[The following was written in March 1980, before the recent strikes in Poland. It appeared in the September 11 issue of the French-language fortnightly Inprecor, published in Paris.]
Since the Polish United Workers Party (PUWP) leadership’s attempt to cut the living standards of working people at a single blow in June 1976, Poland has been living through a new crisis. The most obvious, daily symptoms of this crisis are economic and social: rising prices, chronic and acute shortages, especially of agricultural produce, a severe energy shortage, dislocations in industry, great strain on the social services – the housing shortage, shortages of medical supplies – heavy indebtedness to the bankers of the capitalist West, and so on.
But these economic and social problems are seen by many, of all different political persuasions, as symptoms of a deeper crisis of the whole social and political order in Poland, a more general crisis requiring new global solutions. The political regime has not itself come forward with any overall program of renewal, but the sudden fall of Piotr Jaroszewicz and Stefan Olszowski (Note 1) at the party congress is a clear indication that the regime’s political paralysis over the last four years has produced growing tensions at the summit of the party and state apparatus.
In these conditions the various political groupings within Polish society are beginning to define their own programs and strategies for overcoming the crisis and are starting to turn to those social groups inside and outside Poland which they hope will be the main agencies or allies for carrying through their programs.
Let us look at the diagnoses and proposed solutions to the various main political currents.
Economic Managers
The managerial elite responsible for organizing production is quite satisfied with the general arrangements within the Polish state under Edward Gierek, but it sees the main cause of the current crisis in the indolence and indiscipline of the Polish working class and in the absence of effective weapons for making Polish workers work harder. The most conscious currents among the economic managers, those who have raised their thinking to the level of overall programmatic solutions, have expressed themselves quite clearly in the pages of Polityka. They want the regime to attack one of the most basic gains of the Polish workers in the post-war period – the right to work. They want a pool of unemployed workers so that every worker feels the threat of unemployment. In this way they think that the workers will be forced to work harder, produce a larger surplus product enabling the regime to overcome the crisis.
The Party leadership has shrunk back from this program because it fears reaction of Polish workers to such a proposal. It knows that working people would resist unemployment with all their strength and it does not feel confident that it could win such a battle with the working class – Polish history suggests the contrary.
Catholic Hierarchy
The Catholic hierarchy offers its own diagnosis of the crisis and its own program for the solution of Poland’s problems. While Catholicism in Poland is embraced by people in every social group and of every political persuasion, the Church hierarchy has its own distinctive standpoint, corresponding to its collective interest in strengthening the Church as an organization and in increasing the hierarchy’s own influence over the course of events in Poland.
It is often said that the hierarchy is not political, that it is concerned with the salvation of souls not the affairs of the Polish state, but this is a naive view. The task of protecting and furthering the power of the Church makes every important event in Poland a matter of great concern to the hierarchy, which is not shy of attempting to exert influence to gain advantage for the Church from the turn of events. The fact that it does not use conventional political language and methods in order to achieve its ends does not alter in the slightest its deep involvement in politics.
What does the hierarchy want, what is its view of the crisis? First of all, despite its official anti-Communist ideology, the hierarchy is not seeking to overthrow the social and economic foundations of the Polish state as they were established at the end of the second world war. Nor is it seeking to overthrow the existing political regime or even to support those who are struggling to rid Poland of the bureaucratic dictatorship. As Cardinal Wyszynski said during President Carter’s visit to Poland in 1978, indicating the hierarchy’s thinking, “Gierek has the interests of Poland at heart.”
Why do the Polish bishops adopt this standpoint? Is it because such support for the existing regime is the duty of Catholic dignitaries everywhere? Certainly not. In many countries Catholic priests and bishops have played a very active and militant role in struggling for the rights of the oppressed. Why not in Poland?
Because the Polish hierarchy is thriving in Poland as part of the established order of society. It has great prestige and support within the population, its religious organization is able to function without repression and it feels itself to have a strong stake in the existing status quo.(Note 2) That is why the Catholic bishops seek only a quantitative expansion of their own powers, not a basic change in Polish society.
Cardinal Wyszynski’s policy is one of persuading the regime that it is in the PUWP’s own interest to increase the powers of the Church. Only the Church, he tells the party leadership, has the authority to make the Polish workers work harder. The bishops want the institutional rights of the Church to be expanded, especially through gaining greater access to the mass media and education. At the same time they want an end to atheist propaganda and they want to spread the influence of their social policies throughout the society – against homosexuality, against divorce, against contraception and above all against abortion. They label these things as morally degenerate and want their view of them to prevail in Polish society because in that way the influence of the Church will grow.
