1. After two months of strikes involving more than two million workers, the Polish working class won a magnificent victory. For the first time since the establishment of the Stalinist totalitarian bureaucratic dictatorship in the USSR, later extended to Eastern Europe, the working class has won in struggle the right to organizations of its own, the right to strike, the partial lifting of censorship, access to the mass media, greater religious freedom, the liberation of political prisoners persecuted for their solidarity with the strikers, and the admission by the bureaucracy of the existence of exorbitant material privileges. This is a victory of historic significance for the Polish working class and the workers everywhere.
Despite all the efforts of the bureaucracy to isolate and divide the strikers—blacking out information, conceding some things to some workers and not to others, and desperately attempting to prevent any centralization of the strikes—the Polish workers have given proof of a remarkable solidarity and sense of class organization.
The strikes began in the Ursus factory, which had been in the forefront of the struggle in 1976. The movement spread from one industrial center to another. At first, a network of correspondents, which arose in the aftermath of the .1970 and 1976 strikes and was linked to the newspaper Robotnik, spread the news on the successes of the first strikes. Later, semiclandestine, semitolerated worker mobilizing committees arose in several factories and helped extend the movement.
Right from July 17, with the strike of the Lublin railway workers—sixty kilometers from the Soviet border—the movement took on the character of a quasi-general strike, involving seventeen factories and paralysing the economic life of that city. When the strike movement reached the Baltic ports, the sector of the working class which had the most experience in the strikes of 1970 and 1976, it achieved a higher level of organization and politicalization. Strike committees (MKS) linking different workplaces appeared. The MKS in the Gdansk-Gdynia-Sopot region was composed of 800 delegates from 500 workplaces, and met around the clock in the Lenin shipyards. It became a true workers council. The example of this MKS was emulated in many other areas. In Upper Silesia, which came into the struggle later, the strikers, who had great weight given the decisive role of coal in Poland's economic life (coal exports earn the largest portion of foreign exchange), formed a MKS with delegates from seventy-two workplaces. The miners won an even greater victory than in Gdansk. The twenty-one demands of the Gdansk MKS served as a model for the workers' demands in many other areas. The centralization of all the MKS's of the country into a single central committee of the strike was on the agenda when the bureaucracy capitulated to the Gdansk strikers.
The strikers and their leadership displayed a good sense of tactics, realistically evaluating the relationship of forces and the nature of the bureaucracy. They did not let themselves get taken in by any provocation. They transformed the factories into bastions of the working class, refusing to negotiate anywhere else, refusing to negotiate at the Communist Party or government offices. They avoided street confrontations. Building their own organizations in the course of the struggle, relying on mass democratic meetings and choosing correct tactics all went hand in. hand. Negotiations were conducted under the control of the strikers. Regular mass meetings of the workers critically examined each step in full and unrestricted democratic debate.
The strikers compromised on demands that the bureaucracy would not have been able to concede without committing immediate suicide or provoking an open rupture with the Kremlin. They took account of the fact that while there was universal sympathy with the strikes, only a minority of the working class was directly involved. Furthermore, they had to weigh the danger of direct Kremlin intervention. In the given relation of forces, it was a question of consolidating their autonomous organizations, an initial victory against the bureaucracy, without immediately facing a showdown confrontation with it. The results speak for themselves. While the total number of strikers was not more than two million, there is already double that number now in the "self-managed" trade unions, as the workers call them. Thanks to its exemplary struggle of July-August 1980, the Polish workers have reached a higher level of organization now than during the strike itself.
2. The extent of the workers' victory can be explained by the breadth of the struggle, the high level of organization achieved, the enormous sympathy throughout the country, and by the changes in the international and national relationship of forces, which are a lot more favorable than in 1956 or 1970.
The deepening crisis of capitalism and of Stalinism, the resistance of the West European working class to the austerity offensive of capital, the fall of the Somoza and shah dictatorships under the blows of the masses, the criticisms of some aspects of the Kremlin's undemocratic practices by the Western European Communist parties, the long-term repercussions of the Soviet invasion of Czecholovakia—and all those factors which contribute to the modification of the international relationship of forces to the detriment of imperialism and capitalism, including the new gains of the world revolution—makes a Soviet invasion more difficult in Poland.
