Workers Opposition Alliance Program Introduction ONE OF THE organizations making up the Workers' Opposition Alliance [POR - Porozumienie Opozycji Robotniczej] is the Union of Workers Councils of the Polish Resistance Movement [ZRP PRO - Zwiazek Rad Pracowniezych Polskiego Ruchu Oporu] in Upper Silesia. This organization has existed for four years and is rooted among the workers in big industry. Its local units, which are called "workers' councils," are active in dozens of factories, mines, steel mills, transport enterprises and so forth, in which a total of around 100,000 people work.
The great majority of the activists in the ZRP PRO are young workers. Some 75 per cent of them are manual workers, and 85 per cent are under 30.
The ZRP PRO has headed up various mass actions in the enterprises in which it is rooted, such as struggles for higher wages and better working conditions. It has organized "strikes for healthy conditions and safety on the job." It has given an energetic lead to the boycott of the "new unions" and has forced the dissolution of several official workers' councils subservient to the plant managements.
The underground workers' councils of the ZRP PRO, which today are organs of working-class resistance, are preparing at the same time to lead a general strike with factory occupations, when the right moment comes, to establish a self-managing workers' power in the enterprises. The general-strike strategy defended by the ZRP PRO is intended to lead to the establishment of "workers' ownership of the factories," assuring the workers democratic and collective control of the basic means of production. Likewise, it is intended to lead to the overthrow of the political regime of "actually existing socialism" and the establishment of a self-managed republic.
An organization of activists, but not a political party, the ZRP PRO is one of the highest expressions of the political consciousness of Polish workers today. Below is its ideological-political statement,
POLAND stitutions of workers' self-management that would represent workers' ownership in the enterprises. •It is working through its provisional organs - the workers councils in the plants and the unions of workers' councils - which are the embryos of the future independent institutions of workers' self-management.
The totalitarian regime, based on a bureaucratic-police apparatus and working through an antiworking-class and antinational party, the PZPR [Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza - Polish United Workers' Party, the Communist Party ], has seized the three pillars of domination in the state - the ownership that should belong to the workers, the power that should belong to a self-managed society, and the science that should be associated with free thought.
The Zwiazek Rad Pracowniczych Polskiego Ruchu Oporu: • Recognizes the struggle by the society for a self-managed system, for a full democratization of the state and for the right to independent creative activity. •In the fight for ownership, power and science, the ZRP PRO sees inseparable links to the people's fight for peace and national independence. • It considers that the working class is the only class that can assure victory in the struggle and the building of a self-managed society, as well as the development of free thought and of national dignity. The basis of these revolutionary changes will be the right of the workers to ownership of the enterprises. The workers must be not only producers, transformers and extractors, but also owners. • The ZRP PRO adheres to the following five points: the factories to the workers, the land to the peasants, power to the self-managed society, science to free thinkers, the state for an independent nation. To achieve these objectives, it is essential that the society organize itself and assure freedom of action for political parties, that trade-union pluralism be established, that a free parliament be elected through free elections and that it exercise control over the state apparatus. • It recognizes all the organizations, structures and associations existing in the country whose programs or platforms include support for at least one of the five points enumerated above. •It does not seek to change the existing social system but to remove from the road of progress the obstacles erected by the totalitarian bureaucracy and to reestablish the principles on which the present system is based by ousting the antisocial, antiworking-class, antinational and antisocialist rulers of so-called
15 followed by an interview with a mission of the POR.
The Zwiazek Rad Pracowniczych Polskiego Rucho Oporu of Upper Silesia: • Is not and does not pretend to be a political party. It is a workers' movement and relies on the allied liberating forces of the progressive intelligentsia and the society in general, which are in solidarity with the workers' struggle. It is a movement that arose on the basis of the ideology
International Viewpoint 2 June 1986 member of the executive comand programmatic achievements of the independent self-managed union Solidarnosc. •Today, it is preparing the working class for self-organization and self-management, for an organized national general strike, under whose pressure workers' ownership of the enterprises could be established. •It is preparing the working-class cadres to lead the independent in-
POLAND actually existing socialism, which is a version of the Stalinist system.
•In its work, it takes inspiration from the best traditions of the workers' struggle and their revolutionary assaults on power.
•It supports the struggle for social identity and national independence of the countries under the domination of the totalitarian bureaucracy, in particular the sister peoples of the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia and Ukraine.
•It supports the struggle of the working class to win social identity and national independence in the countries under the domination of the totalitarian bureaucracy, especially the working class of the sister peoples of the German Democratic Republie, Czechoslovakia and Ukraine.
• It upholds proletarian internationalism in all its dimensions.
•It recognizes all international alliances contracted on a basis of sovereignty and calls for international cooperation based on the principles of equality, as well as of respect for security and national identity. •It collaborates with all organizations, groups, structures and associations whose programs, platforms and activity do not conflict with the right of the working class to ownership of the enterprises.
• It regards as enemies and hostile to the interests of the working class any organization that opposes the right of the working class to ownership of the enterprises and will treat them in the same way that it treats the totalitarian bureaucracy. • It rejects any agreement with the government of the bureaucracy, except one based on a full implementation of the demands included in the five principles. •It will not recognize any organization or social movement that wants to negotiate with the bureaucratic government on a basis of giving up any of the five demands of the working class, and it will consider any attempt of this sort as a betrayal of the interests of the working class. •It will disseminate the principles contained in this declaration and spread its organizations in other regions of the country in order to build a national organization of the ZRP PRO. • Since the ZRP PRO is a workers' organization, it does not consider itself a representative of all of society or of other social groups and classes. It recognizes the social sovereignty of these groups or classes and their right to represent their own interests. It does not recognize the right of non-working-class organizations of a general social character to represent the interests of the working class. 16
•It supports the struggle of the union Solidarnose to regain legality and recognizes the underground Solidarnose as a union and as a social movement. • It recognizes the right of all churches and religious institutions to work, in separation from the state, to offer spiritual services to the people.