The reactionary dispair of the cheated
ПРЕ
Opten
Jan Malewski explains what went wrong with the workers' movement which inspired a generation of self-management militants, and forced the collapse of Poland's Stalinist system
Poland * EMERGING FROM THE GENERAL STRIKE OF summer 1980, the independent self-managed trade union "Solidarnosc" was the political expression of an immense movement of social self-organisation around Poland's great regional industrial bastions. The roots of this movement can be traced to the collapse of a project of accelerated "Stalinist" economic development, based on the low rates of credit available on the world market at the beginning of the 1970s; the consequent beginning of a decline in the standard of living of the Polish people; and the popular feeling that this was largely attributable to the incapacity of the governing elites and their desire to preserve at any price their privileged social position. The defeat of this model of development discredited the bureaucracy of the party-state and pushed to the forefront an intellectual democratic opposition that had succeeded in building links with the workers vanguard after the repression of the strikes of June 1976.
The model of society which Solidarnosc embodied was inspired by this sentiment and the strikers' experiences of self-organisation -an egalitarian society based on ideals of solidarity. The galvanising effect that the strikes in the industrial bastions had on the demands of the least powerful sectors (health, education and so on) was the immediate translation of this aspiration.
The aim was a society which would guarantee the dignity of the workers through a system of enterprise self-management, modelled on the August 1980 strike committees and the 1956 workers' councils. A society which would respect capability, without placing those with special skills higher than the others. The symbol of this egalitarian desire was the role of "experts" in the movement. Counsellors to Solidarosc did not, generally, take part in the final decision making. Another illustration was the practice of nominating enterprise directors in the workers' councils.
This model was expressed in the language of the democratic opposition. The main currents of this opposition, some of which had their origins in the anti-Stalinist
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* Poland left of 1956, rejected Marxist references, which they associated with their bureaucratic caricatures. Solidarnosc preferred to speak of the "societisation" (1) of the economy, and a "self-managed republic" rather than use the word socialism. But, despite the mediation of exclusively 'democratic' language, and the search for a terminology as different as possible from the "novspeak" of the bureaucracy, the model of society expressed through Solidarnosc in 1980-1 was, essentially, that of a radical democratisation of the existing social system and not that of an overthrow of its social fundamentals. It amounted to a challenge to "actually existing socialism" in the name of the values that its propaganda upheld.
A challenge that became increasingly radical to the extent that the bureaucratic regime showed itself incapable of satisfying the aspirations clearly expressed by the masses. For it not only amounted to a challenge to the bureaucratic regime - in the enterprises and at the local level at first, and then the state - but also and above all to their privileged social situation, the demand that they come down from their pedestal (small though it was) to become part of the mass.
This was, it should be noted, a demand considerably more radical than that of a return to capitalism. That particular demand appeared after the defeat of the movement,. After having attempted to dam the dynamic of this movement through a project of economic reform that sought to structure the decisions of the councils of self-management through a set of market mechanisms and through the central power of the state - a project accepted by the union negotiators and challenged by the first congress of Solidarnosc, which imposed the primacy of democratic rank and file decisions - the bureaucratic leadership decided to break it through imposing the state of emergency. Its principal author, General Jaruzelski, would write ten years later: "We were hypnotised by the conviction that the central organs and experts of Solidarnosc did as they wanted. We overestimated their capacity to orient and manipulate the organisation. A social and political movement as powerful and radicalised as this. It carried its leaders more than these latter led it. That, certainly, did not justify them totally, but it is a fact. In December 1981 it reached its apogee". (2)
The state of emergency was, then, imposed to stop this dynamic. Its authors sought to preserve the chances of a future compromise with those who could embody the legitimacy of the social movement, while 30 International Viewpoint 277 decapitating its structures and seeking to break the link between leaders and rank and file militants - the democratic vehicle of the radicalism of the movement. The repression was not, then, blind. It was massive at the level of the enterprises, in order to extract the working class militants from their social milieu, to force them to capitulate or to emigrate and thus paralyse the movement by depriving it of its intermediary cadres.