It would be irresponsible to discount the danger of such an invasion. But it would be more difficult than in the past, and the Soviet bureaucracy would pay a much higher price, including within the Soviet Union itself. The international context as a whole has encouraged the Polish workers and helped force the Polish bureaucracy to make real concessions.
Within Poland, there has been a modification of the social relationship of forces. The working class is now the majority class in the country. There has been a reduction in the weight of the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie compared to what it was in 1956. There has been an extention of industrialization and urbanization, and an elevation of the cultural and educational level of the proletariat, etc.
Inside the working class, a layer of vanguard militants has appeared, experienced and battle-hardened through the antibureaucratic struggles of 1970, 1976, and 1980. They have lost a substantial part of their illusions in the possibility of the bureaucracy reforming itself, illusions that were much in evidence in 1956 (the Gomulka experience) and 1970 (the Gierek experience).
The bureaucracy finds itself in an economic impasse, which limits its capacity for maneuver. After the 1970 crisis, the regime first of all stimulated an economic boom, stoked by a growing debt to the capitalist countries. It tried to use the rise in the standard of living of the workers as a basis for restabilizing its control over them. However, the waste and negligence of the bureaucracy, the duplications of investment and "regional and enterprise egoism," inevitable in the absence of true control by the workers, as well as the effects of the capitalist economic crisis that the bureaucracy did not foresee—all ended up in exacerbating economic difficulties (in particular concerning the supply of foodstuffs and consumer goods to the workers) that the regime tried to resolve on two occassions, in 1976 and 1979-80, by a cut in the workers' living standards. Both times the workers responded, with increasing power.
The bureaucracy failed to divide the antibureaucratic opposition. No political alternative with any credibility in the eyes of the masses was put forward by any faction of the CP. In 1968, the student and intellectual opposition in solidarity with the "Prague spring" remained largely isolated from the working class. On the other hand, the 1970 workers' revolt found practically no echo in the intelligentsia. Between 1976 and 1979, however, the prestige of Gierek was undermined by the 1976 strikes and the concessions he was forced to make. A political opposition was rebuilt among some intellectuals, which won in practice the right to semilegal expression (KOR, Robotnik, Catholic intellectuals, nationalist groups). In and around the CP itself timid opposition tendencies reappeared, incapable however of presenting a platform or leader with mass support. So while many opposition intellectual and Church tendencies were ready to avoid any direct confrontation with the bureaucracy or any mass struggle, being content to pressure the bureaucracy, the enormous wave of workers' struggles in the summer of 1980 has qualitatively modified the situation. In fact it unified the immense majority of the people of the city and countryside in support of the workers' strikes.
Thus, while practically the whole country was conscious of the deep crisis that was rocking society, it was the working class, in struggle, which won social hegemony of the antibureaucratic opposition. Leaving aside the first weeks that followed the invasion of Hungary by Soviet troops in November 1956, this was the first time this occurred with such breadth and duration in a Stalinist totalitarian workers state. This augurs well for the future political revolution in the USSR where the social relationship of forces is substantially comparable to Poland, if not even better.
It is not the social counterrevolution, the restoration of capitalism—which has only a miniscule social base in Poland—which is on the agenda. What is on the agenda is the replacement of the totalitarian dictatorship of the bureaucracy by the working class through its own democratic organizations. The social and economic basis of the workers state would not be challenged for an instant, as has already been admirably confirmed (after Hungary and Czechoslovakia) by the comportment of the Polish strikers throughout the summer of 1980. The objective thrust of the struggle of the Polish workers is workers democracy and socialism.
3. Even though the Polish workers have achieved a great victory, they have not yet won the final victory over the bureaucracy. The latter remains master of the state apparatus. It continues to control the social surplus, and therefore all the decisive sectors of social activity. The power of the bureaucracy has not been overturned. It has been contested, shaken, and obliged to make concessions that a short time ago would have been unimaginable. But its power remains.
