Ten million workers organised in independent trade unions in a 'communist' state seemed unthinkable as recently as last summer when the Polish strike wave against meat prices began. Now the labour movement [illegible] the possible outcome: Soviet intervention, liberalisation, or real workers' power? Oliver Macdonald, editor of Labour Focus on Eastern Europe examines the prospects for political revolution in Poland.
The present Polish crisis like earlier political upheavals in Eastern Europe poses one central problem: how far, if at all, can the political system be democratised? The answer to this question can only be found through a thorough examination of the political system in Eastern Europe. For socialists the roots of any political system are not to be found in the 'dominant values' of society or its 'political culture' but in the character of its economy and its socio-economic structures.
In the Eastern European states the basic means of industrial production have been nationalised. (There is also in Poland a system of petty commodity production by peasants on 68 per cent of the arable land but this is subordinate to the state sector of the economy.) The nationalised character of the industrial economy has immense consequences because it entails the suppression of the capitalist ruling class and of the capitalist market as the regulator of the economy. Instead economic life is regulated by the political planning principle. Production resources are therefore not allocated between industries and factories according to economic pressures — profitability on the market — but through deals made by those who manage the various production resources. These deals are made in the political arena by whoever is involved in the political system. This in turn means that the system of production must be bound together with the political system. There cannot be the separation which is fundamental to capitalism of the 'public' world of the political system from the 'private' world of capitalist property in the economic system.
The traditional model of the post-capitalist society, as envisaged by Marx and Lenin, consisted of democratic state organisations of the producers, managing all the political and production affairs of the state through political struggle and debate, and involving from the outset the withering away of the bureaucratic organisation of the state. In fact a different model has emerged in all the post-capitalist states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, where a bureaucratised mass Communist Party has a complete monopoly on all political power and economic management. This latter system operates in Poland.
The mass Communist Party in such a system needs to incorporate more than just the economic managers and higher state officials. The suppression of the capitalist market has not only removed the economic discipline of the struggle for profits from the owners of factories, it has also removed the economic whip of unemployment from the producers themselves. The political masters of the state must therefore develop new instruments for mobilising the productive efforts of the workers. The traditional 'sticks' for this purpose have been the Gulag and the police, while the 'carrots' have included the privileges of party membership. This membership in the factory is intended to be the driving force and example for other workers in their productive efforts.
Thus the working class membership of the party is not at all an irrelevancy for the functioning of the Eastern European states, nor simply a decorative relic stemming from the party [illegible] cent of the party membership were workers. But that is a far cry from suggesting that the working class base of the party actually exercises political power in Poland or any other Eastern European state. Power is exercised in the social interests of the party/state apparatus. Since the social base of this fused apparatus is the planned economy, it is antagonistic towards any return to capitalism. At the same time however it preserves and defends its political monopoly by resisting all attempts at institutionalising socialist democracy. The bureaucratic apparatus is strictly hierarchical. The criterion for entry into the ruling elite is not social position — ownership of capital or land, social origin or the like — but political capacity to defend the interests of the bureaucratic apparatus. It is these features that are in many ways analogous to the officer corps in a traditional army — hence Trotsky's definition of this layer as a bureaucratic caste.
The membership of this caste roughly corresponds to the professional party apparatus, which in Poland at present numbers around 10,000, and the 'party activists' who number some hundreds of thousands of functionaries in the national, provincial and city state administrations, the apparatuses of the police and military and the economy, the official trade union and youth organisation administrations and so on. There is a frequent interchange of personnel between these two layers. The bureaucracy as a whole involves all those jobs covered by the 'nomenklatura' on a national or local level: that is the list of appointments controlled by the superior party secretary in the given field. At all levels the aspiring bureaucrat must satisfy one key criterion: his or her capacity to defend and serve the political needs of the bureaucratic apparatus as a whole.
From an historical point of view the bureaucracy is a weak and transient force. Its predilection for police apparatuses, its deceptions of the most short-sighted variety, its permanent tendency towards corruption and defiance of its own laws are all symptoms of its weakness. Simultaneously it has, however, for six decades in the USSR and thirty years in Eastern Europe also exhibited an immense political strength. The sources of this strength are derived from three crucial features of the post-capitalist states that have emerged.
