitting unions to participate in
the management of capital. Such attempts not only collided with already
established institutions but, more importantly, Polish capital had
nothing to offer workers other than what they could grab through
extensive and laborious struggles. The abyss between the imperatives of
class collaboration and the hostility of workers toward the system
itself and toward capitalist exploitation as such, was expressed not
only in the wave of increasing wildcat strikes but also in the daily
rejection of a system which the workers were convinced had nothing at
all to offer them. These were no longer political actions, but ones
which affected capitalâs very foundations and which again became
political, but at a level where they were associated with the
destruction of a system rather than its reform.
When the problem of the union was seen in these terms, the only recourse
of the "workersâ organization" was to try to offer political solutions
which would permit it to play its role. The development of the
self-management network had already forced the union to set itself up as
coordinator on the highest level by proposing self-management as the
best solution for assuring the survival of the system and a return to
the "normal" exploitation of labor. By 1981, it was no longer possible
to claim that Solidarity was simply a union; it was "also a social
movement of conscious citizens determined to work for the independence
of Poland" (declaration to the Congress on September 9, 1981).
Everything propelled Solidarity along this path; not only the usual
dynamics of a "workersâ organization" in a capitalist society. Since the
totalitarian control of the medias and the Party monopoly prevented all
self-expression and all meetings with political themes, every political
faction hastened to take advantage of Solidarityâs existence and of the
relationship of forces between capital and labor in order to use this
organization as a political springboard. Just as the 1976 upheavals had
permitted the rise of the KOR and underground unions, the 1980-81
struggles saw the entire movement become engulfed in political
controversies, with views ranging from ultra-nationalist to trotskyist,
especially after Solidarity itself became more a political than a
unionist body. On September 12, the Solidarity leader from Szczecin
declared that he thought that "the union now has people capable of
forming a new national government" and that he had "the impression that
he was witnessing the birth of a political party." As in every
monolithic political organization, various political currents emerged
which tried to respond to what they thought were the concerns of the
workers in their rejection of the system. The conflict between the
rank-and-file and the bureaucracy of the union became a conflict between
the rank-and-file and a political apparatus. One path was thus
eliminated; Solidarity, which came to life in order to be a unionist
mediator, found itself, through the very logic of the system, thrust in
the direction of political power. As it increasingly lost its power as
representative of the rank-and-file, it sought political legitimacy and
then became vulnerable to the whims of the imperialisms.
The interview Walesa gave to Playboy in December 1981 undoubtedly
expressed only his personal opinions, but it nevertheless clearly
indicated the direction of Solidarityâs endeavors:
"l will help the Party whenever it is discredited or starts to
disappear. There are no other realities here. We are not able to
overturn the Party. We are not able to deprive it of its power. We
should preserve it. . . At this time, everything is organized so the
Party takes care of everything. lf some day there were no longer a
Party, it would mean pandemonium. . . But we should create conditions
favorable to this Party."
It is significant that Walesa made such a statement at the very moment
when material necessities and the capitalist classâs rejection of all
attempts at reform were obliging workers as well as rank-and-file
unionists to launch an economy run by them and for them, notably in the
Lodz region (described earlier). It is just as significant that several
members and experts on the national executive committee had a negative
opinion of this movement, which got underway in fact and not just in
words, and that one of the main experts went so far as to call this
movement "ultra-left." Even though everything was almost over, these
same leaders revived the idea of the "active strike" as a tactic to
counter the governments resort to force. In the face of the
rank-and-file movement (ambiguous though it might have appeared at the
time), Solidarity leaders adopted fundamentally the same position as
capitalist leaders.
By the end, Solidarity had repeatedly demonstrated its inability to
control the upsurge of wildcat strikes and to perform its role as union.
Can the coup dâetat resolve all these problems, given the extent of the
crisis in the Polish economy and the resistance of the rank-and-file
movement? If capital expects to get the economy functioning and if it
expects to control the workers in order to accomplish this, it will have
to find something besides the army in the factories, the Party-dominated
union or the resurrection of Solidarity.
In an interview with Oriana Fallacci published in the (London) Times on
February 23, 1982, Rakowski defined the tasks of the military
government:
"Firstly, to re-establish the economy; secondly, to recreate the trade
unions and resurrect Solidarity with the right to strike but not of
disrupting; third step to offer concrete proposals to various political
forces."
In an earlier statement (February 16, 1982), the intentions were stated
more explicitly: "The union movement should be frozen at present.â and
"strikes would not be forbidden, but should not be used except as a last
resort. Regional structures within the union would be abolished and
unions ought to be organized according to profession." At the Seventh
Plenum of the POUP on February 24, 1982, Jaruzelski spoke about "the
reconstruction of a strong union movement, independent and
self-managed." At the same time, an article in the (London) Sunday Times
(February 14, 1982) tried to define what the governmentâs tactics might
be in dealing with the problem of a union:
"lf it wants to destroy popular unrest, then it must drive a wedge
between the worker members of Solidarity and their advisers: the
infrastructure of opposition. There is no other way of building a
malleable, tame trade union."
This probably is the path the new regime will take but, in the Western
branch as in the Eastern branch of capital, they always consider only
the chiefs and leaders who incite the masses. This is the same logic
that led the military regime to imprison the entire Solidarity staff,
and after a year to detain only the leaders of KOR. This logic
completely ignores the fact that it is the economic and social situation
which determines the political situation, not the other way around. The
governmentâs selective action against the union leadership and its
advisors is not what separated the rank-and-file from what remained of
Solidarity or from the part of it that reconstituted itself underground;
it was rather what this organization-before and after the military coup,
before and after the repression â was forced to do in order to maintain
its existence in the face of the rank-and-file movement.
Once the government announced its guidelines (which did not formally
exclude Solidarity) this organization regrouped around two poles: one
pole was centered among the rankand-file, who created a profusion of
more or less autonomous factory organizations with informal networks of
coordination; the other pole consisted of those officials who escaped
arrest and who, in their contacts with the rank-and-file, tried to
preserve Solidarity as it had been before the military coup. The main
concern of the rank-and-file was to defend itself, to find efficient,
appropriate means to do this; the concerns of the apparatus were to
consolidate, to make contacts, to try out slogans, to organize movements
in order to improve its credit rating with the government and to
establish itself as a useful intermediary. There was, even so, quite a
discrepancy between the imprisoned Walesa who said, "Even with tasks
limited to purely union activities like workersâ safety and salaries,
and even with limited right to strike, it is worth fighting for," and
Bujak, an official of the underground Solidarity committee who pointed
out on May 11, 1982,
"The fundamental factor which can force the government to come to an
agreement, is the economic situation. The union should demonstrate that,
after a compromise, real opportunities for stabilization would appear,
since an agreement is the only way for Poland to regain access to trade
with the West and to international credits."
The discrepancy shows that Walesa saw himself as union leader and Bujak
as political leader, while both of them expected to find a rank-and-file
on which to base their move toward power. One can ask why the military
authorities and the union leaders did not come to an agreement, since
they seemed to speak the same language. It was because the modifications
and adjustments to the state of siege had not fundamentally changed the
question of the union: a modern capitalist economy has to turn a union
into an increasingly integrated mediator in the management of the labor
force.
After April 1982, relations between the reconstituted Solidarity
apparatus and the rank-and-file (even when acting in the name of
Solidarity) reverted to what they had been before intervention by the
army: the apparatus did not at all control the rank-and-file and was
unable to rally it to its platform. For the same reasons as before, the
apparatus had to present itself as a political intermediary and it
increasingly identified with the KOR â even though the government tried
to isolate the KOR leaders by keeping them in prison. It is
understandable why, at this time, the Catholic hierarchy advised
Solidarity "to limit its political ambitions" and why Rakowski,
addressing the Parliament on May 5, 1982, again referred to "the
reconstruction of an independent and self-managed union movement," while
rejecting Solidarity which, he said, had become "a political force of
opposition."
In an April 22, 1982, statement from prison, Kuron declared that direct
action against the government was the only alternative: "Force can only
be countered by force and clearly spell out to the authorities. . . "
The only method for controlling the more or less disorderly uprisings
was to organize "a strong centralized resistance movement." This was
essentially the route that Solidarity was attempting to follow-with some
variations, of course. If Kuron supported an attack "aimed at the
overthrow of martial law," the more realistic Bujak advocated
construction of a movement of mutual aid and of self-education, as did
Bogdan Lis, who declared that it was necessary "to avoid a frontal clash
with the Communist authorities." In the August 31, 1982, Le Monde,
Guetta stressed that "it is not the Provisional National Committee that
disturbs the authorities, but the thousands and thousands who edit,
reproduce, distribute. . . , read." One might also add, those who act.
