The Polish bureaucracy has declared war on the workers, students, and all the uncorrupted forces of the whole nation. It cannot accept the putting into practice of the old slogan: “the emancipation of the workers will be the task of the workers themselves.” It has launched a massive, brutal, and bloody repression against the working class and its allies.
Eighteen months after the beginning of the antibureaucratic political revolution, Jaruzelski, his stooges, and the Kremlin have unleashed the counterrevolution by the military coup d’etat of December 13, 1981. Their objective is clear: to eliminate all the political gains that the proletariat has wrested from the bureaucracy over the last months. The program of this counterrevolution speaks for itself — suspension and destruction of the independent trade union controlled by the workers themselves; elimination of the right to strike; abolition of the free and uncensored workingclass press; ending of the “free” Saturdays; lengthening of the working day; suspension of all basic democratic rights; and the proclamation of martial law. Tens of thousands of tradeunion leaders and shop stewards freely elected by the workers and members of Solidarity have been arrested. Any room for free and independent political, ideological, and cultural activity has been eliminated.
This repression will almost certainly become more severe. The bureaucracy, once it has started off along this path, will not shrink from slaughter and setting up concentration camps. It will trample underfoot the most elementary human dignity.
The onset of the counterrevolution expresses the will of the Polish bureaucracy, vigorously urged on by the Soviet bureaucracy and all its allies, to maintain at all cost its monopoly of political power in Poland, which is the basis of its exorbitant material privileges. It has launched one operation after another since the summer of 1980 in an attempt to keep its grip on power, seeking to contain and divide the mass upsurge. In the eyes of the bureaucracy, the Gdansk agreement in itself was only a maneuver to gain time.
Parallel to its appeals for “national unity” the bureaucracy has not spared its efforts over the last months to prepare the counteroffensive. The attack on and evacuation of the Firefighters Academy on December 2 was a test chosen by the bureaucracy — the situation was heading towards an inevitable showdown. Attempts at conciliation from all sides had failed. January 18, 1982
This failure was neither due to the “extremists” inside Solidarity nor to the hardliners inside the bureaucracy. /t is the result of the fundamental incompatibility between the bureaucratic dictatorship and trade-union and democratic rights for the workers. In the long term the only way to defend the rights of workers is to overturn the bureaucracy. The only way to defend the bureaucratic dictatorship is to repress the workers.
In recent weeks the bureaucracy realized that its credibility was on the wane and that, to the same extent, Solidarity’s credibility was on the ascendant, and that the workers organization was emerging in the eyes of the masses as a full-fledged alternative power. The most recent opinion poll conducted by Polish sociologists backs this up. The rank and file of Solidarity was pushing forward towards setting up a system of workers control over production and distribution of goods and a system of workers councils and workers defense guards in the factories.
This radicalization was expressed even inside the National Commission of Solidarity, despite the fact that advocates of moderation had done everything they could to resist it. The “active” general strike and the preparation of an emergency plan were the logical response of the proletariat to the attempts of the bureaucracy to disorganize the supplies of basic necessities and then to blame this on the trade union. In practice the workers answered all these liars and saboteurs who ruled the country by giving examples of how, under their control, production could proceed smoothly and meet the needs of the people.
The Polish revolution has shown once again that the masses will display great courage, initiative, creative capacity, and willingness to fight in the course of a revolutionary upsurge. Without such qualities no revolution is possible. But by themselves they are not sufficient to ensure victory. The question of power remains decisive.
The enemy can retreat. It can appear to be paralyzed. It can refrain from striking back and even intervening during a certain period. But as long as it maintains the essential part of its power (an operational nucleus of repressive force, access to telecommunications, the capacity to act in a centralized way) and there is not a centralized counterpower which opposes it at every level, it can decisively retake the initiative at the time, place, and in the conditions which it chooses. From that moment on, the balance can shift back in its favor.
To prevent such a negative outcome the masses must have centralized organs of power able to marshall their enormous strength, and on this basis emerge as contenders for power. Furthermore it was around this question that a process of differentiation developed inside the ranks of the trade unions. Thus elements were coming together that could have given rise toa leadership capable of mobilizing the masses and leading them in the fightback at the decisive moment. The ruling bureaucracy fully recognized the development of this advance of political consciousness. It has come down hard also to put an end to that, Its response has literally been to declare war on its own working class — like some vulgar Pinochet. This has been done by cynically violating its own constitution and laws, which give the right to proclaim a state of siege only to the Sejm (parliament). This military dictatorship has been established in the name of, and in the interests of, the bureaucracy as a whole, and not to benefit some “military caste” or other.
The immediate aim of the political counterrevolution which has begun in Poland is not at all to “defend socialism” against the bourgeoisie or imperialism. It is to defend the power and privileges of the bureaucracy against the working class — to liquidate the gains the workers have made in the last eighteen months. But behind this immediate political aim looms another social and economic objective which is just as important for the bureaucracy.