If Solidarnose was thus able to preserve the continuity of its national leadership and its intellectual supporters, at the level of the enterprises this continuity of cadres and accumulated political experience was broken. Rather than a mass organisation preserved in clandestinity, Solidarnosc became after a few years a network for the diffusion of ideology from its intellectual centres to a rank and file condemned to passive consumption.
Jaruzelski's coup had yet another impact; it was very largely perceived as the ultimate proof that change was not possible in he framework of the system, when a mass movement as powerful as this one - and пона ін ро оти succeed in humanising actually existing socialism". At the same time, the formidable wave of solidarity that the attack on the Polish system had generated abroad, which had forced the Western governments to verbally and materially commit themselves to support for the Polish opposition, endowed capitalism with humanist virtues in the popular imagination.
The terrain was thus ripe for an idealisation on a mass scale of the capitalist option; the reins of intellectual self-limitation (3) were loosened and the clandestine publications of Solidarnosc quickly made up for lost time, inundating the movement with the neoliberal prose then in fashion in the West. It was in 1984-85, when the trade union movement was at its lowest point in the workplaces, that a first break with the project of the "self-managed republic" emerged among the leading circles of the clandestine Solidarnosc. In a report prepared at that time for Lech Walesa and entitled "Solidarnosc five years after August"(4), this break is clearly made under the rubric of "economic reform" and a return to the market economy, presented as the only "natural economy". In September 1985 the clandestine provisional leadership made public a document entitled "The economic demands of the TKK", which constituted a fundamental rupture with the choices of the first Solidarnosc congress. The
TKK postulated here the introduction of a market in capital and the privatisation of the enterprises as well as a guarantee of security for foreign investments in Poland.(5)
This economic orientation was also the culmination of the evolution of the positions of the majority of Solidarnosc leaders towards a solution of historic compromise with the bureaucracy, obtained cold, or alternately on the basis of a limited social mobilisation that would create the conditions for an agreement between the leaders of the opposition and those of the bureaucracy. This went together with an increasingly pronounced opening of the Polish economy to private initiative, under the aegis of general Jaruzelski, himself subject to the crushing pressure of the foreign debt. In 1988-89 when the social mobilisations resumed in the workplaces and turned, naturally, towards the symbols of Solidarnosc, the leadership of the trade union and the intellectual opposition were in the main convinced of the superiority of capitalism. As to the renewed rank and file of the union it no longer had the opportunity to experience a movement of self-organisation similar to 1980. Legitimate trade union structures were there, it was enough to fill them. The leaders came out of clandestinity with the status of martyrs and it sufficed to fall in behind them. The few historic dissidents among the Solidarnosc leadership were subjected both to state repression and ostracism by their former comrades - if they succeeded despite everything in making themselves heard, they appeared as those who divided and thus weakened the movement. The team around Jaruzelski, engaged in a profound market reform and involved in the first initiatives aiming at the privatisation of the economy, then became aware that in the absence of legitimacy it could not achieve its goals.(6)
This was also the signal given clearly by the IME, which had taken an active part in the elaboration of the project of capitalist restoration. Only the political and social opposition could legitimise this policy in the eyes of the masses and thus furnish the guarantee of success demanded by the West. Bronislaw Geremek, one of the principal Solidarnosc experts involved in the negotiations with the regime., which culminated in the so-called "round table accords" in April 1989, reported that from January 1989 onwards the priorities of the regime shifted from the economic to the political front: "it appeared that the economic questions had been pushed back from the programme of negotiations, or in any case
that they had begun to play a secondary role. On the other hand the establishment of a link between the legalisation of Solidarnosc and the political acceptance of elections was pushed to the front rank". (7) During the partially free parliamentary elections of June 1989, the Solidarnosc leadership had supported the candidatures of the civic committees of Solidarnosc, with the effect of creating a confusion between the trade union emerging from clandestinity and a political elite in formation. The result of these elections had rather disturbed the projects which came out of the round table. General Jaruzelski lost any remaining legitimacy, and could no longer hope to remain in power with the critical support of the post-Solidarnosc opposition. He had to hand power to someone else. The leaders of the opposition, after hesitation, accepted to take charge of the government. In doing so, they established a parliamentary democracy. They adopted, with great conviction, the transformation of society under the tutorship of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The centre of political gravity shifted to the state institutions. The reconstituted Solidarnosc trade union passed into the background. Though it maintained its unhesitating support for government policies which, in the name of the necessary rupture with the dictatorial past, also prepared a rupture with the previous social relations.
