POLISH WORKERS CHALLENGE BUREAUCRACY Free Trade Unions Grow From Strength To Strength

Workers in Gdansk discussing strike news The Soviet Union has begun to brandish its war machinery in an effort to divide the opposition movement in Poland and to press the Polish bureaucracy towards further repression but it has not succeeded in intimidating Polish workers, The independent trade union movement, Solidarity, has continued to extend its roots among workers and now has a membership of over eight million out of a population of thirty five million, It has answered every attack made by the bureaucracy in order to maintain its stranglehold on Polish society.

But the leaders of Solidarity are giving themselves time to develop organizational strength and have called on workers to avoid strikes for the time being. They are determined to maintain the unity of the movement and to give the bureaucracy no pretext for attacking.

But the workers are far from hav— ing lost confidence in face of the threatened crackdown. On December 17 more than 500,000 gathered in Gdansk for a ceremony at the new monument commemorating the workers gunned down during the 1970 upsurge, Farmers are also beginning to organize and an organization which claims to represent 500,000 farmers is discussing means of forcing the government to register them as an independent union. Polandisa highly agricultural country and its 3.5 million private farmers account for three quarters of its agriculDear Editor, The struggle for political status has certainly been a watershed for some political groups on the left and for the Socialist Labour Party, perhaps more than others. When the SLP was formed 2 years ago and drew in various strata on the left, it was probably inevitable that widely differing views on many issues would manifest themselves within the party.

This became especially evident when the national question was on the agenda, Perspectives advanced tural production, If the Soviet Union invades Poland it will be a serious setback to the interests of world revolution, Its chief effect will be to give the US government an opportunity to present itself as the 'defender of peace and democracy! and the excuse to increase its military expenditure, Over the last year anda half, there has been a clear popular opposition to war moves by the US government from inside the US, euphemistically described by commentators as ‘tine Vietnam syndrome!,Intervention by the Soviet Union will allow Washington to say that war is inevitable and the picture of Soviet tanks rolling in to crush the Polish working class in the name of "protecting socialism" will disillusion workers around the world, The reason jiven by the Kremlin and its allies to workers in the other'communist countries is that "counterrevolutionaries" are at work in Poland. However, as the bureaucratic castes well know, the workers are not demanding a return to capitalism in Poland, They want democratic rights and a voice in government decisions, The things they are fighting for is what socialism is all about, If the Soviet Union decides to invade Poland, it will pay a high cost in international working class opinion andit will pay a high military cost as the Polish people are certain to put up a strong resistance.

The anti-Stalinist unions have founding conference of the Nat, / H Black/Armagh cttee. was attended by some SLP members of the Socialist Workers Tendency (by then the sole remaining tendency in the party) and their willingness to become involved strengthened party credibility within the campaign, After the Feb, 1980 conference however, the SWT and SLP parted company and resistance to the "liasion" line on the North was greatly weakened. Although policy was not amended, activity in the H Block campaign declined to almost zero with the exception Polish trade union leader Lech Walesa speaking to workers in Gdansk.

1968, taken deep root and the Polish are much more numerous arid better prepared than the peoples of Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in But despite the risks, the Kremlin is making moves to crush the resistance of Polish workers, It recognizes the risks posed to its privileged position by the democratic aspirations of the Polish people and the danger of them spreading to other worker states are greater than the damage to interriational public opinion and the military costs of an invasion, This is why the bureaucracies in the workers! states cannot be characterized in the term, "red bourgeoisie", Unlike the real bourgeoisies in the capitalist countries, the power of the bureaucracies does not rest on real ownership and control of production, They cannot automatically hand on their power to their offspring and in a planned and nationalized economy, they play no necessary economic role, They are parasites, They disrupt the economy by their search for privileges, by corruption, by sheer incompetence and mismanagement, rule, and, above all, by silencing the voice of the producing classes, Because the bureaucracy plays a parasitic role, it is not necessary for the workers to change the economic structures in order to achleve power. The bureaucracy plays a political role in guarding its Own existence and it has to do this by totalitarian methods because movement were increasing, th SLP pe sp ective was not to ~ cl from their present position of limited participation*, (doing nothing at all) It urged’ compromise with the Brits thereby placing themselves in the respectable company of Cardinal O'Fiach and C, J. Haughey. It campaign, pushed the absurd idea that the socialist movement cannot gain from supporting prisoners, but unlike the SLP the vast majority of socialists are not abandoning the prisoners and are placing themselves in the front line of the defence campaign, They are not withdrawing from the Meeting of striking workers in Lublin.

freedom of discussion in a workers!

state immediately raises the demand for a voice in decision making and questions the necessity of having a privileged, non-productive layer.

This is what has happened and is developing in Poland. The example of the Polish workers can easily spread to the rest of Eastern Europe and to the Soviet Union(especlally in the Baltic States and the Ukraine). That is why Polish publications have been banned there and news o the Polish struggle has been very distorted, The role of the Catholic Church has been often cited as an example df workers! conservatism but the Church has twice warned workers to step back from their struggles and has beenignored each time, In an atmosphere of repression, the Church was able to appear asa pro-democracy opposition force:

but with the loosening up of politics after the mass strikes in 1980 it has had to step in and show its real face. Solidarity, and not the Catholic Church, has increasingly become the pole of attraction after all the anger and frustration which has built up after decades of totalitarian The struggle of the workers in Poland is a message to the workers of the world that collective ownership of the means of production is not inseparably bound up with totalitarian dictatorship. It has begun to show what workers! democracy would look like in action, SARAH O!IHARA standing ot the National Question, It is a lession they seem unable to learn — Editor, Socialist Republic.

* Note: They SLP sent an instruction to its members to have only a "limited participation" in the H-Block/Armagh