Solidarity’s Wrong Turn (1989)

From the October 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

So, nine years after it was formed as the first independent trade union in Eastern Europe since the war, Solidarity has now supplied a Prime Minister for Poland. Remarkable as this development is, it is nevertheless a fateful mistake from a working class point of view for an organisation formed as a trade union to get involved in government.

This is because the exercise of government power and trade union action are ultimately incompatible. Governments, whatever they might originally intend, have to give priority to maintaining or restoring the profitability and the international competitiveness of industries, whether private or state-owned, situated in the country they are governing. Trade unions, on the other hand, exist to defend workers against the downward pressures that are constantly exerted on their wages and working conditions, whether these come from employers or governments. Those Solidarity members who have entered the government in Poland have put themselves on a collision course with the membership of Solidarity as a trade union. However sincere they may be, they have betrayed the original aim for which Solidarity was established by ordinary workers in 1980, as will become clear when they find themselves, as they will, obliged to oppose wage demands and strikes.

It is true that Solidarity eventually developed other aims, like trade unions everywhere (after all, most trade unions in Britain made the mistake of associating with the Labour Party). Opponents of the regime realised the potential of a movement supported by millions for bringing about changes, and Solidarity’s original working class leaders came to be surrounded by “advisers” and “experts” and “Catholic intellectuals”. These people had other aims than the mere defence of wages and working conditions. They wanted an end to Polish dependence on Russian imperialism, freedom for the Catholic Church to do what it wanted and, on the economic field, a more market-oriented economy and more freedom for private enterprise.

The Class Structure or Polish Society

Solidarity, though far from being a socialist organisation even nominally, realised very quickly that Poland was a class-divided society in which the working class was oppressed and exploited and not a society in which, as the regime’s propaganda machine claimed, the working class ruled through its vanguard, the Polish Communist Party. The exploiting and oppressing class was identified as being the nomenklatura – those filling the top posts in the Party, the government, industry and the armed forces, reserved for Party nominees and carrying with them various material privileges – and the Communist Party was identified as the party of this class and not the working class as – it mockingly pretended.

The class situation in Poland has not been better analysed from within the country than by Jacek Kuron (now a Solidarity MP, whose name was even one of the three proposed by Walesa to General Jaruzelski for the post of Prime Minister) and Karol Modzelewski in the Open Letter to the Party they wrote in 1968 (earning themselves a three-year jail sentence):

  In our system, the Party elite is, at one and the same time, also the power elite; all decisions relating to state power are made by it and, in any case, at the top of the Party and state hierarchies there exists, as a rule, a fusion of responsible posts. By exercising state power, the Party elite has at its disposal all the nationalized means of production; it decides on the extent of accumulation and consumption, on the direction of investment, on the share of various social groups in consumption and in the national income; in other words, it decides on the distribution and utilization of the entire social product . . . The worker is thus exploited, because he is deprived of the ownership of the means of production; in order to live, he must sell his labour. From the moment he performs that act, which to him is indispensable, i.e., when he sells his ability to do a given job in a given time, his labour and its product no longer belong to him but to those who have bought his labour, the owners of the means of production, the exploiters. To whom does the worker in our country sell his labour? To those who have at their disposal the means of production, in other words, to the central political bureaucracy.

The class Kuron and Modzelewski call here the “central political bureaucracy” is the same as what everyone in Poland now calls the nomenklatura. It was a class that was imposed on Poland by the Russian army after the last world war as a mirror-image of the Russian ruling class. Through its party, the Communist Party, it has ruthlessly governed Poland for the past forty years, jailing opponents and brutally suppressing strikes by discontented workers.

The Rise of Solidarity

Then came August 1980 when, in a manifestation of mass working class discontent with their exploitation, millions of workers throughout Poland went on strike. Unable to suppress this by armed force, the government had to agree to negotiate with the representatives of Solidarity, the union the striking workers had formed. But the Polish ruling class had still not given up its desire to rule by dictatorship. Egged on by the Russian ruling class who feared that things might get out of hand and Poland escape from its sphere of influence, the government declared martial law in December 1981 and banned Solidarity. Its leaders, including Walesa and the present Prime Minister Mazowiecki, were rounded up and jailed or sent into internal exile.

