THE SOLIDARITY THAT THE POLISH WORKERS NEED
"The Winter is Yours, but the Spring Will Be Ours."
This slogan has been appearing on walls throughout Poland for more than two weeks now. It expresses quite well the fact that while Solidarnosc has suffered a severe defeat, it has not been crushed.
A resistance movement has begun to organize clandestinely and it is preparing to build a campaign by every means necessary to "lead Solidarnosc to victory over evil and violence, " as Seweryn Jaworski expressed it in a message to the workers from Bialoleka prison.
In this situation, the solidarity campaign that is developing in the
West has to be seen as a long-term task of continuing and growing; importance. It poses some difficult tactical and political problems. That is especially true now when the movement in Poland has been forced underground and can no longer show so clearly by example and direct contacts what its objectives and nature are.
Thus, the bourgeois forces and the the right have a greater opportunity to distort what Solidarnosc is about and to use the issue of the bureaucratic crackdown demagogically to whip up an anticommunist campaign that is aimed, among other things, at demoralizing the workers movement in their own countries.
The capitalists want to discredit the very idea of socialism and sow confusion and fear among the workers in their countries who are being driven toward socialist conclusions by the general economic crisis and who were inspired by the example of Solidarno sc,
What help to the Polish workers was the hypocritical show put on by Reagan? In the name of defending the Polish workers, he appeared side by side with a representative of the military dictatorship in Ankara, which has jailed tens of thousands in the attempt to crush ¡the Turkish trade unions. The very
day that Reagan made his statement about Poland, he called on the Common Market to lift its sanctions against the Turkish junta. Reagan was so cynically contemptuous of the Polish workers and workers in general that he included on his show Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau who openly said he understood the need for suppressing Solidarity since it was a union and unions always demand too much.
What help to the Polish workers are declarations of indignation about the violation of trade-union rights in Poland coming from the likes of the Thatcher, government, which is dedicated to attacking the very same rights of workers in its own country.
The intent of these hypocritical capitalist gestures is only to divide the radicalizing workers in the West from their Polish fellow workers. They give the impression that Solidarity must be fighting for something different from what the workers in the capitalist countries want, something that suits the interests of the bosses rather than theirs.
The capitalists' maneuvers fit in perfectly with the campaign of the Polish bureaucracy and the proStalinists in the Western CPs, who are trying to present Jaruzelski's crackdown as a defense, however costly, of the fundamental interests of the workers and oppressed peoples that are fighting capitalism and imperialism. These operations are an attack on what Solidarity has been try ing to achieve both before and after the crackdown.
What Solidarity has instinctively sought is unity of workers East and West. Its representatives who were abroad at the time of the crackdown have raised a call precisely for that as an answer to the Stalinist counterrevolution of the bureaucracy.
"We want a campaign by the workers movement, " said Piotor Kozlowski, a Solidarity activist and worker at the URSUS factory at numerous meetings during a tour of Great Britain, "Because the experience of this tour shows us that it is the workers who instinctively understand and support the struggle of Solidarnosc."
At a rally organized in Amiens by the oppositionists fighting against the CP leadership of the biggest French union federation, the CGT, Zbigniew Kowalewski, leader of the Lodz region of Solidarnosc, said:
"They (Western workers) must understand that a military dictatorship can never represent the interests of the working class, whether this is in Turkey, El Salvador, or Poland.
"In Poland, it is not General Jaruzelski, or the military officers, or the ruling party apparatus that represents the interests of the workers but the independent self-managed union Solidarnosc.
"Solidarnosc should become the symbol of the aspiration of the workers in the workers movement thoughout the world to take their fate into their own hands. "
In order to achieve this unity, it is necessary to clarify what the real aims of Solidarity have been and are. Solidarnose never proposed restoring capitalist property relations, but rather that the workers should collectively take control of their own affairs.
We have to familiarize people with the program of this social movement of ten million people who were fighting to establish genuinely democratic and egalitarian social relationships. Their struggle showed the way forward for the Western workers who are fighting unemployment, layoffs, and cuts in their standard of living.
