The Polish Socialist
Party in the plants
POLAND sciousness of the rank-and-file activists.
JS: When Walesa signs the accord with the government, Solidarnosc is going to divide between those who are already tired and above all else long for some stabilization, and those — the young people first of all — who will not accept being co-opted. I don't think that the plant unions will accept what goes against their interests. • How did It happen that you find
CZESLAW BOROWCZYK is a worker at the Dolmel engineering plant in Wroclaw. He was fired because of his union activity. A national leader of the PPS-RD, he is also spokesperson of the Solidarnose organizing committee at Dolmel.
JACEK SUCHOROWSKI is a worker at the Hutmen foundry in Wroclaw, where he leads the Solidarnosc committee. He is one of the PPS-RD leaders in the city.
MILKA TYSZKIEWICZ is one of the leaders of the countercultural surrealist movement "Alternative
Orange." A national leader of the PPS-RD, she edits the
PPS-RD's Wroclaw bulletin, Nowa Lewica ("New Left").
W
HAT IS the PPS-RD's attitude to Solidarnose?
CB: We have decided to devote the bulk of our forces to building the Solidarnose structures in the enterprises. We distribute the factory union bulletins in front of the gates, and we participate in their publication. In Wroclaw, for example, we are involved in building
Solidarnosc factory structures at Dolmel,
Hutmen, Polar, Hemitex, Pilmet and
JS: Today the conflict between the regional and national union leaderships and the factory structures is widening.
leaderships have in fact ceased to operate.
They are waiting for the round table. The people on the shopfloor are tired of this waiting. The workers have to tighten their belts, when at every step they run up against waste. The young people are sensitive to this. They aspire to other social choices, other investment choices - for example, a cut in arms spending to expand
They are hostile to the economic reform, because they see what it is leading to in the plants, a drop in the real incomes of the workers and deterioration in production
(there are not even tools any more to work!)
Striking seems to be the only way out, as long as this process of impoverishing the plants and the workers themselves is not ended. To force through such changes, strikes are necessary, not cold negotiating.
Recently, in our plant, all the clandestine and public structures together protested about wages, appealing to the manager and the Self-Management Council. If the management does not accept our demands, we will begin an action — first a ban on overtime and then a strike.
We know that the Self-Management Council will support us, because the conflict is between the manager and all of the workers. Unfortunately, we also already know that the Solidarosc regional leadership around Wladyslaw Frasyniuk will not • If the Solidarnosc leaderships accept self-limitation by the union in exchange for its legalization, what attitude will the plant union struc-
CB: The public union structures will certainly take advantage of this legal framework, even if it is narrow, but without any intention of respecting its limits, in particular as regards the right to strike. What is more, almost everywhere there are parallel union structures, public ones and clandestine ones. The latter will continue to function as they do today, because people remember that above all you cannot show
MT: The self-management structures are operating legally on the basis of a law dating back to 1981, which in fact represented a compromise between the demands of the masses and the projects of the regime at the time. Given the present situation, it is a rather good law. At the beginning of the year, the second national meeting of self-management structures took place in Wroclaw. Some 215 delegates took part. It was entirely devoted to the question of the necessary political reforms. Through trying to manage, they also arrived at the conclusion that it was necessary to change the political system. Once Solidarnosc has to accept the constraints of respecting this legality, it will be put in the same situation, and that will not fail to have effects on the conyourself in conflict with your former comrades in struggle, like Wladyslaw Frasyniuk, for example?
CB: For a long time, up till 1987, I was very close to Frasyniuk. It was at the time of the formation of the public regional leadership (RKW) that our paths parted. I was asked to join it. I thought that a leadership could not be appointed from above, that it had to be made up of plant delegates. When the Dolmel plant organization adopted a different attitude from Walesa's toward the anti-crisis pact, the RKW censored the journal. They transformed the resolution from the clandestine plant committee into total support for Walesa.
So, the plant commission decided to go independent. It is such attitudes that are impelling more and more rank-and-file Solidarnosc activists to demand a new election of the union leaders. This is the only way to preserve unity. After refusing to hold such elections, under various pretexts, some regional leaderships have had to yield.
But in Warsaw and Wroclaw, the establishment has already prepared slates of those who are to be elected and those whose election must be prevented. This is, in a way, a repetition of what we have been experiencing for more than 40 years in Polish political life.
MT: In Warsaw, the union establishment has presented an organizational scheme for electing the union leadership. This proposal limits the plant structures to 50 percent of the delegates, and distributes the rest to the central structures (press, information, outgoing leadership, and so on), to the Church and even to the Industrial Association, which is a grouping of former oppositionists tempted by the perspective of creating enterprises and accumulating capital, and which thus has nothing in common with
15
Rajiv Gandhi on sonalities?
Today, if you like, the two principal rivals for bourgeois political leadership are Rajiv Gandhi and his former finance minister, Mr. V.P. Singh, who is the head of a new political formation called the Janata Dal, or the People's Party [different from the Janata Party]. What is interesting about this case is that it is the person who makes the party. It's not the party who threw up the leader. It was V.P. Singh who was cen-
THE DECLINE of Rajiv Gandhi since his unprecedented sweep to power in the 1984 general election after his mother's assassination has been rapid. The most recent example is the defeat of his Congress Party in the elections in the state of Tamil Nadu in the third week of
February.
Congress came in a poor third, after the Jayalitha faction of the Tamil regionalist party, the All-India Anna
Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK). (The AIADMK has been split between the factions led respectively by the wife and mistress of the deceased former film-star premier of the state. Jayalitha was the mistress.) The winner was the DK (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam), the party most favorably inclined to the Liberation Tigers of
Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka, who represent one of
Rajiv's thorniest foreign policy problems.
M. Navid, a leader of the Indian section of the Fourth