The concessions won by the Polish working class are in the long-run incompatible with the continued rule of the bureaucratic caste. The bureaucracy is not a new ruling class. It does not play an economically irreplaceable role in society. The working class is perfectly capable of exercizing the leadership functions that the bureaucratic caste has usurped. The totalitarian bureaucratic dictatorship can only continue in the long-run on the basis of the political passivity and atomization of the working class. If the workers continue to massively challenge bureaucratic management, it will be condemned.
That is why the appearance of a massively organized workers movement involving millions constitutes a death threat for the totalitarian dictatorship. The two cannot live together for very long. Either an independent working class, through a successive series of confrontations, abolishes the political power of the bureaucracy and carries out a victorious anti-bureaucratic political revolution, establishing the political power of democratically elected and centralized workers councils; or else the Polish bureaucracy, powerfully supported by and spurred on in this direction by the Soviet Union and the "brother countries" of Eastern Europe, will liquidate one by one the concessions seized by the workers at the end of August and early September.
With such a future confrontation looming, currents inside the political opposition in Poland, within the working class, and even among the vanguard who led the strike are trying to avoid it by seeking to restrict the activity of the new independent trade unions to only defending the workers' immediate economic interests. The bureaucracy, from its side, is pushing in the same direction, as part of its attempts to corrupt, limit, and eventually liquidate the conquests of the summer of 1980.
But this is doomed to failure. In a society founded upon the nationalization of the principal means of production and exchange, any economic question automatically becomes a political one. Any broadbased workers' demands in the domain of consumption, immediately raises questions concerning the reorganization of production, of economic policy, of the plan, and the modification of the distribution of the national income and the national product between the major sectors (funds of consumption and funds of investment; productive consumption funds and unproductive consumption funds; investment funds in industry and in agriculture, in production and in distribution and transport; individual consumption funds and social consumption funds, etc.)
The Polish workers are perfectly conscious of the flagrant imbalances introduced in the economy by the irrational investment decisions inherent in bureaucratic planning, by the wastage, negligence, and arbitrary nature of such planning, which does not enjoy the corrective of control by the masses. The workers have given two answers to the argument that "any increase in wages not linked to a rise in production leads automatically to inflation, thereby hardly increasing the standard of living of the masses."
First, they have pointed out, not only workers consume, but also the well-off bureaucrats and the rich petty bourgeoisie. In reducing the part going to them, by cutting down their privileges and increasing equality, workers consumption can be increased without necessarily increasing production.
Second, increasing production is not necessarily tied to a new increase in investment paid for by a reduction in workers' consumption. It can also be obtained by a better use of the notoriously underutil ized productive resources, by a better equilibrium between agricultural and industrial production, by the elimination of the abuses of bureaucratic management, which results in the indifference shown by the workers to production.
This manner of posing the question of the causes of the Polish economic crisis goes in the direction of workers' control, a demand which has already been made in many factories and cities.
In other words, within the framework of a workers state like Poland today, any immediate economic demands by the workers end up becoming an alternative economic policy to that of the bureaucracy. This could be seen quite clearly in the initial twenty-one demands of the Gdansk MKS. It is still too early to say whether the formulation of such alternative economic policies will be raised through the new trade unions or other organs such as the "works councils," which still legally exist in legislation dating from 1945 and 1956 (although they have ceased to be independent organs of the working class). But whatever might be the body that expresses the workers' desire for a different economic and social policy from the bureaucracy, it is this trend itself and not the specific body that is incompatable with the power of the rule of the bureaucracy. But in a workers state, any independent mass organization of the workers will tend to go in this direction. That is why the conflict between independent trade unions born in the summer of 1980 and the bureaucratic dictatorship is inevitable. One of them is forced to eliminate the other.
Right after the agreements of August and early September, the bureaucracy was seeking to nibble away at the gains of the strike. It systematically obstructed the construction of the new "self-managed" trade unions outside of the Baltic port region. Everywhere, and including in Gdansk, it tried to hinder, if not to prevent the appearance of a workers' press controlled by the workers themselves. It put pressure on the workers by threatening them with a loss of their social benefits in the event of disaffiliating from the "official" trade unions. Or it tried to transform the latter, headed by leaders nominated from above, into integral parts of the new independent unions in order to weaken them.