A poll taken in September 1982 revealed that 90% of the workers wanted
the return of Solidarity and, at first sight, it seemed foolish for the
government, in the following month, to institute new union laws which
completely ignored past history. But the cohesion of the rank-and-file
and the fact that it managed to avoid control by any apparatus (as it
had also done before December 1981), created an impossible situation
which the military solution had in no way resolved. After just a few
months, the new government realized that its plans involving Solidarity
were unworkable because the basic problem which had led to the military
coup (namely, the problem of dominating the labor force) was still
there. Rakowski acknowledged this when he said it was necessary "to
outlaw the present union and start again from scratch."
In the direct confrontation between capitals repressive force and the
workers, the realism of both sides was visible. 'The realism of the
rank-and-file can be seen in a variety of responses. We have mentioned
the most obvious one of the rank-and-file distancing itself from the
reconstituted Solidarity, even though this same rank-and-file accepted
the name of Solidarity. Other responses appeared inside the enterprises
and are little known; one can assume that they varied between ignorance
about the special committees which were set up in all large enterprises
in order to assist the military representatives assigned to supervise
the work, and some collaboration with these committees. In Nowa Huta,
employing 36,000 workers, where all the Solidarity leaders had been
arrested and the rank-and-file delegates ousted, the committee was
composed only of Party representatives who reported directly to the
Military Council for National Salvation. In contrast, at the Ursus
tractor plant, employing 16,000 workers of whom only ten were
imprisoned, the committee contained former Solidarity members who did
not hide their intention of setting up another union.
The realism of the government could be seen in the new law on unions
which was passed by Parliament on October 8, 1982. All the existing
unions were abolished and a step-by-step reconstruction of new unions
was projected: by the end of 1983, unions at the enterprise level; by
the end of 1984, their organization into national industrial unions; by
the end of 1985, a national confederation. Unions at the enterprise
level could be organized by just fifty employees and statutes would have
to conform to the law, which contained numerous limitations; the crucial
limitation called for mandatory arbitration to resolve conflicts and
permitted legal strikes only after a complicated procedure.
In spite of appeals from Solidarityâs underground National Committee,
and even though the rank-and-file considered itself Solidarity, the law
was passed without serious opposition. However, when the law was put
into effect, the authorities found much less acceptance than they had
anticipated; of 40,000 major enterprises, only 16,000, involving around
three million workers, had set up "their" union by August 1983; there
was widespread lack of interest, especially among young workers and
managerial staff; even Party members were unenthusiastic. But, as in the
case of the special committees, this observation is a generalization of
very different situations, of which we have few examples. In Katowice on
October 21, 1983, the first congress of the new Federation of Mine
Workersâ Unions was held; it represented 150,000 out of 400,000 miners.
Half of the members were toadies, the other half were there to see what
could be done within the limits of the new law. Martyniuk, the
president, was a former Solidarity member and he stated,
"If workersâ interests require it, we are prepared to use our right to
strike; we are demanding joint discussions on wages and working
conditions, on Saturday work and maintenance crewsâ Sunday work."
At the discussions there was apparently strong resistance from the
minister in charge of mines, namely, the boss; but the attitudes and the
way things developed were reminiscent of a "normal" Western-type union.
On December 8, 1983, the 9,500 workers at the Warsaw Steelworks freely
voted for a new workersâ council; among the candidates were former
Solidarity activists, including some who had been imprisoned. This does
not seem to have been typical, however, since, on one hand, workers
boycotted most of the council elections and, on the other, hard-liners
in the Party complained that the new law on self-management left them
little influence. At the Steelworks, underground leaflets supported the
election of the workersâ council and saw it as a chance to "break with
the atmosphere of passivity and negativity" among the workers. At the
end of December 1983, 1,780 workers out of the 13,800 at the FSO Zeran
auto plants became members of an "independent and self-managed union,"
but this union competed for the role of managing the work force with the
factoryâs workersâ council, which had been democratically elected before
the December 1981 coup and which continued to function.
Solidarityâs underground organization was aware of the withdrawal of its
rank-and-file but did not see how to proceed in order to define new
tactics. Ultimately, one had to agree with Guettaâs comment on
Solidarity in the November 24, 1982 Le Monde:
"The union is now only a vanguard which is seeking a path for itself."
After the ineffective strikes, which caused only the slightest
inconvenience to the government, the Solidarity leadership had no choice
but to acknowledge the state of affairs; first, its isolation from the
rank-and-file, and second, the resulting impossibility of participating
in the governmentâs projects to construct a union better suited to the
requirements of the Polish economy. Some leaders advocated a return to
legality while leaving the rank-and-file to organize itself (this was
largely recognition of a situation over which they had little
influence). Other leaders advocated the development of an underground
press in order to mold activists for the future (here, one sees the KOR
tendency to create a political organization which awaits another worker
revolt in order to insert itself into it). The middle position between
these two extremes was entry into the new unions, where the Solidarity
militants served to counterbalance other tendencies. Here, too, what
remained of Solidarity as organization was reduced largely to a
political and ideological role.
This is the place to make some observations about Walesa, whose fate in
some ways was the same as that of other Solidarity leaders but differed
because of his role as unionist. The mass movement made use of
organizational leaders as tools for the moment, but the leaders believed
it was they who had created the mass movement. The ebbing of this
movement and its changed forms left the leaders high and dry,
desperately looking around for the currents which had sustained them in
the past. This was even more obvious for Walesa than for the others. The
occupants of the Polish structures of domination did not misjudge him.
In an interview with Fallacci published in the (London) Times on
February 22, 1982, Rakowski stated, "In fact, some in the church are
kind of tired of him . . . So there are rumours that the church is
considering the possibility of dropping him.â In another statement (to
Newsweek in January 1983), Rakowski said, "For a certain social group,
Walesa is still some kind of symbol."
Walesa could no longer be regarded as head of the Solidarity which had
become a secret organization with underground leaders and which was
pursuing political goals. It is incorrect to say that Solidarity
remained a union which was carrying on its operations illegally, because
the underground movement was completely different from a union. As for
Walesa, he believed in the union and considered himself a union leader
who was concerned only with union affairs. But since Solidarity was no
longer a union but a political group guided by persons who had been
leaders of the KOR, Walesa was no more than a union chief without a
following. He undoubtedly retained his popularity as a union chief, a
popularity he would have lost had Solidarity succeeded in becoming a
traditional union.
His popularity persisted because of a mistaken impression held by Polish
workers: that Solidarity expressed their interests. Solidarity
disappeared as a result of the coup dâetat, before the conflict between
the rank-and-file and the administration became visible. The conflict
remained latent because of the tendency of Solidarity to become a
traditional union, but it never appeared openly because events
continually prevented Solidarity from assuming this role. There were now
two distinct entities; Solidarity to a large extent became a dissident
political movement and Walesa became a symbol.
This was a significant change, and even the Church had to take it into
account. The Churchâs influence was derived from the peasantry and its
influence among workers was due to the rapid shift of the peasant
population toward industry. In order to maintain its authority, the
Church had to adopt conciliatory and realistic attitudes, and had to
seek relationships which would maintain social peace. The Pope and
Archbishop Clemp had no alternative except to work for a reconciliation
with the regime in power. These two churchmen might have seemed l like
the natural allies of Solidarity and Walesa as long as the latter two
remained within legal bounds and had a welldefined function. But when
Solidarity moved in the direction of the underground, illegal and
politically competitive KOR, and when Walesa became a union chief
without followers, the Church rejected these potential allies. A
compromise between Jaruzelski and the Church was worked out with a view
to maintaining social peace.
The Churchâs attitude did not destroy Walesaâs symbolic importance. The
Walesa symbol objectively served as a prop to the regime; it reconciled
the oppressed to their oppression.
Before the combined effects of the class struggle and the economic
crisis led to the disturbances of the summer of 1980, the development of
capital in Poland had already affected the structures of the various
social classes. The ruling class, the capitalist class, consisted of
some 200,000 families situated in the Party, the official unions, the
administration, and the management of enterprises. This class sought to
perpetuate itself by way of personal enrichment (the scandals which the
movement exposed in this regard merely touched the tip of the iceberg),
by having privileged access (guaranteed by force) to the material goods
available through collective ownership of the means of production, and,
as everywhere, by reproducing itself as ruling class. As a journalist
commented in the August 26, 1980, Tageszeitung,
"the single preoccupation of the people who govern, is their desire to
stay in power."
