Fighting to break links with police state "unions"

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John O'Mahony and Tony Rict the Polish Solidarity Campaign

The TUC sends food - but all donated by employers! WHAT PROBLEMS do we face in organising solidarity with Solidarnosc in Britain?

In the first place, the practice of the broad labour movement is to accommodate to the police state pseudo-unions in the Stalinist states. This is an enormous barrier.

The TUC leaders junket with the top cops who are their nominal opposite numbers in Eastern Europe. Even during the Polish strikes of August 1980, the TUC refused to call off a scheduled visit to the official 'trade union' movement - some of whose leaders were calling on the state to shoot down their own striking members. (The Poles finally cancelled the visit).

The abominable treatment of real trade union militants like Vladimir Klebanov by the police state in the USSR is widely known. Yet links are maintained with the state 'unions' there.

Not only the Stalinoid 'left' bureaucrats have this attitude. Many on the right do too. A stone-age right-winger like Bill Sirs went on radio during the strikes of 1980 to talk with sympathy of the problems of his Polish "colleagues' These people recognised Solidarnosc when it had struggled to life in defiance of their Polish 'colleagues. THE changeover from military government to a civilian government on the West Bank of the Jordan has been rightly seen by the Arab population there as the first step towards the annexation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by Israel.

It is as if Israel, having agreed to withdraw from Sinai as part of the Camp Davia agreement, is now intent on following. up its annexation of the Golan Heights with a larger annexation of the other territories occupied since 1967.

The settlement strategy of the Zionist state aims at setting up on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip AT A TIME when the Zionist state of Israel has again received international condemnation following the annexation of the Golan heights, the Bradford Labour Movement Campaign for Palestinian Solidarity is organising a national day school in Bradford to expose the nature of the Israeli state, and to build support for the Palestinian cause within the labour movement.

The school will take as its theme the present reality of Israeli expansionism, tracing this back to its roots in the doctrine of Zionism. It will discuss the conditions sufferable people like Joan Maynard.

Thirdly, many so-called Trotskyists are inhibited and ambivalent in face of organising labour movement action (as distinct from routine denunciation) against the deformed and degenerated workers' states. A big part of the international current to which the IMG been answered by brutal repression by the Israeli army and vigilante groups of Jewish settlers.

The protests started with the dismissal of the Arab Mayor of El Bireh and his Council. The savagery of the repression has led to the unprecedented resignation of 30 Arab policemen.

Petering

Although the five day general strike is reported to be petering out with shop keepers beaten and arrested for not opening shops, the protests are still very militant - especially now that the Mayors of Nablus and Ramallah have been dismissed. (Other towns like West Bank - protests continue .AIT1У belongs is vehemently opposed to any working Class action in the capitalist states to comply with Solidarnose's call for blacking of Polish goods. Back in 1980 the IMG itself refused to call on the TUC not to go on the official visit to Poland.

Finally, Thatcher's

Reagan's embrace is for Solidarnosc the kiss of Halhoul and Hebron have only acting mayors because the elected mayors have been deported).

The Mayors of Nablus and Ramallah are accused of being PLO members and supporters of terrorism.

Both were, in fact, the victims last year of terrorist assassination attempts by Zionists.

The repression on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, which has already claimed the lives of eight people, is matched by increased repression against leftist organisations within Israel.

ANDREW HORNUNG Judas. In the labour movement their sympathy serves only to denounce it, to make militants suspicious of it, and thus to blur the class reflex of solidarity with a trade union movement.

Activists ask: what kind of trade union is it that Thatcher, the enemy of free trade unionism in Britain, is championing in Poland? What kind of liberty can the friends and sponsors of the butchers in El Salvador stand for?

And the loud noises of Reagan and Thatcher do not mean very much.

In 1956, during the savage repression by the USSR army of the Hungarian revolution, the US made it publicly plain that it considered Hungary within the USSR's 'sphere' At the time of the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the US government made it plain that Czechoslovakia was in their eyes Russia's.

We must oppose imperialist government sanctions, but in fact the talk about such sanctions is rather empty.

Afghanistan was not the USSR's by agreement as Eastern Europe is. The invasion of Afghanistan reflected a. certain change in the balance of military strength between the USSR and the USA. Thus the outcry. Pres-, ident Carter imposed sanctions. Tough-talking Reagan removed them.

They know very well that serious sanctions would be a preliminary act of war. They do not consider that a possibility.

Imperialist propaganda about Poland is a different matter. It is tremendously useful to them. Right now the outcry about Poland is being used in the USA as part of the government's drive to overcome mass resistance to the arms drive and to the reintroduction of conscription So the official imperialist noise is of small comfort to the Polish workers. It is little help to them (it may to an extent be a restraining influence on Jaruzelski and Brezhnev). And it alienates many who are the class sisters and brothers of the• Polish trade unionists, and their natural allies and supporters.

These problems are reflected in the Polish Solidarity Campaign, and dominated its conference last Sunday, 28th.

140 were in attendance. Much of the time was occupied by skirmishing between a small group of IMGers and a grouping at the centre of PSC (Adam Westoby, Robin and Karen Blick, and their friends).

Westoby and Blick are ex Marxists who see capitalism as a progressive and supportable alternative to Stalinist totalitarianism. Trained and formed in the SLL/WRP, they are a counter-sect of Leninophobes. Thus Adam Westoby talked as if a Polish nationalist attitude to the Russia-Poland war of 1920 should be a condition of membership of the PSC!

Edgy

The dominant mood was one of edgy and self-conseious hostility to double standards on the left. There was a strong strain of Stalinophobia.

A motion explicitly condemning the agitation of Reagan and Thatcher, and linking the development of Polish solidarity work with an explicit solidarity with the Left in El Salvador was massively voted down. But conference then voted with only 6 or 7 against to send greetings to the El Salvador demonstration on the same A very confused motion was carried which seemed to envisage solidarity stretching all across the parties and to all good liberals everywhere: There was a lot of expressed opposition to a 'narrow' focus on a labour movement campaign.

At the end the witch-hunting of Westoby backfired: By a small majority, Socialist Organiser supporter Tony Richardson was elected to the National Commitconference last that he would have supported Russia in 1920, etc etc.

It is difficult to assess the conference. Given the general political confusion, it is inevitable that many of those who rally to Solidarnose will tend to mirror and invert the Stalinoid currents in the labour movement. Stalinism constantly creates and recreates illusions in liberal capitalism.

But the double standard of the Left in Britain where Stalinist repression is concerned is disgusting.

Broad

The way forward for Polish solidarity work is to build a broad working-class/ labour movement oriented campaign which formally dissociates itself from the cold warriors, and at the same time accepts restraints or inhibitions against striking with everything the labour movement can muster against those who are trying to destroy the Polish labour movement.

There are some grounds for thinking that the PSC may yet be able to play such a role, despite the Westoby/ Blick sectlet. That will probably be determined by the way we manage to build and politically shape Polish solidarity work at local level in the period ahead. 40p plus postage London N8

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PHOTO: JOHN HARRIS RELIEF FOR POLISH WORKING EOPLE FROM THE TUC

Sunday, March 28 ELD

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