We are seeing only the first skirmishes. Other and much sharper confrontations will come, including the use of repression. The workers have so far replied tit for tat, not hesitating to threaten strikes or to actually strike again in order to force respect for the August-September agreements.
4. The struggle against the political power of the bureaucracy is hampered and complicated by the contradiction between the striking force, self-confidence, and capacity of organization of the working class on the one side, and the unevenness and insufficiency of its political class consciousness on the other side. The uneven development of the workers' upsurge in Eastern Europe operates in the same direction. That is without any doubt the principal contradiction of the present crisis in Poland, without which the power of the bureaucracy would have been brushed aside in a single blow.
This contradiction is expressed at two levels. First of all, within the "self-managed" independent trade union itself it is necessary to distinguish at least three distinct groups of workers: those who have gone through the most advanced forms of organization in August and September (above all the workers on the Baltic coast and Upper Silesia, but doubtlessly also those of Ursus and some other key factories); those who participated in the July-toSeptember strike movement without reaching such forms of organization; and those who didn't go on strike in the summer of 1980, while joining the new trade unions afterwards, notably the majority of workers of Warsaw and Lodz, the two main industrial centers of the country. The weight of the workers' vanguard, and particularly that of workers' leaders recognized as such by the broad masses, is definitely different according to these three categories.
Furthermore, for the large majority of the Polish workers, there is a striking contrast between a class instinct, a remarkable elementary class consciousness and low political class consciousness. In other words, an important part of the Polish proletariat is still marked by a pronounced political-ideological confusion. This is shown by the very strong influence of religion and of the Catholic clergy among the workers, by the presence of petty-bourgeois nationalist currents, by the influence of anarcho-syndicalist tendencies to the left of the independent workers movement now being built.
The fundamental cause of this political-ideological confusion in no way resides in the pressure of the petty-bourgeois peasant milieu in Poland itself or in the pressure of a surrounding capitalist world. On the contrary, before the Second World War, when these pressures were much stronger than at the moment, the Polish working class was one of the most advanced of Europe from the point of view of level of political consciousness.
The political tradition of the Polish workers movement is one of the most impressive and glorious. It was among the Jewish workers of Poland that the first socialist organization in tsarist Russia was born, the Bund, which gave birth to the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, out of which Bolshevism arose. At the time of the Second International, the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania of Rosa Luxemburg educated revolutionary socialist cadre who helped spread communism in at least three countries. Alongside the Russian Bolsheviks and the German Spartacists, the Polish internationalists were in the vanguard of Zimmerwald and of the struggle against social patriotism. In the 1918-25 period, the Polish CP was one of the most influential of Europe.
The fundamental cause of this present political and ideological confusion is the disastrous effects of Stalinism on the Polish workers movement in the course of the last forty years.
Stalinism began by destroying the moral and political integrity of the CP by the support given to the Pilsudski coup d'état in 1926. It followed this disastrous work by a blind factional sectarianism that isolated the party more and more from the working class. Then it formally dissolved the CP and physically exterminated nearly all its leading cadres in the 1937-41 period. It put into power mediocre bureaucrats, who were corrupt and unconditional supporters of the Kremlin, most of them brought into Poland by a foreign army identified by the masses with foreign agents. Finally, in the course of the last thirty years, it has systematically "educated" the proletariat in a chauvinist spirit against the true internationalist tradition of the Polish workers movement, smothered any sign of autonomy or critical action from the workers, and since 1956 elevated the activity of the Catholic church hierarchy to the level of the only quasilegal mass opposition in the country, while continuing to submit the church to a thousand petty interferences.
It is not surprising that in these conditions, where Marxism has been perverted into an apology for totalitarian bureaucratic rule, that religion appears more attractive in the eyes of the masses than any ideology that seems to be identified with detested bureaucratic dictatorship.
