ON THE EVE OF THE MILITARY
CRACKDOWN:
SOLIDARNOSC AND THE QUESTION OF POWER
By Zbigniew Kowalewski
(The following article was written by a member of the leadership of the Lodz region of Solidarnosc for the Swedish weekly ETC. translation is by IV.)
After a long struggle, the radical currents supporting workers self-management scored a victory during the second session of the First National Congress of Solidarnosc. The congress rejected the compromise that the presidium of the union's National Commission (KK) had made with the Sejm on the Workers Self-Management Bill and the State Enterprises Bill.
The union assembly, however, did not consider that the fight over the question of the laws was over, even though it had led to a partial defeat for Solidarnosc, largely as a result of the compromise made by the KK.
As had been proposed by the delegates from Lodz, it was decided that the government's decrees to implement these two laws--which stood in flagrant contradiction to the positions of the union and the Movement for Self- Management-- should be submitted to a referendum in the factories.
It was on this basis that the union was to fight for modification of the laws adopted by the parliament. Moreover, the congress clearly expressed its determination to continue the struggle for genuine workers self-management. And it committed the union port the struggle of the even if this led to violating the laws (1) •
After this resolution was adopted, a section of the activists who were partisans of self-management went ahead, without waiting for the end of the congress, to start the preparatory work for a new expansion of the movement. This involved both stepping up its activity and moving to higher forms of organization.
The regional coordinating committee of self-management bodies in Upper Silesia, under the chairmanship of Jan Huzarewicz and with 18
Henryk Szlajfer as its advisor, decided to put into practice what the "Lublin Group" had been fighting for for several months already.
On the initiative of Upper Silesia, about a week and a half after the congress, on October 17, the delegates of seventeen regional coordinating bodies founded the Organizing Committee for a National Federation of Self- Management Councils (the KZ-KFS). This committee was to function as a provisional leadership until the holding of a National Congress of Workers Councils, whose task would be to achieve the conditions for "creating a self-management model for the economy and the
Contrary to the Lublin Group, the Network of Solidarnosc organizations (the Siec), including seventeen big plants, had not up till then supported the idea of a vertical structure of the self-management movement. It was even rather opposing this perspective. its most well-known activists, Hans Szyc, was even elected chairman of the KZ-KFS.
It must be stressed, however, that the Gdansk regional coordinating committee joined the Federation only after a lot of hesitations, and that the Lower Silesia coordinating committee refused to join
Both were under the influence
At the time of the congress, a section of Network activists the resolution on self-management, even though the majority of plant committees belonging to the Network were taking part in the fight for workers self-management. But most of the Network's experts and some of the Solidarnosc activists under their influence were partisans of the market economy and competition among factories.
Thus, this element often took a hostile attitude to radical initiatives taken by the Self-Management Movement. Having more confidence in parliamentary democracy than the democracy of workers councils, I they preferred to appeal to the technicians than to the workers themselves. Nonetheless, the workers who made up the rank and file of the union clearly aspired to radical actions.
As the sociologist Jadwiga Staniszkis noted, the gap between the ranks and many leaders was tending to deepen, insofar as it represented a difference of political
"I am afraid that the language of the leaders is not very convincing for the rank-and-file activists, " she said. slogans of socializing ownership and self-management do not greatly appeal to the imagination of the
There is a reason why it is easier to give impetus to self-management by talking about the seizure of economic power, do; or by talking about active strikes (the workers taking over production), as Kowalewski does in
So, it is not surprising that the Solidarnosc leadership retreated soon after the second session of the First Congress. The KK, to start with, did not formally recognize the Federation as a partner. Without being, strictly speaking, equivocal, its position was not
While the Lodz delegation had explicitly demanded that the referendum be organized within a maximum of six weeks after the congress, the KK delayed taking the decisions that would have made it possible to organize the vote. The experts advocated two possible tactics--to postpone the referendum to the indefinite future or to minimize the implications of the vote.
In view of this situation, on November 13, the Lublin Group decided to draw up a draft of nineteen questions for the referendum (4), which it submitted to the Committee of the National Federation for Self-Management. The 1. Dokumenty Zjazdu, BIPS, Gdansk, 1981, pp. 124-26. 2. AS, bulletin of Solidarnosc for the Warsaw region, No. 45, October 13-18, 1981. 3. Niezalesznosc, No. 129, September 16, 1981. 4. AS, No.52, November 12-15, 1981, p. 207.
latter accepted it. For their part, the KK's group of experts presented a draft limited to four questions, which testified to their determination not to go beyond a certain point in challenging the laws.
