ON OCTOBER 27, 1991, the Polish parliament will be elected through free elections for the first time. Two years after the formation of a government originating from the Solidarnosc leadership, one and a half years after the beginning of the pro-capitalist economic reforms, the Polish mood is far from euphoric.
Already, It Is clear that the turnout in the elections will be very low; opinion polls carried out at the end of September, as the electoral campagn began, revealed that less than 10% of the population was Interested in It. Yet no less than 65 lists are competing for the favours of the electors.
JAN MALEWSKI
HE RESULTS of two years of hard line monetarism, carried out under the guidance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) by
Leszek Balcerowicz, vice prime minister and minister of finance in the two successive governments, defy any commentary.
Between August 1989 and August 1991
33.7%.
industrial production fell by investment declined by 24%, productivity of industry by 20%?.
Unemployment will be more than 2 million (10.5% of the workforce) by the end of the year, whereas real average wages have fallen by 37% in two years.* Even if some of these figures could be exaggerated, nobody can deny that the Polish economy is experiencing the gravest crisis of its history.
Some observers have pointed to Balcerowicz's success in the struggle against inflation. This has been brought down from an annual rate of over 1,000% at the end of 1989 to 80% in 1991.5 However, after experiencing a lull in mid-1990, the rate of inflation is increasing again and it is feared that the most pessimistic predictions will be surpassed in 1992.
In September the Diet had to take an emergency vote on a corrective budget authorizing a deficit of 26 thousand billion zlotys for the year 1991.6 Polish exports have grown only moderately, and this despite a devaluation of the zloty at the beginning of 1991.? The foreign trade deficit is growing and the IMF has just suspended its payments to the guarantee fund of the zloty.®
More seriously, the public enterprises
- which continue to represent 80% of
8 industrial production and which, in 1990, furnished more than 81% of fiscal receipts — are experiencing very serious financial difficulties. "For the first time in history, the balance of losses and profits was negative for the public sector taken as a whole"? at the end of the first quarter of 1991.
The collapse of the Soviet market, after the move to transactions in Western curand the forbidding, under IMF pressure, of barter agreements, is partly responsible for this. But, above all, the public enterprises are groaning under the weight of taxation while the private sector is to a great extent exonerated from paying taxes; it looks as if the government has consciously decided to demonstrate that the public sector is inevitably non-competitive by ruining it. 10
Several hundred public enterprises are today on the verge of bankruptcy. Their liquidation, which could be decided on after the elections, will show the degree of submission of Polish society to the laws of capital. If this milestone is passed, the point of no return will have been
The crisis of the public sector has not been counterbalanced by the development of the private sector, which enjoys a 1. Zycie Gospodarcze, no. 38, September 22, 1991. The weekly Nie, for its part, estimates a fall of 40% between September 1989 and September 1991. 2. Nie, no. 39, September 26, 1991. This lowering of productivity is essentially due to the underemployment of the productive apparatus. 3. Predictions the Central Office of Planning (CUP), cited by Polityka, no. 35, August 31, 1991. 4. Nie, op. cit. 5. Prediction of CUP, reported by Polityka, no. 35. 6. Or around $2.26 billion. This deficit is more than 10% of the provisional budget.
activity which do not require the immobilization of significant amounts of capital and in which it is possible to reap rapid profits while largely escaping public control.
Despite the government's efforts in this area, foreign capital has invested little in Poland. The main aim of the handful of joint ventures or enterprise purchases realized until now has been to eliminate competitors from the world market.
Thus the international consortium ABB bought up for next to nothing several Polish electric turbine manufacturers that had shown themselves capable in the past of competing with ABB's own production in a number of countries; these enterprises are today experiencing great difficulties because they have been reduced to the status of subcontracting while the Western owners grab the contracts that they once could have obtained themselves.
No serious Western investment
The rules of the economic game fixed by the government at the behest of the IMF favour speculation: "No serious Western entrepreneur has invested in Poland. It makes more sense to get credit from a Western bank, for example $30 million at 15%, then buy television sets in Singapore, sell them in Poland below their cost of production — at the same time killing the Polish industry — then place the zlotys thus obtained in a Polish bank at 80%, so as to draw out the equivalent of $50 million six months later. Let's not be astonished that it is only speculative capital that flows into our country" writes a Solidarnosc economic expert. "
It is true that such conditions have also permitted the beginning of a primitive accumulation of capital in the hands of some Polish speculators —a beginning only, however, for these latter cannot obtain $30 million credit from the western banks. 7. Whereas the maintenance of a fixed rate of convertibility of the zloty was one of the touchstones of the "Balcerowicz plan". 8. Gazeta Wyborcza, September 27, 1991. 9. Jerzy Kleer, in Polityka, no. 35, August 31, 1991. 10. Jeffrey Sachs, the principal foreign adviser of the Polish goverment, said in an interview with Gazela Bankowa:
"My goal was to lead the big nationalized enterprises to bankruptcy", according to Tygodnik Solidarnosc, no. 39, September 28, 1991. 11. Tygodnik Solidarnosc, no. 39, September 27.
