[Big cracks had also appeared in the ruling…]

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Big cracks had also appeared in the ruling party itself. The PUWP, a party of three million members, began to experience the revolt of its own rank and file.

Apart from the hundreds of thousands who had already left the Party, roughly one in three of the Party's membership had- also joined SolidarFeeling misled, cheated, and angry at the leadership's . unaccountable, undemocratic, and traditionally repressive - role, the tank and file began to organise outside the accepted and strictly controlled 'vertical' channels of authority, into the so-called 'horizontal movement' (But already many PUWP members had been won over to the Solidarnose movement. In Szczecin and Silesia, for example, PUWP workers were prominent in the MKS structures, and drove much harder bargains with the bureaucracy than did Gdansk).

Horizontal

Party cells made contact directly with each other rather than going through the central leadership. The founding meeting of the 'horizontal movement' in the city of Torun, grouped the most radical elements in the PUWP with the aim of sweeping away the old leadership in the coming 9th Extraordinary Party Congress. They also aimed to defeat the reactionary factions in the PUWP grouped in hard-line Stalinist, circles like the Katowice Forum (whose Open Letter to the Party questioned the competence of a leadership which in their view was "pandering' to the democratisation movement).

If anything would tip the balance towards a Russian invasion, it was the PUWP, as a bureaucratic machine, losing its grip on the situation and its ability to accommodate reforms then claw them back later.

Rife

Speculation was rife as to whether the Soviet Union would allow the 9th Extraordinary Congress to take place at all. The Czechoslovak invasion had taken place just before the Party there was due to have its Congress.

The horizontalists demanded free elections throughout the entire Party - punishment of all the guilty, elections with no limit on number of candidates, voting to be secret.

They were out to smash the central apparatus.

Other PUWP members, for example in Lodi, demanded "that only those who had the courage to oppose totalitarianism, who can be incorporated in Solidarnose", should prepare the new Congress.

These were tremors which must have shaken the Kremlin to the core.

Brezhnev was making outspoken comments that 'one must suppose that the PUWP will be able to defend the cause of socialism". . On the eve of the Congress, the Russian leadership attacked the PUWP leadership with a list of its deviations, everything from conscious "accommodation to counter revolution" to 'mercantilism"!

But the Congress was held, and the balance in the PUWP leadership remained roughly the same.

It was, however, a totally exceptional congress in the annals of ruling Stalinist parties, with serious democracy and substantial weeding out of the leading committees.

•General Jaruzelski, à popular army leader and head of the government, gained dominance at the congress, receiving the highest vote for the Politbureau (higher than the then general secretary Stanislaw Kania). *. The elevation of Jaruzelski signified that the Party was focusing • its hopes on this man - uncompromised by recent events, willing to declare he would 'never use the troops against the working class' a real national communist. . He would soon hold in his hands not only governmental and army power, but also the general secretaryship of the PUWP (a unique collection of posts in the Stalinist world).

Outside the walls of the congress, the bunger marches were beginning throughout the country."

Tens of thousands marched in Lodz on July 30. Economic catastrophe was crashing down on the ration, as queues lengthened, people tried to exist below subsistence level, and even the most basic of consumer goods disappeared from the shops. Poland's foreign debt was soaring even further.

Hopes of repayments on the debt faded away, while Western governments and financiers nervously gathered together to reschedule the debt and entice Poland into the monetary discipline of the IMF.

One year on, and the working class saw itself daily cheated, despite its strength, sacrifices, and determination. The Party, still clinging tenaciously to its control of the economy, was relegating the masses to starvation and a bitter winter ahead. Scenes of Ask. terrible d ed, scarce advanced outside of The wi greater v industry, economic paralysis And th The clo: Solidarne in the Ka which v the ment mo ory, or Sovietisn In Gdansk, from all represen Solidarnı for the moveme They iss ous 'Apr of Easte of thia fin VI LIE LUI working• alism to glacial s Stalinisn The borderes The cont ed as Bacchan iet Balti plougher off the Siwak, ! state istically legalisat The s congres: the mon ers' cor leaderst by Szczecil of Bydg Jurcz attacker acclima nobbing and hi:

rank ar called 1 the W declare should aims ar 'overes Soviet t The 1 old re ised b:

Zbignie lestitution appearely paralleled in an lindustrial country f wartime. orkers pushed tor vorkers' control of to meet this : collapse and e Party's reaction? sing down of a SC : newspaper towice steelworks, vas spearheading orkers' managevement in the factsupposed 'antiGlacial September, in 912 delegates over the country, ting 9,500,000 osc militants, met first part of the nt's congress. sued the momentreal to All Workers rn Europe' - one noct arnraccinna inf class internationemerge from the paces of European * Russian reaction I on the hysterical. gress was denounc.an, 'anti-socialist ¡aliam and the Sovic Fleet ominously d the foggy seas Baltic coast. Albin boss of the Polish unions' ' euphemcalled for the 'detion of Solidarnosc' second part of the s followed later in ith — as the workitrol issue became and Walesa's lip was challenged arian Jurezyk of n and Jan Rulewski yk and Rulewski d Walesa's gradual itisation to hobg with the Stalinists s divorce from the nd file, and openly for withdrawal from 'arsaw Pact. They d that Solidarnose not moderate its id struggles through timation of the chreat' decomposition of the gime was symboly the invitation of ew Pudziak, represAnna Walentynowicz, Anuret! entative of the 40,000 strong independent police union, to address the congress. The police would no longer do the regime's dirty work, announced Dudziak, to the delegates' thunderous applause.