The head of the official unions expressed this candidly on Gdansk
television on September 1, 1980:
"When we took power into our hands thirty-five years ago, we did not do
it in order to share it with others."
The dividing line between this ruling class and the impatient middle
class, which we will discuss later, is probably not very precise, but it
is the same as in Western countries. The same class structure was noted
in another, already cited, observation from the August 26, 1980,
Tageszeitung referring to the strikes:
"The higher one goes in opposition circles, the more one finds
willingness to compromise."
Events in Poland can be understood only if one considers this country as
a capitalist entity with a relatively weak national capital. This
situation made Poland a field for confrontation and collaboration
between the two capitalist groups: the West (especially Western Europe)
and Russia. The confrontations were principally economic. Investments
had to assure a return with an appropriate rate of profit-regardless of
the forms. Each of the dominant capitalisms tended to dictate its own
terms-which meant it imposed political conditions. Each was interested
in the sector of development which would reinforce its own economy and
the form of domination of capital within its own borders. This required
a certain type of production, certain methods of production as well as
social relations appropriate to that type of production.
As always happens within a capitalist class, major social upheavals in
Poland provided occasions to rejuvenate the leadership. A new generation
of 30to 40-year olds moved up toward positions of authority as a result
of "Party reform" (which this group supported largely because it
furnished the only opportunity to advance quickly). The capitalist class
was rejuvenated: thousands of former "officials" were eased out; they
lost their positions and the privileges attached to their power, but
they were not sent back to the factories or the mines. These changes
took place in a context of clans whose programs were determined by the
struggles of inter-imperialist rivals for economic and political
influence in Poland. These clans really had no consistent line except to
preserve their class power. As Staniszkis observed,
"When far from power, people adopt a critical attitude, but they do not
change their way of thinking."
Their temporary options were linked to whichever capitalist group best
suited their economic and social position. This was especially true for
enterprise managers. A director of the Ursus tractor plant, which is
linked to Massey-Ferguson and Perkins, was certainly more "open" to the
West than a director of a steel foundry which exported its products to
Russia.
This is much less true for political leaders. Although some of them were
clearly "marked" by their choice of imperialism, many others were
difficult to define because of their opportunism. In the Polish
situation, this is understandable: every member of the capitalist class,
even if he leaned toward a Westerntype development, had to pay
lip-service to Russia, which still controlled the critical economic
fields. In their struggle to acquire the power of capital (which in
Poland is just as ferocious as the capitalist and bureaucratic
competition in the West), these clans needed leverage and supporters;
the class struggle, the struggles of the workers and the peasants,
furnished the leverage and supporters. In contrast, these clans saw the
intermediate bureaucracy and intellectuals (the equivalent of the middle
classes) merely as an auxiliary element which was also seeking
advancement through the class struggle. When the Polish capitalist class
insisted that it was capable of resolving its problems by itself, it
meant that, in the context of the economic and social adaptations
underway, it would be able to maintain its domination without any
"assistance" other than what it already received from the imperialisms
to which it was economically and financially linked. Even issues which
seemed specifically political, such as the Russian military presence or
the dominant role of the Party, actually came within the framework of
inter-imperialist rivalries because of the way they were treated by the
clans of the Polish capitalist class. When the governments of South
American countries started to look more to West European capital than to
US capital for their development, the United States, freed from the
burden of the Vietnam war, re-established the balance in its favor by
unparalleled political and military violence. Russia found itself in the
same position in Poland, except that direct intervention would have had
more dangerous consequences because the crisis in Poland is to some
extent the crisis of the Eastern capitalist system.
In Poland the peasants make up 30% of the population; they are not
agricultural workers but small, independent farmers who, by the size of
their holdings, their methods of producing for the market, and their
habits of consuming their products themselves, could be compared to
French peasants at the beginning of the century. On the average, they
are quite elderly and their children have had to move to urban centers
because the land could not support them. We have already mentioned that
the 1980 class struggle aroused the peasants, who had previously
remained aloof from the workersâ economic and political demands, but
their involvement was due mainly to a single cause, the rapid
industrialization of the country during the past ten years, which had
shaken up this class. The peasant demands were not so much for the right
to form an agricultural union but rather for the guarantee of land
ownership--the right to dispose of their land through sale or
inheritance--and for access to modern methods of production. (The
peasants cultivated 80% of the land but received only 25% of the
investments, while the rest went to state farms.) Most of these demands
seem to have been met. In France, for example, the unionization of
farmers had been a factor, along with mechanization and widespread use
of fertilizers, in agricultural concentration which brought about a
transition toward production for the capitalist market. In Poland, there
were parallels between the peasantsâ demands, which were concerned with
greater productivity, and demands in the industrial sector which were
concerned with similar problems. (In the industrial sector, however,
private ownership did not exist, and the "freedom" demanded was for
investments through self-financing or bank loans.) To a certain extent,
the failure of the plan for industrialization was due to the systemâs
inability to get the peasants to produce enough food to maintain a
low-cost labor force; the explosion of July 1980 was a direct result of
this situation. The fact that the peasants entered the struggle also
shows that their static situation of the preceding decades had already
been left behind and that the impetus toward concentration was under
way. The large proportion of private ownership in this sector inclined
it toward traditional capitalist paths of concentration. The peasantsâ
struggle hastened this concentration; this gave rise to other movements
similar to those in Western Europe. The kiss of the capitalist class â
its recognition of the agricultural union and its providing access to
modern techniques-will prove to. be a kiss of death for the peasantry
(and also for the Catholic Church, whose power stems mainly from the
peasantry). The elimination of the peasants will be achieved by direct
capitalist pressure and not by authoritarian bureaucratic methods. The
speed of the process will depend on the total development of the economy
and on its capacity to absorb both the manpower ejected from agriculture
as well as the increased agricultural production. These problems are of
utmost importance for the capitalist class since the transformation of
agriculture is its key to resolving, "by itself," on a medium and
long-term basis, the formidable problems presented by the economic
crisis and the class struggle.
In the economic and political crises which intensified throughout 1981
and in the face of the Partyâs manipulations of food supplies, the
peasants showed that they constituted a distinct class. They continually
reduced their deliveries to the state because there was nothing to buy
with the money they received, and they said so. As always in such
situations, they resorted to a barter economy and turned to the black
market. They made almost no attempt to deliver their produce directly to
the workers-in spite of the existence of Rural Solidarity and of
connections through the Catholic Church. Walesa betrayed his
disappointment in an interview with a Dutch journalist on December 5,
1981:
"The farmers think only of themselves.â
In his confrontations with the working class, Jaruzelski took care not
to arouse the peasants or to interfere with their harvests. In addition,
the values brandished by the general â patriotism, order, etc. â were
the traditional peasant values and were those advocated by the Church.
This served to legitimize the new regime and to reassure the peasants,
the Churchâs most devoted supporters. With the bitterness of an
idealist, Walesa said in his interview with Playboy at the beginning of
December 1981,
"Along with the intellectuals, the peasants are the people hardest to
negotiate with. The farmers think only of themselves."
The project of direct management in the Lodz region (which was mentioned
earlier) depended on everyone recognizing that it furthered his
interest. Industrial products were to go directly to the peasants in
exchange for agricultural products. This would have been the only way to
organize production autonomously in a non-capitalist context, and it
would have meant the dispossession of all the classes that dominated the
productive process. This project was not given enough time to show its
possibilities.
The working class had been changed by the shift from heavy industry to
processing industries. A significant portion of the young workers
probably still came from the countryside, but, more than earlier, they
were relegated to the assembly line and worked in the more modern
industries. For many of the unskilled workers, heavy industry meant
repetitive labor. During the events of July and August, it was largely
workers from the newer sectors who were the first to rebel while in the
more traditional sectors like mining, steel and ship building, workers
joined the movement only in mid-August. The former seemed to be
satisfied with guarantees on matters of consumption while the latter,
particularly the skilled workers, were more concerned about structural
reforms leading to economic integration. The dynamics of the development
of capital changed the composition of the working class. Some workers
might have developed defensive reactions in order to retain certain
advantages and this could have led to a temporary understanding with
other classes. But, on the whole, the workersâ movement followed its own
autonomous development, since the forms of exploitation were constantly
changing and the only thing the capitalist class could guarantee was
increased exploitation in order to improve productivity and production.
Even those workers interested in economic integration could not have
achieved it because "there was no basis on which they could have taken
part in the decisions." Staniszkis continued,
"This workersâ movement is anarchist in a way, but in the good sense of
the term, that is, it opposes all institutions and all hierarchy."