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POLAND speculators
POLAND finds the little rackets which allow some people to join the ranks of the "middle class", projected by the new official ideology as the foundation of a modern democracy. The former regional president of
I WILL BE PRESIDENT OF ALL THE CATHOLICS
The virtual absence of Polish capital, the lack of interest of foreign capital, except in exceptional cases that involve the buying up of potentially dangerous competitors, or the purchase, for a derisory price, of industrial premises which can be used as shops for imported commodities, have reduced to nothing the dreams about the rapid privatization of the Polish economy. In June, the government sought to resolve the problem through a plan for general privatization, affecting 4,000 enterprises at once. 70% of the capital of these enterprises was to be distributed under the form of free shares to the whole population. Three months after the vote in the Diet, this law is at a standstill and looks increasingly likely to be forgotten.
In the enterprises this project comes up against the resistance of the workers; they are not inclined to see their trade union and self-management rights' disappear in exchange for control of 10% of the shares. In any case, this plan could never hope to bring in the funds necessary to modernize ruined industries and put them back on
But the pro-capitalist orientation has had some impact in another area; corruption has become widespread in public life. It is no longer possible to keep count of the number of "affairs" in which the new dignitaries are implicated up to their necks. The administrators of the fund for the management of the foreign debt are in prison, accused of having used their position to feather their own nests abroad, while largely wasting the assets of the fund. The banking system has been shaken
.. ER... ALL THE GOOD POLES! by the revelation of the existence of a combine formed by the new bourgeois proprietors of the enterprise Art. B, who took advantage of the underdevelopment and extreme slowness of the banking sys tem to invest the same sum of money several times over and thus draw multiple
This affair cost the president of the mini-governmental crisis. Since then, sevaccused of using their positions to get the public banks to finance enterprises in which they are shareholders. One of the big Polish weeklies published some photographs of Lech Walesa with the Art B. racketeers on its front page and posed the question; how many people have they paid off, and under what form? 14 They have not subsequently been sued for libel.
These "affairs" are far from being the privilege of the national elites. In each region, indeed in each enterprise, one 12. See /V 211, July 22, 1991. 13. A privatized enterprise is considered as a new legal entity; the agreements made with the old management are no longer applied and the trade unions themselves must be reformed. Moreover the workers' councils disappear. The only advantage is that wages are unfrozen, but experience shows that what the workers gain in increased direct wages they lose through the disappearance of the social wage. 14. Nie, no. 39, September 26, 1991. 15. The president of Solidarosc in the Bialystok region has thus lost his position (but not his capital after having played a controversial role in the privatization, to the benefit of himself and some of his cronies, of one of the rare profitable enterprises in the region (see Glob 24, September 27, 1991).
Solidarnosc becomes the proprietor of a brand new automobile salon, as a representative of the interests of Ford. The former regional vice president of Solidarnosc is head of the entrepreneurs' association. Finally, at a somewhat lower level, the leader of Solidarnosc in a recently privatized enterprise (sold for a song to its direct competitor on the world market) turns up as one of the directors of the new subsidiary, whilst his comrades in clandestinity swell the ranks of those seeking work. All the decision makers, whether linked to the old regime (providing they managed to change their colours quickly enough) or to the new, whether local councillors, parliamentary deputies, trades unionists or priests, can hope to profit from the manna. At worst, they get a bad reputation', and rarely do they have to pay anything back.
Lack of popular interest in political life
It is not surprising that the people show less and less interest in political life, or that the hints about a "strong and just regime" or the authoritarian speeches of
, and some of his opponents - such as Stanislaw Tyminski, Walesa's challenger during the presidential election, and today the leader of Party X17 — find attentive ears.
Passivity and demoralization are becommonths by a coalition of parties who certainly chose the right side during the presidential election, but who appear devoid of any real popular support!8 formidable propaganda campaign which eulogizes capitalism and rules out any other form of development, suffering the effects of the "construction of capitalism", the people take refuge in abstention.
The trade union organizations are suffering the consequences of this, losing memgains won in the past. Sociological surveys reveal a worrying rupture between the "elites" union and political party leaders, new middle classes and directors of the state 16. The latter sent one of his aides to Washington in June to find out about possible US reactions if he decided to resort to emergency legislation. 17. This party, which employs a classic reactionary populist discourse, has just been de facto forbidden from participating in the elections, for in a majority of regions the signatures that it claimed to have received have been judged to be false. Cynics say that the electoral commission has not taken the trouble to verify many of the other lists. Party X thus appears as the only one excluded from the electoral battle, something it is likely to stress in the future. 18. The Liberal Democrat Congress of prime minister Jan Krzysztof Bielecki had about 300 members when its leader took over the reins of government. It now claims to have 2,000. 19. See /V 211.
