through reformist, tionary socialist emerged. differentiation has continued to develop in the years since. In this article ZBIGNIEW KOWALEWSKI, a leader of Solidarnosc in Lodz during the union's period of legality, outlines the differences which have emerged - and in particular looks at the revolutionary socialist coming out of Solidarnosc.
THE defeat of the revolution following the declaration of the state of siege in Poland did not lead to the destruction of the social movement, a first in the Soviet ntoc. Solidarnosc, 1980-81, not only led a revolution of greater mass participation and longer duration than any other in the Eastern bloc, but now, following December 1981 coup, it has generated a prolonged social resistance.
Nevertheless, enterprises, particularly in the larger factories and in some centres of intellectual work such as the research institutes, cells of militants continue to operate. cous de orcamoco as mid-culeronse committees of coordination regional icaaerships.
There is still a clandestine national leadership. Despite the growing list of its members who have fallen into the hands of the police, the forces have not been able to break it up, not even with the recent capture Zbigniew Bujak, who underground for four years. It is estimated that approximately 10 per cent of wage earners continue to pay union dues to Solidarnosc's enterprise committees.
The legal workers' councils - the faint residue of the workers' selfmanagement bodies that arose during the last revolution - are composed, Smell great majonly, militants of Solidarnosc in practically all the enterprises in which workers • have been able to force a democratic election. In the big industrial centres, the underground press is distributed in all large and medium-sized enterprises among circles, some of which larger, smaller. monopoly of information, one of the fundamental by totalitarian bureaucracy rules, been broken.
The most spectacular expression of the vitality of this resistance is the distribution of more than five hundred — according to some estimates, almost one thousand - independent newspapers, some with impressive circulations, such Mazowsze (Mazowsze Weekly) which has a circulation of several thousand copies each week and is edited by the Warsaw Regional Executive Committee of Solidarnosc.
According to estimates, the underground editors have already published at least 1,200 books. The network of illegal presses is so vast that the regime has been unable to wipe them out, even though they are a primary target of the police.
A process of differentiation and polarisation is inevitable in a social movement. 'Politicised' political groups of differing orientations have formed within or around Solidarnosc. These groups from (1) the Fighting Organisation, the oldest such group (having already formed by the spring of 1982), which covers its ideological haziness with an elevated level of activism; (2) political groups around the journals Wola (Will) and Robotnik (Worker), in their frame of reference between social democracy and the 'alternative' movements of East and West; to (2) the revolutionary left, which has appeared more recently. The Workers' Opposition Alliance is presided over from the underground by a 27-yearold Silesian worker, Dziubelski. innumerable Solidarnosc Other Jacek For as security strength of was and a half old project management and of a economic management defined by Solidarnosc's in would 'combine over the supposed market economy.
Weakened The ficulties being has sectors.
sociologists from Tygodnik regions of the conservative democratic involving several voting free speech currents or range favoured full Solidarnosc management!
results of the poll pointed, analysis, to the formed which vacillate for WOlKer.
Damian half of the workers, In 1985, the national leadership of Solidarnosc initiated two big campaigns: (1) for the boycott of the elections to the Diet; and (2) against the price increases. Zbigniew Bujak and Kuron justified these campaigns as a means of pressure on the government to accept elections that would be a little more democratic and be forced to carrv out an economic reform of a fairly hazy character.
These campaigns were not conceived as a means of building the the workers, elevating their level of organisation and prepar- try. ing a new wave of mass movements, even though this would be a logical step. Instead, the programmatic conque sid Solidar of worrer sed.
as National Autumn of 1981 the plan, selfmanagement, and the market', gave wav to the discourse ot intellectual ex. perts in the leadership of Solidarnosc which merits of the The aspirations of the working class, meanwhile, have enormous difexpressed due, mittee among other reasons, to the fact that the clandestine leadership of Solidarnosc has weakened its ties with the working class base and nas begun lo rely primarily on dissident intellectual At the end of 1984, a team of the University of Poznan took a poll among: a sample of personnel, primarily blue collar workers, from four large factories in heavy industry situated in different country. Questions tional workers would suppori elicited a 78 ideal social per cent response in favour of truly Danianiellay elections lists; 65 per cent in tavour of several concurrent political parties; 80 per cent in favour for all people, including both supporters and opponents of the political system. 58 per cent were in tavour of social ownership of the means of production and a planned economy, while 87 per cent workers' selfOne of the under- were ground newspapers that published the In Its clear aspiration of Polish workers for a 'different system of humane, democratic socialism'.