The group of experts claimed that a number of the controversial decrees on implementing the laws could be interpreted in a sense favorable to Solidarnosc, forgetting that only those who held the power-that is, the bureaucracy and not Solidarnosc--could do the interpreting.
Under the pressure of its radical wing, the KK finally adopted a resolution setting the first week of December as the date for the referendum. But it did not settle the questions either of the way the question would be formulated or the way the vote was to be organized. This date proved a fiction and could not be respected. In this same resolution, the KK nonetheless recognized the need for creating coordinating committees of self-management bodies on the regional and national levels. It committed the trade-union organizations to help set these bodies up (5). This decision clearly represented a success for the council activists. But it did not yet mean recognition of the Organizing Committee of the Federation.
Along with this, the situation for the self-management bodies in the factories was, while not always difficult, at least often very complicated.
It seemed in effect that the government intended to ignore the Solidarnosc congress resolution demanding that in nearly all the enterprises the managers should be elected by workers councils or councils representing the personnel. It was learned that the authorities wanted to maintain the exclusive right of the state administrative organs to name the directors of the 1, 500 largest plants in the country, that is, those that had a decisive importance for the national economy. Clearly, the struggle to break the party nomenklatura was only beginning.
However, the most militant and conscious sectors of the Self-Management Movement refused to yield. Despite the difficulties, the struggle for the election of managers continued. An ever-increasing number of workers councils adopted the method for choosing managers worked out by independent experts, members of the Lodz branch of the Scientific Association for Organization and Management. That is, they called on qualified candidates to submit applications that would be passed on by the workers councils.
Since August, this method had been popularized by the Lublin Group (6). Ignoring the position of the authorities, the workers councils often invited the Lodz experts to come to help them organize the competition for the job of plant manager.
The policy of faits accomplis was not limited to that. The State Enterprises Law made it clear that the plant manager was to run the factory. The resolution of the Solidarnosc Congress, on the other hand, maintained that the plants should be run by the self-management bodies, and that the manager's job was to execute their decisions. Everywhere that Solidarnosc and the workers council considered the relationship of forces favorable, it was not the law that was followed but the position of Solidarnosc.
Nonetheless, it must be stressed that in most cases, the workers councils were not yet self-management bodies but organs of struggle for self-management and for supervision by the workers over the production process. "This supervision represents the main axis of transitional program for real workers self-management, and at the same time, one of the main ways of fighting for self-management. In the conditions in which we are working, this workers control involves above all a thorough knowledge of the enterprise and the right of veto over the decisions of the administration (7). "
Regardless of this, however, in a growing number of factories the self-management bodies and the commissions of Solidarity declared in the name of the workers their determination to end the subordination of these enterprises to the Industrial Associations, which are the intermediate bodies of bureaucratic management between the ministries and the units of production. The parasitical character of these Associations was particularly obvious.
Workers commissions set up in the plants worked out their own schemes for establishing democratic relationships, based on freedom of choice, between the enterprises. At the same time, regional and national organs of the Self-Management Movement developed and popularized similar schemes, which made it possible to take back the initiative from the bureaucratic apparatus.
THE REGIONAL COORDINATING
COMMITTEES
The role of the regional coordinating committees of the self-management movement was limited in general to helping the self-management bodies in the factories to develop and reinforce themselves. They had not yet reached the stage of exercising social control over the economy. Nonetheless, there were some first steps that went in this direction. This was the case notably in Upper Silesia, where the authorities tried to get more coal mined by bribing the workers and by trying to increase the workweek.
Against the background of a worsening energy crisis, the regional coordinating committee developed a scheme for increasing production based on quite different approaches. In this plan, increasing the volume of coal mined and increasing efficiency in the use of coal were to be the "results of changes in the organization of work designed to 1) increase the productive work time in the workweek; 2) save on electrical energy consumption in the productive cycle (8)." It was shown that the productive work time in the mines was an average of 66% to 73% of nominal time, and that poor organization resulted in wasting energy equivalent to millions of tons of coal.