What has to be stressed in order to win to the cause of Solidarity those workers who have been confused by the bourgeois propaganda is the gains made by the movement for self-management, of the movement toward the workers assuming control of the economy by means of "active strikes;" that is, factory takeovers, and toward control of the media by the masses.
It is also important to clear away misunderstandings caused by the special features of Poland's history.
THE ROLE OF THE CHURCH
Some 90% of the Polish people identify themselves as believers. And Catholic church symbols such as the cross and the Black Madonna have in fact appeared quite prominently as tokens of the union movement's opposition to the bureaucracy, as has the holding of masses before union assemblies.
However, Solidarity activists have always asserted the independence of their union from the Church. "The Pope? He is the symbol of the Catholic ethic, and we are in agreement with that ethic, That's all." This is what was said by members of a Solidarity delegation that came to Switzerland on the eve of the crackdown.
On the other hand, these Solidarity activists maintained that they had the moral support of the Church. "The Church has played an important role in Polish history."
It is true in fact that the Church is something more than the scandalous statements made recently by Monsignor Glemp, the Polish primate:
"For more than a year and a half anger has prevailed here, and now we have succeeded in overcoming it.
"The unfortunate events at the Wujek mine have remained an isolated incident. We are confident that, with the help of God, we will be able to clear up the causes of our anger through dialogue and not by means of violence. " Dialogue between the workers and those who unleashed the bureaucratic terror!
The Church in Poland is, to be sure, the same reactionary institution that can be seen everywhere else, dispensing retrograde "moral' principles about education and holding back the consciousness of the working class, especially as regards the role of women in the family and in society.
But the Church is also all the parish priests in the towns and countryside who helped the movement to organize before the August strikes by opening the church halls to the initial groups of activists. It is all the priests who are aiding the resistance movement today by taking charge of the distribution of the food that comes in from abroad and who are taking risks that have resulted in many of them being
The Church also provided the platform from which the Wroclaw student chaplain could deliver a sermon on January 13 denouncing the dictatorship: "A suffering and weeping Poland has had to bow under the club of a military council that claims to represent national salvation." working-class unity are not served by engaging in the sort of primitive anticlericalism that the Stalinist leaders do in Spain, Italy, Belgium, or France. This shows both a lack of internationalist understanding and a lack of respect for workers' right to learn through their own experience.
By concretely aiding the Polish workers, we can build the sort of links the Solidarity leaders quoted above were talking about. Then we will be better able to help the Polish working class along to an understanding that in the final analysis, the interests of the Polish hierarchy have nothing in common with those of Solidarity, as a movement that is fighting for total emancipation of the workers.
At the same time, by helping the Polish workers keep up the pressure on the Church, we can help assure that they can continue to get the sort of practical aid from it that they have, and that they still need.
If the mass pressure weakens, the Polish bishops will quickly fall back to their historic objective, maintaining the status quo. "Poles are capable of coming to an agreement among themselves, " Monsignor Glemp said.
Can Economic Sanctions Help? Economic sanctions or boycotts will not help either in achieving the unity of workers East and West that the Solidarity activists want.
It is the Polish workers who would have to pay the cost of these sanctions if they were applied. Such boycott measures would be different from the boycott on arms deliveries as was proposed for Chile or Argentina or a propaganda campaign such as the boycott of South African oranges.
An economic boycott against Poland would apply to all forms of economic exchanges and to credits that are mainly needed for foodstuffs, chemical products, manufactured items, machines, maintenance of transportation. would mean nothing more nor less than economic strangulation of a country. It could only bring further deterioration of the standard of living of the working class in the context of an already unprecedented
Moreover, unlike the Western bosses, who are directly affected by economic sanctions in that these endanger their profits and therefore their very existence as exploiters, the bureaucracy derives all its sustenance from its control of the state apparatus.