In the modern sectors, where most of the work force is unskilled, the
same tendencies were appearing as are found in every society of
consumption. It is certain that if capital had attempted rationalization
â which would have meant, as some observers foresaw, a significant pool
of unemployed â attacks against capital at the workplace would have been
extended to attacks on commodities at the marketplace. Some indication
of this has already appeared; looting of the stores in Zamosc on May 28,
1981, for example.
Precise information on the middle classes in contemporary Poland is
difficult to obtain, but we can get some idea from the importance of the
various agencies of control and restraint: the Party, the unions, the
Church, the police, the army, the intellectuals, the vast bureaucracies
of civil servants and of economic managers. To those should be added the
owners of small, independent handicraft and commercial enterprises, who
were numerous enough to ask for and be granted their own "autonomous"
union; there were about 200,000 to 300,000 of these private enterprises
employing five or six workers.
Changes in the economy probably also changed the balance of forces
within the highly diverse sectors of the Polish middle class. This can
be seen in the fact that, within this class, an opposition group had
been able to develop which based itself on the workersâ movement and
which, in June1976, openly called for a change in the relations of
power. In spite of the repression, this opposition group had not endured
severe Russian-type persecution and it had succeeded in establishing and
unifying itself on a nationwide scale. It was not by chance that this
class was attracted to a form of government similar to bourgeois
democracy. The 1980 class struggle aroused these people as well as the
more privileged sectors of the working class, which until then had
remained quite loyal to the bureaucracy. On July 20, 1980, Kuron
revealed that the KOR was receiving many petitions from skilled workers
who no longer looked to "management" (the Party and official union) for
satisfaction of their grievances. At the beginning of the strike in the
Gdansk naval shipyards, all the factory security forces went over to the
side of the strikers instead of trying to break up the gatherings.
Litynski, who was arrested at the end of August, stated after he was
freed,
"The police kept us informed. As the days went on, they supported us
more and more."
Staniszkis reported that the July movement was also a revolt of the
middle echelons within the bureaucracy, who had gradually been excluded
from any role in decision-making. It is probably difficuIt to determine
specific causes for this exclusion, but one can see parallels to the
movement within industrial structures in the West where trained
personnel tend to be ousted from decision-making roles and become
involved with demands for participation in management decisions. All
these currents appeared in the strike committees, in the union
Solidarity and in the subsequent requests for restructuring enterprises.
The (London) Sunday Times wrote on October 12, 1980:
"It is not only a battle between discredited hardliners and resurgent
reformists but a complicated realignment and settling of accounts
involving many different factions and regional interest groups."
Economic crises make class conflicts within capitalist societies very
visible. Within each class, clans confront each other and vehemently
defend those interests which are threatened by the crisis and by the
reorganizations which grow out of it. In bourgeois democracies, a
powerful technocratic current appears with the elimination of family
capital, the increased control by banks, the expansion of the
nationalized sector, the repeated attempts of the state to regulate
economic mechanisms. Unions increasingly depart from their original role
and become more closely associated with the management of capital,
particularly in its modern forms. In Poland, when the middle classes
called for "democracy," they all understood it to be on the same
advanced level as in the bourgeois democracies. But this seems to have
been an impossible demand, since Poland had already gone quite far in
abolishing the type of state which is associated with bourgeois
democracy. The union was hardly aware that it was centering its greatest
efforts on this very same self-management of capital-on direct, economic
self-management without the traditional mediation of politics.
Of course it is important, when considering all the talk and all the
activities in Poland, to make a distinction between what was simply a
project, a momentary concession designed to gain time so as to return
later in a stronger position, and what would remain permanently in the
class structures and social relations. One thing is certain, that the
pre-198O system could not go on. As the economic crisis deepened,
reforms became more and more urgent for the capitalist class. Already in
January 1981, there was a "small reform" which essentially abolished
restrictions relating to employment and ended the determination of
aggregate wages by the central planning authorities. This "small reform"
aimed at closely tying aggregate wages to increased production (for each
percent of increased production, aggregate wages could grow by 0.3%). In
a period of crisis like the current one, the goal of legislation like
this was to transform workersâ concern for their wages into a general
concern for increased production; in practice it resulted only in a wage
freeze. The new legislation shifted the responsibility for dealing with
wage demands away from the higher echelons of the capitalist class so as
to keep wage conflicts from degenerating immediately into political
conflicts. Enterprise managers took over the power to decide â according
to the specific development of their firm â the aggregate wages, the
total work force and the schedules of shifts. Olszowski, one of the
economic reformers but a hardliner in political matters, stated on
September 21, 1981,
"In the broadest sense, a reform will increase the power of individual
enterprises and of the workers themselves . . . An authentic system of
economic costs must be introduced; planning methods and top level
decision-making mechanisms must be reformed."
At the same Party meeting, another expert, Professor Jan Majzel,
declared,
"The basic economic unit in the future must be the individual
enterprise. Management would be allotted centrally determined tasks but
also be given full freedom to carry them through as well as they saw
fit."
The intention was to shift the task of resolving conflicts to enterprise
managers, but this did not keep Polish workers from knowing that the
firms still depended on directives from the central authorities. It was
obviously impossible to reverse decades of development of a collective
capital simply by issuing administrative regulations. It was just as
obvious that one section of the capitalist class would not even consider
resolving the problems of a very centralized capital (as Polish capital
was at that time) by cutting it into little pieces, as one would cut a
cake. The centralization of economic decisions was not a mere whim of a
bureaucratic party hungry for power, but an indication of the extent to
which capital had become centralized in Poland. The functions of the
central bureaus could neither be eliminated with the stroke of a pen nor
simply delegated. Moreover, this was not the goal of either the "small
reform" or the "big reform" projected for 1983. Greater participation
was to be authorized for the periphery, so that sections of the
capitalist class would have more power over secondary issues in the
management of enterprises. But there was to be no fundamental change in
the centralization of the system. The guidelines for capitalist reform,
as defined by a joint Party and government commission in January 1981,
did not call for sweeping away the centralized system, but for
substituting a different centralism â this time a flexible one â in
place of the inflexibility of a rigid mechanism (the system of
directives from above).
Greater flexibility was to be achieved by redefining the functions of
central planning and by setting up new procedures for accomplishing it.
The central plan was to be limited to "strategic" objectives which would
be defined by the five-year plan. The annual political and economic
plans would determine only the global estimates which were to be
reached, not by directives, but by manipulation of "instruments of
economic control" (prices, interest rates, import duties, taxes, etc.),
and by the so-called "rules of the game" mentioned above, which linked
net production to wage increases. In the domain of foreign trade,
however, the central authority would continue to set import quotas and
to formulate export directives. Regulations for furnishing raw materials
were to remain in effect for a time, but eventually they were to be
suspended. Directives on investments were to continue, but only to
determine what would go to the infrastructures, to industrial projects
of a structural nature, to housing construction, etc. All other
investments were to be covered either by self-financing or by bank
loans. Banking credit, too, was to be free of central control; it would
have fixed limits in order to insure some regulation over investments.
As for prices, most of the enterprises were to be allowed to set the
level themselves within the limits established before the summer of
1980. At that time, an enterprise could fix prices on approximately 30%
of all its finished industrial products and on about 60% of so-called
"new products" (new items which the firm added to its line).
As for wages, enterprises were to be allowed to raise the level if they
were able to reduce the work force involved in production. Managements
had been seeking such a ruling, since it would provide more flexibility
on wages. The director of a copper foundry explained in October 1980
that
"if management could get more control over wages and employment, it
could reduce the work force by 10% or even 15%"
While the capitalist class was hoping to assure the continuation of its
leading role by devising a plan to replace its instruments of direct
control with more indirect methods, analyses of the economic crisis and
conceptions of reform expressed by certain Polish economists were imbued
with illusions. The principal target of most of these critiques was
centralization and the incompetence of the central bureaucracy. An
influential Polish economist wrote in the (London) Financial Times on
November 11, 1980:
"Socialism means public ownership of the means of production. What we
have to ensure is that the management of those public assets is in the
hands of men educated at the Harvard Business School, not half educated
bureaucrats in the planning Ministry.â
Such critiques foreshadow reforms like the one proposed by a working
group from the Warsaw Planning and Statistics Institute at the end of
December 1980. Their suggestions included: abolition of all directives
on production and of all financial constraints; reduction of economic
administrative personnel by one-half and, if possible, reduction of the
actual work force by one-third; reduction of planning commission
personnel by one-quarter; the possibility of firms to go bankrupt;
abolition of the central governmentâs right to require the merger of
enterprises; supervision of voluntary mergers by an anti-monopoly
commission with wide powers; limitation of the central governmentâs
authority over determination of prices to simple approval of increases.