Nonetheless, the most important task was still to set up self-management bodies in as many plants as
The law adopted by the Sejm set December 31 as the cutoff date for forming self-management bodies in all state enterprises. Where the workers were not yet ready for the idea of self-management, this deadline could be used by the bureaucracy to set up councils regardless of the level of consciousness or activity of the masses. Where this level was low, the coun cils would fall under the political control of the bureaucracy.
Forestalling this danger required a considerable ideological and organizational effort by the leaderships of Solidarnosc and the regional coordinating committees of the self-management movement. But if these coordinating committees existed already in twenty-five regions at the end of November, at the same time it should be noted that outside the big industrial centers, the regional Solidarnosc leaderships were often not very active in building self-management.
In this struggle, the big factories played a key role. It was often in such plants that self-management got the most support from the workers. But it was in these enterprises also that it was most difficult to or5. AS, No. 49, November 2-4, 1981, p. 302. 6. Samorzad (bulletin of the Lublin Group), No. 2, pp. 22-26. 7. Zbigniew Kowalewski, Solidarnosc i walka o samorzad zalogi, Lodz, 1981, p.23. 8. Henryk Szlajfer, S. Jablonski, W. Latoch, H. Nojman, Wzrost produkcji wegla kamiennego, Katowice, 1981, mimeographed.
ganize such a system because making workers democracy function was more com-
The law required that the workers concil be elected directly. The Lublin Group had declared itself earlier in favor of indirect election, by delegates (9), which better suited the conditions in very large enterprises. But this idea did not get sufficient support in Solidarnosc and was not accepted by the law. The process of electing the council was not only more drawn out as a result but still more complicated.
This difficulty was aggravated by another factor. While the idea of building self-management from below--based on teams, brigades, and workshops--had been popularized since the beginning of 1981 by various activists and theoreticians (10), it aroused little interest among the workers. In the big factories, this did not facilitate the struggle against the division between manual and intellectual workers, and that made it more difficult to transform the relationships within the enterprises and to abolish the authoritarianism prevailing within them.
Nonetheless, the radical currents in the union did not present the referendum and the struggle for changing the laws as the only way to advance workers self-management.
THE TACTIC OF THE ACTIVE STRIKE
Beginning in August, the Lodz region opened up a big propaganda campaign around the question of the active strike, based on a plan that I worked out (11). The vice-chairman of the regional Solidarnosc, Grzegorz Palka, developed a proposal dealing with the tactics and strategy of the struggle for an economic reform based on workers self-management. active strike had an important place in it.
Moreover, Andrzej Slowik, the chairman of the regional Solidarnosc, developed a scheme for setting up a second chamber of the Sejm and in the local govemment councils that would represent the economic power of the workers (12). Along with all this, there was the scheme for trade-union supervision over the rationing system and the distribution of consumer goods, which began to be put into practice in October (13). Thus, a strategy began to 20 emerge for the struggle to achieve workers
On October 23, the active strike was recognized by Solidarnosc as a method of trade-union struggle. In the resolution adopted on that day, the KK warned the government that the to prepare for and to undertake an active strike in certain sectors of the economy (14), "if by the end of October the government had shown itself incapable of taking energetic action to meet the needs of the population, if it continued to oppose social control of the economy, and if it did not end repression against the
A few days earlier, the chairman of the Journalists Association, Stefan Bratkowski, wrote a letter to the Fifth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers Party (PUWP) in which he said that the society might very well respond to the government's demonstrations of strength by an active general strike:
"Don't forget, Poles have an incredible capacity for self-organization. In a few days, a general strike could establish a spontaneous network of communication, a network of coordinating and mutual aid committees. The plants would continue to function during such a strike, production and exchange would continue. But the government would no longer have anything to say about it (15)."
The authorities were panic stricken. A 9. Cf the Plan for Workers Self-Management in Sociat Enterprises, the Ownership of the Entire People, which was drawn up by the Lublin Conference, July 14, 1981.