Solidarity, however, continued to exist and, still supported by millions of workers, went underground. Meanwhile Poland’s economic situation continued to worsen. In the 1970s the Polish government had borrowed heavily from Western banks in order to finance investments and imports of consumer goods, hoping to be able to pay off these debts from the increased exports it expected to follow from its investments in new equipment. Then came the world slump; the exports failed to materialise and Poland found itself reduced to the status of a Latin American debtor country. Living standards continued to fall, and rations became smaller and smaller and spread to more and more goods.

Under these circumstances working class discontent grew, culminating last year in the biggest strike wave since 1980. The Party and government, now completely discredited, realised that they were going to have to negotiate again with Solidarity. So weak was their position that they had to concede not just the re-legalisation of Solidarity but a revision of the Constitution.

The agreement, reached in March, provided for elections to be held this June but elections of a special kind in that the Communist Party (and its satellite parties) was guaranteed a majority in the lower house, with 60 per cent of the seats being reserved for them. Elections to the new Senate, on the other hand, were to be completely free. In the next elections, to be held in four years time, there were to be no reserved seats in the lower house either.

The results of the election confirmed that Solidarity enjoyed overwhelming support and that the Communist Party had no support outside the ranks of the nomenklatura. All the seats in the Senate save one (which went to an independent oppositionist) and the 35 per cent of freely-elected seats in the lower house were won by Solidarity (the other 5 per cent had been reserved for some Catholic representatives). The Communist Party even failed to win on the first round all the seats reserved for it since a number of their candidates, including the outgoing Prime Minister Rakowski, failed to achieve the 50 per cent of votes cast required to be elected.

In Office but Not Power

This result was embarrassing, both to the government and to Solidarity since it undermined the compromise deal whereby the Communist Party would be allowed to rule until further elections in four years time. The way out favoured by the Polish ruling class was a coalition between their party and Solidarity, with Solidarity as the junior partner whose role would be to defuse working class discontent while highly unpopular measures, involving price rises and redundancies, were pushed through. But Solidarity was not prepared to be used to bailout the regime in this way.

This refusal placed the Polish ruling class in a dilemma since the only option now left was to allow Solidarity a larger share of power, but could they be trusted? After all, hadn’t Solidarity identified them as the class enemy and hadn’t they spoken of dismantling the whole system of patronage and privilege from which they benefited? In the end they decided to let Solidarity form a government while retaining key ministries for their own direct political representatives – the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of the Interior which together control the coercive forces of the Polish state. In addition, the President, General Jaruzelski, retains considerable powers. But even though the Solidarity government will be in office rather than in power, it will still have to assume responsibility for running Polish capitalism, inevitably against the interests of the working class in Poland. This of course is the plus side for the Polish ruling class. They will still be able to use Solidarity to defuse working class discontent while the unpopular measures, necessary to restructure Polish capitalism and render it internationally competitive again, are implemented.

Already, even before the Solidarity government came into office, Solidarity politicians were urging workers not to rock the boat by going on strike. The Financial Times (19 August) reported that in a debate in the Senate the previous day

  Senator Leszek Pietrowski, the Solidarity Senator from Katowice, appealed to striking miners in his constituency to return to work in the name of their feelings for Solidarity. ‘We can’t strike when Solidarity is beginning to rule the country’, he said

More, much more, such talk will be heard over the coming months. Indeed, it is probable that Walesa refused office precisely so as to be able to use his influence with the trade union side of Solidarity to get workers to accept the austerity measures that the Solidarity government will be imposing on them.

Transition to Private Capitalism?

A Solidarity government, despite its trade union origins, will do – can do – nothing to further the interests of workers in Poland. However, committed as it is to an economic programme that amounts to the transformation of Poland from the bureaucratic state capitalist country it has been since 1948 into the sort of mixed private and state economy that exists in the West, the Solidarity government could well take steps that really would undermine the position of the nomenklatura, benefiting instead the growing private capitalist class – the zloty millionaires, as they are known – that exists in Poland.

Earlier this year the Financial Times (13 January) published a revealing article by Jan Winiecki, who lectures at the Catholic University of Lublin, which amounted to a blueprint for a transition from bureaucratic state capitalism to free enterprise private capitalism. Discussing the “critical mass of changes that must be made at the beginning to get things moving towards the market system”. Winiecki argued that:

  an elimination of the nomenklatura Communist apparatchiks’ privilege to appoint managers at all levels of economic management is the crucial, though politically most difficult, component of the critical mass. Elimination of the nomenklatura is not an end in itself. It is simply a prerequisite to establishing some sensible property rights in place of the chimera of ‘social’ ownership.