First, the suppression of capitalism and the nationalisation of the means of production has placed social initiative for the first time in human history in the hands of the immense majority of the population, the producers themselves. But the acute poverty of the first workers' state in Russia and its devastation by civil war and wars of intervention left the masses without the living standards and free time to exercise their initiative. The Bolshevik Party leadership, not programmatically prepared for such conditions, was in its majority ready to occupy the field left vacant by the masses and to succumb to its own bureaucratisation.
Secondly, the fusion of economics and politics in a workers' state concentrates enormous power in the hands of the political masters of the state. When these masters are the workers themselves, gigantic gains for the masses can be accomplished. But the bureaucracy can use these levers of power to consolidate its grip in a thousand ways over the workers.
Thirdly, the existing Eastern European states were born in the context of fierce resistance by imperialism on the military, political, economic and ideological levels. This offensive served to justify a heavier subordination of the workers to production and a semi-military style of social organisation which repressed all political oppositions.
The crucial problem for the bureaucracy is to maintain the complete political subordination of the industrial working class. Yet, as the productive forces in the Eastern European states develop and the standard of living and free time of the working class increase, the planned economy itself increasingly demands the active, creative involvement of the workers in the productive and political system. The bureaucratic caste becomes more and more a disorganising obstacle to the development of the forces of production, and at the same time has increasingly severe difficulties in maintaining the political subordination of the workers. Here we have the central contradiction in the Eastern European states, one that has acquired explosive features in Poland today.
The place of the working class within the economic and state structures pushes it to struggle for thoroughgoing, radical democracy and working class management of the affairs of state. Repression becomes more and more economically costly for the bureaucracy while the alternatives, buying off the workers and enlarging the party's base in the working class, ultimately weaken the bureaucracy's grip over the workers still further. The key features of the political system in the Eastern European countries and Poland therefore include the political atomisation of the working class and the bureaucracy's need to seal it off from information and ideas which might weaken bureaucratic control. Some political autonomy may be conceded to other social layers such as the intelligentsia of the Catholic hierarchy insofar as this does not promote political ferment and mobilisation of the working class.
Political Alignment of Other Social Forces
There is therefore no possibility of the political system in Eastern Europe gradually evolving towards political democracy through mass working class pressure. Such pressures cause an immediate crisis threatening the social position of the bureaucratic caste, and ultimately posing in a sharp way the question of general political power. Thus the bureaucracy tends to split into diverging currents. One seeks to re-establish bureaucratic rule through concessions which do not challenge its political hegemony over the working class. Another wing seeks the use of external, ie. Soviet, military intervention to re-establish its rule. The entire course of post-war Eastern European history has yet to produce a section of the national bureaucracy prepared to lead a movement seriously struggling for an overall alternative to bureaucratic rule.
The characteristic form of working class struggle in Eastern Europe combines the struggle for democratic rights with a battle to establish working class management of the economy. For the workers these are two aspects of the same struggle. Radical democracy is necessary to ensure efficient production and an end to bureaucratic mismanagement.
The Polish crisis has afforded many examples of the workers spontaneously and immediately connecting their own labour with the whole field of collective consumption: the general strike in Jelenia Gora to turn a Ministry of the Interior sanatorium into a public hospital; Katowice workers demanding a party conference hall be turned into a social amenity; Bielsko Biala workers' long strike to stamp out corruption among local officials. In capitalist countries these connections are not characteristic of the first mass workers' struggles.
While the students and most scientific and white-collar workers in industry link up strongly with the industrial workers, the bulk of the cultural intelligentsia desperately seek some sort of compromise between the workers and the bureaucracy, usually involving greater, though largely informal, liberties for themselves rather than the workers. In Poland this current has no confidence in the victory of the workers over the bureaucracy and therefore prefers concessions from the apparatus. Such a view is probably shared by some of the intellectual 'experts' advising Solidarity who inserted the clause on the 'leading role of the party' into the Gdansk strike agreements last summer. These same advisors have opposed every mass action taken by Solidarity since that time to free imprisoned militants and for the five-day workweek. The same people favoured turning the Gdansk commemoration ceremony for the 1970 victims into a religious celebration of spurious national unity. They also manoeuvred to change the Solidarity delegation to Italy from a trade union sponsored event into a pilgrimage to the Pope.