Adam Michnik, one of the most brilliant theoreticians of the 1970-1990 period, now the editor of the country's largest liberal daily newspaper, does not hide: "the round table was preceded by two waves of strikes, in spring and in autumn of 1988. The strikers could rightly consider that it is thanks to them that the new system was successful. And yet these strikers became the first victims of the transformation. Prices increased dramatically. Real wages fell sharply. The inefficient large enterprises were condemned to internal restructuring or bankruptcy. Their workers discovered the threat of mass redundancies. Farmers felt threatened by the invasions of foreign products. The intelligentsia was hit by the brutal ending of state patronage. After the great euphoria, the great disillusionment appeared. The populist stereotype of the "unfinished revolution" and the "state divided up by robbers" was a reaction to this. In the absurd accusations there was however a rational kernel. The market revolution and privatisation inevitably signified a brutal growth of social inequalities." (8)
Inside Solidarnosc this populist stereotype, to take up Michnik's term, would gain increasing support. The successive trade union leaderships could respond to the profound unhappiness of their members only with the argument of time; a little more patience and the future would be better. Subsequently, time having passed without improvement, those who accused the liberal currents of having protected "the communists", hence "stopping the reforms", emerged on top. Incapable of understanding that the form taken by the democratic victory was at the same time a social defeat of the workers, and utilising the stereotypes of the old regime (where the dictators and the privileged were the same and where liberty meant also an end to the unreasonable "We liquidated the old nomenklatura, Father, but we didn't have time for anything else." privileges that the bureaucrats had fraudulently granted themselves) the Solidarnosc trade union engaged itself in the struggle for "de-Communisation", demanding, at the same time the heads of the former party members, yet more privatisation, yet more market, in short yet more capitalism.
In the name of this ideology, the Solidarnose leadership did not hesitate to divide the strike movements against the more brutal aspects of government policy, refusing to support them and thus leaving the ground free to the rival trade union OPZZ (originating from the official trade union movement of the declining years of the dictatorship), which it identified with "communism" (9) This drift was completed by a growing alignment with the most traditionalist and reactionary sectors of the Polish Catholic hierarchy.The electoral victory in September 1993 of the parties with roots in the old regime has accelerated this evolution. Since these parties continued the neoliberal policy - with, it should be said, a
Poland * more consistent social policy; real wages have begun slowly to rise and unemployment has slightly reduced - the enemy could at last be designated.
Once again, Solidarnose showed itself capable of taking the head of the movements of social resistance, of organising workers' mobilisations and obtaining some successes. If today its strength can hardly be compared with that of 1980, its influence and its capacity for mobilisation being negligible in a private sector in full expansion (where union rights are scarcely recognised), it continues to be dominant in the big public sector enterprises that give it an imposing strike power.
The strike movement of May 1995 in the "Ursus" strike factory in Warsaw bears witness to this capacity and throws a spotlight on he political evolution of the most radical sectors of today's Solidarnosc. Ursus was a bastion of resistance under the old regime; in June 1976, the workers of this enormous factory cut the international ParisMoscow railway line, thus unveiling their revolt in the eyes of the world. In 1980 it was again here that the strike movement commenced, at the beginning of July. It was a Ursus worker, Zbigniew Bujak, who was in the course of the 1980s the most symbolic underground leader of Solidarnosc. In the course of the 1970s the factory experienced an investment boom with the government's decision to make it into the biggest manufacturer of tractors in Europe, following the purchase of a licence from MasseyFerguson. This immense workplace was never totally completed, but with the decentralisation of the financing of investments, Ursus fell heavily into debt in the course of the 1980s. Neoliberal shock therapy would sound the death knell for it like other public enterprises; Ursus was now to pay the state a "dividend" on capital (payable even in the case of deficit!) and a gigantic tax on wage increases. It was refused access to credit and lost its traditional markets in the east and even within the country, the peasants no longer having the means to invest. This policy was supported by the historic leaders of Solidarnosc at the factory, Zbigniew Janas and the aforementioned Bujak.