The workers councils were to be elected indirectly not by all the personel but by an assembly of delegates. The members of the workers councils would represent workers councils in the various shops. 10. Zbigniew Kowaleski, op.cit., pp. 2544; J. Strzelecki, "Rady robotnicze 195658" in Robotnik, No.73, 1981, p.4 Stefan Bratkowski, Nowy Marsyliusz Warsaw, 1981. 11. Zbigniew Kowalewski, O taktyce strajku czynnego, Lodz, 1981. 12. Programmatic Proposals from the Presidium of the Lodz Regional Leadership week later, during a session of the Sejm, Premier Jaruzelski warned those who might resort to active strikes about the risks they would run. Other PUP leaders, including Central Committee Secretary Stefan Olszowski, made statements of the same tenor. The central organ of the PUWP, Trybuna Ludu, purlished a long commentary about the pamphlet On the Tactic of the Active Strike. It said that this work contained a scenario for the seiaure of power by Solidarnosc and that it had to be opposed at all cost (16).
Despite its earlier decision, the KK did not begin preparations for active strikes. A concerted attack was in fact launched against this tactic within the circles of experts. In a discussion at Solidarity's Center for Social and Professional Research, some of these experts said: "It is very difit is quite easy to strangle one (17), While ficult to carry out an active strike,
Some of the technicians who favored a market economy expressed their aversion to the perspective of forming a centralized authority of the councils: economic power in an active strike, and the subsequent establishment of a government of workers councils, can lead to replacing one central bureaucracy by another, and one authoritarian system of distribution and central decision making by another (18)."
In a trade-union meeting in Lublin on December 4, one of the most influential of the KK's experts said that the concept of the active strike was "an idea launched by ultraleftists and Trotskyists, a term that has a nice ring to it but nobody knows exactly what it means." This irritated many of the workers present, who not only knew very well what an active strike was but who were working on concrete plans to put it into practice in their factories.
This was not an isolated reaction among
In November and early December, the idea of the active strike was rapidly gaining popularity in the union, and particularly though not exclusively among the workers in heavy industry.
A sociological study carried out in early November in the Lodz region indicated that 65% of the union members favored active strikes, as against only 12% who were for the classical passive strike (19). of Solidarity for the First Congress of Delegates of Solidarity. 13. Zbigniew Kowalewski, "Solidarite a 1 la veille du coup de force ou la bataille du pouroir, " Le Monde, Januaey 7, 1982. 14. AS, No. 46, October 19-25, 1981, p. 30T. 16. A. Pawlowska, Czynnie po wladze, Trybuna Ludu, November 2, , 1981, p.2. 7. AS, No.48, October 29-November 1, 1981, p. 205. 18. A. Krajewski, "Oglosimy strajk, bedziemy pracowac, " Przeglad techniczny, No. 48, 1981, p. 8. |19. AS, No.50, November 5-8, 1981, p.401.
In a big modern plant in Lodz, Wifama, 85% were in favor of active strikes. The workers saw this method as an effective one by which the society could struggle against the crisis and the economic policy of the bureaucracy, which was contrary to their interests.
The chairman of Solidarnosc at the Manifest Lipcowy mine explained: "The only perspective is to impose social control over production.
And the only effective means that we have today for doing so is the active strike. It is a form of action that enables us to exercise control over the entire process, from the point of production in the factory to the point where the product reaches its consu-
The setting up of workers self-defense guards was becoming more urgent since the army's "territorial operational groups" were beginning to appear in the plants. reinforced the suspicion that their objective was to gather intelligence in preparation for an assault on the factories.
At this point, the crisis already had an openly revolutionary character. In November, the authorities had explicitly abandoned the idea of introducing their own economic reform--a very limited one--in January. They postponed it to 1983 at the earliest. On December 3, the presidium
"The so-called provisional economic system for 1982 (Provizorium) in practice
Zbigniew Bujak, chairman of the Warsaw region Solidarnosc was one of the union leaders who realized the need for determined opposition to the government's tactics both with respect to the economic reforms and elections. He said:
"This involves a conflict with the authorities, virtually a final one, a conflict similar in dimensions to the one over Bydgoszcz (where police attacked union leaders in March), but this time with no concessions. We are convinced that this is the only road we can take. If we lose, the situation will hardly be worse than it is today. But we will be in a better position than if we yielded. Because giving way would mean disarming ourselves, it would mer (20). "
In some regional bodies of Solidarnosc, preparations began for calling active strikes, and the enterprises responsibility for deciand special teams were assigned to the project. This was the case not only in Lodz but also in Stalowa Wola in Warsaw. During the patriotic demonstration on November Il, the vice-chairman of Warsaw Solidarnosc, Seweryn Jaworski, called on the workers to prepare themselves to take control over the factories by means of active strikes.