These suggestions in no way corresponded to the reality of Polish
capitalism. The economic crisis did not arise because of bureaucratic
incompetence, nor from poor planning or wrong decisions on the part of
the central institutions, but because of the dynamics of the class
struggle. All reforms expressed in terms of centralization or
decentralization are inadequate, because neither centralization nor
decentralization could resolve long-term productivity problems (which
are also an expression of class antagonism).
All attempts to decentralize showed very quickly that the managers of
individual firms were no more competent than the central institutions to
resolve the crisis of profitability of capital. This only confirmed that
no capitalist class (nor any part of it, even if it could afford the
luxury of an education at the Harvard Business School), was actually
able to manage the development of capital or class relations according
to its conceptions or will. The capitalist class already sensed its own
powerlessness when it tried to closely link its conception of economic
reform to the reappearance of workersâ councils and to a new definition
of union rights and obligations. Workersâ councils, which had already
played a role from 1956 to 1959, were to replace management councils,
which were composed of delegates from the Partyâs factory committees,
officers of the official industrial unions, and factory managers.
Councils were now to be elected by the workers; they would be authorized
to determine planning in the factory and would have a voice in choosing
the director. Union reform was supposed to give unions the right to
strike, but complicated arbitration procedures had to be observed before
the legality of any strike would be recognized. The union was to have
rights of actual comanagement as foreseen earlier in agreements between
the strike committees and the government. The unions were also to take
part in discussions on basic issues concerning the general standard of
living (distribution of national income between consumption and
accumulation, areas and structures of investments, price adjustments,
determination of principles for setting wage levels, etc.).
A journalist wrote that "slowly Poland is groping its way toward another
form of social relations which could be beneficial for other communist
countries." The head of Interpress elaborated this point in Der Spiegel:
"The new unions will gain confidence in themselves from the fact that
they are an element in the political and social climate of Poland. There
has to be a change in the current system, there has to be a change in
peopleâs attitude toward their work and toward participation in a
different organization of production; sooner or later, this will be the
task of the new unions as representatives of the workers. lf the role of
the unions is not understood in this way, it is impossible for a State
to function in a society where there is production for the market.â
The question was whether the new structures could even be set up â not
so much because of opposition from Russia, the dominant imperialism, but
because of internal conflicts in Poland, the class struggle on one hand,
and resistance from privileged strata of the established ruling class on
the other. This aspect of the proposed economic reform aroused a great
deal of interest among the officials of Solidarity because it coincided
with their interest in self-management and also with certain practical
conceptions of the rank-and-file. One part of the capitalist class did
everything possible to hinder the adoption of this reform; even pending
legislation for a temporary compromise arrangement was set aside and
replaced by a decree. The former system of management would remain in
effect through 1982 and there would even be more centralization in
certain areas. The allocation of all raw materials and of all materials
important in production would remain the monopoly of a special bureau of
the state apparatus.
At some regional levels of Solidarity, this setback gave rise to
preparations to take over production, which was to be supervised by a
strike committee according to a plan elaborated by the workers
themselves with a view to social needs. Supervision of distribution was
to be set up at the same time. The threat of such a takeover caused as
much panic in the state apparatus as it did in the union and among the
economic experts. This was going much too far beyond the progressive
reform of an economy administered by capitalists. This is the context of
Jaruzelskiâs announcement on December 25, 1981, that "âthe process of
disintegration of the State has been stopped." In effect, he was
announcing that all decisions dealing with the economy were henceforth
to be made at the top rather than under constant pressure from a
rank-and-file movement, and that there was no chance of condoning any
rank-and-file action which would deprive the bureaucrats of their power.
Military intervention undoubtedly raised hopes of revenge among ruling
Party members eager to settle accounts and re-establish their lost
authority. Albin Siwak, a spokesman for Party hardliners, commented on
February 4, 1982, "The people whoâve been running this country since the
war got the fright of their lives with the rise of Solidarity. They sat
there biting their nails in the months since August 1980. Now they want
to get their own back." But the extent of the repression and the
additional vengeful punishments should not disguise an essential fact:
capital still had the same problems to resolve. The military
intervention was directed principally against the rank-and-file
movement, but it was also directed against opponents of reform projects,
even opponents within the capitalist class. The intervention simply
replaced a chaos controlled by no one. The December 19, 1981 Le Monde
observed,
"What we are seeing in Poland since the proclamation of a state of war
is .. .the first attempt to interrupt the continuity of power in a
communist country."
Militarization of key sectors of the economy was not for the purpose of
intimidating the population. One apparatus replaced another and, as the
Financial Times pointed out on December 19, 1981,
"General Jaruzelskiâs intervention, however deplorable in many ways,
nevertheless offers the last faint hope for the reform movement in
Poland." Once Solidarity was suppressed, there was in fact continuity
with the reform movement, not only in the declarations of the military
rulers but also in their policies: "The government will resolve on its
own all the problems which were originally to have been negotiated with
Solidarity" (Le Monde, February 10, 1982).
The now superfluous Solidarity was not the only body excluded from
taking part in the reform of the system. Many agree that the dominant
role of the Party was finished for the time being and that, in the
future, the military council, an informal group of military personnel
and civilians, would not act on behalf of what remained of the Party, a
Party whose basis remained questionable (see the figures cited earlier).
On December 30, 1981, a spokesman for the military council stressed that
"it will be necessary to maintain all staff in their current jobs, given
the exigencies inherent in the state of war and the difficult economic
situation of the country."
Several committees were set up to study projects of economic reform, new
political structures (there was again talk of a new national front), and
new formulas for setting up unions which would be different from both
the official unions and Solidarity. In his short speech of December 25,
1981, Jaruzelski specifically mentioned that âin our socio-economic
system, there is room for self-managing and really independent unions"
and added that "the chances for national accord could be greater than
before." On February 9, 1982, Rakowski further elaborated:
"Authentic, independent and self-governing representation of
professional and social interests of the working people should be
harmoniously linked with the supreme aim of strengthening the State and
socialist democracy.â
Beneath the elegant words, his statement was an admonition for the union
to restrict itself to the function assigned it by capital. But the
fierce struggles between clans made it impossible to decide on a
concrete proposal; some still wanted to seek an agreement with
Solidarity, others wanted a new union subordinated to the government.
Specific needs of enterprises made it urgent to decide quickly on the
status of committees which had been set up on a local level to fulfil
certain union functions.
These discussions were not simply academic debates or geared to
propaganda: they went together with the drastic measures taken by the
military authority as soon as it entered the scene. A profusion of
economic rulings had constantly been postponed because of the class
struggle and now the military government tried to impose them in the
wake of its repressive actions. Beyond their immediate effects â an
increase in the level of exploitation resulting from a lowered standard
of living as well as an extension of working time---they sought to
provide long-term financial and social means to restructure the economy.
For this reason, it was soon necessary to go further.
The following measures affected essentially all areas of the production
process:
-Average working time of 42 hours a week, Saturday work obligatory and
manipulation of paid vacations.
-Considerable price increases on basic food products (between 200% and
400%), on coal, gas and electricity (200%), but smaller increases on
industrial products (70%); some adjustments in wages (small increases
for low-paid jobs and arduous work such as mining). In this domain, the
new regime, at least initially, succeeded in doing what no other
government since December 1970 had managed to do.
-Devaluation of the zloty and free circulation of foreign currency to
finance selective imports.
-Exchange of goods furnished by peasants for machinery which would not
be available until 1983, but at current prices for the equipment.
-Assignment of military commissars to factories in order to assure
co-ordination between enterprises, especially provision of spare parts.
-Massive lay-offs which took the form of a political-unionist purge;
obligatory jobs in factories and on public works for anyone unemployed
between the ages of 18 and 45. (In Lodz alone, forced labor was imposed
on 7,000 out of 11,000 unemployed).
