SolidAnass Bitter lessons of fight to 'reform' away Polish bureaucracy

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Marion Jurczyk (centre), Szezecin shipyard leader, now faces charges of high rtreason for advocating that the government As the Army's grip descended, Solidarity workers were beginning to move towards a revolutionary struggle for power. Here we summarise and excerpt an account by Lodz Solidarity leader Z.Kowalewski (who came to France just before the coup) in the Paris paper Le Monde (January 7).

AFTER THE shock of the raid on the firemen's academy in Warsaw by the hated militia, in all the factories of our region, Solidarity militants and activists were on full alert.

At this crucial moment, Andrzej Slowik, president of Lodz region Solidarity, left for Warsaw to take part in an emergency meeting of Solidarity's national leadership.

In Warsaw, Slowik presented a proposal for union action: an active strike movement together with the creation of workers' militias.

Such measures were necess ary because, we arrived at the conclusion.. that the crisis had already assumed a revolutionary character.

For months the Party, liberals and hardliners alike, was pushing the idea of a National Salvation Front as a replacement for the : crumbling National Unity Front - a creature of the PUWP which pulled in other supposedly 'independent' parties behind the PUWP on the single list for elections to the Polish Parliament.

The PUWP's idea was fairly transparent. In the new 'Front the union and the working class would provide the labour and sacrifice, while the PUWP would have the whip hand.

Kowalewski responded: Our position was the following: National Salvation Front - No! Entente - Yes!

The content of any agreement had to be determined by three forces: the power of the state, the church whose moral authority no-one questioned, and Solidarity as the major social movement...

The basis of such an agreement could onty be the thes. es adopted by Solidarity's Congress. The agreement would have to relate to three points:

* The fight against the * The implementation of economic reforms, * The creation of a selfmanaging republic.

But Polish society was on the point of breaking up as hunger threatened millions of people. All the fine promises of the Party about 'reforms' had come to noting - the PUWP's main preoccupation was to fight battles against the workers' insistent demands to take over control of the factories and economic management.

Elsewhere in his account Kowalewski poses the relations between the workers and the state machine not in terms of different bases for an agreement, but stark conflict.

During the Presidium meeting at Radom, Lech Walesa and numerous other leaders had become convinced, as we in Lodz already had, about the revolutionary situation, and for the first time began to pose the question: who is to rule? A bureaucracy minority or the working masses?

Provincial administrations were incapable of determining even the precise number of people who should receive ration cards. Cards were distributed in secret to people closely linked to the power structure.

Nobody controlled the destruction of these cards after they had been used: they found their way into circulation again.

The result: to obtain something even with ration coupons, it was necessary to queue for a whole day. sometimes even for two or three days. For workers in particular the situation was tragic.

So the union töok over the distribution of ration cards printed by Solidarity "should be hung" itself. Lodz was the only region in the country where this occurred.

control commission consisting of union and city officials... took over the distribution of ration tards and this allowed us to put an end to the privileged access to foodstuffs. And we were successful in this.

Central government refused Solidarity the right to control food distribution, arguing. that it represented en encroachment on their prerogatives and power. As vice prime minister Rakowski had told Walesa, 'In this country he who maintains control of food distribution has, by virtue of this, power' But in our region we already exercised such control... Special teams of trade unionists controlled the situation in the collection points in the countryside, in the abattoirs, the warehouses, and in wholesale and retail outlets...

Thanks to our activities, the feeding of the population was greatly improved and the queues shortened. We already had prepared a plan dealing with the controt of industrial production in the area.

The idea of workers' control was already being enthusiastically discussed and pushed for in Lodz as early as January 1981, months before the issue exploded on the national political scene, their slogan was 'power to the workers in the factory'. Factory coun cils linked up at regional level, and those regional bodies were grouped together in a National Federation of Self-Management Bodies in October 1981, covering 26 regions.

Combat At regional level, writes Kowalewski, we were convinced that the only method the working class could employ was the active strike. Active strike action consists of taking control of production by the strike committees, and this control to be based on a plan worked out by the workers themselves to meet society's needs...

On 9th December, six members of the area Presid ium met with workers in the 12 largest enterprises of Ladz. At mass meetings the active strike was discussed, as was the setting up of workers' militias and other measures to combat economic sabotage.

The immense majority of workers were for such forms of action.

The military takeover and imposition of martial law mine Le Monde (January 8) also carried an account by a miner of the sit-in strike by him and his comrades against the martial law.

IT WAS on the evening of December 14, the day after the declaration of martial law, that we decided not to come out of the pit. Two thousand miners took part in the occupation.

The population sent us down food and drink without interference from the police.

The : strike committee rationed the food: a small cake, a bit of sausage, and a piece of chocolate, was our daily ration.

At night it was extremely cold and we huddled together. After five days, the food deliveries were stopped and our rations became more and more miserable.

After Christmas Day, each of us had no more than one third of a cake, a tiny piéce of sausage, and two cups of water a day. The miners began searching round for the crumbs dropped on previous days.

The priests tried to persuade us to give up the occupation, saying that it After learning from ti strike committee that v had no intention of stoppi our action, the priests lef promising to return the ne day to say Mass. But the never returned.

It was very disillusionin Most of us are believers.

After Christmas Day ti food situation became u bearable. The strike comm tee, after hearing that ti occupations in other min had finished, proposed the management that y would end our occupation return for a guarantee th no reprisals be taken ai that work would recomme ce normally.

Management havi: agreed to this, we left the r on December 27.

Most miners, like myse ' left the place, which was fi of militia and military. B the strike committee n arrested and taken away ir bus.

The following Mond we realised that the ott promises weren't kept eith We were all sacked. I had to reapply for work, a management decided to ta us on only if we agreed sign a deciaration that ' would never strike again a