One year ago the Polish army moved to end the existence of a mass independent working class movement, Solidarnosc. Davy Jones spoke to Oliver MacDonald about the prospects for Solidarnosc's existence and the lessons of the Polish events.
Could you explain the significance of the release of Walesa for the situation in Poland one year after the introduction of martial law?
The release of Walesa coupled with the announcement of the Papal visit to Poland scheduled for next summer marks an attempt by the Jaruzelski regime to regain the political initiative, to end the renewed outbreak of factional warfare within the regime itself and to prevent the Solidarnosc underground movement from regathering its strength. The immediate context of Walesa's release was the relative failure of the Solidarnosc underground's attempts to organise eight hour strikes on 10 November, the second anniversary of Solidarnosc's legal registration followed by demonstrations on 11 November, the anniversary of the independence of the Polish state in 1918.
Let's look first at the internal crisis of the regime. Jaruzelski's regime has been under basically constant pressure from the Soviet and East European leaderships and their agents in the Polish party at least since the summer. It became evident by late July that the Soviet leadership considered that Jaruzelski was placing far too much reliance on creating a stable alliance with the Church hierarchy, in order to regain some sort of popular base of support for the regime. The Czech leadership is also unhappy about this strategy when it is currently engaged in a war against Catholic believers in Czechoslovakia.
The Soviets were also concerned at Jaruzelski's inability to regain control over the working class and his ineffectiveness at stamping out and disorganising the Solidarnosc underground resistance. These fears were reinforced by the demonstrations on 31 August. The Jaruzelski regime claimed that these demonstrations had been easily handled, but the main lesson from them that Moscow drew was that Solidarnosc has organised underground networks in all the main urban centres in Poland, which were capable of mobilising over one hundred thousand people despite enormous threats and police violence against the demonstrations.
The response by the workers to the formal banning of Solidarnosc by the regime on 8 October turned this pressure from Moscow into an open factional move against Jaruzelski inside the Polish Communist Party leadership. As on 31 August this response was contained but in the view of many observers it was only just contained. The strikes began on the Monday in Gdansk in the Lenin shipyards, spread to other yards in the Gdansk/Gdynia region and there were some signs of support from other factories in Gdansk on that Monday. The strike movement also spread right along the coast as far as Sczeczin, on down into the most prestigious factories, the bastions of the working class in Poznan and Wroclaw. The strike movement also spread to the mining areas of Silesia and to Huta Lenina in Krakow. However the strike wave was not coordinated, the underground leadership seems to have badly misjudged the situation, on the Monday in Gdansk urging caution against trying to spread the movement into a general strike, then on Wednesday calling for effective strike action thoughout the country by which time it was too late — the workers in Gdansk had felt isolated, they had not received news of the strikes [illegible] movement [illegible].
But as far as the authorities in Warsaw were concerned this was a traumatic event. It was the first time since 1 May that they had seen really mass mobilisations of workers, and the first time there had been mass strike actions, more or less spontaneously organised since the consolidation of martial law in January. It showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that the mass of the workers in the big factories remained as resolutely hostile to the new order and as committed to the idea and tradition of Solidarnosc as ever. At the Central Committee following those strikes and the banning of Solidarnosc there was the first open factional move against Jaruzelski since the Spring when that wing of the party bureaucracy fronted by Grabski issued a general denunciation of the Jaruzelski regime, saying that it was too soft on the Church and the intelligentsia while offering the working class nothing but confrontation and repression. Grabski also accused Jaruzelski that the party was collapsing, there were new figures coming forward within the regime and strong hints of possible challenges to Jaruzelski.
On the other hand the banning of Solidarnosc and the workers' response shook Jaruzelski's base of support in the pro-Catholic wing of the Communist Party and state bureaucracy and blew apart the alliance that had been tacitly operating with Glemp and the Church hierarchy for many months. This was demonstrated by resignations from the Sejm (Polish parliament), by the voting against the banning of Solidarnosc by the pro-regime Catholic deputies in the Sejm, and by the criticisms of the regime by those previously considered close to Jaruzelski — for example some close advisors to Deputy Premier Rakowski allowed a document they had written warning against the banning of Solidarnosc to be made available to the Western press. So Jaruzelski faced the danger of falling between two stools: between those in the party bureaucracy arguing for re-establishing bureaucratic control through an alliance with the Church, the middle classes and the intelligentsia against the working class, and on the other hand those arguing for its re-establishment through utilising the party apparatus, the capacity to buy off sectors of the working class through corruption and promotion and so on, along with using reactionary political mobilisations among the workers such as [illegible].