This super-technocracy, which used quasi-military methods in the hopes
of achieving efficiency, seemed to think that extending the hours and
increasing the number of workers was all that was needed to increase
production. It also nourished hopes of achieving some degree of economic
autarchy, namely of strengthening Polish national capital by means of
agricultural self-sufficiency, development of natural resources needed
by Polish industry, and reduction of dependence on the West. This is the
response of every national capital when confronted by the international
economic crisis, but a national capital cannot simply disregard the
class struggle in the country it controls, nor its links of
interdependence with world capital. As for the class struggle, the
central problem in Poland was still productivity, which could not be
resolved in the current context of violence, super-exploitation and
disorganization of the structures of domination of labor. As for the
links of interdependence with world capital, they could be strengthened
only if the class struggle could be contained within limits comparable
to those in other industrial countries. The struggle of the Polish
workers was more than ever the key to future prospects for the national
capital, and these prospects were dubious at best, since across the
threshold lay the international crisis of capital.
Shortly after the accession of this super-technocracy, Baka, a
government minister responsible for economic reform, stated:
"It was necessary to pass through the state of war before this change
was possible."
And on February 16, 1982, a member of Parliament regretted that
"for Polandâs history, the imposition of martial law has the ring of
defeat for the existing socialism."
Behind the travesty of words, we recognize that the capitalist class
really did consider itself defeated and saw that it had to focus its
offensive on the workers and on reforming the system, thereby affecting
the high status of a sector of the capitalist class that was clutching
its privileges; only then could the capitalist class get the workers to
pay the price for this rescue of capital. A statement by Finance
Minister Krzak on September 15, 1982, defined the situation in much more
precise terms. He pointed out the
"other aspect of martial law: it provides a shield for the introduction
of economic reform in pricing, in self-financing for enterprises, and in
profit and loss accounting . . . These reforms, if they are fully
implemented, will add to the power of the Finance Ministry at the
expense of the central planning organization."
In other words, with Poland in the throes of a crisis, the government
was making a shift toward what could be called finance capital and away
from industrial capital.
A list of some of the provisions included in the economic reform
initiated in 1982 makes it clear that considerations of capitalist
profit were primary:
-State-run companies were free to set prices within categories that
covered 10% of consumer goods and 60% of industrial goods;
-They had more freedom to raise workersâ wages;
-They were permitted to set their own production targets except for
"operational programs" and "state contracts" which covered 30% of the
output;
-They were free to hire and fire workers;
-In cases of bad management, credit was suspended and there was
possibility of bankruptcy;
-Anti-cartel legislation was directed against collusion among large
enterprises (and such legislation can be trenchant in a "socialist"
state). This means the reappearance of competition. In other words,
financial requirements took precedence over production requirements â a
common response to the crisis in all capitalist countries.
In order to successfully implement this reform in the midst of an
economic and social crisis (which, ironically, had made the reform
necessary), the rulers had to prevail over not only the workers but over
an entire sector of the political and economic bureaucracy. Aside from
the repressive machine-police and army-the rulers could count on only
two allies. One was the Party, which itself was in great disorder and
which served as refuge for the ousted section of the capitalist class;
the other was the Church, which was in a position to cash in on its
power. It is significant that both allies had strong ties with world
capital; the former, with the Eastern branch, the latter with the
Western branch. This meant that Polish national capital had to make its
mark not only in exploiting the workers but also among the competing
imperialisms, whose presence was felt not only in penetration of capital
or commodities, but also internally, in the active factions of the
capitalist class itself. At this point the Church took over the role
that Solidarity had not been able to play-even though the Church was
itself an integral component of capital. The Popeâs visit in 1983 was a
recognition of this situation. Statements made by the rulers after the
military coup always recognized this role of the Church. Rakowski stated
in the February 15, 1982 Newsweek, "We treat the Church seriously as a
partner shaping Polandâs future;" and in an interview with Fallacci
(reported in the (London) Times on February 23, 1982), "they (the
Church) need us as much as we need them."
Again on August 24, 1982, he reiterated that the Church "is an
indispensable element in the social and political relations of our
country," and added that dialogue "had never ended and still continues."
In fact, the Church was an important link in the system of domination
because, in addition to possessing real power, it retained great
influence among the peasants and workers with a peasant background. And
as was the case in Spain under Franco and in Poland in the period before
July 1980, the Church served as refuge and rallying point for opponents
of the regime. For the workers, because of its position in Polish
society, it directly and indirectly provided a substitute for the
non-existent union. The Church appealed for calm on behalf of the regime
just when its role as rallying point of the resistance was giving it the
status of opponent. The Churchâs ties to the peasants were stronger and
more important for the system. Peasants make up one-third of the
population and the new economic policy needed to manage them so as to
achieve self-sufficiency, a crucial element for "economic recovery." It
was not by chance that the leader of Rural Solidarity joined the new
official peasant organization. In September 1982, the government
conceded an important point; it guaranteed inheritance of the land for
peasants farming their own land and it permitted the size of private
holdings to increase from 30 to 100 hectares. The government also took
measures to provide more agricultural machinery. In the long run, these
were policies which would lead to agricultural concentration. It did not
even seem strange to see the Church (itself a landowner with extensive
holdings) negotiating with the government for the establishment of a
sort of ecclesiastical bank (with funds coming largely from West
Germany) for the financing of agriculture and small private industry, so
as to encourage cooperation between the two.
After two years of various measures to get the machine working again,
what could be said about the Polish economy? In 1980, industrial
production declined by 6% in relation to the previous year. In 1981, the
gross national product declined 13%, industrial production 11.2%, trade
20% and investments 26.7%. In 1982 there was a further decline of gross
national product by 2%, industrial production 10.7%, trade 5% and
internal consumption 20%. In the first two quarters of 1983, industrial
production rose 12%, trade 6% and internal consumption 22%. At first
glance, it might seem that things "had returned to normal" but the 1983
figures indicate that there was a return only to the situation of 1981,
the year with the most unrest, the year which preceded the December
coup. Also, after examining the data closely, one can see that a large
part of the recovery came from extractive industries, particularly from
increased coal production, and this was due to the modernization of
techniques during previous years, the compulsory extension of the work
week, and the addition of 20,000 more miners while those already working
in the mines were forbidden to change jobs. Another part of the recovery
came from various measures such as the one introduced by the Church. New
ways for introducing foreign capital were found; investment of foreign
capital was permitted in small enterprises. In 1982, more than three
hundred of them were set up and their production jumped by 500%. They
were exempted from taxes for three years and were allowed to export 50%
of their profits. Some of them had as many as one hundred employees and
the high wages they offered attracted highly skilled workers. Another
example was the employment of Polish workers in foreign, largely German,
factories.
These developments indicate that the central aim of the new policies â
to lower wages in order to increase surplus value â continued to be
unrealized due to the interrelated effects of economic chaos and the
class struggle. The most modern sector of the economy attracted large
amounts of foreign capital in the expectation of handsome profits, but
it operated at barely 60% of capacity. A typical example was the Ursus
tractor factory in a Warsaw suburb. Equipped to manufacture modern
Massey Ferguson tractors and Perkins motors, it produced only a few
hundred of them, whereas it had previously supplied Polish agriculture
with tens of thousands of old-model tractors. For various complex
reasons--the class struggle is one of the central ones â international
capitalist . competition was a severe shock to capitalist Poland. The
December coup caused a sharp decline in Polandâs standing in the
hierarchy of industrialized countries. Drawing its subsistence from
extractive industries, operating obsolete high-tech plants which
manufactured only out-dated equipment for internal use, relying on
agriculture and small industry, and letting a black market grow out of
control, Poland in some ways resembled an underdeveloped country rather
than a modern state even though it had the industrial structures of the
latter.
The economic impasse was intensified yet further by resistance from the
bureaucracy. One sector of the capitalist class had no interest in
making any change whatsoever, since these people clearly saw that it
would eliminate their positions of authority. This sectorâs conceptions
of management were those of another era and were completely
inappropriate for modern industry, and even less suited to an economy in
crisis. In an interview in the January 10, 1983 Newsweek, Rakowski
claimed: "During the last two years we changed from 70% to 90% of the
managerial staff at all levels. They are new people.â This was far from
obvious, since in October 1982, a governmental report stated that the
authorities were "finding it hard to overcome the deep-rooted
conservatism of the countryâs bureaucracy," and on April 22, 1983, a
different official report called for energetic measures to encourage the
central bureaucracy to restore its dominant position, which had been
undermined by policies of decentralization.