Some say that the Polish bishops stand for democratic freedoms and Polish independence. But when have they thrown their weight behind a struggle for these demands? Such aims had the best chance of success in 1956 and in 1970-71 and Polish students struggled for them in 1968. What was the record of Cardinal Wyszynski and the bishops in these crises? Was it not to urge all Poles to support Gomulka in 1956? Was it not to urge upon Polish workers that they should seek peace and reconciliation in December 1970 with a regime which had massacred hundreds of working people on the Baltic? And why did the hierarchy remain silent in the face of the vicious, anti-Semitic and reactionary campaign of Moczar in 1968? (Note 3) Is it not because the bishops put the narrow, institutional interests of the Church before the general interests of the working people of Poland and because they find the interests of the Church best served by peaceful coexistence with the bureaucratic dictatorship?
Reformist Intelllgentsia
Among the official intelligentsia in the fields of science and culture various diagnoses of the crisis and programs for its solution have been advanced. The most prominent of these groupings was that known as Experience and the Future. The letter to Gierek by Edvard Ochab and other former reformist leaders of the Communist Party is another example of such a program. A third that we could mention was the analysis of the economic crisis by a number of economists around the Committee for Social Self-Defense (KOR) produced with an introduction by Professor Lipinski in autumn 1978. All such programs have certain basic features in common.
All these programs rest on the assumption that the interests of the existing bureaucratic regime can be reconciled with the interests of working people in Poland. They take as their diagnosis the fact that errors have been made by the regime in the past and their programs offer a guide for the regime to correct these errors in the future.
They call for greater democracy within the existing political institutions and for economic reforms. In the case of the Ochab letter little is offered in the way of practical economic proposals, but there is a stress on the need for inner party democracy, the autonomy of the various existing parties in the National Front and greater choice in elections, as well as an opening of a real dialogue between the party and the masses.
In the case of the economists’ document, there is a suggestion for a sort of “Italian solution” to the crisis: that the working class should accept a cut in its living standards and austerity in return for some political concessions and reforms on the part of the regime. The proposed reforms on the part of Experience and the Future are of roughly the same sort.
What all these ideas have in common are the following assumptions:
1. that through persuasion, the regime can carry through a reform adequate to the tasks of reconciling its interests with those of working people in Poland;
2. that mass, working class mobilization and the creation of a working class movement entirely independent of the regime is not necessary;
3. that root and branch transformation of the political system in Poland is unnecessary.
Yet the experience of thirty-five years of post-war Poland suggests that such assumptions are profoundly mistaken. Each move for reform of the system from above has eventually run out of steam and been succeeded by a new, explosive crisis: this was true of the Gomulka regime after 1956 which ended ignominiously in the upheavals of 1970; it was true of the Gierek regime whose promises of lasting change were succeeded by the upheaval of June 1976 and the subsequent crisis.
Secondly, all the serious moves for reform at the top have been wrung from the regime through the extremely painful and costly struggles of the working class, whether in Poznan in 1956, on the Baltic and in Lodz in 1970-71 and in the great strike wave of June 1976. Each such working-class mobilization has been followed by strenuous efforts by the party leadership to bring the working class again under strong bureaucratic control and once that objective has been achieved all real impulses to political reform have been easily neutralized and destroyed.
Thirdly, the bureaucratic stranglehold over political and social life is not the product of erroneous thinking or erroneous policies on the part of this or that leadership team: it is rather the natural and necessary consequences of the monopolistic and monolithic political system as such. The structures of the system inevitably entail a gulf between the mass of working people and the regime. They inevitably produce a situation where, before the June 1976 upheaval all but one of the district party organizations reported to the party center that the proposed price increases would be accepted by the population!
During the last four years since the June strikes, unofficial opposition groups have emerged outside the framework of the PUWP, directly appealing for support from the mass of the population. These groups also have come forward with their diagnoses of the crisis and their programmatic answers to it. The two main types of programs advanced from these opposition groups have been nationalist programs and programs put forward by various leaders of the nationalist programs and programs put forward by various leaders of the KOR. We will look at each of these in turn, taking what we think are characteristic expressions of the views of these currents of opinion.
