THE TEST OF POLAND The hope created by the great mobilizations of the Polish working class over the past sixteen months has not yet been crushed. It poses a more and more urgent challenge to the workers movement throughout the world,
Solidarity's rise provided a political example, hope that the world could be changed and that the working class could do it.
The victories of the Polish workers movement in particular inspired the workers in the industrialized countries in which the decisive and final struggles of the world working class will be fought.
It is symptomatic that the half million American workers who marched in Washington in September against the capitalist offensive led by Reagan took as their symbol the struggle of Solidarnosc.
The workers at the FIAT automobile factories in Turin were also inspired by the Polish workers' example to fight back harder against the capitalist offensive, much to the discomfort of their Stalinist-led union, which favors a "historic compromise" with the bosses.
Solidarity's example inspired not only the workers in the advanced capitalist countries and the industrialized workers states and nations oppressed by the Kremlin bureaucracy.
For the first time in history, workers in the colonial and neocolonial countries have expressed massive support for a struggle against Stalinist bureaucracy. Among them are the steel workers of Sao Paulo, Brazil, the vanguard of a powerful and growing struggle for the basic rights of labor against one of the most brutal U.S.-backed dictatorships in Latin America.
The workers of Brazil, and of Mexico, where there have also been I important expressions of support
3
for Solidarity, have fought long and bloody struggles for elementary trade-union and democratic rights. Constantly, they have to risk their lives and livelihood for them. natural that they feel a strong identification with the cause of Solidar-
From China to Brazil to South Africa, more and more the new generations of workers are insisting that freedom and rights are not something for the advanced ist countries alone, not just a luxury for the rich. They want rights and freedom too. For them Solidarity can also be an inspiration.
The breadth of support for Solidarity around the world indicates that the Stalinism is becoming discredited among wider and wider sections of the world working class.
Massive sections of the world working class in the advanced countries of Western Europe which came under the influence of the Stalinist ¡parties for various historical reasons were almost unmoved by the Hungarian revolution of 1956. But the {Warsaw Pact armies crushing the Czechoslovak workers movement twelve years later sent most of the significant Communist parties in advanced capitalist countries into a deep and continuing crisis.
Because of the Communist parties' identification with totalitarian dictatorship, the new radicalization of workers in key countries, France in particular, has almost entirely bypassed the CPs.
why the demonstration called by the lunions not run by the CP could draw many tens of thousands of participants, perhaps in excess of a hundred thousand, in Paris on December
14 and why the march had a clear
The Internationale was sung repeatedly from lone end of it to the other, and one
4 people on other issues even when it was important to them to do so. The basic fact is that the struggle of Solidarity is immensely popular with the newly radicalizing French
They identify their own aspirations with it, and they are outraged by the brutal crackdown of the bureaucracy. The popularity of the fight for democratic rights explains also why the CP leadership of the CGT, traditionally the strongest union federation, is running into increasing opposition inside their own organization.
At bay, the CP union leaders have had to resort to publicly threatening the SP chiefs that if they did not take the heat off, the CGT might not give the government the cooperation it needs to get the workers to go along
As both the crises of capitalism and Stalinism deepen, they are becoming more directly intertwined. This has been demonstrated in both the economic and political arenas, dramatically in the case of Poland. For the first time capitalists and their publications, and at least one of the more doltish and truculent capitalist heads of state, Canadian prime minister Eliot Trudeau openly indicated that he supports Stalinist repression of the Polish workers, since unions always demand too much and have to be curbed.
The other side of this, is that even abject class-collaborationist bureaucrats such as the AFL-CIO tops feel the need to defend Solidarity against the charge raised in one way or another almost universally in the capitalist press that it provoked the military crackdown by going "too far."
With the progression of the capitalist economic crisis, the argu ment is being heard more and more from big business and its press that while it is possible to live with unions in normal times, when there are serious economic problema they have to be curbed by whatever
In races are protests ovex ti uppression of Solidarity have i creasingly drawn attention to the suppression of the Turkish trade unions, the only mass independent trade-union movement in the Near East. The plight of the Turkish unions has up until now been shamefully neglected by the Western work-
The greatest hope created by the rise of Solidarity and the resistance of the Polish workers is the first indications of the possibility of uniting the entire workers movement on a world scale in defense of the basic rights of labor, both trade-union and democratic rights. hope is represented by the sign carried by dissident members of the French CP-dominated union, the CGT, that can be seen on out
"The CGI defends the trade-union and democratic rights of the Polish workers."
The fight for this hope is only
It depends not only on the ability of the Polish workers but on the growing political class consciousness of workers in the advanced capitalist countries, underdeveloped world, and in the bureaucratized workers states. depends finally on the capacity of fully conscious revolutionaries to clarify the issues at stake for the great masses of workers and activists and begin to mobilize them. In politics there are no automatic processes. Historical opportunities become dangers if they are missed.
In action, the workers in the capitalist countries will learn the difference between their solidarity with the Polish workers and the hypocritical lip-service that the Western capitalist governments and trade-union bureaucrats give to freedom for the workers,
Polish workers will learn it as well.
Like any other fighters, the
Polish workers want real and im-
The workers movements throughout the world, and only they, can give it to them. That is the great hope in the Polish crisis, and why its challenge is so urgent.
working people of the entire worl depend on meeting it.