In other words, the monopoly control over industry currently exercised by the nomenklatura – supposedly in the name of society but in reality in their own interests as a class – should give way to monopoly control exercised by private capitalists enjoying legal ownership rights over industry.

Realising that the nomenklatura are not likely to accept without a struggle what amounts to their dispossession, Winiecki proposed that:

  If the nomenklatura cannot be beaten it can still be bought out. Party apparatchiks and high level bureaucrats (or most of them) should be offered high compensation for leaving their positions, which would then be abolished.

Actually, if they see that the bureaucratic state capitalism of which they are the beneficiaries really is going to be abolished, this could be an attractive deal for them. They could use their “high compensation” to convert themselves into private capitalist investors and continue to live the life of parasites on the workers to which they have become accustomed.

Only history will tell whether Poland will take this road or whether some other compromise will be worked out between the two sections of the capitalist exploiting class there – the nomenklatura and the zloty millionaires – but one thing is clear. Such a change in the composition of the exploiting class has nothing to offer the workers who sacrificed so much to establish Solidarity as a trade union.

Adam Buick

The Nature of Russian Society (1967)

Book Reviews from the December 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917-1967 by Isaac Deutscher, O.U.P. 21s.

A Revolutionary Socialist Manifesto by Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, International Socialism, 4s.

Every Revolution creates its own myths. The French revolutionaries thought that all privilege had been abolished when kings, nobles and priests had been dealt with. Even today in America the dominant ideology denies there is a class system there. And so in Russia where the official mythology proclaims a classless society. But even many who are critical of the government there argue that it is wrong to talk of Russia as a class society. Among these is the late Isaac Deutscher. Deutscher, a freelance trotskyist, was invited to give the George Macaulay Trevelyan lectures in Cambridge this year. He chose to outline what can be called the orthodox trotskyist theory on the nature of Russian society. This may have been new to Cambridge professors but it is old hat to Socialists. All the same, since Deutscher, like Trotsky, can write well the arguments are worth going over again.

Deutscher closely follows Trotsky. [1] Owing to Russia’s economic backwardness and political isolation a bureaucratic caste (not class) was able to usurp power. This bureaucracy cannot be said to be a class as its privileges are not based on property. Their relationship to the nationalised means of production is the same as that of the working class. Its privileges appear in the consumption not in the production of wealth.

  What this so-called new class lacks is property. They own neither means of production nor land. Their material privileges are confined to the sphere of consumption. Unlike the managerial elements in our society, they are not able to turn any part of their income into capital: they cannot save, invest, and accumulate wealth in the durable and expansive form of industrial stock or of large financial assets. They cannot bequeath wealth to their descendants; they cannot, that is, perpetuate themselves as a class.

Deutscher was of Polish origin. By coincidence two young Poles, now in jail, Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, provide a complete answer to his points in their Open Letter to the Party written in 1965:

  It is said that the bureaucracy cannot be a class, since the individual earnings of its members do not come anywhere near the individual earnings of capitalists; since no bureaucrat, taken by himself, rules over anything more than his mansion, his car and his secretary; since entrance to the bureaucratic ranks is determined by a political career and not by inheritance; and since it is relatively easy to be eliminated from the bureaucracy in a political showdown. This is quite wrong. All the above arguments prove only the obvious: The property of the bureaucracy is not of an individual nature, but constitutes the collective property of an élite which identifies itself with the state. This fact defines the principle of the bureaucracy’s internal organisation, but its class character does not depend on its internal organisation or its mores, only on its relationship—as a group—to the means of production and to other social classes (above all, the working class), (our italics).

That a privileged class could own property collectively seems to have escaped both Trotsky and Deutscher. Perhaps because they attached too literal a meaning to “private property” (after all, in English, private often means individual), they held that nationalisation abolished privilege based on property. Whereas in fact nationalisation is just another form of sectional property. Marx himself, in an early essay discussing the role of the Prussian bureaucracy, showed that he realised a class could own property collectively. [2] Kautsky knew this too. Discussing what, in Western Europe, is the classic case—church property in feudal times— he wrote that after the priests had suppressed the primitive democracy of the early churches “it goes without saying that the property of the community now became in fact the property of their administrators, though not their personal property, but that of the bureaucracy as a corporation”. [3] Some trotskyists even realised this. But the most thorough examination of this species of sectional property was done by Karl Wittfogel. [4] He spoke of “political property”. Kuron and Modzelewski have “bureaucratic property”. But whatever it is called this relationship is clearly a form of class monopoly over the means of production.