The material basis for the hierarchy of the Polish Catholic Church comes from the popular funding from the church-going masses. This makes the Church susceptible to mass pressure even if such pressures represent a deadly challenge to the Church's reactionary social doctrines and its rigidly authoritarian structures. The hierarchy therefore used its authority to win concessions for itself from the regime in return for demobilising the mass movements.
This pattern was established in the crises of 1956 and 1970 and repeated more recently by Cardinal Wyszynski's televised appeal on 26 August last year to the workers to end their strike. Over Christmas the hierarchy's press spokesperson attacked the KOR and the radical socialist journal of the Warsaw Solidarity organisation NTO, in an attempt to drive a political wedge into Solidarity.
The Polish authorities have reacted with hostility to the organisation of the poor peasants into Rural Solidarity. Some 600,000 out of a peasant population of 3 million have waged struggles for improved state prices and credit for the peasantry. This peasant movement sees itself as closely linked to the workers' Solidarity. The richer peasants who have fared well over the past years have remained neutral in the recent crisis. The long-term interests of the working class require a better exchange relationship between town and country and more investment in agriculture coupled with gradual moves towards co-operatives to overcome the current inefficiency of agriculture.
Political Revolution
Trotskyists use the term 'political revolution' to describe the transition from the monolithic rule of the bureaucratic caste to a system of workers' democracy. The 'political revolution' in Eastern Europe does not necessarily involve working class insurrection and armed confrontation with the repressive apparatus of the state. The appearance of a mass national working class movement immediately plunges the bureaucracy into crisis, as the central prop of the political system, the party, loses its working class base. This causes a much greater paralysis of the state structures than in a bourgeois democratic state or even a military dictatorship. A greater crisis of political legitimacy can also occur as the bureaucracy gains its authority from its claims to represent the working class. In such circumstances the use of the repressive apparatus against the masses can be suicidal for the bureaucracy. Its alternatives are external, ie. Soviet, intervention or retreat in the face of the mass movement in order to preserve the skeleton of the state apparatus intact.
The mass movement in Eastern Europe can very quickly make gigantic inroads into the bureaucratic system — a very different case from the protracted character of the socialist revolution in the West. Similarly the workers in Eastern Europe do not need to struggle to wrench the productive apparatus from the capitalists and suppress the workings of the law of value. The bureaucratic rulers cannot use the weapons of mass unemployment or the flight of capital from the country against the workers.
Political revolution in Eastern Europe also differs from political revolutions in the capitalist world — the transition from dictatorship to bourgeois democracy. Any democratisation process in Eastern Europe has to go much further than in bourgeois democracy to avoid bureaucratic recuperation. It must reach deep into the economic life of the state and be anchored in mass working class involvement in the country's political institutions. Only a mass working class movement leading all other sectors of society can carry through this transformation. Bourgeois or petty bourgeois currents would be too conciliationist towards bureaucratic restoration.
Another distinctive feature of the political revolution in Eastern Europe is its international character. Every working class movement for democratisation in one country threatens to upset the entire international bureaucratic system. The Soviet leaders therefore attempt both to seal off information about all such developments from the rest of the Eastern bloc and to use military force to nip such movements in the bud.
There are two responses within the mass movement to the Soviet threat. The first attempts to confine the movement to forms acceptable to the Soviet leadership, namely forms that perpetuate working class political subordination, thereby making an invasion unnecessary. The second is to develop the independent working class movement to break out of the cordon sanitaire and gain the broadest possible support for the democratisation process making an intervention impossible.
To carry through this latter orientation successfully it is not enough to celebrate the spontaneous actions of the masses. At every stage the vanguard of the working class must fight for demands that can win the support of the entire class, as well as deepening alliances with other layers and winning support from the workers of surrounding countries.
This method rejects the notion of preconceived 'limits' for the struggle which are acceptable to the bureaucracy, beyond which the movement cannot progress. Such a notion ignores the capacity of the working class to impose its own 'limits' on the bureaucracy through struggle. Nor can the democratisation process be limited to a single country. Precisely because of the common aspirations of the Eastern European masses any such movement must utilise its international impact to further the whole movement. All other schemas are utopian.
That is not to suggest that an immediate all-out confrontation with the bureaucracy should be sought at all times. The most politically advanced sectors must ensure that at all times the movement chooses the key objective at that time to struggle for, downgrading if necessary other questions. At times the movement may have to make tactical retreats to consolidate its forces. But at all times the movement needs to preserve its political independence of the bureaucratic regime itself.