The clout of this bureaucracy is evident from accusations of sabotage of
the economic reform, and it is more concretely illustrated by the
"revision" of a list of 550 enterprises which the banks had marked for
bankruptcy; in the end the number was reduced to fifty. Of course one
might interpret as an indication of confidence in the recovery the fact
that in September 1983, 452 of the 1600 projects that had been cancelled
in 1981 were reinstated; a year earlier, October 29, 1982, a report to
the Political Bureau spoke of "recession and collapse of the economic
equilibrium, of weariness, of apathy, of passivity, of little confidence
on the part of the workers, of confusion within Party ranks and of lack
of cohesion in the ruling bureaucracy." The explanation of this apparent
contradiction is that Polish capital, with the help of international
capital, was condemned to forge ahead in "the hope that the economic
reforms would improve conditions sufficiently to dissolve the
discontent" (as a 1982 report of the Experience and the Future
technocrats put it). In other words, Polish capital was counting on
assistance from international capital and on the isolation of the Polish
workers.
For a period of eighteen months, Poland was no longer a real state;
authority was constantly scoffed at and the economy seemed to be adrift.
There were constant strikes and threats of strikes, often over seemingly
minor issues but ones which were so explosive and so central to the
interests of capital that the rulers (Party, union, Church, etc.) had to
stifle their disagreements and join forces in order to hurry to the
location and attempt difficult negotiations which almost always ended in
capitulation to the workers.
No state, in the West or in the East, could have tolerated for long a
situation where strikes obliged it to dismiss high public officials, to
reassign the function of public buildings, to make the rich return
ill-acquired wealth, to halt proceedings against persons revealing state
secrets. And to make matters worse, the economy increasingly suffered
from the effects of the international crisis and the class struggles.
The workers thought only of their own interests and not at all of the
"general interest" â the interest of capital. The rulers were completely
incapable of making the slightest improvement; the only remedy familiar
to them â making the workers work harder for less money-could not be
applied. On the contrary, the rulers were having to accept less work for
more money. Repercussions were particularly serious at the international
level. The Polish capitalist class was unable to fulfil commitments it
had made in previous years and it was reduced to begging to its
creditors like an importunate debtor. Before any reform projects managed
to see the light of day, they were rendered ineffective because of the
class struggle, which also prevented a consensus within the capitalist
class itself. Since it could not prove that it had the situation under
control and would be able to guarantee profits in the future, the Polish
capitalist class encountered only hesitation and delays when it
approached the international capitalist class. And although this
international capitalist class seemed to agree pretty well on what
should not be done (in order to avoid yet greater difficuIties), it too
was uncertain about what should be done.
One thing was clear: the class struggle had compelled the capitalist
class to drastically revise "priorities." Supplying goods for immediate
consumption took precedence over investments, food imports were
increased, significant concessions were made to independent peasants.
Nevertheless, the class struggle did not subside and it intensified yet
more the problems that capital could not resolve.
In the December 7, 1980 Sunday Times (London), Kuron declared,
"The Polish tragedy does not consist of the fact that we are under a
superpower but that the superpower has nothing to offer us."
His sentence can be made plural: the superpowers have nothing to offer
Poland. In fact, they demanded a great deal from Poland: the maintenance
of relations in which Russia had a privileged status, the repayment of
debts to Western capital, which presupposed continued trade relations
with the West. In other words, the superpowers demanded that the Polish
workers continue to support the burden of "obligations" toward Russian
as well as Western capital.
Capital was in crisis in every part of the world. Everywhere the fierce
race for profits through competition as well as speculation was
gradually eliminating the concessions the ruling class had made to win
over one section of the working class. In the West, capitalâs setback
was marked by the disappearance of the ideology of indefinite growth and
by the elimination of all the participation schemes which had originated
at the onset of the crisis. Capital could no longer burden itself with
onerous attempts to lure workers into saving the system. By now it was
quite clear that if the system was to be saved, it would be in
opposition to the workers, and that policies at the governmental and
enterprise level would represent capitalâs own interests and no others.
The only function of institutions like unions, which formerly
collaborated in and often initiated various forms of self-management,
would be to negotiate layoffs, distribute minimal welfare relief and
administer poverty. The class struggle would grow more intense,
especially in countries like Poland, which had been counting on the
continued expansion of world capital and were hit by the economic crisis
at a critical period in their industrial development. Just as one
wonders if there is a role for bourgeois democracy in countries like
Spain and Brazil, one wonders if there is any chance for reform in
Poland, even though the class struggle provided the outline for one as
sketched above
One might be tempted to think that the answer to this question lies in
the Eastern branch of capital. Many people think that the form of
domination by capital in these countries might permit political
solutions to have more impact over the hidden movement of capital. In
the Eastern bloc, and particularly in Russia, capitalâs development is
concealed by the institutional facade, by the pretensions of the
planning institutes, and by the enormous mass of propaganda produced by
bureaucrats who are its most gullible believers. In some ways the Polish
crisis can be seen as the crisis of the entire Eastern branch of
capital. Russia was experiencing the same inability to adapt its
structures (even though a large part of capital had gone beyond the
level of formal domination), the same backwardness in agricultural
production (in spite of the facade of almost complete collectivization
of the land), and the same internal conflicts in the capitalist class
between the backward ones advocating totalitarian political methods and
the "progressive" ones seeking methods appropriate to the real
domination of capital. One-half of Polandâs trade was with the West, and
this fact has sometimes been used to explain the social crisis in
Poland, but this is certainly not the case with Russia. It was rather
the movement of capital itself which prompted the demands for structural
changes involving enterprise "autonomy," along with all the debates and
infighting between clans, that we saw in Poland. In Russia, too, the
same class struggle has been developing, expressed most notably by a
tenacious resistance to any increase in productivity, and using methods
which are as varied as they are ingenious. From this standpoint, the
assertion that the Polish crisis could furnish a solution to the crisis
of the Russian system seems valid. Might Poland be a testing ground for
a reform of the Eastern branch of capital?
This perspective considers only one part of capitalâs larger problem in
the Eastern branch. And it treats the Russian system of planning as a
model of management of capital which is superior to the Western model
and which could, with some adjustments, resolve a problem which capital
in the West is seemingly unable to resolve. To some extent, what is
happening in the Eastern countries today is a sort of double setback to
the "socialist" system, namely to the system of management and
development of capital (exploitation of wage labor) which is based on
complete centralization and its corollary, the planning of the entire
economy. This system has shown itself to be as incapable as any Western
"democracy" of making internal changes, of adapting its political and
social structures to its development and its technology, and this
inability has led to serious and dangerous political crises.
Furthermore, this "socialist" system has shown itself incapable of
solving, or even foreseeing and facing the central problem of capital,
the problem of crises; it is unable to do the very thing that was
supposed to justify the existence of this society that had supposedly
put an end to the capitalist system. Behind the facade and the
pretensions of half a century of propaganda, Russian centralized
planning (like its reformist Social Democratic counterpart in the West)
shows that it is completely dominated by the real movement of capital.
The slow-down and cessation of growth in Russia is the same
manifestation of crisis as in every other country. In Italy, Spain,
Brazil, Great Britain or South Korea, no one would consider holding the
regime or any ruling political faction responsible for effects of the
economic crisis. Today, no one claims that any of these countries
possess a remedy to the crisis other than to destroy working class
resistance to increased exploitation; and if this fails, to face the
destruction of capital.
It is striking that since the coup in Poland, it has been almost
impossible for the government to follow a clear-cut course, to choose
between direct repression or a reformist approach. One can find an
analogous situation in the Western democracies which, unable to proceed
resolutely along one path or the other, are reduced to constant
procrastination. In Poland, the path of direct repression â either by
internal methods using the union and/or the police, or by external means
using Russian intervention-could not be used basically because of the
class struggle (in all its forms), which made recourse to any violent
solution very risky, more destructive than beneficial for everyone, and
as dangerous for the precarious equilibrium in the West as in the East.
In addition, having been invoked repeatedly, it had lost its deterrent
power. As for the reformist approach, we have seen that it was present
at all levels. From the start, it considered measures appropriate to
advanced capitalist countries, but nothing came of them since any reform
was caught in the squeeze between the class struggle and opposition from
a privileged sector of the capitalist class.
At the international level, new policies were adopted day by day with a
view to relieving tensions. There was obvious agreement between East and
West to grant credits and assistance in the hopes of disguising the
economic failure and of saving what could be saved:
"It is in the bankersâ interest to continue to extend financial support
to Poland... If money was refused, Poland might have defaulted on
existing borrowings which would have meant considerable losses for a
number of major international banks... In the present situation the
banks have little choice but to make the best of a difficult problem...
The banks do not expect long term political or economic disruptions to
result from the present wave of strikes" (Financial Times, August 27,
1980).
