Origin of deficit with USSR Causes of the Polish debts

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In recent weeks we have published information on the political struggle in the American Socialist Workers Party which has led to mass expulsions and the formation of a public faction. Here we publish extracts from a critique of the SWP's trade union work written in 1981 by veteran Teamster Harry De Boer and fellow members of the Twin Cities Branch of Minneapolis/St Paul. Many of the criticisms apply equally to the British Socialist League, international co-thinkers of the In 1975 we imported 3.5 million tonnes of grain, at present we import ten million tonnes. The Soviet traders have, at their disposal, tools such as the International Bank for Cooperation and the 'transferable rouble"; they also have a naive contracting party - the Polish Ministry of Foreign Trade and Maritime Economy. They do not need to stimulate food production in their own country. Here they have an "El Dorado" , a mine of foreign currency where one does not have to dirty one's own hands - as for clean consciences I am not so sure.

This is what the dynamics of trade with the rouble area look like in terms of percentages: 1966-70: 8.2% per annum, 1970-75: 17.0% per annum and for 1976-80: 22% per annum (predicted). The increase in production from 1976-80 amounted to 5.8% per annum.

The gap is visible. The growth of export exceeded the increase in production several times over.

Here we find part of the answer as to why, in the last five years, the provision of food and industrial articles has deteriorated, and why we were only able to devote 4% of industrial production to agriculture. According to a TV programme on 5 May 1981, with representatives and directors, in 1981 industry will not even supply the promised 4%. I have made a list of figures illustrating the dynamics of turnover in the last five years, they include:

*Between 1975-6 the USSR trebled its purchases of mining THE American working class is like a simmering volcano. What is taking place in Poland today, could be sweeping across eastern and western Europe in a relatively short period of time. And such explosions could be ripping through the American class in the not-too-distant future. We are drawing ever closer to the American revolution.

The party today,. however, is failing to respond to developments in the class. It has abandoned the methods that build the class struggle left wing in Minneapolis in the 1930s. It has rejected the trade union strategy of Trotsky and Cannon and Skoglund and Dunne. Our party • has sought to substitute itself for the workers' movement through blind, sectarian policies that are isolating the party within the trade Ecs We are becoming Eit it corrent..

Ta= serious MEET FETT CITIZEN I BELT IT STEAD SO THEIR TA FIT.

#: 353532 This is the second anniversary of the declaration of martial law in Poland. The economic crisis which underlay the rise of Solidarnose and its brutal repression remains unsolved.

Below we reprint the second instalment of extracts from a speech on the crisis by Marian Rajski a delegate at Gdynia's Civic Party Conference, on May 16 1981.

It is republished from ‹Voice of Solidarnosc', published fortnightly at f8 for six months from NSZZ Solidarnosc, 314 Grays Inn Road, London WCIX 8DP.

and extracting equipment from *1976-80 the Cegielski factory increased exports of railway carriages to the USSR by 60%. *We sell ships on credit for 10-15 years, while we ourselves buy them for cash, and more expensively. *We direct 60% of Bolish exports of computer systems, industrial automation and physico chemical apparatus to the USSR.

SWP.

trade union methods aren't working.

At the heart of the party's misguided trade union policy is the strategy of talking socialism in the weeks and months after a party member gets off probation.

Plant JE50C WEEDS DE DESSEC. OF =o selling IX: Digs when plant, thus tipping off everyone in the plant -bosses, bureaucracy and workers - that he or she is a socialist. Party members are pressured to openly declare themselves socialists at the earliest opportunity. We do not choose the word "pressured" lightly. Those who come out quickly as socialists are rewarded with the major srasca assignments, execusive board positions, a=d elevation to the nationi otice or Trotsky school.

Pary work is measured on the basis of how quickly party members can initiate party campaigns in the workplace, without consid. eration of whether mem*The USSR signer contracts tor 1981-85 for supplying 4.1 million tonnes of coal per annum to Last Germany, and 3.2 million tonnes to Czechoslovakia. Along which road does this export travel? Four reloading points on our eastern border dispatch our coal in precisely the opposite direction. Once again, this export enriches us by 62 kopeks for a dollar's worth of coal.

These are a few examples from several hundred industrial concerns, up to 90% of whose production we direct to the rouble area. The complete list includes shipyards, aircraft factories, railway carriage factories, the electronics industry and armaments factories.

To assure this production it will be necessary, in 1981, to borrow the extra sum of 11 thousand million dollars from the West.

Here we find the answer to the question why agriculture lacks 80 thousand tools and spare parts for machines, while the waiting time for an apartment is twelve years. There is a similar situation with spare parts in the mining industry.

We lose on practically everything we export to the USSR but, apparently, we gain on the import of nine million tonnes of ore and 13 million tonnes of oil from the USSR. The latter myth was demolished in a TV broadcast on 12 March 1981. It featured our Vice-Premiers of Economic Affairs, the USSR's trade representative, Boris Koltunov, and several highSocialists Party members didn't have to tell the workers in mass numbers that they were socialists in Minneapolis during the 1930s, because the bosses took every opportunity to smear our members. But it backfired. Most workers, on hearing the smear, said, "Maybe they're communists, but they're good union fighters and that's good enough for me." That's how we won the workers to our side and that's how we'll win them again. If we perform correctly, workers will learn we can be depended on. A good policy is to remember that actions speak louder than words.