It was then that the leadership of the local trade union passed into the hands of a radical current. Its principal leader became director of the enterprise in 1992 with the support of Solidarnosc. The directors and the trade union tried to improve the profitability of the enterprise while simultaneously improving
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* Poland the lot of the wage-earners; wages experienced a slow increase. But the factory, whose capacity of production is 70,000 tractors a year, could only sell around ten thousand. In May 1995, when bankruptcy threatened again, the enterprise being incapable of facing the increasingly pressing demands of the creditors (both bank and state), Solidarnosc called a strike. On several occasions thousands of demonstrators invaded the centre of Warsaw. As in 1976 the strikers cut the international railway. They were joined by contingents of miners, steelworkers and arms sector workers, also on strike at that time. They would face the police and the condemnations of the media.(10) Their demands were as follows: wage increases, access to cheap credit for the factory, cancellation of the debt to the state and social insurance, suppression of the control of wages, repayment of the VAT that the enterprise had paid for the components of its production. In short, starting from the economic reality of their own enterprise, an alternative model of economic development to the prevalent liberalism.
It was, however, on the ideological front that the strike was out of the ordinary.Anti-
Semitism mingled with anti-Communism appeared in broad daylight. An effigy of the prime minister and member of the social democratic party (SDRP - which emerged from the former Polish Unified Workers
Party, in power from 1944 to 1989), Josef
Oleksy, decorated with a Star of David was burnt by the demonstrators. The latter also barracked the liberal ministers and former
32 International Viewpoint 277 leaders of Solidarosc, calling them thieves, traitors and, into the bargain, Jews, who they said should be sent to the gas chambers! The discourse of the Solidarnose leader at Ursus, Zbigniew Wrzodak, took up themes well known from other times; attacks against "international finance" and the "red oligarchy", demands for "credit for Polish production" accusations of "crimes against Poland" formulated against the elites.
In an open letter to the procurator general,
Wrzodak wrote in the following terms of Kolodko, the social democratic and very liberal economy minister; "the contempt shown by Gregorz Kolodko to workers who struggle for their own survival and that of their families, the lordly (11) arrogance worthy of an enriched vagabond and of a simple guttersnipe carried to the summits of power, his pretensions as an economist" when his decisions are worthy of a simple speculator (12) - all this should be interpreted as a rotten provocation' seeking to produce an inevitable social explosion escaping any control, and subsequent to this a blood bath in Poland" (13)
This public reappearance of all that which is worst in the Polish political tradition is a pure product of the disarray of the workers, who do not understand how what they had experienced as their victory has escaped them. In the course of a few years their habits, all the know how necessary to get through everyday life, very many of their reference points and values have become obsolete. This terrain is particularly fertile for a conspiracy interpretation of history and a falling back on "stable values"; faith, family, country. Welcoming to Ursus Jan Olszewski, programme was both traditionalist Catholic and in favour of a radical "deCommunisation" — he is a former prime minister whose government fell after he had denounced as communist agents several historic leaders of Solidarnose including Lech Walesa (14). Z. Wrzodak presented him as a victim of "the Communist system, and their agents, directed by Mr. Walesa" (15). As a result, the Solidarnosc organisation in the Ursus plant decided to support the Olszewski electoral campaign (16). Olszewski won 42.7% of votes at the Warsaw region Solidarity conference, which was rather more votes than Lech Walesa collected.(17)
The Solidarnosc leadership is less extremist. It asked the Catholic hierarchy to mediate its attempts to facilitate a common electoral list for the traditional right. But in the end Solidarnosc decided to support Lech Walesa in the presidential elections. It distanced itself from the most vocal outbursts of anti-semitism, and tried to create a programmatic alternative. It even presented a draft constitution, based on "decomunisation," privatisation by distribution of shares, and enshrining a corporatist state structure, in which the budget would be adopted by a tripartite commission of workers' unions, peasants' unions, and representatives of the employers. They also proposed a draft law on privatisation and reprivatisation (which would allow proprietors expropriated after 1945 and their descendants 10% of bonds!) was also drawn up (the aim is to distribute property to all Polish adults) as well as another seeking to render the tax system "pro-family" and a draft reform of social insurance (tripartite management: employers, unions, consumer representatives).
