Before the Second World War Poland had been governed by a military junta led by Pilsudski. The political outlook of Pilsudski was close to that of the largest pre-war political grouping in Poland, the National Democrats — a band of crudely anti-semitic fascists whose national ideal was similar to that of Hitler’s Germany. During the war the Polish working class were victims of some of the foulest Nazi atrocities. In June 1945 a Committee of National Liberation declared Poland to be a ‘People’s Democracy'. There was by no means a wide Polish consensus in favour of the new government, which was seen to be a political puppet of the Stalinist state bureaucracy which was effectively the capitalist ruling class of Russia. In 1945 a "Democratic Alliance", comprising the Communist Party of Poland and the Socialist Party of Poland, won a number of votes in the election. Soon after the election the Socialist Party was expelled from the “Alliance" and the agents of Russian capitalism dominated Poland.
The leader of the Polish Communist Party in 1945 was Gomulka who, above all else, was a Polish nationalist. Even before adhering to the Russian policy of state capitalism he was committed to the equally anti-socialist policy of strong national pride. The difference between state capitalism and private capitalism is that under the former a state bureaucracy (composed of senior Party members) possess capital, whereas under the latter form of capitalism the means of wealth production and distribution are privately possessed. Neither form of capitalism excludes the other entirely; for instance, in 1945 the Labour Party nationalised a number of industries; this did not stop them from being capitalist concerns, which produced wealth for profit rather than use. but simply altered the political arrangements.
Similarly, although Gomulka's Poland was primarily state capitalist, this did not stop his government from trading with the West and borrowing 40 million dollars from Western banks. These bank loans are of crucial importance: as soon as a professedly ‘socialist state’ borrows money from a bank it has to repay the loan and the only way it can do this is by the process of exploiting its workforce. A second economic area in which Gomulka resisted pressure from the Kremlin to establish total state capitalism was agriculture. The Stalinist policy was to nationalise all land, but Gomulka found it politically inexpedient to do this. He had gained power by promising the Polish peasant farmers that they could retain ownership and control of their land. Lenin and the Bolsheviks had promised the same thing to the Russian peasants in 1917, but they broke their promise when in power. Gomulka kept his promise to his supporters and as a result 80 per cent of the agricultural land in Poland remained the possession of 10 per cent of the population. This is still so today.
Gomulka's political insolence, which he was forced into in order to retain the support of his capitalist-nationalist-minded supporters, earned him the criticism of his Russian masters. In September 1948 Gomulka was removed from the leadership and replaced by the hard-line pro- Kremlinite, Bierut. From 1949 until 1956 Poland, like other Stalinist satellites, underwent a period of state terror and unprecedented economic hardship for the workers. During this period, marked by the notorious Six-Year Plan, everything was sacrificed so that industrial capital could be accumulated. The aim of the government was to turn Poland into an industrial power and in order to do this maximum profits had to be extracted from the labour of the wealth producers.
Just as in Britain in the early 1800s. and in Chile and Zimbabwe today, working class combination is outlawed so as to ensure the passivity of labour which is necessary for the rapid accumulation of capital, so in Poland the trade unions were regarded as an unacceptable obstacle to the objectives of state capitalist production. As in Nazi Germany, the state did not ban unions, but took them over. During 1949 and 1950, 80 per cent of Polish trade union officials were purged. The state-run unions ceased to be a weapon of working class resistance against the rate of exploitation (which even before 1948 they were hardly able to be) and became a weapon in the hands of the exploiters to extract as much profit as possible out of the exploited. The excellent Polish film, Man of Marble, provides a vivid social portrait of the appallingly tyrannous condition of Polish capitalism during the period of the 'plans' for capital accumulation.
The death of Stalin and Bierut, and the relaxation of state terror which occurred after Krushchev denounced Stalin at the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, resulted in a desire on the part of many Poles — including some Party members — to liberalise state capitalism. In Hungary, the period of so-called destalinisation was considered by the Kremlin to be excessive and in 1956 the Russian tanks went in to Budapest. In Poland the end of the brief period of “liberalism" was decisive, if less dramatic. In 1956 fifteen thousand workers in Poznan held a demonstration to complain about the high production targets which they had been set. The militia was used to break up the demonstration and eighty workers were murdered on the streets.
After 1956 Gomulka returned to power. As in 1946, he chose to finance Polish industrialisation by borrowing from the Western banks. Between 1957 and 1963. 529 million dollars were borrowed from America alone. The result was a consistent effort by the state authorities to intensify the rate of exploitation — notably in heavy industries like ship building. In 1970 the workers in the Gdansk shipyard decided that enough was enough: they went on strike and made the fatal mistake of demonstrating in the streets. The state responded in the only way it knew—just as the authorities in Manchester did at Peterloo — and once again workers were fired on and killed.
In Gdansk in 1970 the state had exposed itself as a ruthless defender of capital and an opponent of the working class interest. Learning from the street demonstrations of 1970. many Polish workers began to realise the need for organisation. After the Gdansk affair Gomulka was removed for a second time and Gierek was brought in to replace him. Although the leader was new, the policy remained the same: Gierek borrowed heavily from the West, receiving 100 million dollars from Russia and 50 million dollars from the West in 1971 alone. There seemed to be an initial success. By 1973 Poland had the third fastest productivity growth rate in the world. Production of consumer goods rose by 7 per cent and real wages rose by 40 per cent between 1970 and 1975. By 1975 Poland owed 6,000 million dollars to the Western banks. To pay off these debts more wealth had to be produced. To produce more, machinery had to be imported. To buy the machinery, more debts were incurred. Eventually, the Polish state decided to cut back on the production of consumer goods for the home market and devote more and more production to goods for export. The contraction of production for the home market led to increased prices of consumer goods and a second problem: the private farmers, who own most of Poland's land, refused to sell their agricultural produce to the state because they had nothing useful to buy with the money. The commodities required by the peasant farmers, such as machinery and chemicals, were being produced for export. Consequently there was a desperate shortage of food, as the price increased still more.
By 1980 the Polish state owed 27,000 million dollars to the banks. It was finding it difficult to sell its goods on the world market because of the world recession. Productive growth, which increased by about 9 per cent between 1971 and 1977, was contracting. Sixty per cent of the industrial products due to be completed in 1980 were unfinished at the end of that year due to lack of goods, leaving Poland with 10.6 billion dollars worth of frozen assets. In 1975, 30 per cent of Polish government expenditure was on food subsidies and welfare services; by 1980 this had fallen to 20 per cent. In 1980 there was a coal shortfall of 12 million tons; shipbuilding amounted to 400,000 tons, 35 per cent less than in 1978. Truck production fell by 6 per cent of 1979 figures and there was a sugar beet shortfall of 30 per cent.
It was thus in response to a crisis of capitalism that the workers in the Gdansk shipyard went out on strike in 1980. In 1981 the workers' journal, Jednosc, contained an article which posed the question: how is the emancipation of labour to be achieved? The answer given was that "it involves true socialism, undistorted socialism . . ." and went on to make the highly perceptive statement that “State ownership and social ownership of the means of production are two completely different concepts which should never be confused. The means of production may be owned by the state, but this does not mean that it is thereby the property of the working class”.
Socialism means the common ownership and democratic control of the world and everything in it by the whole community. There cannot be socialist countries or socialist governments or socialist banks or socialist police or socialist prisons. Our fellow workers in Poland must learn from their experience of opposing their oppressors in recent times. The enemy is capitalism, whatever its form, and to the end of destroying it the Polish workers will have the support of socialists everywhere.
Steve Coleman
No comments:
Post a Comment