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9
International Viewpoint #215 • October 28, 1991
POLAND / USSR administration — and the rest of society!?. Little by little, the traditional division in Poland between partisans of the old regime and its former opponents blurs over, to be replaced by a new division between the profiteers and all the others, cutting through the old camps.
The forthcoming bankruptcy of the enterprises has provoked numerous strikes. In September workers at the Star truck factory, after six weeks of occupation, managed to block the immediate liquidation of their enterprise. The 50,000 workers in the aeronautical industry have struck — their enterprises, dependent on exchange with the USSR and government orders, have been on the brink of bankruptcy since the beginning of the year. The railworkers have restarted their hunger strikes, as have the peasants.
But these movements rarely end in victory for the strikers. Most often, when the situation is explosive, the authorities make a gesture, then everything begins again some weeks later. More seriously, on September 1, the bus drivers of Bialystok, who occupied their depot to protest against the liquidation of their enterprise and the bringing of transport under the private companies, attacked and evacuated by the police. A precedent has thus been created, Without any wave of solidarity against the attackers. The members of the municipal council which called the police in were found to be among the shareholders of the new private transport enterprises.
Frequent strikes express growing resentment
Although strikes against the policy of the new government are becoming more frequent and more bitter, the resentment of the workers finds no political expression. Nearly all the organizations which emerged from the struggle of Solidarnosc are under the control of the partisan of a pro-capitalist orientation. The Solidarnosc trade union itself seems divided between its apparatus, in its great majority still loyal to Lech Walesa, and its rank and file, inactive and atomized.
Such a paradoxical situation allows the organizations once tied to the old regime, purged of a good part of their careerists by the process of transition to capitalism, to appear as a potential point of support. In the workplaces the two principal trade unions — those linked to the OPZZ federation, set up under the state of emergency, and those linked to Solidarnosc, rebuilt under clandestinity — today enjoy equal status in the eyes of the workers. And they are increasingly found side by (though not yet arm in arm!) in the strug
Inside the Diet, those deputies of Solidarnosc origin who tend towards the left sometimes vote with the Social Democrat10 - eno originate from a tradition which ic deputies2 to the point at which the latte!
has denied the existence of a left not subordinate to it — speak today of the need for cooperation between the "post-PUWP left" and the "post-Solidarnosc left".
In the forthcoming elections it is unlikely that the voice of the small and fragmented left organizations which have emerged from Solidarnosc will be widely heard. They will have to compete with some dozens of other groups, some of whom can rely on financing by the new bourgeoisie.
Nonetheless, the opinion polls? imply hat the left organizations originating from Solidarnosc — Labour Solidarnosc (SP) led by Karol Modzelewski, and, to a lesser extent, the Social Democra Movement (RDS) of ex-Solidarnosc leader Zbigniew Bujak — can hope to find some response.
Support for opposition to government policy
The lists presented by the two trade unions originating from clandestine times — that of Solidarnosc and that of Solidarnosc 80 — may, in some places, attract the support of workers who wish to take their distance from the policy carried out until now. These two organizations are however very heterogeneous and in certain regions have formed electoral blocs with reactionary formations. 2
The struggle for the reins of government will doubtless be fought out between the Democratic Union, led by ex-prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, and the forces grouped around the president, Lech Walesa (Liberal Democrat Congress, Catholic Electoral Action and the Union of the Centre). The two coalitions essentially agree on the economic policy carried out over the past two years. They carry the principal responsibility for the current crisis. The lack of popular interest in the elections is by no means astonishing in these circumstances.
The beginning of the transition to capitalism has provoked an intense crisis, at once economic, social and moral. But, in the absence of a credible alternative, the restoration of capitalism continues. The electoral campaign now underway does not seem to be capable of leading to sig nificant changes. * 20. SDRP — Social Democratic Party of the Polish Republic - was formed by former members of the Polish United Workers' Party (the Stalinist party in power during the four preceding decades) at the beginning of 1990. Its leader, Aleksander Kwasniewski, told the weekly Polityka (no. 40, October 5) that his party would consider it a success if it gained 10% of the votes. 21. Whose unreliability should be taken into account. 22. The Labour Solidarosc electoral list includes members of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and, in Wroclaw, of the MKK — a local left tendency within Solidarosc and the Socialist Political Centre (SOP), which identifies itself with the Fourth Interna23. Thus in Wroclaw, the Solidarosc list has made an alliance with Catholic Electoral Action and the Union of the Centre.
«We are
preparing
for the
struggle"