All these projects are based on a corporatist vision of Polish capitalism and a conception of a society founded on the most traditional Catholicism and a narrow nationalism. Moreover, in August 1995 the president of the Solidarnosc union, Marian Krzaklewski, announced that Solidarnosc would organise a march on Warsaw -modelled on the Mussolini's march on Rome - if the law on the commercialisation of enterprises which had just been voted through the Diet was applied - this law being seen as an obstacle to "true privatisation". (18) At the 7th congress in June 1995 it was decided that Solidarnosc should be the name not only of a trade union but also, in alliance
with the political parties of the right, a great anti communist social movement with the goal of sweeping the left from power. As a consequence Marian Krzaklewski, elected as head of the union for the third time, then ensured the election to the leadership of Zbigniew Wrzodak of Ursus. (19)
Lech Walesa, who after a quarrel with Solidarnosc had renewed his links with the leadership, was heavily applauded when he said "our Solidarnose revolution has been stopped half way... dreams of a benevolent and just state, rich and stable, remain unfulfilled... a narrow group of people enrich and take in their hands the majority of key posts. The others - who are the overwhelming majority - get poorer and have to satisfy themselves with the crumbs from the masters' tables. Such is capitalism when it is built by the hands of the former Communists. " He appealed for the building of "a coalition of forces capable of carrying out the reforms" (20). In October, after an internal referendum, the leadership of Solidarnosc decided to commit the union to Walesa's campaign. This commitment seemed to go beyond the electoral campaign.
Following the announcement of the victory of the social democratic presidential
K wasniewski, Solidarnosc president Krzaklewski spoke of a new partition of Poland. In the days that followed the union organised a massive campaign seeking to have the result annulled, gathered more than 600,000 signatures. Finally - and this is not perhaps an anodyne reference given the links Walesa has built up with the army leadership - in commenting on his defeat Walesa cited Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, architect of Polish independence in 1918 and founder of a strong state in Poland following a military coup supported by the trade unions in May 1926; "To be vanquished and not to give up is a victory. To win and rest on one's laurels is a defeat". He then left it to be understood that he could still present himself in an election, "perhaps even before it is due".