This ideological confusion means that even though the working class has already conquered social hegemony inside the anti-bureaucratic opposition, which takes in the immense majority of the Polish nation, it has not yet conquered political hegemony inside the opposition. The political evolution of the country in the months and years to come, the outcome of the confrontation with the bureaucracy, the chances of the success of the coming political revolution—all depend to a large extent on the capacity of the working class to reconquer, after its organizational independence, its class political independence, that is, a clear conception of the alternative of socialist democracy to the Stalinist bureaucratic dictatorship.
This reconquest will be greatly furthered by the existence of the mass organizations in the process of being built and by the experience of struggle that the workers are going through. The presence of a revolutionary Marxist current rooted in the working class, supporting all the demands and struggles of the masses and resting firmly on the fundamental program will play without a doubt an important role.
To be able to combat the obscurantist influence of Catholic and petty-bourgeois ideologies in the working class, revolutionary Marxists must above all understand the specific conditions in which the political awakening of the Polish working class is taking place. This gives particular importance for all those who support Marxism, authentic communism, to intransigently defend democratic rights on the widest level for the working masses. We defend not only the right to strike and freedom of organization, including political organization, but also freedom of assembly, of the press, and unrestricted freedom of religion. Far from criticizing or opposing the access of the church to radio and television won by the Gdansk strikers, we welcome this as a step forward along the road of breaking the monopoly of the bureaucracy on the mass media. We demand that what is rightly accorded to the Catholic current also be accorded to all the currents present in the working class and the opposition: to the Committee for Social Self-Defense (KOR), to the trade unionist currents, to various socialist currents, to the communist opposition.
To combat religion and the clergy with administrative and repressive means is totally counterproductive and only reinforces their weight inside the masses. The only efficient struggle against reactionary ideology is by open ideological and political debate, obliging the hierarchy to give their position on the big day-to-day political problems (like the call to order and for a return to work by Cardinal Wyszyinski in August; like the positions taken by the clergy against birth control and abortion). This will help reduce its influence inside the proletariat and the youth, providing that there are other mass alternatives to Stalinism.
Furthermore, the accusations concerning the role of the church and of petty-bourgeois forces in the strikes and the antibureaucratic opposition are pure hypocrisy. Apologists of the bureaucratic dictatorship quite easily find a common political language with those forces. It is the bureaucracy's appeal to the "national interest" and to nationalism, its refusal to base itself clearly on the interests of the working class, that allows the most flexible wing of the bureaucracy to have an echo within the intelligentsia and the Catholic hierarchy and among a section of the workers. But the more the independent organization and self-confidence of the working class progresses, the more that such ideas will lose influence inside the workers movement.
5. Two other social classes have weight in post-capitalist Polish society, although very much less than that of the proletariat the peasantry and the urban petty bourgeoisie.
The Polish peasantry is socially weaker than it was in 1939 or in 1956. Having won the end of forced collectivization and the return to private property in 1956, it is today extremely differentiated. The majority of the small peasants are very poor and only have about one to one-and-a-half hectares of land, which is exploited in an archaic way without the use of mechanical tools. It has already led important struggles, like the milk strike in 1978. It is beginning to organize itself. This mass of small peasants understand the well-founded greivances of the workers' strikes of the summer of 1980 and openly solidarized with them. They have begun to develop their own organizations, analogous to the "self-managed" independent trade unions, which can work out a solution in common with the organized workers to the most urgent problems of supplying the cities with foodstuffs and the countryside with industrial products.
Collaboration by such independent "self-managed" organizations in the present period will prepare the terrain for a solid workers' and peasants' alliance. After the victory of the political revolution, the creation of peasant cooperatives by the poor farmers, freely and without any force and with the massive introduction of modern agricultural machines into the cooperatives, would ensure their members, right from the beginning, a level of life and culture superior to their present misery.
Thus the links that are set up now between independent workers trade unions and the poor peasant independent trade unions can end up in the cooperation of the workers councils and the poor peasants committees in the democratic socialist Poland of tomorrow. The presence inside the villages of a semiproletariat of 3 to 4 million—small peasants who are at the same time salaried workers working in the towns—creates a natural social link between the two classes that facilitates the appearance of peasant trade unions first of all and peasant councils later.