The most consistent and coherent expression of the nationalist program is that put forward by the Confederation for an Independent Poland (KPN) and by its main ideologist and leader, Leszek Moczulski. This current sees the fundamental source of all the problems faced by Polish society today as coming from Poland’s subordination to Russia at the end of the Second World War. In the words of the KPN’s founding declaration, that period saw “the final dismemberment of the republic, and the subordination of Poland to Soviet hegemony.”
The nationalists are of course right, and far from alone, in focusing on the crucial role played by the Soviet bureaucracy in determining the fate of the Polish people. Insofar as they diagnose the basic problems of Polish society as stemming from the bureaucratic form of state imposed upon the Polish people by the Soviet state they are absolutely right, (although some nationalists such as Moczulski, by denying the existence of a Polish state altogether and thereby equating Poland with the Ukraine or the Baltic republics, make a serious error of judgment).
However, in the field of programmatic solutions, the nationalists make fundamental errors. In the first place, they seek to divorce the struggle for national self-determination from all other international and domestic political and social problems. In the words of the founding declaration of the KPN, “The KPN unites the activities and the efforts leading towards independence. It assembles various groupings with different outlooks on various ideological, social and political questions, yet is faithful to the overriding aim of independence.”
This notion that in the national struggle all social groups and political tendencies can be united is quite unrealistic. In reality, as Jacek Kuron has pointed out there are powerful forces within Polish society, by no means confined to the leading group in the PUWP, which have a basic stake in the existing bureaucratic dictatorship. There are also groups and forces in Polish society who would like to replace the present oppression of the Polish workers with another form of oppression, through the restoration of the old Pilsudski (Note 4) order of the pre-war years, a regime which bound the Polish economy hand and foot to the capitalist interests of Britain, France, and Germany.
Secondly, the notion that independence is the absolute value to which all other issues are subordinated overlooks the fact that nationalism is the religion of the state machine and it is a popular religion within the Polish state bureaucracy itself. The possibilities of currents like that of Ceausescu in Romania coming to the surface within the bureaucratic dictatorship itself cannot be ruled out. And would such a bureaucratic nationalist regime help the Polish working people? Not in the least. National independence cannot be an absolute value for those who struggle for a better life for the working people of Poland. It is only a lever for gaining real, material advances in the economic, social, political, and cultural life of the working people of Poland. And once the yoke of Soviet domination has been thrown off, these real advances will require the closest possible cooperation between the Polish working people and the peoples of the surrounding countries of Eastern Europe.
In the long term such cooperation can best be expressed through the establishment of a federation of the peoples of Eastern Europe. And in this context it will be vital that the Polish people struggle today in the closest collaboration with the other oppressed peoples of Eastern Europe and of the Soviet Union itself, against the yoke of the Stalinist bureaucracy. And it will also be a crucial task to help to stimulate and to support the struggle of Russian working people themselves to overthrow the Russian Stalinist regime. The idea that the Russian workers and farmers benefit from the oppressive Russian chauvinist regime in Moscow and would suffer from its overthrow is completely false.
In this struggle for national self-determination, it should not be forgotten that pre-war Polish nationalism was itself deeply reactionary and chauvinist. The record of National Democracy was one of unremitting persecution of the Polish jews. Pilsudski systematically oppressed the Ukrainian and Belorussian communities, refusing to recognize their right to self-determination. In order to establish a real cooperation with the other peoples of Eastern Europe in the vital, international struggle to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy it is necessary to repudiate this reactionary nationalist tradition.
Committee for Social Self-Defense
The KOR, which is organized as a “self-defense committee,” does not present itself as a political grouping with an overall program for the solution of the crisis. Yet the form and name of the committee do suggest a general line of action and the committee does attempt to speak on behalf of society as a whole.
When KOR was first formed as a defense committee campaigning for the unconditional release of all the workers jailed in June 1976 and for a Sejm inquiry into police brutality against the strikers and their families and friends, it was performing an absolutely essential function, taking up one central problem of the day and attempting to mobilize all possible people around its demands. But when the KOR had succeeded in gaining the release of the imprisoned workers it entirely transformed its function by becoming a general “social self-defense” body, speaking out on all manner of issues affecting the various social groups.
