The birth of a new left
POLISH DOSSIER Jacqueline ALLIO, Cyril SMUGA During 1984 several currents or groups of the left in the broadest sense, or even of socialists, have emerged inside Solidarnose. This process began out of a growing awareness that effective resistance to the rule of the totalitarian bureaucracy cannot be achieved through the sheer determination of the social and trade-union movement alone.
It is also necessary to organise politically within the movement in order to be able to draw up programmes and strategies for struggle against the bureaucratic dictatorship and for the construction of a self-managed republic. The enormous backwardness of the Polish movement in this regard is reflected more and more in its activity. Solidarnose is continually plunged into a programmatic and strategic crisis which comes out more clearly in moments of heightened political tension. But this crisis is also felt very keenly in periods of relative calm in the midst of the routine day-to-day activities within the structures of Solidarnose and particularly in the workplaces.
In response to this problem, certain attempts have been made to take political initiatives as in the case of the Fighting Solidarity Organisation which decided in the summer of 1982 to give itself a formal structure. tempts to organise politically in the workplaces within Solidarnose have come from the left except in the case of the Confederation for an Independent Poland (KPN), a nationalist organisation which has practically ceased to exist since 1981. other exception is Niepodleglos (Independence) which puts forward the idea of a setting up of a liberal-democratic party, but which has taken its distance from Solidarnosc, considering it to be a movement without perspective. The initiatives taken by the left are very limited, not so say embryonic, and at the same time very diverse.
The majority stand on the tradition of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) was the main reformist workers' from the end of the nineteenth century until 1948, when it ceased to exist. This party played a leading role in the national and social revolution of 1905 and was the most influential party within the structures of the underground government' under nazi occupation. The new socialists look to it mainly because this party not only defended the notion of the emancipation of labour, the demands of parliamentary democracy and independence for Poland but it was also anticommunist. Within Solidarnosc most people identify communism with Stalinism and totalitarianism of the Soviet type.
Jacek Kuron and Adam Michnik were among the first to claim to stand in the tradition of the PPS when they broke from Marxism and began to work within the KOR before August
The review Krytyka, which still appears intermittently in Warsaw, was the mouthpiece of this current. It is generally assumed that Kuron, Michnik and a number of other ex-KOR members have a perspective of building a socialist party in the future based on the traditions of the PPS. The point of departure, organisationally speaking, for this project was the building just before the declaration of the State of War, of the Clubs for a Self-Managed Republic and for liberty, justice and independence' (WSN).
Since 1983 this project has been continued. It is carried out under the banner of WN groups although not much is heard about them and the publications have a very limited circulation. This comes from the fact that the main initiators of this current were in prison up until last July.
The Committee of Resistance (KOS) has a much more important influence. It was created immediately after December 1981 as an underground structure linked to Solidarnose and was set up through a network of five-person groups. KOS itself 16 declares that, It is not a secret organisation of cadres based on discipline and hierarchy, nor a political party with a unified programme aiming to seize power. The committee produces a weekly paper, Kos (Blackbird), which has a circulation of about 20,000 copies and which is one of the two main underground journals.
Kos is opposed to the setting up of a political organisation today because they are afraid that it would become a substitute for the wider social movement, thus weakening it and undermining unity. They do not call themselves socialists because they believe that 'in Poland, as in other countries in the Soviet empire, socialism is identified with a regime of violence, lies and exploitation.' It is, however, generally considered to be a current of the left. It has established contacts with certain social democratic parties in the West and initiated contacts with peace groups in END (the movement for European Nuclear Disarmament), the first group in Poland to do so. As with the WSN, the KOS represent the right-wing of the Polish left.
In February 1984 a political group was formed around the weekly newspaper, Wola (Willpower) which is produced by trade-union militants with links in the factories in the Wola
This group bases itself on the tradition of the PPS. But the only group which for the moment calls for the construction of a socialist party is the group around the weekly Robotnik (The Worker). This paper has no connec tion with a bulletin of the same name set up within the KOR in 1977, and which today no longer exists. This journal has a circulation of several thousand copies. It is produced by members of the workers interfactory committee of Solidarnosc (MRKS) in Warsaw.
In some articles the Robotnik political group presents the view of Western social democracy, whose positions and real nature they completely idealise, as the reference point of the whole of the international workers' movement. On this subject it says, for example, "Through the methods of gradual reform they [Western social democracy ] try to limit the influence of private capital, to appease imperialism in international relations and to put into practice egalitarian principles in social relations. Above all, they try to contribute to the development of the standard of living, the welfare state and the culture of the workers.' In the following pages we publish two documents from this current.
This attitude towards social democracy combined with the methods that Robotnik puts forward for the construction of a workers' party, have been the object of a polemic which we reproduce here Robotnik (Free Worker), produced in Silesia. came from a current of the revolutionary left. It is this current which produced the journal Front Robotniczy (Workers Front) which started publication in August 1984. They stand for a programme of struggle for power through workers' councils put forward in the famous 'open letter' of Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski written in 1964 when they were still revolutionary Marxists. The appearance in Poland of a revolutionary socialist current is proof of the ideological and political radicalisation of certain sections of the Polish new left.
The following dossier is a selection of the most interesting aspects of the debates currently going on among the Polish left. We begin with some extracts from the polemic of KOS with Charter 84, a document drawn up by the trade-union underground commission (TKZ) of Solidarnosc in the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk. Following that we reprint two texts from the Robotnik group and two from the revolutionary left. We finish with a further article from Robotnik in which the themes of an important debate on the history of the Polish workers movement are taken up.
International Viewpoint 24 December 1984