Alongside this mass of small peasants there is a minority of well-off farmers who have manifestly enriched themselves in the course of the last twenty-five years. They have about ten to twenty-five hectares per farm and much machinery, which allows them to carry out modern agriculture in a profitable way. This richer peasantry welcomed the 1956 reforms as a big victory. It is at one and the same time strongly linked to the bureaucracy (into which it is well integrated, especially on a local level) and the Catholic hierarchy between whom it constitutes a social intermediary link. It is this layer which has the monopoly of the surplus foodstuffs with which it both supplies the cities and can export. It is urgent that the working class emancipate itself from this dependence on this layer of rich farmers by the development of a modern cooperative sector, with a high productivity of labor, which can come out of a reconstituted worker-peasant alliance.
The rapid development of industrialization, urbanization, and of literacy has produced a petty-bourgeois intellectual layer that is much bigger than in the past, to which we can add, especially since the 1956 and 1970-71 reforms, a layer of independent minientrepreneurs in the service sector who have quickly enriched themselves like the well-off peasants.
While the latter exists in a state of symbiosis with the bureaucracy, based above all on corruption and reciprocal favors, it has a contradictory relationship with the dictatorship. While it has shown on several occasions (in 1956, 1968, 197071, and 1976) a spirit of irreverent critique, which finds a particularly clear expression in the artistic world (cinema, theater, posters, and poetry) and in certain social sciences, it is particularly partial to the nationalist arguments of the regime and has only weak links with Marxism.
This layer, which accepts a series of the political axioms of the bureaucracy, had a tendency between 1977 and 1980 to consider an anti-working-class austerity policy inevitable. It willingly concedes to the blackmail of the "Soviet intervention" argument against workers' struggles. Its influence is felt even within the KOR. But the bracing experience of the big workers' strikes of the summer of 1980 will no doubt provoke a new differentiation within the intelligentsia. The glorious tradition of Polish Marxism, destroyed by Stalinism, will rise again among the workers primarily, but will also be embraced by those intellectuals ready to place themselves firmly in the workers' camp.
6. The Polish bureaucracy has been deeply shaken by the strike wave and was more and more divided on what response to give to it. This division became a panic when the specter of a national general strike appeared. The capitulation of August-September can only be explained in the light of this panic.
The tactic finally opted for by the bureaucracy was to stop the movement at any price, since it could not repress it, contain it, or divide it—with a view to taking back the concessions later on when the movement would be in reflux. Within this process a big reshuffle of the top structures was also necessary. The more and more complex tactical problems that an independent workers movement that is not in reflux, but rather in full expansion, will pose for the bureaucracy will no doubt cause many new divisions and reshuffles.
The Soviet bureaucracy was first of all irritated by the manifest incapacity of its Polish ally to reestablish control over the working class, then deeply worried by the extent of the concessions that the Polish regime had to give to the strikers. It rightly fears the international repercussions of these concessions in other "people's democracies," and even in the USSR itself.
It reacted on several levels at the same time: drowning in silence the fact that the strikes took place, their importance, the strikers' demands, and the content of the agreements; grossly slandering the strikers, the MKS, and especially the independent "self-managed" unions as being manipulated by "infiltrated antisocialist elements," which also is a calumny against the Polish working class itself (4 million workers with full workers' democracy were supposedly manipulated by the enemy); threatening to withhold economic aid and thinly veiled blackmail with regard to military intervention; and trying to line up all the bureaucratic regimes in Eastern Europe in a common block against the "Polish virus."
Up to now it has scored some points with this tactic. Despite some sort of show of "independence" by the Kádár regime in Hungary, the bureaucracies of the "people's democracies," who are all threatened by an awakening of their own working class inspired by the Polish example, have all aligned themselves with the Kremlin. They are all pressuring Warsaw toward a gradual "normalization" of the situation. It is true that the East German bureaucracy, whose population has been fully informed of the Polish events thanks to its access to West German radio and television, has not been able to hide the demands of the Polish workers from the East German proletariat, nor the extent of the victory that has been won by them. But that did not prevent them shrieking in alarm against the "antisocialist" elements who were "teleguiding the MKS"—in the same way as the bureaucrats of Prague, Sofia, and Bucharest.