Solidarnosc accepted their defeat in the elections. They challenged the government and the social-democratic presidency on every conceivable point. Shortly before the ceremony transferring power to the new president, the outgoing team accused the social democratic Prime Minister Jozef Oleksy of being a Russian agent, forcing him to resign. In contrast, Lech Walesa was warmly received at the Solidarity headquarters. His return to the Gdansk naval dockyards, where mass redundancies have been announced, as an ordinary electrician, testify to his desire to reestablish himself as the labour leader he was until his election as president. His political project is to unify the anti-capitalist right (Solidarity, Jan Olszewski's Movement for the Reconstruction of Poland, ROP, and the Christian National Union, ZChN), and then to add the liberal right (Union for Liberty, UW). "I give them five months to unite," Walesa has said. "If they come together, I will give them my blessing. If not, it is me who will be the motor." (22) 1. The Polish term "uspolecznienie", usually translated as "socialisation", is formed from the term "spoleczenstwo" ("society"), and thus has no common root with "socjalizm" (socialism). In our opinion this was the reason for the success of this term. 2. Wojciech Jaruzelski, "Stan wojenny diaczego" ("Why the state of emergency"), BGW Warsaw 1992, p. 390. 3. It is generally admitted that self-limitation - the term advanced by Jacek Kuron in 1980 - consisted in the first place in avoiding formulating over-radical demands on the political front (the "question of power" in particular). This is correct, but partial; the societal reflection was itself self -limited. Leszek Balcerowicz, one of Solidarnosc's economic experts from 1980, and subsequently minister for the economy in 1989-91, thus wrote later; "in 1980 and in the course of the following years, the self-management version of economic reform appeared as the best of possibilities. I was myself its partisan up to a certain time, without for all that having the illusion that it amounted to a worse solution than the private market economy" (L. Balcerowicz, "800 dni - szok kontrolwany" (*800 days -the controlled shock"), BGW, Warsaw 1992, 4. cf. "Raport Polska 5 lat po Sierpniu" ("Polish report 5 years after August"), MSS, Warsaw 1985 (clandestine edition). 5. "Tygodnik Mazowsze" no. 141, 1985 6. Cf. Cyril Smuga, The consequences of historic failure, "IV" # 169, September 18, 7. Bronislaw Geremek and Jacek Zakowski interviewed, "Geremek opowiada, Zakowski pyta", Rok 1989 ("Geremek talks, Zakowski interviews, the year 1989"), Plejada, Warsaw 8). Adam Michnik, "Teren zaminowany", ("Mined terrain"), in "Gazeta Wyborcza" (henceforth GW), November 21, 1995, p.18) 9. cf. our article "Workers struggles revive", "IV" # 235, September 28, 1992. 10. The commentator of GW wrote; "In a market economy there is no reason to
Poland * Solidarosc is thus resolutely turning its back on any mobilisation of the workers in unity with the other unions to devote themselves to a fundamentally ideological conflict. It must take responsibility for a lasting division of the Polish working class at a time when this latter is on the defensive after the heavy defeats suffered since 1981. If the former Polish regime merited the sobriquet of "the country of the disconcerting lie" (as Anton Ciliga designated Stalinist
Russia), decidedly the change of regime has not, for all that, made the lie disappear. * maintain a factory just because it is big and deserving. It must be useful and guarantee profits."† (May 27-28, 1995) As for Zbigniew Janas, historic leader of Solidarnosc at Ursus, he explained; "even if the government cancels the debts, after one or two years, with this director and head of the trade union, debts will grow anew" (quoted by GW, May 20-21, 1995). For his part, the social democratic deputy Zbigniew Siemiatkowski explains; "Ursus should shake up the imagination of my colleagues of the Alliance of the Democratic Left (the electoral bloc of the social democrats, which also includes the OPZZ trade union) which regarded privatisation without sympathy. It is enough to compare what happened at Ursus with the situation in the privatised steelworks Lucchini [in Warsaw, and another historic bastion of Solidarnosc in the capital] (quoted by GW, June 2, 1995). 11. The term used in the original text is a word of polish slang borrowed from Yiddish 12. Again the term used is borrowed from 13. "Teraz Ursus" of May 26, 1995, Solidarnose factory bulletin. 14. Cf. Jan Malewski and Jaroslaw Wardega, "War at the sulmmit", IV # 234, September 15. Quoted by GW, August 28, 1995. 16. In the first round of the presidential election Olszewski obtained 6.87% of votes expressed, coming fourth. 17. According to GW, October 19th, 1995. 18. GW, August 9th, 1995 19. Subsequently the presence of Wrzodak on the leadership of the union has been challenged under the influence of Lech Walesa, who did not find him "presentable" (cf. GW, December 11, 1995). 20. Quoted from GW, June 9, 1995. 21. Walesa won 62% of the votes of delegates at the congress against 23% for Olszewski and 10% for the President of the National Bank, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, cf. Gazeta Wyborcza du 19 octobre 1995. 22. Quoted in Gazeta Wyborcza du 16 avril
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