But this poll reveals a serious contradiction as well: a very strong working class loyalty to the democratic and self-management traditions of Solidarnose is accompanied by the support of barely 20 to 25 per cent of workers the underground activities of Solidarnosc. A similar percentage of in the same poll, are partisans of the regime. This means that among more or less, while hostile to the regime, do not identify with the structures and the actions of the social movement as it presents itself today.
Already by the end of 1983 an organisation had been formed, at the time limited to a single region, that marked the beginning of the regroupHell or arcouloary worker wine of the social movement. It was the Union of Workers' Councils of the Polish Resistance (ZRP-PRO) of Upper Silesia, situated 1n one of the larger industrial centres in the coun The leaders of this organisation, blue-collar workers, say that in particular three experiences influenced The first two go back to 1982. Following Jaruszelki's coup, a defence committee for the jailed and persecuted members of Solidarnosc, initiated by the future leaders of the ZRP-PRO, was formed in Upper Silesia.
collaborated with parishes of the Catholic Church, delivered humanitarian from the outside. Some priests refused to aid the common-law wife and "illegitimate' ot imprisoned militant, and wanted, in general, impose their own. criteria on distribution of material aid. The comreacted by separating itself from the Church.
Critical At the end of 1984 and the beginning of 1985, two events happened that led the ZRP-PRO to adopt an openly critical attitude toward and to act completely independently of leadership of Solidarnosc, without thereby renouncing the united front. Under the pressure of the Western trade-union bureaucracies, the na leadership of Solidarnoss refrained from solidarising itself with the strike of the British miners. Fur ther, in Upper Silesia, the leadership unleashed sharp attacks against the Solidarnosc miners' committee, which, in its clandestine radio pro gramme and in its messages to the British miners' union NUM, had proclaimed its support for this strike and denounced the Polish bureaucratic regime for having increased its shipments to the Thatcher regime The argument they advanced that, through this strike, the Stalinists trying to destabilise democratically-elected regime. In this debate, the ZRP-PRO placed itself on the side of the British miners and op posed the attitude of the Solidarnosc leadership.
In the same period, the latter launched a call for a national strike of 15 minutes to protest the price increases. At the last minute, believing that the government was willing to rescind the merenses. which turned out not to be true, Lech Walesa and Zbigniew Bujak called off the strike. This produced disorientation and demoralisation the workers. Further, ZRP-PRO, which called themselves underground workers' councils, existed, according to data from the end of 1985, in more than twenty large factories, mines, enterprises, eLC. leadership, it was stated organisation workers' organisation Silesia, solidly implanted in all cuteouses on severa cues. well as better prepared than others for the general strike and for the seizure of factories by the workers.' It had led numerous mass actions bovcott of the regime's unions. the withdrawal workers' councils obedient to the administration, for wages and benefit increases, against poor working conditions things, health and safety strikes). Report The According i LO the leadership of the ZRP-PRO at the end of 1985, 70 per cent of the members of aid this organisation WUIKCIS, technical or secondary education, and more than 80 per cent were younger than 30. More than a third had not the belonged December 1981 because they were too young. It is interesting to note that not one intellectual was part of the leadership. This data says a lot about the sectors that are coming forward the workers' vanguard movement, and its renewal. polițical position: the ZRP-PRO were, from the beginning very different from the Solidarnosc leadership: its objective was to build clandestine cells that, with a new rise of the mass movement, would be able to assure a leadership of a mass strike with occupations, establish workers power in the enterprises, and, on this basis, follow the road of the revolutionary overthrow of the bureaucratic regime. definitely clear: the conversion of the fundamental means of production into truly social property, the collective ment of the means of production. Coa The ZPR-PRO', we read in it:
1983 declaration, was following five points: the factories to the workers, the land to the peasants, power to the self-managed science to free thinkers, the state for an independent nation. these objectives, it is essential that organise itselt freedom of action for political par ties, that trade union pluralism established, that a free parliament be elected through free elections and that it exercise control over the paratus In its work takes inspiration from the best traditions of the workers' struggle and their revolutionary assaults on power. It supports the struggle of the workthe ing class to win social identity and national independence in the countries tity tionalist forges, transport Nationalists' liberals' that "this now the largest last few in Upper imporfor the for the legal other allull?