For its own reasons, the Chinese bureaucracy has taken a different line. It publicized the strikers' demands sympathetically, apparently to prepare the Chinese population for a big mobilization against what it thought would be a rapid Soviet intervention. This has already boomeranged, with Chinese workers in many factories asking for the same rights as those that the Polish workers have won.
For the moment, the Kremlin is still counting on the Warsaw bureaucracy taking back under control the Polish working class step by step, while preparing the terrain for a more radical solution. The more that the Polish bureaucracy is seen to be powerless to stop the organization and politicization of the working class in Poland, the more this upsurge has repercussions in other bureaucratized workers states, the stronger will be the temptation of a military intervention by the Kremlin. That remains technically and politically possible, as long as the political revolution does not develop in several of the "people's democracies" at the same time and the awakening of mass political activity does not affect the Soviet proletariat itself.
But it is precisely in this direction that the logic of the crisis of Stalinism and the totalitarian dictatorship in all these countries is heading. The first direct repercussions of the Polish strikes were modest: the strike of the Reichsbahn workers of East Germany (who live, however, in West Berlin); and the solidarity movements among groups of dissidents and some small groups of young people in several Eastern European countries. But the more that the existence, the legal functioning, the program, the effective role of the independent "self-managed" Polish trade unions are known, the more their force of attraction will influence sectors of the working class in the "people's democracies" and the USSR.
That is why time is on the side of the Polish working class, as long as its mass movement and activity do not regress. The international extension of this movement is the only guarantee against a military intervention of the Kremlin. That is why a real proletarian internationalism is today an obvious political requirement for the Polish working class.
The bourgeoisies of capitalist Europe and imperialism as a whole have been just as frightened as the bureaucracies of the USSR and the "people's democracies" by the upsurge of the Polish working class. They are worried about the impact this example will have on the working class of their own countries, the risk that the workers of Western Europe, North America, and Japan will respond "Polish style" to the austerity measures of the capitalists. This fear goes along with that of the trade union bureaucracies, the CPs and SPs, that the workers of the capitalist countries will demand "self-managed" unions, that is, trade-union democracy and strike committees democratically elected in mass meetings of strikers like the Polish workers did. That is why, while giving "verbal" support to the Polish strikers and while looking to exploit the strikes for anticommunist propaganda ends, all the conservative forces—including the leaders of the so-called Eurocommunist parties—have welcomed with relief the end of the strikes and the "intelligence" of Warsaw in avoiding a frontal conflict.
The de facto support given by the international bourgeoisie to the Warsaw regime was not limited to platonic declarations. It also took the form of more than a thousand million dollar loan given to the Polish bureaucracy in order to permit it to get through the immediate difficulties of paying the servicing of the colossal external debt and to allow it some room to maneuver both in relation to the Polish workers and to the Kremlin's pressure.
The bourgeoisie, as much as the bureaucracy, fears as a mortal threat a victorious antibureaucratic political revolution in Poland, which would be a powerful stimulus for the socialist revolution in Western Europe and for the extension of the political revolution in Eastern Europe and the USSR too. The whole framework of the fragmentation of the European proletariat, created at Yalta and at Potsdam, would be threatened.
To those who say that overturning the power of the bureaucratic caste in Warsaw would threaten Europe and the world with a third world war, we reply that this is a shameless lie. The stronger and more active is the working class of Eastern Europe and throughout the world, the more the specter of a third world war retreats. When the working class is mobilized in its millions, as in France in 1968 and Poland in 1980, that is the best barrier against the mad suicide of a world war. Proletarian victories in Europe, East or West, will have deep repercussions inside the American and Soviet proletariat. Those who contribute to, encourage, or tolerate the nuclear arms race and those who demoralize, divide, and condemn the working class to passivity actually encourage the imperialist war drive—not those who are going down the road of the working class taking and exercising power.