Through its arbitrary power, wasteful management, corruption, the incoherence and disproportion of its economic projects; by its resorting, on an irresponsible scale, to capitalist loans; and because of the blows it has struck against planning itself, the bureaucracy in Poland has caused the most serious economic crisis experienced by a bureaucratized workers state since the end of the Second World War. The fall in industrial and agricultural production, the disorganization of the transport system and of the supply of basic necessities and basic social services to the population, have provoked unbearable economic and social tensions. Whoever governs Poland would be obliged to take radical measures in order to put the house in order and bring about an economic recovery.
But the concrete content of any “economic reform” that is applied does not simply express technical preferences or ideological choices. It expresses political and social priorities in accordance with the interests of quite specific social groups. The economic “reform” that the ruling bureaucracy is aiming to carry out, with the support of a sector of the technocracy and intellectuals, would have to accomplish, through a severe austerity policy at the expense of the working class: a drastic reduction in real wages; elimination of the right to work, i.e. mass redundancies in the workplaces; 13 along with lengthening of the working day and speedup.
The bureaucracy is perfectly aware of the fact that such a reform cannot be achieved with a working class that is organized and free to express its opposition. Thus the unfolding counterrevolution aims to disorganize and once again atomize the working class in order to reduce it to silence.
Just before the coup d'etat, the director of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism (close to the Polish United Workers Party), Jerry Wiatr, in a lecture given at Krakow and reported by the local Stalinist daily Gazeta Krakowska, laid out four possible “political solutions” to the Polish crisis. The third one, according to him, was the “establishment of a military government... a benevolent autocratic power.. basing itself on the peasantry and highly competent white-collar workers.” Let us not comment on this “competence.” We can also leave aside the possibility Gen, Wojciech Jaruzelski has for broadening his social base through a coup d'etat — in fact the likelihood is that the base will narrow. It seems that there was a clear understanding of the government plan to base itself on the “peasantry and whitecollar workers” (a sector of the latter being part of the bureaucracy). But against whom?
The pressure that international capital, particularly from Europe, has been putting on the Polish bureaucracy to establish order in its own country has to be understood in the same way. This capital wants its interest and debt repayments to once again flow without restriction to the Western banks. These Polish workers are always on strike, keeping the people on top from going about their exalted tasks, risking the spread of disorder throughout Europe with their foolish pretensions of wanting to be their own masters and even to manage their own factories and state! According to the Swedish bourgeois paper, Dagens Industri (December 15, 1981), these bankers are said to have even discreetly intervened in favor of a strong government before December 13. The London Sunday Times (December 13) reported similar information from other sources.
Besides this, ever since the negotiations for rescheduling loan repayments due in the spring of 1981 and the preliminary negotiations requested by the Polish bureaucracy for joining the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the autumn, the Western capitalists have exerted pressure on the Polish government to commit itself to imposing tough austerity measures on its people, which it acknowledges would reduce living standards and increase unemployment (New York Times, April 28, 1981).
One just has to listen to the reaction of all these “responsible world leaders,” the day after December 13, from the pope to Ronald Reagan and Helmut Schmidt, Claude Cheysson and Margaret Thatcher, to grasp how much this worldwide “Holy Alliance” fears the potential of the Polish proletariat’s struggles. It wants to let the clique in Warsaw plant its boot on the neck of the Polish masses. So that order can continue to prevail in Europe, they berate 14
JARUZELSKI the Polish workers on hypocritical “humanitarian” grounds — “Moderation, moderation! Above all no organized resistance! Nor irresponsible actions!”
But the Polish workers have not listened to these voices which call on them to capitulate and give up. Feeling the force of their numbers, their organization, and the weight they have in the social and economic life of their country, and conscious of the fact that the whole nation lives from their work and their efforts, they have begun to resist, to strike in their hundreds of thousands, and to occupy their factories. They call for the liberation of their arrested comrades and for the reestablishment of the rights and liberties that have been taken away from them. Following on from the first upsurge of July-August 1980, they have thus given a magnificent example of class solidarity and action to the whole international workers movement. A national strike committee has been set up. They have tried to rebuild basic trade-union structures and have called for a general strike on the 19th of December.
It is too soon to know whether this exemplary fightback will rapidly meet with success or if more time will be needed to undermine the bureaucracy’s military dictatorship. But one thing is certain — the self-organization of the working class has been, and will remain, too broad and its impact on the whole society has been too deep for the bureaucracy to be able to quickly put an end to it all. The struggle will be long and hard.
The international working class has indeed understood the message coming out of Warsaw, Gdansk, Krakow, Wroclaw, Szczecin, Poznan, Katowice, Lodz, and Lublin as a call from their class brothers and sisters. It has mobilized on a vast scale, above all in France and Italy, but also in all countries of capitalist Europe and North America, and in several Third World countries, to express its solidarity with its repressed Polish brothers and sisters who are defending themselves with exemplary courage. An attack against your trade unions is an attack against our trade unions. When your liberty is taken away our liberty is threatened. An attack on one is an attack on all, That is the cardinal principle of international workers solidarity — of proletarian internationalism.