Jaruzelski therefore had to take some new political initiative. Otherwise this fragmentation within the regime would have continued. He was able to take the initiative of freeing Walesa and offering the Papal visit for three reasons. First, the events on 10 November showed that the underground Solidarnosc leadership was not capable of mounting an effective political challenge. Secondly, Jaruzelski had managed to achieve a far reaching agreement with the Church hierarchy, the nature of which is not yet public. They met two days before the 10 November demonstrations and we can only assume an agreement along the following lines: that the Church hierarchy was prepared to continue to work for so-called national reconciliation, ie popular acceptance if not approval of the Jaruzelski regime, despite the fact that Solidarnosc itself would be a thing of the past. That was a new position for the Church hierarchy put forward by Glemp who had just come back from meeting the Pope in Rome, and in return for this the hierarchy was demanding a greater stake for itself within the system, including the Pope's visit and no doubt Walesa's release. Thirdly, they seized the opportunity of Brezhnev's death to announce Walesa's release, feeling that they could pull it off while the Soviet leadership was totally involved in the funeral.
There is no doubt that Walesa has been relatively well treated. Any suggestion that he has been brainwashed should not be taken seriously. He has also been kept informed about the main developments in the situation not only by his wife who had visited him more than half a dozen times but also by Church officials who have had quite frequent contact with him. So Walesa's release is not that of a broken man. It is also highly significant Walesa has not been asked or has not agreed to make a statement before his release in some way breaking with his past. Walesa has already said: 'We must be careful, we want negotiations with the regime, we want agreement with the regime, on the other hand not on our knees, I haven't gone back on my beliefs', and so on.
There are some indications of his political orientation over and above these statements. Most important is his relationship with the Church hierarchy, especially the Pope. From early on in Solidarnosc's life this has been one of the most important compasses that Walesa has used. That is not to say that Walesa has been the pawn of the Church hierarchy but he has always sought to respect the limits which the hierarchy felt existed and has always insisted that is was both undesirable and impossible for Solidarnosc to risk a head-on confrontation with the Church hierarchy. So for example over the Bydgoszcz crisis in March 1981 when Solidarnosc activists were beaten up by the police and a general strike response was threatened Walesa's final reason for acting to defuse the situation was that it would have meant a break with the hierarchy. It seems clear that he has always accepted the basic approach of the hierarchy since martial law, which has meant a readiness to give very substantial concessions in terms of a restructured Solidarnosc, a ban on strikes for a couple of years, and so on.
He has also seemed ready to go along with warnings against actions which could lead to violence. He has been quoted as being against street demonstrations and the like. He has never given any overt support to the underground leadership of Solidarnosc. There are also rumours that he has told the Church hierarchy that he will accept any framework for negotiations that they put forward. Now that he is released it seems inconceivable that he would be able to lead a campaign for the full restoration of Solidarnosc. If he had been ready to do that the Church would not have pressed for his release and the regime would not have released him. Further he seems likely not to press for the demand that all the leaders of Solidarnosc elected from the last conference should be with him in negotiations with the government. This was made very clear by the fact that Frasyniuk was put on trial at the very time that Walesa was released. He has said that he wants everybody to be freed but he has not gone beyond that general appeal.
We can therefore assume that Walesa's perspective must be to try to bring about some degree of change on the trade union relationships not on the basis of returning to Solidarnosc and repealing the 8 October law, but on the basis of alterations to the arrangements laid down in that law for new trade unions. The problem remains of the basis on which Walesa could negotiate with the regime, after all he is not a leader of any legally recognised organisation at the moment. Here it is significant that the Church hierarchy has suggested that he would be a member of a lay advisory council to the Bishop of Gdansk — a very conservative figure — joined by his two key former advisors from Solidarnosc, Geremek and Mazowiecki. This suggests that the negotiations between Walesa and the regime could be a Church lay council framework, rather than a Solidarnosc framework which is now illegal. One should remember that Archbishop Glemp's lay social council in Warsaw also contains a number of former Solidarnosc advisors and was responsible for drafting in the Spring the negotiating positions of the Church hierarchy.
From the point of view of the underground leadership of Solidarnosc the release of Walesa raises a big question. Their authority as an underground leadership, their right to speak for Solidarnosc to the mass of workers hinged upon the fact that they alone were free, not in jail or internment camps. Now there is a second centre of authority separate from the Solidarnosc underground leadership, namely Walesa himself. And he of course has immense authority, infinitely greater than the underground leadership among the vast majority of Polish workers. He is the one whose authority has steadily grown, particularly during his internment, and whose words carry tremendous weight inside the Polish working class. This creates a very difficult situation for the underground leadership and a potential crisis of authority.
Now that the Jaruzelski regime has taken the initiative and got Walesa into play and the Papal visit on the agenda, it also seems likely to press that initiative further by formally lifting martial law. The question now is how will it attempt to use this initiative to gain some sort of social base for its operation, not a positive legitimacy in the eyes of the working class but at least a realistic acceptance? In my view the Jaruzelski regime wants to try and use Walesa to undermine and disorganise the underground leadership and at the same time breathe a little life into the regime's credibility. But this would entail making concessions to Walesa about the new trade union framework, which would create difficulties for the regime itself in Moscow. The extent to which it would be prepared to risk Moscow's wrath depends partly on its assessment of the new Soviet leadership, and its acceptance of what concessions it can get from the West.
