Daniel Singer: The Road to Gdansk, Monthly Review Press. £8
The massive revolt of the Polish workers is the best advertisement for socialism in years. At last workers throughout the world can glimpse an alternative to capitalism and Stalinist totalitarianism, Daniel Singer's message in The Road to Gdansk is one of hope: the confident belief that more than 25 years after Stalin's death the monolith that he created may soon be cracked by the workers of eastern Europe
Singer's book was almost finished before [illegible] confirmed his thesis, He begins with a study of arguably the most famous writer in the world, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and the impact of his work, He polemicises with those who dismiss Solzhenitsyn because of his indisputably reactionary outlook
Singer argues that the only way to confront Solzhenitsyn's message that revolution leads to the concentration camp is to understand why it is so devastatingly subversive within the Soviet Union. The reason is that within his writing there are passages of unpalatable truth about the horrors perpetrated in the name of socialism which threaten the whole Stalinist edifice
In his essay on the Soviet Union Singer outlines the limitations of the changes introduced by Khruschev after Stalin's death, and the contrasting 'grey days of Brezhnevism'. Beneath the surface however contradictions are slowly working themselves out, Russia is increasingly a country of town dwellers — the rural population has declined from 57 per cent of the population in 1953 to 38 per cent in 1979. Meanwhile the working class has grown from 30 to 78 million
But after the repeated failure of the economic plans and the steady decline in labour productivity [illegible].4 per cent in the 1950s down to 3.4 per cent in the late 1970s — Russia is now heading towards [illegible] growth Such a perspective threatens to undermine the economic basis for the political quiescence of the Russian workers
Singer is critical of the opposition movements in eastern Europe for their failure to develop a rounded project linked to the concrete needs of the working class. Bahro's vision in The Alternative is deficient not in its analysis of the defects of eastern Europe but his proposed agents of change. Singer argues that the decisive role lies not with the intelligentsia [illegible] with the working class, and he turns his attention to the Polish workers' revolt of 1970 as the harbinger of future progress,
While the riots were bloodily repressed the awesome power of the Polish workers ousted Gomulka and forced on the new Gierek regime a big rise in the workers' living standards in the early 1970s. When Gierek clumsily tried to raise prices himself in 1976 he received a speedy and ominous rebuff from the confident Polish workers. And in the same year the intellectual dissidents reorganised to form KOR laying the basis for the worker/intellectual alliance that was to prove insurmountable to Gierek last summer
Singer can be excused for understating the enormous significance of last August's Gdansk agreements in his hastily-written postscript. Only now can their full meaning be grasped. For the first time in eastern Europe the vast majority of the adult population — 10 million workers, 2 million small farmers, as well as students and intellectuals — are organised independently from the iron grip of the party/state bureaucracy More disturbing still for the Stalinist rulers of the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, powerful democratising currents have emerged within the Communist Party itself, one third of whose members are active with Solidarity
After Gomulka and Gierek's broken promises they are determined to introduce structural [illegible] make the party leaders [illegible]. But the last year was the easy part, Solidarity's mass movement will increasingly have to tackle the thorniest problem of all; can present system and ruling party be reformed or must they be replaced by a new higher form of socialist democracy. Resolving this question will require all the courage, ingenuity and class consciousness that the Polish workers already vividly displayed,