The history of the struggles in Eastern Europe shows that there are two key phases in the development of the political revolution. First, the establishment of an organised independent mass working class movement on a national scale. Secondly, the establishment of new institutions of working class state power within the country which the international bureaucratic apparatus is forced to accept. Previous working class upsurges in Eastern Europe have always failed to achieve these objectives. In Hungary in 1956 the workers responded to Soviet intervention by throwing up their own organs of state power — workers' councils — but this was before a national independent working class mass movement with a trusted leadership had been built.
In Czechoslovakia the working class built a powerful working class movement through the trade unions after the Soviet invasion. But it remained under the political hegemony of the Communist Party apparatus which capitulated totally to the Soviet leadership, forcing a wholesale retreat. Poland in 1956 saw a mass working class movement arise but it did not attain organisational independence from the bureaucracy which reincorporated it. In 1970-71 the independent mass movement did not establish itself strongly enough on a national scale and bureaucratic rule was reimposed. But in Poland today with the establishment of a nationally organised independent working class movement the political revolution has established itself with greater chances of victory than in any previous crisis in Eastern Europe.
The leadership of last August's strike movement had assimilated the lessons of previous workers' upsurges and the democratic organisation of the movement allowed the Polish workers to force the bureaucracy to grant independent mass working class organisation. Solidarity is rooted in the decisive sectors of the working class: heavy industry and the mines. Its regional cross-sectoral forms of organisation have helped to shatter the bureaucratic monopoly of political life. After the August victory the crucial task was political and organisational consolidation. Tremendous achievements have been made in the latter field but in the former there are still considerable problems. These can be summarised in the role of Solidarity and its relationship to the bureaucratic order.
The clause on the 'leading role of the party' was inserted into the Gdansk, but not the Szczecin, strike agreements not simply on the bureaucracy's insistence but also through the pressure and manipulation of some of the strike committee's 'experts', especially their chairperson, Mazowiecki. One of the 'experts', a Marxist, resigned from her position over the inclusion of this clause which was accepted only after some delegates were removed from the meeting that voted on the agreements. She fought instead for a definition of Solidarity's acceptance of socialism in terms of the country's socialised property relations. The workers struggled throughout last October against this clause in the battle over Solidarity's registration.
The inclusion of the clause in the agreements weighs heavily on the workers' movement. Every sentence of the agreement is a battle line in the struggle between the workers and the bureaucracy as each side uses the agreement to legitimise its cause. 'The leading role of the party' is the decisive principle of reintegration of the working class into the bureaucratic straightjacket. It is the dividing line between those advocating a revolutionary or a reformist solution to the Polish crisis. The main tactics to face the bureaucratic reincorporation of the working class are: to restrict Solidarity to 'economic' issues, and in particular winning Solidarity's acceptance for a new bureaucratically managed plan; to use the economic crisis to lower the living standards of the masses as a whole while granting a privileged status to some sectors thus dividing and demoralising the mass movement; to reassert the role of the local and national party apparatus in carrying out political decisions and 'getting things done' thereby forcing Solidarity out of political activity and strengthening the party apparatus within Solidarity itself. Some reformist currents champion such a perspective, believing that it will lead in turn to the growth of democratising currents within the party itself. But this view seriously underestimates the central role of the independent mass workers' movement in developing such currents within the party.
Other reformist currents, such as the KOR theoretician Adam Michnik, gloss over the fundamental nature of the antagonism between the interests of the workers and those of the party-state apparatus. They consequently suggest that Solidarity and the bureaucracy can co-exist as parallel institutions in the same way that the bureaucracy has allowed the parallel existence of the Church hierarchy and of various intellectual opposition — and semi-opposition — groups. Michnik does not acknowledge the fact that for the regime such concessions are in general precisely a means of pursuing the bureaucracy's aim of maintaining its grip over the mass of the Polish workers. Neither does the preservation of private peasant agriculture present a serious political challenge to the regime: the experience of the last 25 years has been one of political co-existence between the bureaucracy and the peasantry, without any serious challenge to the structures of the regime from the countryside.