If the economic situation worsens as a result of Western sanctions, the bureaucracy will move to maintain its privileges by reducing the share of the national income alloted to meet the needs of the population.
As Jerzy Urban, the government's spokesman for the Western press, said cynically: "We can always find the means to feed and clothe ourselves. It is the society as a whole that will have to bear the consequences."
Does anyone think that if the workers have to stand in still longer lines every day and have still less to eat that will help the resistance movement? Does anyone think they need that to encourage them to rebel?
The calls for economic sanctions and boycotts are a diversion from the needs of building a mass mobilization in support of the Polish workers. They create illusions both about the effectiveness that such measures could have and about the nature of the banks and the bourgeois governments that are being called upon to apply them.
For example, the Reagan government has made the most noise about economic sanctions, loudly denouncing the Europeans for signing a contract with the USSR for the delivery of natural gas. But it has not said a thing about stopping U.S. grain exports to the USSR. sales represent two-thirds to threefourths of U. S. grain exports; and in the first eight months of 1981, they brought in 1.3 billion dollars.
The difference between Reagan's noisy advocacy of economic sanctions and West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt's demurrals comes down to straight capitalist national interest.
In 1980, West German exports to Poland and the USSR (respectively 1.20 billion dollars and 4. 3 billion dollars) were three times those of the U.S. Furthermore, the U.S. banks had. a mere 2.1 billion dollars in outstanding loans to Poland, representing 2 to 3% of the capital of the banks involved. On the other hand, West German banks were owed
In the case of the Bank fur Gemeinwirtschaft, its Polish loans represented 45% of its total capital, and three-fourths of these loans were guaranteed by the state.
So, it becomes understandable why Schmidt could not go along with Reagan's boycott proposals, and why he expressed so much concern about the unfortunate effects such measures could have on the welfare of the Polish people.
The attitude of the West German Social Democracy also expressed the interests of the capitalists of their country. They pressured the Socialist International into adopting a scandalous resolution which "takes note of the Polish leadership's intention not to halt or reverse but rather to continue the process of
In general, the Social Democrat and other procapitalist Western labor leaders have no interest in promoting mass mobilization in support of the Polish workers, and where the January 30 demonstrations for Poland were controlled by them, the results were poor. They are too much tied to the capitalist rulers of their respective countries.
The French SP has gone further than others in support of Poland, because of certain specific interests, including scoring points at the expense of a CP rival committed to support for Jaruzelski. But even in opposing the West-GermanSP sponsored resolution in the Socialist International, Mitterand stayed within the logic of sort of of division of the world established by the Yalta accords, while proposing a certain revision of the specifics.
Therefore, building an effective solidarity movement with Poland has to be based on fighting for independent working-class action in the framework of the workers move-
The development of the campaign over the past two months has shown that it was possible to force the leaders of the established workers movement to back solidarity actions. This has been true even where, as in Great Britain, the bureaucrats have shown the most total indiffer-, ence, once the first declarations of sentiment were done with, leaving the field open for the demagogic initiatives on the right. Nonetheless, the tour of Solidarity leaders mentioned before inspired strong support among workers. In Spain, where there were also very negative attitudes on the part of substantial forces in the workers movement, the arrival of a Solidariy leader from the coordinating commit mittee of committees for Solidarity in France forced the leaderships of the major union federations in Madrid, Asturias, and Guipuzcoa to organize rallies in support of
In Germany also, taken by the coordinating committee of Solidarity Committees forced some leadership of the DGB, the national labor federation, to do something. This made it possible to establish contacts between the Volkswagen workers and representatives of Solidarity. The best way to help Solidarity is to make known its real objectives by organizing public meetings and rallies. It is to collect money to aid the families of the prisoners and the interned, as well as those to set up committees of jurists ready to help the accused and to fight to get into the trials.
It is along these lines that we must continue our work, striving to get all workers, and in particcular the most militant and the most class-conscious, to understand that the struggle of the resistance movement and the victory of Solidarity are of vital concern to them, something that has a great importance for their own struggle.