In their first four chapters the two Poles brilliantly argue the case that Poland (and, by implication Russia) is a class society; that the working class and peasantry are exploited by the elite “who occupy conspicuous positions in the (Party) hierarchy and who collectively make basic decisions” (a group they call the central political bureaucracy). They show how the working class are propertyless and so have to sell their mental and physical energies to this bureaucracy for wages in order to live. They show too how the peasants are deprived of all surpluses above subsistence so that cheap food is available to keep wages down in industry. They conclude that the way out for the working class is to overthrow by force the bureaucracy and introduce genuine democracy into administration and industry.

Deutscher shares this aim. But because he denies that Russia is a class society he thinks that this change will come about not through a political struggle of the working class but as a result of the evolutionary process he sees now going on. His arguments here are very weak. He says that while managers in the West are responsible to the shareholders

  Soviet managers have not only to acknowledge that all shares belong to the nation, but to profess that they act on the nation’s behalf, and especially on behalf of the working class. Whether they are able to keep up this pretence or not depends solely on political circumstances. The workers may allow them to keep it up or they may not. They may, like a sluggish lot of shareholders, accept bad managers; or they may dismiss them. In other words, bureaucratic domination rests on nothing more stable than a state of political equilibrium. This is—in the long run—a far more fragile foundation for social dominance than in any established structure of property relations sanctified by law, religion, and tradition.

But neither Kuron and Modzelewski (nor we) would argue that it is the managers of industrial concerns who are the privileged class in Russia. They, like those in the West, are really a very highly-paid grade of worker. In Russia they, like the working class generally, must take orders from the bureaucracy (the real equivalent of the shareholders).

Deutscher's argument that the rule of the bureaucracy is less firm than that of the capitalist class in the West has even less merit. For it is true here also that capitalist class rule “rests on nothing more stable than a state of political equilibrium". Here the capitalist class rule primarily because their rule is accepted and endorsed by the vast majority of workers. In fact surely it is they who are in the the weaker position. For as a result partly of past working class struggles and present working class understanding and organisation they are forced to seek, every now and again, a mandate to rule from the working class. The Russian ruling class has to undergo no such indignity. They have all the means they need ruthlessly to suppress any opposition—which they don’t hesitate to use. Kuron and Modzelewski disclose that as late as 1962 tanks were used against workers in Novocherkassk, a small town near Rostov in southern Russia. For the working class to get the ruling bureaucracy off their backs requires quite as much political knowledge and organisation as we need to get the traditional capitalists off ours. Indeed, it requires more for first they must establish elementary rights of expression and association. In fact their struggle, and ours, are part of the same movement of the working class the world over to free themselves from exploitation and oppression.

Adam Buick

Footnotes
[1] Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed.
[2] Marx, Critique et Hegel’s Philosophy of Law.
[3] Kautsky, Foundations of Christianity.
[4] Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism,

Let Them Eat Cake (1968)

From the February 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

In their Open Letter to the Party (see the Socialist Standard, December 1967) Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski analysed the living conditions of workers in “communist” Poland. Using official, Polish-government data they produced a devastating criticism of the state capitalist system in that country. One passage in particular stands out in my mind—that dealing with meat consumption in working class families.

 Polish food physiologists established 4 norms for meat consumption. Norm A, hardly adequate and not recommended for a long period, requires a monthly per capita average of 3.7 Kg. Norm B, adequate and permitting a normal functioning of the organism over a long period, requires 4 Kg. The data on family budgets reveals that in about 23 per cent of working class families the consumption of meat and meat products is below the hardly adequate norm, and in 18 to 19 per cent of such families, it is within the hardly adequate norm but still below the adequate norm.
  According to a research project conducted at the Warsaw Motorcycle Factory in 1957, 23 per cent of the workers ate meat for dinner once a week or less, and 25 per cent ate it twice a week. One might suppose that data seven years old are no longer true, but in fact consumption of meat and meat products in 1957 was 43.9 kilograms, a level higher than that of 1960 (42.5 kilograms) and not much below that of 1962 (45.8 kilograms).

