[Alexis Carras surveys the tremendous drive for freedom…]

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Alexis Carras surveys the tremendous drive for freedom by the Polish workers since summer 1980, and argues that the bureaucrats' clampdown shows that the system Jurezvk (centre: leader of Szczecin workers) - arrested TOR 18 months, the world las looked at Poland with lope, curiosity, and fear.

For socialists, out to 'eplace our own ruling class n the West with a workers' lemocracy and also resoluly demarcating ourseive. rom the model of 'social. sm' in astern Europe he emergence of Solidar rose has been a cause for intense hope and jubilation.

The: Polish workers' revenge on their bureaucracy has been our revenge "socialism "a and a social well, a model 01 caste which has trumpeted itself as the progressive alternative to capitalISILE For those in the workers' move ment who have insisted on believing in the great Stalinist myth, Solidarnosc must have been a nightmare - or for some, hope, a new awakening. Especially cruel is the latest hammer blow of Jarüzelski's tanks against Solidarnosc, for the illusions of those who have assured us that these regimes, whatever their faults and cruelties, were in the end capable of self-reform.

The peaceful evolution to workers' democracy in the East is just as phoney. as the peaceful road to socialism in the West.

Promises

Despite all its reforming promises, the bureaucracy has always remained true to its nature and its own social interests. The workers, for them, are there to work, to keep quiet, and above all to express gratitude.

An anonymous worker poet replied in "The Twenty Second Demand':

'Give over telling us you're sorry, What guilt for past mistakes you carry, Look in our faces, weary Grey and exhausted, like our lives.

Give over calling us to order, To diseipline and honest Try self examination when You call as 'Ous Bear Countrymen' The tragedy of the Polish working class is that it is trapped in the boundaries of a nation-state more or less totally reconstituted after the Second World War. After the population exchanges and migrations of millions, the transplanting of entire communities from eastern Russian provinces to the west and the reciprocal migration of millions of German-speaking people, and the shifting of the entire borders of the Polish state 200 miles to the west, Poland has always had to look over its shoulder at its great eastern neighbour - the USSR.

Mockery

The Soviet bureaucracy was the supposed guarantor of Poland and also simultaneously the one factor which made a mockery of any national independence and sovereignty.

This fact has exercised its ineluctable pressure not only on the Polish Stalinists is: also on the workers' = *÷==*: Ire idea of revolution' =*: = s: forcefully * ÷ç= = Jacek Kuron =a-disbanded ers' attempt to prise themselves free piecemeal from Stalinist domination, without provoking the Kremlin.

For 18 months the 'selflimiting revolution' has fought for survival, heroically, determinedly, but continually aware that it was negotiating a narrow and treacherous passage between the Scylla of cynical Western finarice capital, concerned .. to retrieve its precious billions, and the Charybdis of the USSR.

The "Russian Umbrella' would always fall over Poland and ensure that the debts were paid to the West - even if this meant bloody repression for the Polish workers.

The 'self-limiting revolution' was the reason for the creation of Solidarnosc - a trade union whose original aim was to bargain within the Stalinist system, and transform it piecemeal.

Solidarnose was to begin the demolition work on Stalinism, but in a subtle way - "to take much of the substance of power away from the Party and the State bureaucracy, but to leave them with the form ... Poland was like an old house living under a preservation order. The interior could be modernised, even gutted and replaced.

But the facade and roof must stay intact" (Neal Ascherson, "The Polish August').

Walesa - arrested Kuron - arrested When the workers occupied in Gdansk in August 1980, they closed the factory gates and attempted to create inside a haven of working class peace and control and 'a space' for genuine Polish pride and national feeling. This symbolised the "self-limiting revolution' The palace walls were not to be stormed. There were no headlong marches and surges into tne streets of the towns and the cities - but a gradual widening, like ever-expanding concentric circles, of the space created by the occupations, to engulf the entire country.

The bureaucracy was not to be toppled headlong, but slowly eased out.

The blood of the 'Paris Commune' shipyard workers, mowed down by. the militia and the army, the dead Gdansk strikers of 1970, was a shocking and chilling reminder of what awaited if the workers pushed too far, too suddenly.

