International solidarity needed after Bujak's arrest movement.
One of the consequences of this has been the recent emergence of political currents within the social movement, in particular a revolutionary socialist current known as the Workers' Opposition, whose perspectives focus around generalizing workers' struggles.
But while Bujak's authority was
IN THE WAKE of the decision of the International Monetary Fund Board of Governors to admit Poland, the Polish political police arrested the main underground Solidarnosc leader, Zbigniew Bujak. CYRIL SMUGA
On the same day, the police arrested other known activists in Warsaw -
Bielinski, a member of the underground regional leadership of the union; Ewa Kulik, editor of Tygodnik underground journal of Solidarnosc, with a weekly circulation of several tens of thousands; and Henryk Wujec, a former elected leader of Solidarnose in Warsaw.
Wujec was a member of the Work-
Defence Committee (KOR) and founder of the first workers' journal (which ceased publication in 1981). Unlike Bielinski and Kulik, underground. roundup threatens seriously to weaken regional leadership of
This blow against Solidarnosc was struck at a time when the very rightwing Warsaw correspondent of the Paris daily Figaro was writing: "The Polish government hopes to be able to get the population to accept unhiding behind Western experts."
Bujak's arrest was a severe blow for the Polish workers' movement as a whole. This former worker at the Ursus tractor factory in Warsaw made contact with the KOR at the start of 1980.
When the Polish government raised food prices in July 1980, he led the first strike in Ursus. At the time, he tried to organize a workers' commission modeled on the Spanish ones.
Elected chair of Solidarnose in the Warsaw region, he was also a member of the union's national leadership.
In the fall of 1981, he tried, like the unionists in the Lodz region, to impose social control over distribution in order to combat shortages.
Managing to escape arrest at the time of the December 13, 1981, crackdown, Bujak was one of the founders of the Provisional Underround Leadership (TKK) of Solidarnosc. the general-strike strategy advocated in particular by unionists in Lower Silesia, he counterposed that of building a countersociety ("an underground society"), which was supposed to force the bureaucracy to negotiate.
To the detriment of building coordination among the factory organizations, this line favored developing other areas of resistance. It was widely challenged by the Solidarnose cadres, he remained in the eyes of all the symbol of determined resistance normalization schemes.
Within the TKK, Bujak was the last national leader elected before the imposition of the state of war, and thus he symbolized the continuity of Solidarnosc.
Bujak's arrest comes in the wake of a long series of other arrests of underground leaders. Three union leaders in Lower Silesia (Wladyslaw Frasyniuk, Piotr Bednarz and Jozef Pinior) were jailed in 1982-83. The Cracow union leaders Stanislaw Handzlik and Wladyslaw Hardek were arrested respectively in 1982 and 1983
The Poznan underground leader, Janusz Palubicki, was seized in 1983 The Gdansk leaders, Bogdan Lis and Bogdan Borusewicz, were picked up respectively in 1984 and 1985. And finally Tadeusz Jedynak of Upper Silesia was taken in 1985.
All these arrests have weakened not only the TKK but the movement as a whole. These leaders, properly elected in 1981, represented the continuity of the resistance movement.
Today, the TKK has been reduced to two underground activists, Andrei Gorny from Upper Silesia and Marek Muszynski from Lower Silesia. Since neither was in the leadership of the union movement before December 1981, their symbolic value is less.
The Communist Party bureaucrats meeting in Warsaw in preparation for their upcoming congress greeted Bujak's arrest with an ovation. But if Jaruzelski hoped to reduce Solidarnosc to impotence by this roundup, his hopes were immediately dashed.
In Warsaw, Wroclaw and Gdansk, the news of Bujak's arrest provoked spontaneous demonstrations. On the same day in Cracow an antinuclear demonstration of several thousand people, organized by the independent organizations, took up the demand for Bujak's release.
Despite increasing repression, the mass resistance to the bureaucracy is continuing and needs international solidarity more than ever.