As can be seen, the statistics used by these two imprisoned ex-Communists go no further than 1962. But a recent article in the Economist (2.12.67) has presented figures for succeeding years. It shows that the trend in Poland at present is for family incomes to rise. This has resulted not so much from pay increases as from the tendency for more members of the average family to go out to work; thus-the labour force has increased by 1,900,000 in the past seven years. As a measure of the poverty of these working class families it is significant that little of their extra money has been spent on so-called luxuries. Instead they have concentrated on buying more of the basic essentials such as foodstuffs. In fact, food products still account for 47 per cent of total consumer expenditure, the same proportion as before. Due to their new-found “affluence” Polish workers have been eating more meat and it is estimated that in 1967 the average working man just reached the adequate level (norm B). The figure given is 4.3 kilograms/month (52 kilograms/year) for per capita meat consumption, compared to the norm of 4 kilograms/month (48 kilograms/year).

Production in state capitalist Poland, however, is not carried on in order to satisfy the people’s needs and the supply of meat products for the market has lagged behind the new demand. This has meant, in classical capitalist manner, rocketing prices of the different types of meat—increases of 16.7 per cent on average, but even higher in some cases (the price of veal, for example, is up by a third). The effect of all this is, of course, quite obvious. It must once more force per capita consumption of meat down below the level which healthy diet demands. The average worker will now only be able to afford 3.7 kilograms of meat each month (44.6 kilograms/year) — the “hardly adequate" norm — if he spends the same money as before on his food. With working class budgets stretched just as tightly in Poland as they are elsewhere, this means he has little alternative than to tighten his belt.

We could not end without mentioning Stefan Jedrychowski, the chairman of the state planning commission. According to the Economist he has “blamed the current shortages in meat supplies on the Poles’ insatiable appetite for meat”! As always, the barbarities of the capitalist system are only matched by the cynical insolence of those in power.

John Crump

Solidarity governs in Poland (1990)

From the February 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is happening in Poland?

What sort of policies are coming from the Solidarity-led government? What are the prospects for the workers? And can it really be possible that the "vanguard" party—the privileged elite—could have really given up their power and privilege, voluntarily?

Over the New Year steep price rises were announced and meat disappeared from the cities' markets. No police were to be seen in Warsaw: even during New Year's Eve festivities in the centre, where thousands of people, many very drunk, celebrated noisily. Some say the police, unpopular and demoralised, are afraid to be seen on the streets. Many have left the force, some setting up in business as private detectives and security guards. Their clients are mostly rich people: "despite appearances. there are more and more wealthy people in Poland" (Warsaw Voice, 31 December-7 January).

With the move towards a market economy and private enterprise there are pickings to be had for the rich, and for Western capitalists. Lech Walesa has been begging Western businesses to set up shop in Poland, and the Economist reminds its readers that, like Portugal. Poland pays very low wages. Why is this? After all, isn't Solidarity supposed to be a trade union, representing workers interests. and doesn't it control the government?

Experts Hi-Jack Solidarity

Almost from the start Solidarity was dominated by so-called "experts". At its birth in Gdansk, in August 1980. when the workers' representatives wanted to demand the abolition of censorship and free elections, a representative of KOR (a group of intellectuals sympathetic to the workers) was the only one to plead for them to be reasonable. That man is now Prime Minister Mazowiecki.

As a result of the advice of such people, the Gdansk Agreement and later policy documents of Solidarity were mealy-mouthed, meekly accepting the status quo. avoiding any challenge to the “leading role of the Party”:

These new unions . . . will be established on the basis of . . . the socialist system which exists in Poland today. They will recognise the leading role of the PUWP in the state and will not oppose the existing system of international alliances. (Gdansk Agreement)

The workers' delegates were furious at this acknowledgement of the Party's “leading role", which had not been discussed with them. "From that moment on. they wanted to throw all the experts out of the shipyard", wrote an eyewitness. Jadwiga Staniszkis.