On December 6, the chairman of Solidarnosc in Lublin, Jan Bartczak, launched a similar call. At the same time, the Upper Silesia regional leadership published a plan for setting up a trade-union center for distibuting goods produced during future active strikes.
Gregorz Palka, the person responsible for economic reform in the KK presidium, designated an informal coordinator in Lodz to direct preparations for an active strike on the national level. In fact, there was already a certain coordination in this work between Lodz, Warsaw, and Stalowa Wola. In Warsaw, Jerzy Dyner, a member of the presidium, who was at the same time an activist in the Lublin Group, had worked out a set of practical instructions for the active strike. THE QUESTION OF "WORKERS DEFENSE
At the same time, the call for the creation of "workers guards," that is, selfdefense militias of Solidarnosc, began to gain a certain hearing. On December 2, the Lodz presidium advanced a "proposition for action by the union--an active strike combined with the formation of workers self-defense guards. " These guards were to "defend the plants and distribution network during the active strike."
Immediately afterward, in a meeting of the presidium of the KK in Radom, Gregorz Palka demanded that the union issue a call for the formation of workers self-defense guards. On December 4, one of the trade-union leaders in Lublin explained: "If Solidarnosc does not prepare itself on this level, we will be taken by surprise and unable to resist. We must not only prepare for an active strike but make the preparations to defend ourselves against the attacks and provocations of the authorities."
maintains the old system of managing the economy, while shifting onto the workers sions that remain in the hands of the central bodies. This amounts to making null and void the reform and the laws on self-managment and the enterprises that were adopted by the Sejm. It threatens to force many enterprises into bankruptcy or to make layoffs. Along with the Provizorium, the government is projecting drastic price increases. It is demanding that the society pay for a reform that has not taken place. The union will not accept price increases without an economic reform. We will defend the workers against the consequences of these increases--factory closures, layoffs, and wage cuts--by all the means provided for in our statutes and in accordance with the legally established purpose of the
The government's decision increased discontent in the working class. The workers had been expecting a lot from the economic reform, realizing that a reform was essential to combat the crisis. So, the determination to take things into their own hands and carry out a reform by their own means gained ground. The latest phase of negotiations between the KK and the government had produced nothing. It became clear to all that the authorities were only trying to gain time. They refused to yield on anything- either on access to the media for Solidarnosc, social control of distribution and economic policy, or price reform. The society began to feel threatened by this bureaucracy that was secretly preparing a special powers bill and an attack on THE RADICALIZATION OF THE MASSES
The radicalization of the masses deepened rapidly, pressing Solidarnosc to fight the bureaucratic authorities. Alongside the call for active strikes, the demand for free elections to the local government bodies and the Sejm gained momentum. Under the pressure of the workers, the union leadership began to understand that a confrontation was becoming inevitable and that it was no longer possible to avoid the question of power, which had already been put on the agenda by the working class. There was no longer any way to resist this mean falling back to purely trade-unionist
Andrzej Slowik analyzed the situation in a similar way. On December 9, after the mass meetings that took place in the dozen biggest factories in Lodz, where the workers clearly expressed their support for the active strike and for forming workers self-defense guards, he told me:
"In March, after the Bydgoszcz provocation, we entered a revolutionary situation. We did not know how to take advantage of it. We made a compromise and called off the general strike. The situation has now become revolutionary
If we do not act accordingly, we will betray the working class. It cannot wait any longer because it knows that the authorities are prepared to keep the society in a state of crisis, if only to maintain their privileges and defend their own interests. This is what the workers in the factories told me yesterday. I consider this a mandate, and it's on that basis that I have to go to Gdansk... There is only one alternative--either a bureaucratic dictatorship that crushes the society, or workers and self-management socialism."
it was decided to undertake the action that would deprive the bureaucracy of its economic power and establish a system of workers self-management by revolutionary methods. It was planned that the first active strike in the country would begin in our region on December 21, that the working class would take control of production and distribution. Along with this, workers self-defense guards would be
Moreover, we had begun to study the question of social priorities and the principles of rational distribution of energy to
The union was preparing to assume control of the energy network in the region. This was an important feature of the preparations for a regional active strike. The feeling of the workers was indicated by the December 8 communique of the Lodz Center for Social and Professional Research:
"Some 88.3% of those questioned say that they will actively support the union leadership, regardless of the dangers, if 20. Statement of the chairman of Solidarnosc at a mine in Jastrzebie. 21. Kommunikat, bulletin of the Lodz region, No. 294, December 4-5, 1981.