Gutted

The 'workers' councils' set up in the factories during October 1956 were quickly gutted by the Gomulka regime, incorporated into assuming full responsibility for economic production and discipline over the working class, but with no power.

Now the unions would be utterly separate - no pseudo-partnership deals with the bureaucracy. And instead of some naive faith in renovation or 'renewal', there would be indifference and hostility to the regime, and the search into Polish history and religion for national solidarity and identity.

Rather than aiming to extend and coordinate revolutionary workers' councils which would directly challenge the bureaucracy for which would gradually erode that power:

In August, with the spread of the strike and occupation wave, and the formation of Inter-Factory Strike Committees, the bureaucracy was brought to the negotiating table. Talks were conducted, assurances given, promises made and written down on paper.

Vice-Premier Jagielski and Walesa signed the Gdansk Agreement, guaranteeing for the first time in the history of a Stalinist-ruled state the right to existence for an independent trade union movement, as well as a whole list of other social demands from wage rises to maternity leave.

Short

It was a short truce. By early October there was a general strike of over six million workers to push for access to the media, wage rises, and other demands.

Gierek may have been replaced, and the ex-security chief Kania brought in, to placate the different factions of the ruling party, the PUWP, but yet the Party insisted on its 'leading role within society'.

When the Solidarnose statutes failed to include such recognition, it was enough for a Warsaw court to rule the union's rule book 'unsuitable. It was Women shipyard workers at 1 another test of strength, and another victory for the workers.

The 'registration crisis' also showed that different sections of the bureaucracy were now wildly colliding with each other and tripping each other up.

The following month there was another major fight - the 'Narozniak Affair' , when two members of Solidarnosc, Piotr Sapelo and Jan Narozniak, were imprisoned for obtaining and publishing documents from the Prosecutor General s office on how police should deal with dissidents and oppositionists. Again there were strikes in facttories and steelworks, and demonstrations, and • the bureaucracy was compelled to do another humiliating volte-face and free the two.

'Star' The bureaucrats returned on the offensive in early January, blocking one of the Gdansk agreements -the five day working week. Millions of workers took their Saturdays off anyway. A compromise was eventually hammered out with the Solidarnosc leadership, in effect with Walesa, that one Saturday every month would be worked.

Walesa, the 'star' of the August movement, was surrounded by Catholic priests and other moderate advisors. And radical resentment at these compromises grew in SolidarnosC.

By early February, the poorer peasantry were organising in their own 'Rural Solidarnose' and demanding recognition from ine government. The backward, impoverished peasant smaliholder, long the victim of urban ridicule, government neglect and Incal party apparatchiks. Gdansk was beginning to actively enter organised political life.

Victory was not outright, despite the support of the city workers. The government backed down in face of a general strike threat, but recognised Rural Solidarose only de facto, not in law.

Trauma Similarly, the students, long dormant after the trauma of 1968, isolated, used by different factions of the bureaucracy, and finally crushed, were once again regrouping politically. Strikes in Lodz University quickly spread throughout the country, the central demands being the dropping of Russian as a compulsory subject along with the dead and sterile courses in the bureaucracy's version of 'Marxism-Leninism' Faced with a crisis out of its control, the Party elevated General Jaruzelski to head the government. The head of the armed forces assumed the leading role in the civilian administration, while Mieczyslaw Rakowski, prime spirit of the liberal wing in the bureaucracy though even this reformer' considered the PUWP's domination non-negotiable!) took the vicepremiership.

This was no more than a prelude to further attacks. Within a month, Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron, major figures in the KOR (Social Defence Committee), were detained and placed under close surveillance, with their right of movement and travel within the country seriously curtailed.

In early April many Solidarnosc militants were severely beaten and hospitalised in Bydgoszcz.

This was the incident which sparked off the first major split in Solidarnosc's ranks. Leading militants resigned from the union's governing bodies over the mild stand of the Walesa wing, which satisfied itself with promises of a future investigation into those responsible for the terror, and the acceptance by Walesa (in what appeared to many a thoroughly autocratic manner) of a three-month moratorium on strikes.

Solidarnosc's conflict with the Stalinists seemed to follow an almost cyclical pattern - successive flashpoints, whether on economic or broader social struggles, followed by weeks of relative calin, the calm then giving way to a new sharp conflict.

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December

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power, the workers tried to organise a trade union