The class character of the Polish struggle has thus determined the class character of the masses’ response in the capitalist countries. Much more than during the repression of the Hungarian revolution in 1956 by the Kremlin’s tanks, even more than at the time of the invasion of the Czech Socialist Republic by Warsaw Pact armies in August 1968, this response has had a marked working-class character. Bourgeois forces have played only a marginal role in the street demonstrations, in some places even being easily brushed aside.
These people — who are the shameless apologists of the Chilean, Brazilian, Uruguayan, and Argentine dictatorships; who justify the repression of the Palestinian people; and who do not lift a finger against the Turkish military (tied to NATO), which has suppressed the trade unions and the right to strike and arrested thousands of trade unionists — have no moral right to raise their voices against the violation of workers rights and liberties in Poland. The wave of solidarity with the Polish working class must therefore be organized on the basis of class independence and be prepared for a long-term activity. It should bring together, on the largest possible united-front basis, the whole of the workers movement, above all the trade-union organizations, for the defense of workers and trade unions repressed in Poland.
Certain social-democratic forces, especially in West Germany, Austria, and Great Britain, are terrified by the revolutionary potential of the Polish proletariat and are looking for a way to capitulate to Warsaw’s fait accompli. They do this because they fear the appearance in their own country and in their own ranks of the mass self-managed trade unionism represented by Solidarity in Poland. That is to say, a trade union democratically controlled and led by its own members and not by a bureaucracy that is increasingly integrated in the state apparatus. They also do so because they play the game of their own bourgeoisie, which is interested above all — in a period of crisis and intense international competition — in maintaining East- West trade. For these social-democratic forces, the demands of this commerce and collaboration have overridden, for a long time, the needs of international working-class solidarity. Finally, they do it because they are afraid of anything that shakes up the status quo in Europe and the world. As if humanity could get rid of the imperialist system, with its train of blood and hunger, or finish with capitalism — whose crisis already is paid for by 30 million unemployed in the industrialized countries alone — without disturbing the status quo.
Other social-democratic forces are inclined to participate more directly in the solidarity movement — while looking to limit its extension, duration, and class consciousness.
More serious and criminal are the hypocritical arguments of those Communist parties in the capitalist countries — led by the French, Portuguese, and West German ones — who are open or veiled apologists of the bureaucracy’s military dictatorship established in Warsaw. For these bureaucrats, “socialism” continues to be identified wth the interests of the ruling caste in the Kremlin. These partystates in Eastern Europe continue to “represent the working class” even when the latter openly shows them its contempt and hatred. The balance sheet is “positive overall” even for these people who trample on the rights of workers and give orders to fire on strikers.
Furthermore it would seem, according to these CPs, that it is the victim that has “provoked” the butcher by working out “wild plans” for a fightback against any eventual proclamation of a state of siege. It is the age-old argument of all cops throughout the world — if you keep quiet there will be no need to repress you! In addition they would have us believe that the repression of trade-union liberties in Poland is a “purely domestic affair.” This is good news for the dictators who are plunging Guatemala and El Salvador into fire and blood, or for the would-be putschists in Spain — they can go right ahead since nobody is going to get mixed up with what happens in their country. In place of Marx and Engels’s famous rallying cry “Workers of all countries, unite,” these Stalinists and their stooges substitute the ignominious slogan “Workers of the world, do not get involved in the affairs of countries which do not concern you!” With this line you will be defeated one by one, and then all be led helplessly to the slaughterhouse.
The Communist parties who have committed themselves in a more consistent way to the so-called Eurocommunist line, above all the Italian and Spanish CPs, have condemned the military coup d'etat and the anti-trade-union repression in Poland. But they refuse to support the workers resistance or to call for support to Solidarity. They propose conciliatory solutions of a “national unity” type.
Make no mistake about it — it is the same spirit that inspires the workers of the world to oppose the military intervention in Poland, to be against the imperialist preparations for intervention in Central America, and to mobilize in their millions against the escalation of the arms race.
Through such actions the international working class forges its internationalist class policy, which it must put forward as an alternative to the international policy of the capitalists if it wants to stop the march towards a third world war.
A working class that is capable of defending its international political interests is a working January 18, 1982 class that is capable of preventing a war. A working class that is incapable of reacting to international events and is absorbed only by “immediate, national” concerns is a working class on the road to demobilization and depoliticization, that is incapable of opposing the crimes of capital and the bureaucracy on a world scale. This would open the way to the world holocaust.
That is why by mobilizing today in defense of the Polish workers on the biggest and most united scale possible, we are not only defending the Polish revolution and our class brothers and sisters in Poland. We are also struggling for our own interests, for those of the workers in all countries — and first of all for those in the Soviet Union — we are struggling for the interests and future of all humanity.
e Solidarity with the Polish workers!
e Down with the bureaucracy’s military dictatorship!
e Immediate release of all arrested trade unionists and intellectuals, of all political prisoners in Poland!
e For the reestablishment of the right to strike, freedom of action for Solidarity, of all political and civil rights and freedoms of the Polish people!
Long live the international solidarity of the workers of the world, with all liberation struggles, in all countries, in defense of all the exploited and oppressed. All of these battles are part of the same struggle for the socialist world of tomorrow.