report from the possible were blue-collar cracy almost yu per cent had a Power Solidarnosc before bureaucratic composition of the the social capacities of the under such The The central strategic end was that is to say democratic manage'adheres to society, means of not through workers' 'linked state ZPR-PRO enemies and hostile to the interests of the working class that opposes the right of the working class to ownersmo or te enterprise. and will treat them in the same way that it treats the totalitarian bureau... It does not recognise the right of non-working class organisations of a general social character to represent the interests of the working In the course of its evolution, the ZRP-PRO established its collaborawith revoluuonary socialist grouped around the publications Front (Workers Front) and Sprawa Robotnicza (Workers Cause). It was on this basis that, in June 1985, the Alliance of the Workers Opposition (POR) arose, , which rapidly surpassed its initial framework. With the joining of new groups, its cells appeared in dozens of cities. The name chosen underscored its political iden with respect • LATE independentist opposition' (nacurrents, 'Catholic 'democratic who, in general, had abandoned the ranks of Solidarnose in the breaking with the workers' movement). democratic opposition. Stating that the political struggle developing in Poland is, above all, a class struggle, the POR explains its platform:
'It is essentially a struggle between the working class, which is subjected to economic exploitation and deprived of all political or economic power, and the bureaucratic state power... Only the working class has the capacity to overthrow the bureaucracy, and it is only thanks to it that the social groups can liberate themselves from the yoke of the bureaucracy .... The transformation of the working class from an object into a subject is only through revolutionary changes. The belief in the possibility of a compromise with the bureau.
is a dangerous illusion that could prove fatal.' In its predictions about how the power can be overthrown, the POR places special importance on three factors: First, general revolutionary strike, which has a tendency to become an 'active strike', that iș to say, a work-in strike (such was the project of the radical Solidarnose leadership in Lodz at the end of 1981); second, the formation of workers' guards, whose principal task consists of assuring the active defence of the factories seized by the workers; third, it states that 'it is only revolutionary conditions that we could expect a part of the army, primarily ordinary soldiers, wher they see that the workers' forces hav a chance of success, to join in the uprising of the working class.?
strategic objective of the future Polish revolution, which the POR characterises as a democratic workers' revolution, is the establish ment of a Self-Managed Republic "The indispensable precondition for the liberation of the working class is for it to lay the economic foundations of liberty, that is, socialisation, out. side of the state and in the framework of workers' self-management of the production that are today statised.' Outside of the state means the bureaucratic paratus of the state, which must be destroyed in the course of the revolu tion, but rather through the power of councils in the enterprises together by horizontal vertical structures on the regional and national scale, as well as institutions of self-management organised on a territorial basis ... Self-management can only function in conditions of unrestricted political pluralism.?
This article is abridged from Against the Current, October 1986
the country's small challenge of US military might. Central America solidarity conference NICARAGUA'S NATIONAL slogan for 1987 is that 'Here, no one will ever surrender!' It is a challenge by population to the threatening US president Ronald Reagan has already indicated Socialist Action 20 Feb 1987