in accordance with the new principles on scarcely count on that.
over when the economy begins to function cial elections. Nonetheless, we can it decides to undertake actions involving confrontation with the government in order to achieve the demands of August 1980. Among the forms of confrontation that might occur, the active strike is mentioned most often (22)."
Within the Solidarnosc regional leadership, the belief was that a call for an active general strike would not be supported by the majority of the national leadership of the union. So, it was decided that if he ran into opposition, Andrzej Slowik would ask for a green light from the KK for an active strike action in his own region. It could be predicted that the Lodz region would draw behind it others that were also determined to undertake active strikes, and that sooner or later this would change the relationship of forces in the KK.
The tactics and strategy proposed by Solidarnosc to resolve the question of power could then be taken up by the union as a whole. Active strikes would have made it possible for the masses, who were looking for radical forms of action, to go onto the offensive. The consolidation of an economic power of the workers would have permitted the accumulation of forces necessary to resolve the question of economic power.
The growth of workers self-management through revolutionary action would have meant the emergence of local and territorial self-management and with it the liberation of the energy of millions of citizens. This would have given a solid basis to the demand for free elections. If the relationship of forces proved favorable enough to resolve the question of political power and therefore led to an extension of dual power, the Lodz region thought that a victorious active strike should lead to the formation of a self-management or socio-economic chamber of the Sejm and the local government councils. Such bodies should be democratically elected by all producers--wage workers, peasants, and individual artisans. They whould concentrate in their hands all the economic power of the state.
THE LAST MEETING OF THE SOLIDARITY LEADERSHIP
The last meeting of the KK on December 12 showed that there was a convergence between the Lodz position and those of other regions (23). The representative of the Cracow region presented the following action program for Solidarnosc.
"a) In liaison with the National Self-Management Federation, the KK will prepare a body of bills and other draft legislation related to economic reform. It will submit the proposed economic model to a referendum in the factories in order to win the support of society as rapidly as possible.
"b) During the general strike, the union will begin to apply the economic program. This will be coordinated centrally by a National Social and Economic Council that will be set up unilaterally by the union.
"c) The union will declare the strike
22 all levels.
"d) Achieving the preceeding goals will be possible only if the union has access to the mass media. The KK will call an active strike on radio and television, in the newspapers, in the print shops, in the transport and distribution network for the press so that the means of communication can be put to the service of the society.
"e) - The general strike announced in the December 3 statement of the presidium of the KK will not be necessary if the authorities of the People's Republic of Poland give up the idea of imposing special powers. Regardless of what happens, the KK will step up its efforts to achieve reform and abandon the ineffective policy of concessions and compromises that it has followed up till now.
"f) All negotiations by the union with the government will be broadcast directly over TV."
Seweryn Jaworski from Warsaw declared his support for active strikes as a continuation of the general strike that the union could not fail to call if a state of siege were instituted: "We cannot let a general strike go on for a long time, we are all perfectly aware of that. The active strike has to be organized immediately during the sit-in strikes. "
What is more, convinced that extremist groups in the government apparatus intended to resort to armed force, Jaworki said:
"I think that it is necessary to form workers self-defense guards in all regions, especially in the big plants. Even if they don't have any special material, we will certainly need them. They can constitute a force that the extremist groups that are ready for confrontation will have to reckon with."
The Upper Silesian delegation also took a radical position, although a different one. It thought that the union should concentrate all its efforts on the fight for special elections to the Sejm and the local government councils, as well as for the socialization of the mass media:
"We hope that the Sejm will make a positive gesture. And the only positive gesture that it could make to accomplish its historic mission would be to call spe-
That is why we have to organize these elections ourselves, without the Sejm and the authorities. Our union, along with all organizations and all citizens have only one aspiration--that power in Poland pass truly into the hands of the Polish people."