Polemics over possible intervention by Russia made the same point. The
Financial Times of November 27, 1980 stated:
"There ought to be a common interest in preventing anarchy and then
perhaps escalation. It is a lot to ask especially of Russia but there
should now be an East-West dialogue on what is going on. A western aid
consortium is not impossible in return for the guarantee of greater
Polish freedom."
(We have already described what such "freedom" means in capitalist
terms.) But as another article in the Financial Times noted in regard to
both Poland and the Iraq-Iran conflict, "Such conflicts are in no oneâs
interest yet nobody knows how to stop them." This is what emerges most
clearly in any situation involving capital; wherever a crisis erupts, no
matter what specific features characterize the individual state, one
encounters the same uncertainty between the forces which defend the
interests of capital, the movement of capital itself and the class
struggle. The class struggle in its various forms manifests itself in
any case, whether openly or underground, and to such a degree that it
spoils the day-to-day solutions adopted by the ruling class to protect
its interests. On December 5, 1980, the Financial Times offered clear
advice on what capital should do in Poland:
"The best way to deal with Poland is to internationalize it and to seek
a peaceful solution through international cooperation."
The internationalization of aid to Poland is an admission of the
weakness common to both branches of capital in the face of the economic
crisis and the class struggle. The commitment to prop up Poland so it
would not become a powder-keg could not be assumed by one country alone,
but needed the cooperation of all capitalist countries. It is obvious
that "saving Poland" meant saving Polish capital. Internationalization
was first and foremost a common agreement to defeat the class struggle
in order to make the workers again accept the legal status of their
exploitation under conditions appropriate to "their" country. Since the
return to "normalization" of exploitation involved profits, this also
meant the protection of all economic and financial interests and the
assurance that everything could proceed on a secure basis. With all
appropriate qualifications, this can be compared to the international
cooperation (including Russian) which smashed the Spanish workersâ
uprising in 1936-37.
Poland experienced the same intervention. Under the combined effects of
the world economic crisis, the class struggle and the blockage of any
reform, the country drifted steadily toward economic bankruptcy. The
debts owed to the West and to the East reached record heights; the gross
national product declined by 20% in two years. In the December 14, 1981
Newsweek, a French financial expert perceived a monetary crisis, a
crisis in balance of payments, a crisis in industrial structures due to
dependence on foreign markets both for supplies and for outlets, and an
agricultural crisis (one typical of "noncapitalist" agriculture),
complicated by a crisis in urban-rural relations. His conclusion was
that the West had "an interest, perhaps an obligation, to reduce the
risk of what could be the worst bloodbath in Europe since the Second
World War." When the representatives of capital talk like this, they are
not thinking of a world war, but of a bloodbath like the one ending the
Paris Commune, and of its innumerable and unforeseeable consequences in
a modern, industrialized world.
lf all else fails, this onerous task falls to Russia which, in the guise
of defending its strategic and imperialist interests, serves as
capitalâs watchdog in this part of the world. Russia was not, however,
in a position to intervene directly, as it had in Hungary in 1956 or in
Czechoslovakia in 1968; the dimensions of the Polish problem were
completely different. Poland ranks eleventh among world powers and this
country of 36 million people experienced a class struggle which lasted
eighteen months and which could not be vanquished. Furthermore, Russia
could not intervene because Russia itself was in the midst of a crisis.
As suggested earlier, the Polish situation pushed Russia further toward
ruin. Russia too was on the threshold of an economic reform whose
initial features appeared on January 1, 1982, when there were
significant price increases. Thus it also saw the advantages of a
peaceful solution reached through cooperation among capitalisms, as was
suggested by the Financial Times.
In fact, Jaruzelskiâs intervention on December 13, 1981, was greeted as
the last attempt to avoid the worst. "Western reactions to the actions
of the Polish authorities have been surprisingly calm," commented the
same Financial Times already on December 15. A German banker drew the
unambiguous conclusions for capital:
"What I say may be brutal, but I think that it was no longer possible
for the Polish government to govern the country. Goal production had
been considerably reduced, exports were only 20% of what they had been,
the country had practically come to a halt. I now see the likelihood of
Polandâs returning to a more normal functioning and this could be a good
thing for the banks."
In reality, the West as well as the East helped Jaruzelski put his house
in order. Russia, doubly concerned, provided material assistance to the
army and police in carrying out their mission for capital. Russia saw to
it that there were contributions from the Comecon countries, especially
from East Germany which by then was something like a rich relative and
had, more than Russia, a direct interest in the "normalization" of its
next door neighbor (no revolutionary contagion, more coal). The West
roused itself to "save Poland" with a deluge of hypocritical tears and
hatred which were processed by the medias. The facade of humanitarian
concerns quickly evaporated behind sordid discussions concerning "food
assistance," extension of the debt, new credits and fierce competition
for markets in the Eastern countries. One thing was clear; no-one did a
thing to diminish the harsh repression which fell on the Polish workers
or to hinder the attempt to "get the economy going" so that Poland could
fulfil its obligations toward capitalist countries in the West and East.
Poland was not the worst defaulter on debts. (Debts in 1982 in billions
of dollars: Brazil $88, Mexico $85, South Korea $39, Argentina $38,
Poland $25.) Polandâs debt disturbed Western Europe more than it did the
US; this explains the difference in response to the so-called economic
sanctions. The concern of the lending banks was not so much the
"bankruptcy" they cried so much about; a portion of their loans was
guaranteed by their own governments or by special organizations. (In the
US, for example, the government quickly repaid its banks the entire
amount overdrawn by Poland.) Jaruzelski was a savior to banks, and in
financial terms the West gained much more than Russia. The February 1,
1982 Financial Times stated explicitly:
"The West is right to withhold trade credits and rescheduling of debts
not as a punishment but because Poland in a state of profound political
conflict is a much worse risk than a Poland which is, within limits, at
peace with itself. Sooner or later that means reform."
Beneath all the bombast, this was the reality of capital. International
capital was waiting for the fire to be extinguished, or at least
contained, so it could determine how things could be made secure at the
financial level. Just as in Polandâs internal affairs, these spokesmen
were neither politicians nor economists but financiers, those who
expressed capitalâs direct interests. Finance Minister Krzak, Polandâs
representative in all the discussions dealing with the countryâs debt,
said,
"We speak a common language of roll-over, revolving credits and interest
accumulation ...We never talk about politics when negotiating with
Western bankers."
Having backed Poland up against a wall, the international financiers
looked to their national counterparts to carry out the expected task, to
assure adequate social peace so that the country would again be a
solvent client. (In September 1982, this solvency was still doubtful
since for 67% of Polandâs imports, cash was required; in 1981, cash was
required for just 28%.) As mentioned earlier, the economic confusion
itself was responsible for reducing demand for imported goods and this
had a snowballing effect, since the lack of parts or of raw materials
further diminished this demand. Poland was able to begin paying part of
its debts by exporting raw materials. Attempts to direct foreign trade
toward Comecon countries succeeded in shifting only 9% of the total.
The aim of capital is to increase capital; an industry operating at half
capacity cannot generate the requisite profits for self-financing and
for Western banks. Nevertheless, the sole capitalist solution to the
Polish crisis was "to get the machine working again." This situation
could not continue indefinitely; regular sources of supplies were needed
for the machine to operate "normally;" a minimal consensus on the part
of the workers was needed for them to agree to their own exploitation.
The rescheduling of the debt in 1983 and the hesitant recourse to new
credits for the re-launching of certain "modern" projects demonstrated
the commitment to resolve the economic crisis with assistance from
international capital. This meant that the Polish proletariat would be
largely responsible for bearing the costs of the restoration, and also
that the proletariat in every country would be increasingly exploited to
underwrite part of the losses imposed on capital as a whole by the
deferred debts and new credits. For the moment, capital has scored a
point in Poland. But has it really won? Everything remains to be done;
first of all, Polish workers have to produce "normally" (namely in
conditions appropriate to present-day capital). Internationalization
could come through direct financial channels; it could also come through
political channels in a repartitioned world where it would be easier to
directly repress the workers. If capital sees the solution to the Polish
crisis in internationalization, this is also the path for class struggle
â but not in the form of "solidarity with the Polish workers," which
would remain nothing but an ineffectual intention.
As long as each branch of capital fears that the repercussions of a
violent clash in Poland would upset the precarious equilibrium of its
power relations with its own workers, harsh solutions are unlikely in
Poland. The outcome depends on the effects of the international economic
crisis, of which the Polish crisis is one manifestation; it also depends
on struggles of workers everywhere within their own countries. This is
the surest path toward the internationalization of struggles in response
to the internationalization of their repression in Poland.