As we spend more time in the workplace, there will be conversations, and there will be opportunities for us to naturally express our viewpoints on Poland, or El Salvador, or the ERA or cutbacks in social programmes. But we should not feel compelled to talk about anything until we have become an accepted part of the workforce. bers are encouraged to tell co-workers what should be done, even if we are the newest workers in the plant and have yet to prove we are serious unionists, let alone know how to work.

5 MA ranking officials, whose task was to repeat banalities about trade and friendship.

Vice-Premier Jagielski said only one sentence: 'Over the last five years we did not keep complementary accounts and it would he worthwhile for the Ministry of Foreign Trade to keep such accounts."

It is strange that a vice-premier responsible for socialist integration and Comecon does not know whether we are losing or gaining in this trade.

Minister Krzak informed us that, in the export of machines to the USSR, the "transferable rouble" costs 44.44 zloty; but i. is worse in the import of raw materials, where the cost of the 'transferable rouble" is considerably higher and exceeds the fixed value of 44.44 zloty. Thus he exploded the myth about cheap raw materials.

Our losses per annum are in line with the annual increase in our debt since 1977 - from the moment we changed to the 'transferable rouble" • This amounts to six thousand million dollars per annum. To this one should add the limited consumption, losses in housing materials and agriculture, and the multi-billion costs the nation is having to bear due to the economic collapse.

The most important statement was made by the Minister for The 1934 Minneapolis leamster strike would have never happened without key party leaders who had been living in Minneapolis for years and were established in the trade union movement. Yet today party members are routinely yanked out of unions where they're getting established and transferred somewhere else.

There is no appreciation for the fact that it takes time to establish credibility in a union and gain influence in the working class community as a whole. The workers won in 1934 because our cadre knew the Twin Cities and Minnesota intimately, had genuine contacts in the labour better many.

Today, workers see our party members lecturing them on what their union should do, and then, the next minute, leave town. It doesn't make a good impression. Nor does it help the branch integrate itself in the labour movement.

Uprooted We believe it is wrong to believe it is wi root members who have : members wh ig years in a union, but ears in a unic LICI NICOTEL the Machine Industry. He claimed that our export of machines and appliances had exceeded our import from the USSR twice over. But why is this balance negative? Even at a Party forum one cannot hold a free discussion. My speech is an attempt to turn the attention of activists, who will have something to say at the Congress, in the direction necessary to find a way out of the present situation.

Horrendous rumours circulate about the prices we pay for arms imported from the USSR. Without unveiling the secrecy from these issues, and their thorough explanation, together with a parliamentary commission having access to. defence secrets, there will be no truly partner-like trade relations with the USSR. A penetrating analysis of arms imports may reveal why our trade balance with the rouble area has become a deficit. When the governments of the richest countries give military or economic aid they have to obtain permission from their representative organs. We do it without any control.

It is the decision of two or three individuals, made as if these billions of dollars were their own private property. this is another cause of our decline, and should not be ignored. Í have set myself the goal of are not in the union targeted by the party. Many of these members in nonindustrial jobs have performed effectively for their unions, including in broad strike support activity, precisely because they are rooted in that workplace. Indeed, the party has lost touch with the class in many places, by yanking its members out of workplaces where they are established, and moving them from job to job like pawns on a chessboard.

Members who have correctly stayed in their old non-industrial jobs have often become pariahs in their own branch, voted off executive committees and shunted to the sidelines, even though they may have extensive knowledge and connections with the labour movement.

In Minneapolis in the 193os, most of the key members of the branch were in untargeted industries.

Oscar Coover and Chester Johnson were electricians, C.R. Hedlund and P.G. Hedlund and I. Nelson were locomotive engineers, and Louis Roseland was a carpenter.

Max and Goldie Geldman were in non-industrial jobs as were others. They all did excellent work, helping 56 C arousing Party consciences and to point in a direction, while the path ought to be indicated by our Party's IXth Congress.

One thing is certain: The Party must find the courage to remove the causes of the present crisis, which lie within the conditions of the present unfair trade exchange, bordering on total robbery.

Lengthy talks with Soviet leaders are essential. Preparations for these talks, and the statement about the balance sheet, cannot be undertaken by people responsible for the situation, from the petty Comecon official right up to the viceminister. If we do not achieve this during the IXth Congress, then everything loses its sense.

Our Party's ranks are dwindling. There will only remain a few hundred thousand administrative workers, members of the security organs and the army, namely people who loathe physical work. Our debts will grow; in the course of a few months we will stand on the brink of our biological extinction. At that point, we will enter the gruesome scenario of events written by people who do not understand the spirit of this nation. •Disregard for these problems in the pre-Congress discussion will not cure our situation: the IXth Congress will be yet one more sham Congress."

comrades in the Teamsters. It would have been absolutely wrong to ask them to leave their jobs. Yet that is our policy today.

That economistic outlook is reflected in the Militant where far more space and front page headlines were devoted during the first half of 1981 to the cutbacks in Conrail, while the even broader, far more devastating cutbacks in social programmes, job programmes, health, welfare and programmes for minorities, got far less coverage. An oversight? We think railroad workers would agree with us that the Reagan plan to dismantle half a century of social programmes should take precedence in a newspaper devoted to all working people.

Economism means placing trade union issues ahead of the basic concerns of the class. The party cannot see beyond the narrow four or five industries which it has targeted.

The party claims that the labour party campaign should be a central "axis"

of party work. We agree, but we count only four articles in the Militant in the first six months of 1918 specifically about the labour party. We don't think that amounts to a campaign.

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Socialist Organisér no.159 December 15 1983 Page

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—Critique of US Socialist Workers Party How not to do trade union work

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