The Gdansk Agreement also urged workers “to show greater work discipline in co-operation with the management of the factories and enterprises", and "to work towards the increase of output'. Later. in its Draft Statutes (31 August 1980), Solidarity's aims are defined as to attempt to bring the workers' interests into harmony with the functioning of the enterprise".

This is the language of the Church, very influential with the leaders of the movement. Lech Walesa is on record as saying that he wouldn't trust himself to be a leader "if it were not for the influence of God" (BBC TV. 12 July 1981).

For the record, previous workers demands had been less humble and had insisted on free elections. Just before the Gdansk Agreement, at another shipyard occupation strike in Szczeczin. an agreement was reached which had nothing in it about the "leading role of the Party". But in Szczeczin no “experts" were allowed to hijack the workers' negotiations.

These "experts", like Mazowiecki, Michnik, Kuron and others of the KOR faction are now elected members of the Polish parliament, the Sejm, endorsed by Solidarity. However, last summers "free" and democratic elections were something of a fraud. Within a few weeks of the announcement of the election, Citizens' Committees (note: not workers' committees) sprang up and produced nominations: academics, writers, actors, film directors, names of all sorts, including KOR activists. Endorsed by Lech Walesa in the name of Solidarity—but without any process of consultation with the membership—these Solidarity candidates all got elected in the one-third of the seats open to them.

The election meant that the old PUWP. and its allies, held most of the seats but wherever there had been a choice, voters had shown their preference for Solidarity candidates. Jaruzelski chose to opt for a coalition, a form of power-sharing. Mazowiecki became Prime Minister and Kuron Minister of Labour while his side retained the key ministries of Defence, Internal Affairs, Transport and External Economic Relations. In short, the PUWP retained control over the armed forces and the police.

Consensus on Economic Reforms

The policies of the Mazowiecki government include the old classics of economic reform: ending food subsidies, increasing productivity, and introducing some form of “market economy". This is in line with the policy decided at the 1981 Solidarity Congress. and not very different from those which the PUWP were then advocating. As Marxism Today commented at the time. “Solidarity's reform proposals for economic decentralisation and the introduction of market mechanisms only diverge in degree from those of the Party and the government" (January 1982).

The continuity in policies is really quite striking. In July 1980. the then PUWP leader. Gierek, said that "rises in the standard of living have to be earned". The solution to Poland's economic crises, then and now, is to make the workers work harder and earn less.

Today, with inflation running at from 100 per cent to 500 per cent, workers' pay rises are not allowed to be above 80 per cent of the rise in the cost of living. So, even if they can obtain a rise, their earnings are cut by 20 per cent. If enterprises pay more, they are attacked with punitive taxation, even bankrupted. Kuron, as Minister of Labour, wants to limit the right to strike. His plan is for strike organisers to "be charged with paying the costs of strikes, a ban on political strikes and strikes concerning collective agreements that had previously been signed by the union"(Warsaw Voice). Incidentally, he appears on TV on Tuesday nights with helpful hints. Like his idea for solving the problem of poverty by opening an SOS bank account for people to send money to for distribution to the needy (a scheme which flopped due to objections from the Polish National Bank).

Under Solidarity rule, conditions for workers are not better than under Gierek in 1980, with shortages of basic essentials, high rates of accidents (in the mines, one death for every 500,000 tonnes of coal), the need to work weekends to supplement low wages, and so on.

Looking back, it seems that a consensus was reached in 1980-1 on plans for economic reform. These would include “marketisation", profit maximisation, ending the nomenklatura system, and some form of "workers' self-management". Already in 1980. Jerzy Urban of the PUWP wrote of the need to do a deal with the trade unions: “to find a place for the new trade unions in the whole system of government in Poland" (Polityka, November 1980).

Jaruzelski's strategy was to incorporate Solidarity as a partner in a coalition government. A similar policy was urged by the Church, always favouring national unity and “harmony". The result is that the PUWP does not have to carry the can for the unpleasant, harsh effects for workers of these “reforms". In fact the situation is one of role reversal. Once the workers' movement, Solidarity is now attacking workers’ living standards, forcing real wages down, and limiting their right to strike. And the PUWP and the old “official" unions are in opposition, protesting against price rises and objecting to Kuron's plans to limit the right to strike.