The mass, independent working class movement is the only force able to lead the country towards genuine, permanent democratisation. The crucial political division in Poland today lies between those who recognise this fact and seek to strengthen the capacity of the workers to make further advances along this road, and those who seek to push the workers out of politics as a means of 'reconciling' the workers and the party leadership.
The crucial next step in the advance of the Polish workers must be the battle for the workers' right to decide the national plan. The economic crisis is reaching catastrophic proportions. The bureaucracy's only answer is massive cuts in living standards, coupled with an attempt to break the backbone of Solidarity. The conciliationist intellectuals will be urging the workers not to struggle in defence of their interests and will thus find themselves objectively aiding the bureaucratic counter-revolution. If the bureaucracy succeeds in defeating the workers' resistance to these attacks there will be no solution to the economic crisis, for the workers will not co-operate with their oppressors. Only when the workers have the right to decide the social priorities and programme of a new plan and the right to supervise its implementation on a national scale, will they be prepared to take responsibility for beating the crisis. This is the only reasonable and realistic approach for the Polish workers.
The battle for a workers' plan will not be led by those sections of the mass movement under the influence of the Catholic hierarchy, the Communist Party leadership, nor the conciliationist layers of the intelligentsia. Only those currents with confidence in the working class and its capacity it build a new, socialist society based on working class democracy will be able to lead the struggle to beat the crisis. Such currents exist in large numbers within Solidarity, not least among many of the party members at the base of the movement. It is urgently necessary for these currents to show their colours on a national scale and to begin to mount a concerted challenge to the pro-bureaucratic, pro-Catholic hierarchy and conciliationist forces trying to gain preponderant influence within the movement.
Within such socialist, proletarian currents, revolutionary Marxists will be in the forefront of the battle to repel the ideological offensive of the bureaucracy and its satellites: against the phoney national consensus of the bureaucracy for the interests of the mass of working people; in place of the leading role of the Party, the leading role of the working class; in place of the battle against 'anti-socialist forces', the battle for socialist, national self-management and mass democracy. The bureaucracy's attempt to present Solidarity to the workers of the surrounding countries as a nationalist, Catholic movement must be rejected and support must be won from the German, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Belorussian and Lithuanian workers for the struggle of their Polish brothers and sisters. Workers in Britain and Europe must demand that the Western bourgeoisies put their money where their mouth is and back their phrase-mongering about the democratic rights of the Polish people and immediately wipe out Poland's foreign [illegible].
These socialist currents opening up a perspective of a working class struggle for power must become an organised political force based upon an overall political programme for the transition to socialist democracy. Without such organisation it will be impossible to rally the most class conscious sections of the working class and ensure that the struggle with the bureaucracy goes forward in a disciplined, planned way. In a number of regional Solidarity organisations as well as in the provincial party organisations the emergence of such organised groups or revolutionary socialists is already evident. It is of the utmost urgency that such developments should be transferred to the national level. Such currents will, of course, be completely subordinate to the collective discipline in action of Solidarity itself and will defend the widest possible democracy for all currents of opinion to express their point of view in an unfettered way within the movement. Without such internal political democracy, Solidarity will be open to manipulation and provocation by the bureaucracy.
It should also struggle within the Polish Communist Party, for full, unconditional support on the part of the party organisations for the demands of Solidarity, the only authentic expression of the will of the Polish workers today. It should demand that in place of only one organised faction in the party — the bureaucratic leadership — all political tendencies inside the party should be able to organise themselves. And it should campaign for a government basing itself on the workers' mass organisation, Solidarity, not on the bureaucratic party-state apparatus. Only through the winning of such a government can the Polish people avoid a new and bloody confrontation between the bureaucracy and the working class and overcome the present crisis. And the winning of such a government will be a great triumph, not only for the working people of Poland and of all Eastern Europe but also for the entire international struggle for socialism. It will be a tremendous ideological blow against the Western imperialist system and an historic turning point for the workers of Europe, east and west.
The struggle of the Polish workers is the most important front of the struggle for socialism in Europe today. The attention and efforts of all socialists must be turned to Poland. We need massive, militant working class solidarity with the Polish workers and their mass movement SOLIDARNOSC. We need a thunderous call from British socialists and the British labour movement to the Soviet leadership to keep its hands off the Polish workers. And we need an equally powerful demand on the Thatcher government to wipe out the Polish debts instead of making the Polish workers sweat for the profit of the City of London.