7. The strike and the victory of the two million Polish workers underlines the growing importance of the antibureaucratic political revolution in the overall process of the world revolution. It confirms more and more the dominant role that the proletariat already plays inside all three sectors of the world revolution: the permanent revolution in the semicolonial countries; the proletarian revolution in the imperialist countries, and the political revolution in the totalitarian workers states. It has given another crushing refutation of all those ideologues, who, analyzing history in terms of their own personal disappointment, are tempted to reject the proletariat, since the uneven rhythm of the world revolution does not respect their arbitrary and preconceived timetables and schemes. After May 1968, after more than ten years of exemplary militancy of the Italian working class, after the magnificent upsurge of the Brazilian working class, after the spectacular urban insurrection in Iran and Nicaragua, the Polish strikes confirm one more time the exemplary capacity of and the irresistable strength of millions of workers in a united, collective struggle.
The working class of the capitalist countries have followed, with increasing sympathy and enthusiasm, the exemplary struggle of their brothers and sisters in the Polish working class. To the extent that the independent trade union organizes, develops, and defends the gains of AugustSeptember 1980, and tries to put into practice the capacity of the working class to formulate an alternative social and economic policy to the bureaucracy, this sympathy will be accompanied by reflection, by the coming to a new consciousness of the true nature of socialism as the valid alternative to capitalism, as was the case during the "Prague spring." For us, irreconcilable enemies of imperialism and capitalism, we can only rejoice, for this growing consciousness will nourish more and more the anti-imperialist and anticapitalist struggle in the countries under the sway of capital.
However, precisely because the principal threat that hangs over the "Polish summer" is still that of repression supported by a Soviet military intervention, and because the "Polish summer" is part and parcel of the world rise of the proletariat, this universal sympathy has to be translated into a true active solidarity movement that modifies the international relationship of forces to the advantage of the Polish working class. The stronger the solidarity movement becomes, the more difficult will be any repressive intervention. It is at the international level that the battle will be decided. The international organized workers movement and the working class can modify the relationship of forces in favor of their brothers and sisters in Poland.
In particular in the trade union movement, it is possible right now to build up solidarity links with the independent workers movement in Poland. The trade unions in the capitalist countries can send delegations to Poland to become informed, to honestly inform their members of the real facts about the "self-managed" independent trade unions in Poland to combat the disinformation of the bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie about them. The information can result in concrete support: the Polish trade unionists have need of aid in the form of advice, technical and financial aid, and aid in building an independent workers press. Support can lead to mutual adoption between trade union branches and the setting up of big information campaigns in the working class on what the organization of the Polish proletariat really means.
Such systematic solidarity campaigns have a particular importance in counterbalancing the pressure of the Kremlin in the trade union confederations that are largely influenced by the CPs (the CGIL in Italy, the CGT in France, the CCOO in the Spanish state, the CGTP in Portugal, and various federations in the semicolonial countries). One of the objectives to aim for is the establishment of official links from confederation to confederation, between the trade union confederations of a growing number of countries and Solidarity, the Polish confederation.
At the same time, it is important to continue to fight against the imperialist war threat, NATO, the introduction of cruise missiles in West Europe, etc. Part of this fight is opposition to the anticommunist manuevers of the International Department of the top AFL-CIO bureaucracy in the United States, the reactionary boycott against Polish goods by the American East Coast longshoremen's union, and any similar proimperialist actions that only harm the cause of the Polish workers.
Members of the Fourth International have a particular responsibility in the development of the solidarity movement with the Polish workers. The Fourth International totally identifies with their aims. The development of solidarity with the Polish workers is an integral part of the building of the Fourth International.
Long live international workers' solidarity with the Polish workers!
Long live the independent workers movement in Poland!
Down with the totalitarian bureaucratic dictatorship; long live the socialist and democratic Polish workers republic!
Kremlin, Hands Off Poland! Self-determination for the Polish nation!
Down with the Stalinist bureaucracy, for a victorious political revolution in Eastern Europe and the USSR!
Down with imperialism and capitalism, for the victory of the socialist revolution in all capitalist countries!
Long live the Socialist United States of Europe!