Enfranchisement of the Nomenklatura

So far the working class have not benefited from government policies. Who is benefiting? Quite a few members of the old elite, the nomenklatura of apparatchiks and managers, are busy feathering their own nests, setting up companies and acquiring business assets. Perfectly legal but decidedly unscrupulous activities are going on, according to the Warsaw Voice (31 December-7 January) in an article headed Watch Out, Thieves!’:

A new process called the "enfranchisement of the nomenklatura" began deep within the Polish economy. Beneficiaries of the previous system used their positions to secure their own financial futures by setting up companies which claimed state properly.

This began with buying up cars and property belonging to state offices and enterprises but "the extent of this destructive procedure is wider than had been believed".

Soon, when a scheme has been worked out for privatising industry, who do you think will have money to spare to buy shares and become legal capitalists? Not the working class, obviously. Effectively the "vanguard’' will re-establish its control of the means of production in a different form, no longer mediated through state ownership.

The Church will preach to the workers about the need for harmony. And Solidarity's activists will urge that their members be "responsible in their demands . . .  We as activists will ask our people here to understand and support the government of Mazowiecki", in the words of Edward Folcik, the Solidarity shop steward at a Wroclaw factory.

On a visit to Poland over the New Year I heard much that reminded me of the period, in the 1970s, when a Labour government arranged a deal with the TUC, a "social contract". This was not in the interests of the workers: in a period of inflation they were told that they could not demand pay rises; that this would not be in the national interest, and could mean the Tories getting back into power.

Similar arguments are used in Poland. Sacrifices must be made to get the economy on its feet again, “there is no other way", the only alternative would be to bring back the PUWP. And trade unions and clergy actively preach at the unfortunate workers about the need to work harder, for a “better tomorrow".

Charmian Skelton

Poland's workers take a step . . . (1980)

From the October 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Polish strikers, in forcing the government there to allow them to organise into independent trade unions with the right to strike, have once again exploded the myth that class and class conflict have been abolished in countries like Poland and Russia. They have completely undermined the ideological justification given for their dictatorship by the ruling “communist” parties in these countries. For, if such parties represent and govern on behalf of the working class, as they claim, why have the Polish workers had to set up a separate organisation to defend their interests? And who do they have to defend themselves against, if not some other class on whose behalf the so-called communist and workers’ parties of East Europe really govern?

That Poland is a class-divided society there can be no doubt. One of these classes is easy enough to identify: the working class itself, those obliged to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary in order to live. There is also a class of small peasants and traders, some of whom have in recent years evolved into “zloty millionaires”. But these private capitalists do not own the most important means of production—the factories, the steelworks, the shipyards, the mines and the other places where the bulk of the wealth is produced.

These are monopolised by a group which is more difficult to identify, since, unlike the private capitalists of the West, its members have no legal titles to say that they are the owners. Their monopoly of the means of production is nevertheless just as effective and, as in the West too, rests on control of political power.

Jacek Kuroń, one of today’s prominent Polish dissidents (who was arrested for the umpteenth time during the recent events and only released as part of the strike settlement) called this group, in an open letter he wrote to the Polish Party in 1965 with Karol Modzelewski, “the central political Bureaucracy”. Milovan Djilas, who had himself been a member of this class in Yugoslavia, had previously called it the “new class”. We ourselves would prefer some such term as “state capitalist class”, but the definition given by Kuron and Modzelewski is clear enough:

In our system, the party elite is, at one and the same time, also the power elite; all decisions relating to state power are made by it and, in many cases, at the top of the Party and state hierarchies there exists, as a rule, a fusion of responsible posts. By exercising state power, the Party elite has at its disposal all the nationalised means of production; it decides on the extent of accumulation and consumption; on the direction of investment, on the share of various social groups in consumption and in the national income; in other words, it decides on the distribution and utilisation of the entire social product.

(An open letter to the Party, p. 7) 

It is to this class that the workers sell their labour power (not labour, as the translation below says) and which exploits them:

To whom does the worker in our country sell his labour? To those who have at their disposal the means of production, in other words to the central political bureaucracy. On account of this, the central political bureaucracy is the ruling class; it has at its exclusive command the basic means of production; it buys the labour of the working class; it takes away from the working class by force and economic coercion the surplus product and uses it for purposes that are alien and hostile to the worker in order to strengthen and expand its rule over production and society. (P. 15)

The same state capitalist system which exists in Poland also exists in Russia, China, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Albania and other such countries. There too the means of production are monopolised collectively by a “Party-state power elite” which exploits the working class.