The moderate current put forward a different tactic. lts main spokesman was Jan Rulewski, chairman of the Bydgoszcz region. He said that the society and the government had entered a period of confrontation, which had sharpened since August 1981: "There are the signs here of a general confrontation, whose culminating point would be a general strike, an active strike." He maintained that this course had to be opposed. It was necessary to find a "political solution" for the crisis of power, based on the experience of the parliamentary democracies. "The Western societies, the democratic civilizations, have long provided a rational framework for political confrontation through the creation of institutions such as parliament, or the Sejm in our country."
Seeking to base himself on the workers who were calling more and more insistently for special free elections to the Sejm, Jan Rulewski said: "The union's strategy must enable millions of people to express themselves and that is why I would like to propose as a framework for this confrontation the organization of a referendum through which not only the union leadership could express itself but also the entire union, its ten million members, and if other forces joined in, the entire society. But--this is a little tactical maneuver--this referendum must not include only questions about self-management. It must be a basis for judging if the society gives its confidence to the present system of representation, to the Sejm, to this government and to the system of exercising power that is in force in our country."
A vote of no confidence in the system of exercising power through the referendum was to be the basis for Solidarnosc calling a general strike. As a result of this strike, if the government did not accept a political solution, it would be necessary to form a provisional government made up of independent specialists. This government would have the task of organizing free elections for the Sejm and the other representative bodies and thereby of establish-
The tactic proposed by the Bydgoszcz region had a number of weaknesses. First of all, it was not based on an analysis of the concrete political situation. was contrary to the approach followed by the representatives of the Lodz region. They considered it essential to start from recognizing the existence of a revolutionary situation to determine what the activity 22. Solidarnosc Ziemi Lodzkiej, bulletin of the Lodz region, supplement No.24, December 8, 1981, p.4. 23. All the following quotations are from the tape recordings of the last session of the KK held on December 12.
PETER GRAHAM MEMORIAL LIBRABX magazine of the Fourth International has just appeared. Its small size is intended to give members of the security services in
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The issue contains articles summarizing
SOLIDARNOŚĆ Z SOLIDARNOŚCIĄ the facts of the resistance to the crackdown in Poland as well as solidarity actions in dokument 'granie Ry Konet ratat pracy" detailing the lessons of the rise of Solidarnosc and of the bureaucratic attack on it.
Zachodni kapitaliści o stanie wojennyn
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of the union should be. -In a situation where a confrontation between the government and society could occur at any moment. Jan Rulewski's proposal did not involve an immediate mobilization of the masses.
What was not clear was how it would be possible to take power from the bureaucracy without a direct confrontation, without a qualitative leap in the development of the counterpower of civil society that was represented by Solidarnosc. A passive strike, even a general one, would not make it possible to resolve this question. The tactic proposed by Jan Rulewski was based on illusions that had been rejected months before by the masses and were being abandoned by a growing number of Solidarnosc leaders.
The fact that it was parlamentary democracy that Jan Rulewski saw as the form of future government of the working people was not without its significance. The more radical currents, while they did not reject parlamentary democracy, favored combining it with the real democracy of workers councils.
The tactic proposed by the Lodz, Cracow, and Warsaw regions had a clear advantage over the one proposed by Bydgoszcz. Nonetheless, it had a weakness found in all the tactics put forward during the 1980-81 Polish revolution. In its struggle to resolve the question of power, even the most revolutionary current in Solidarnosc did not propose any policy for a
The bureaucracy cracks down. (DR) "struggle to win the army. "
The feeling of power that emanated from the mass movement was so great that even the most politically conscious were victims of the illusion that this power would be sufficient to neutralize the army and that the problem of confrontation was not on the agenda. Solidarnosc and the mass movement as a whole had to pay dearly for this illusion only hours afterward.
The KK did not adopt any of the tactics proposed. It limited itself to calling for a referendum on the system and mode of exercising governmental power, which did not conflict with any of the tactics put forward. The debate over how to resol ve the question of power remained open.
Thus, Solidarnosc assumed a defensive stance at a time when it and the entire society were facing the threat of an attack from the government, when it was clear that whoever took the initiative and struck first would gain the advantage in the confrontation.
THIRD ISSUE OF POLISH INPREKOR IS NOW OUT!
LIDARNOŚC Z SOLIDARNOŚCIA
INPREKOR nis
The third issue of the Polish language
Strony 11 - 22
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