The general theme on which all members of KOR seem to be agreed is that the problems of Polish society stem from the divorce between the political regime and the society, and from the regime’s role in stifling social initiative. Their consequent starting point for a solution to the crisis is for society to organize itself so that it can defend itself against the anti-democratic actions of the state. In the KOR’s “Appeal to the Nation of October 10, 1978” – perhaps the committee’s most comprehensive statement of its collective political views – the KOR states: “We consider it our duty to turn to the Polish people with an assessment of the situation and an attempt to indicate remedial measures within their reach.”
The appeal proceeds very correctly to examine the crisis in the country from the standpoint of the real lives of working people: the covert inflation, the crisis of the health service, the housing crisis, the ever increasing pressure for greater work bearing down on the workers, the lawlessness of the repressive and judicial organs, the strangulation of cultural life by the party dictatorship, increasing social inequalities, the agricultural crisis, the authorities’ systematic falsification of the situation in the country, and the arbitrary nature of political decision-making.
But the appeal is far less decisive in spelling out a program to solve the crisis. Its central programmatic objective is spelled out in the following terms: “The objective is to secure the freedom of convictions, freedom of speech and information, the freedom of assemblies and meetings, the freedom of the press, the responsibility of the state authorities towards society. Action aimed at attaining this objective should create social links, consistently destroyed in a system of a monopolistic, centralized rule.”
The appeal further links itself with the opinions expressed in the Declaration of the Democratic Movement, published in October 1977 in the first issue of the unofficial magazine Glos and signed by more than 100 people. This declaration champions the following demands: freedom of convictions, freedom of speech and information, freedom of union association and assembly, “the freedom to work,” the right to strike. Through winning these demands, the declaration envisages the working out of methods of “social cooperation.” It also looks forward to “authentic elections” and it sums up its basic objectives in the following words: “... at the present time it is possible to undertake the struggle for democracy and sovereignty on a wider scale and in a lasting manner. We the undersigned are convinced that this program can be realized here and now....”
The call contained in these statements for democratic liberties and for sovereignty should be accepted by all concerned with overcoming the crisis. But what exactly do these demands involve? What social and political regime does the KOR envisage as necessary in order to give these demands life? Can they be won through improving the existing political system or through overthrowing it? Can they be won through agreement with the Soviet regime or through a root and branch struggle against it for an alternative to it? Should the socioeconomic foundations of Polish society remain those of a planned economy, or should these foundations be replaced by a new Western capitalist system? Which social groups stand to gain from the achievement of KOR’s aims, which social groups stand to lose? In other words, which social forces does the KOR seek to gain support from in order to carry its aims through to a successful conclusion?
These are surely the crucial programmatic issues which an opposition group such as the KOR must surely confront and answer. Yet KOR as a group has systematically avoided any clear answer to these problems. It has on the one hand rejected any solution to the crisis which involves making working people in Poland foot the bill for the crisis. But it has evaded the question of who exactly must foot the bill, and how big the bill for the crisis must be. It has, in other words, evaded the question of political power.
Yet this problem of political power is absolutely fundamental for the working people of Poland. Can the present system of power and the social groups which have a stake in it be remoulded to accomodate wide democratic rights and national sovereignty? If so the road towards a solution of the crisis can be quite short and fairly painless, provided “irresponsible” elements do not disrupt the process of reform. If not, if the present system must be broken up and overthrown, then the anti-bureaucratic forces must embark on quite a different road, must spell out concretely what alternative system they are struggling for, why it can work, and the methods that must be used to destroy the existing order and construct the new one. The KOR does not spell out such an alternative. At the same time, it does not indicate that the existing order can incorporate its ideals. It leaves these basic programmatic issues unresolved.
Footnotes
1. Stefan Olszowskl was dumped in February 1980 at the last conference of the PUWP. He was sent to East Germany. He has just been taken back into the PUWP Politbureau.
2. The appeal made by Wyszynski at the time of the Czestochowa pilgrimage on August 26 most clearly illustrates the line of the religious hierarchy. “I think that there are times when you should not demand too much, as long as there is order in Poland. This is all the more true when the demands, although they are just, and for the most part they are, cannot be met immediately.”
3. General Mieczylsaw Moczar, a nationalist and anti-Semite, was one of the main persons responsible for the repressive measures in 1968.
4. Marshall Jozef Pilsudski took power in Poland in a military coup in May 1926.
Source: https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1980/IP1839.pdf#page=29&view=FitV,3