Despite the overtures to the regime by the moderates, who announced the disbanding of the KOR and proposed a compromise over workers' control, the regime was now, it is evident in hindsight, gearing itself up for a decisive showdown.

The revolt of the long -dead Parliament against government attempts to renege on the workers' control compromise, the rebellion of the police, and behind-the-scenes Russian pressure, led the Party, to sack Kania and elect General Jaruzelski as party leader.

Crusade The haughty general declared a 'crusade against totalitarianism'. He meant, of course, Solidarnose's ten million membership.

The PUWP Central Com406.

mittee pushed for the purging of the party. Jaruzelski deployed small military units throughout the country, especially the rural areas, to lean on the local bureaucracies, to get things moving, and to 'keep the government informed' Meanwhile, a soft-sell was offered to the union moderates - a 'National Front of Salvation'.

Wildcat Walesa accepted the proposal for tripartite Church/State/Union talks - thus going against one of the basic reasons behind the creation of an independent union movement which would not take responsibility for the regime's actions on the regime's terms. Meanwhile the government tried to break the wildcat strike movement gripping the country. They tried to get Walesa to mediate, while Jaruzelski pressed for ban on strikes, special powers, and tight trade union laws aimed to drown spontaneous militancy in a welter of time-consuming arbitration and petty procedures.

The regime tried, and pulled off, the first attempt since August 1980 to physically confront the workers, when it attacked a firefighters' training school in Warsaw earlier this month. Having gained the upper hand temporarily, with hunger stalking the country the regime prepared for a final assault.

Shift

The seeming • shift of Walts: to the side of the radicals, the scrapping in any meaningful sense of the 'National Salvation Front', and the general strike declared for December 17, with the raising of the demand for free elections and legalisation of political parties, convinced the bureaucracy to strike.

With the arrest of Solidarnose leaders, militants and intellectuals; the declaration of martial law and warnings that people ignoring it will shot on sit and the cutting off Poland from the outside world and total censorship, they have tried to plunge Poland back into the ice-age of Stalinism.

Jaruzelski has finally got his 'special powers'. Now it remains to be see if the General's tanks and sold-p iers will be able to maintain 'law and order' Poverty, hunger, the disintegration of Polish society, the exasperation of workers realising how close they got to their goal yet how far there was yet to travel - all these factors no doubt weigh heavily in favour of the bureaucracy. Above all, the real fear of civil war, bloodshed, and the certainty of Russian invasion if civil war does break out, must surely deter many.

Circle

The self-limiting revolution' has come full circle. For many of the 'sympathetic' bourgeois pundits, with one eye on their Cold War rhetoric and the other on Poland's foreign debt, the blame for the clampdown lies unequivocally with Solidarnose's radicals, who went or wanted to go too far.

Yet if any lesson can be drawn from the last convulsive 18 months, it is that any struggle for workers' rights could not simply gut the inside of Polish Stalinism and leave the facade intact.

'As. soon as demolition work began... the roof began to show signs of caving in" (Ascherson).

The social forces unleashed, as in any great upheaval, cannot simply be channelled into some pre-conceived schema of peaceful transformation. The knock-on effect of the workers' movement left no sector of Polish society untouched - it reached right down into the darkest cells of the prison system.

Faced with this encirclement, the bureaucracy turned to the military -and through the thousand and one avenues still open Jaruzelski to it, managed to sabotage, obstruct, wear down and confuse.

The failure of the 'selflimiting strategy' or the 'small step' perspective put forward by Walesa was not so much the tactical compromises (though certainly there were some compromises that were unjustified) as the fact that ultimately it could only disarm militants as to the true nature of the job ahead. The "small step' approach meant that at decisive moments the movement, instead of resolutely facing the bureaucracy's attacks, would always back down.

This was the case with the brutal eviction and arrest of the trainee firefighters occupying their school in Warsaw last week. Solidarnose's failure respond must have emboldened Jaruzelski for his decisive assault.

Polish Stalinism, which traditionally has boasted the largest organised party in Eastern Europe and the greatest degree of internal liberalism and room for manoeuvre with the USSR, now depends for its survival on a conscript army and the militia.

If the workers resist strongly, the army will crack, and then civil war will become national war as the Polish working class will be taking on the troops of 'the socialist commonwealth' With a population several times larger, and a much bigger land area, than Czechoslovakia or Hungary, the struggle, in the eventuality of open war, will be destructive and prolonged.

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Socjalişt Organiser по.66