Bureaucrats Threaten 100078, Clash
Socialist Organiser1981 1981-09-24Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 16 →
Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: expect misread words, and now and then a caption or a line from a neighbouring story. For anything you quote, read the scan.
Scan page 16
STUNNED silence is perhaps the best way to des-. cribe the mood in Poland after the first session of Solidarnosc's National Congress.
The Congress was a landmark for the postwar Eastern European workers' movement and its fight against the bureaucracy. The roar of the tanks ominously patrolling Poland's three land borders was not loud enough to drown out the "authentic voice of the Polish working class".
The Congress marked an important shift leftwards, with a dramatic open letter to all workers of the Eastern European bloc and calls for a referendum on workers' management of industrial ent* erprises, for free elections, and implicitly for the untrammelled formation of independent political parties and access to the mass media.
The shift was not due to a change of heart by the moderates influenced by the Catholic church hierarchy. The • division between them and the radicals still exists and if anything is becoming more bitter.
Shift
The reason for the shift is the impending catastrophe threatening at any moment to engulf the entire country. Production declines precipitously, the food queues grow ever longer: The formal authority of the party and state clashes continually, in a thousand different ways, with the increasingly real authority of the working class. The prisons explode in open rebellion.
More so than ever in the last 13 months, Poland is on the brink of Russian invasion and/or internal disintegration.
Which way forward for the nation? Solidarnosc's or the bureaucracy's?
continued on paye 5, inside