The striking workers of Poland have achieved an important victory. For the first time the rulers of a state capitalist country have been forced to recognise an independent workers’ organisation and to negotiate wages and conditions with it. There have of course been strikes and riots in state capitalist countries before, including in Russia itself, which have compelled the authorities to make concessions over wages and conditions. This is what happened in Poland in 1956, in 1970 and in 1976, but at the price of the deaths of a number of workers shot down by a government supposedly ruling in their interests. The formation and recognition of a permanent workers’ body to negotiate with the ruling class represented by the authorities, however, represents a new advance in trade union consciousness.

The joint strike committee which coordinated the general strike in the Gdansk area (where at least fifty workers were shot when the unrest of 1970 was suppressed) was an embryo trade union and demonstrated a fairly high degree of trade union consciousness. Learning the lesson of the strikes and riots of 1956, 1970 and 1976 which achieved wage increases and other concessions, but left the workers without any means to defend them, the committee put the recognition of a permanent workers’ economic defence organisation before the demand for a wage increase. And, by their determination and with the support and solidarity of workers in other parts of the country, they achieved this aim. The strike committee also seems to have realised that the “workers councils” set up in Poland after 1956 and still existing in Yugoslavia were no substitute for an independent trade union. In fact such councils are only a trap to get workers to participate in their own exploitation and the ruling class of Yugoslavia must be just as worried by the Polish developments as those in the other state capitalist countries of Eastern Europe.

Poland already has organisations called “trade unions” but these are not formed to defend wages and working conditions, but state institutions, along the lines of Hitler’s Labour Front, for controlling and disciplining workers. Their leaders are full members of the “Party-state power elite”, enjoying the same bloated salaries, special shops, housing, prizes and the likes as other members of the privileged class in Poland. Let it be said in passing that the attitude of the General Council of the TUC in Britain in maintaining relations with these so-called “unions” (as indeed with other similar organisations in other state capitalist countries) was quite disgraceful, and perhaps revealing of the aspiration of the TUC leaders to win the same sort of privileged state positions as enjoyed by those they evidently feel to be their opposite numbers in Poland.

What has happened in Poland was predictable—and will happen sooner or later in other state capitalist countries too—since, as we have always held, no dictatorship, however totalitarian or brutal, can permanently suppress working class consciousness. Trade unionism is an inevitable product of capitalism, arising out of the very social situation of the workers under it, as wage and salary earners forced to sell their mental and physical energies in order to live. They are also forced by the same economic necessity to try to sell their labour powers at as high a price as possible—and sooner or later come to realise that “unity is strength”, that it is better to band together and collectively negotiate a price with the employers than to let them fix it unilaterally, as happened in most industries in Britain in the last century and as still happens in all state capitalist countries today—except, now, in Poland.

But trade union consciousness, necessary though it is, is far from being the same as socialist consciousness. It is no more than a recognition that the workers need an organisation to try to ensure the sale of their labour powers on the best terms that market conditions permit. To be a good trade unionist you don’t need to be a socialist and in fact, by all-accounts, the Gdansk strikers were Polish patriots and devout Catholics. This did not prevent them adopting the right tactics to win an important concession from their state capitalist masters, but it almost certainly means that they will make mistakes in the future. It remains to be seen, for instance, whether the Catholic Church will try to take over the new independent unions through some organisation like “Catholic Action” in this country.

Trade unions are no threat to the continuance of capitalism, not even to the state capitalist regimes in countries like Poland and Russia. Trade unions are in a sense useful, even to capitalist employers, as a means of channelling workers’ discontent in an orderly and peaceful way, as some of the more intelligent members of the Polish ruling class have come to realise (or have been forced to realise). Their counterparts in Russia seem to be more shortsighted but then no ruling class has conceded the right to organise and strike except under pressure from its workers. And until the workers in Russia react the ruling class there can be expected to maintain its repressive attitude.

Congratulations, then, to our fellow workers in Poland on winning the right to organise independently. But they must realise that trade union action, though necessary, Is essentially only defensive and that if they don’t want to keep running fast just to stand still (which, we fully appreciate, is not so bad as falling back because you are not allowed to run fast) then they must think in terms of acting in conjunction with their fellow workers in other countries to abolish the wages system.

Adam Buick