We are in a situation rather like Czechoslovakia around September 1968. The regime has not by any means found a political formula for stabilising itself. It now has a situation with some similarities to when Dubcek, the darling of the people, was back in play after going to Moscow, saying that he still defended the Prague Spring, while the Soviets still wanted to use him to gain stability and some sort of acceptance, if not approval, for the new order.
Could you draw out the lessons of the whole Polish experience?
Let's look first at the international lessons of the Polish experience. If the West had really feared the 'Soviet threat' to itself then they should have supported a process of democratisation in Poland. However it is increasingly clear that the West did not look at Poland from this point of view. Instead they saw Poland as an enormous threat to stability. This is a point brought out by EP Thompson and corresponds to the absolutely gut reaction from western bourgeois state bureaucracies, foreign offices and also big capital of loathing of huge uncontrollable working class movements. That was related to the potential international dynamic of Solidarnosc itself, breaking down the Cold War barriers in Europe, offering a new example to the socialist movements of western Europe of how to organise and so on.
A second response of the West was that of Reagan; namely to use Poland as a pawn on his international chess board in his global efforts to destabilise the Soviet bloc, to exert maximum pressure on the Soviet leadership. There is clear cut evidence that the Reagan administration actually wanted a Soviet crackdown in Poland as an ideological justification for launching a new Cold War, as in fact he has done. A third response from the West was an undercurrent which saw Solidarnosc as a vehicle of loosening up Comecon, to pull an element of Comecon into the orbit of the western capitalist economy. Some western bankers used this approach both to justify support for the Polish government's efforts to regain control of Solidarnosc, while on the other hand giving substantial economic assistance to that government pulling it into the orbit of the capitalist economy.
[illegible] which precisely points out that although very many workers [illegible] socialist movements as being their allies, looking rather towards Reagan, that experience has taught them that the real allies of Solidarnosc are the western Left despite superficial similarities in ideology to that of the Communist Party.
The big lesson on the Soviet response is that the Soviet leadership even in the 1980s has again shown its incapacity to tolerate structural democratic reforms of the political system in Eastern Europe, and its readiness to face all the conclusions of this refusal: the enormous Reaganite mobilisation around Poland, a further dramatic loss of its own standing amongst the working class and socialist movements in the West, even the possibility of many years, even decades, of chronic underlying instability in the Polish state. Some people in the western Left don't want to face the fact that the Soviet leadership was orchestrating a campaign of destabilisation of Solidarnosc from very early on. It was helping to plan the crackdown that eventually took place. The idea that the main lesson is that the Soviets have not actually invaded Poland is ridiculous, rather it shows that the Soviet leadership has become more sophisticated since 1968, but there has been no basic change in the programmatic positions of the Soviet leadership.
The next major lesson of the Polish experience, though this would be contested, is that it is possible in principle for these relatively small countries, relatively weak states sandwiched between big powers and within the orbit of control of the Soviet bureaucracy to go a tremendously long way towards thoroughgoing democratisation, working class power, provided that this movement for change comes from below and is led by the working class. It is perhaps difficult for us to remember the attitudes that were prevalent in the West before the rise of Solidarnosc, namely that Czechoslovakia had shown that such a development was not possible. Yet now we have all come to more or less accept the permanence and 'naturalness' of Solidarnosc. In reality the whole experince dramatically showed that such developments were possible provided you had a united and politically conscious working class leading the rest of society.
The final lesson of the experience of Solidarnosc as an open legal movement is that it is not possible for a well-organised coup, a clever manouevre in and of itself to destroy a mass independent working class movement. The coup can create the preconditions for doing it, but to ensure the destruction of the mass movement for decades entails a bloodbath — to do a Franco, or a Pinochet. You have to convince millions of workers that a whole generation of leaders has been wiped off the political scene for good and that the regime relishes such a destruction. The coup did not destroy Solidarnosc and the Jaruzelski regime has faced the contradictions of that problem ever since, namely should it go for a bloodbath, even if it is a slow moving one over a number of years, or is it going at some stage to opt for some sort of social compromise with the working class? Now what you have in Poland is an attempt by Jaruzelski to have a bit of both. There are three thousand people already jailed, another couple of thousand awaiting trial, another six hundred interned. This is a severe blow as many of these have been picked up from the resistance and are now facing sentences of up to ten years in prison. But this savage repression is not enough in my opinion to restore political stability or to obliterate this movement. Therefore this gives us continuing hope that there is a possibility that the regime will be forced to make concessions and draw back from the endless series of wider and wider repressions. Of course this is very difficult given the economic situation for the regime cannot offer the working class economics instead of politics, but there is some real hope which underlines the importance of solidarity work with the Polish workers from the western labour movement.
Finally could you say a few words about the extent of politicisation of forces inside Solidarnosc who are capable of developing leadership for the movement?
The biggest problem facing the activists inside the underground movement is that of historical perspective, namely how is it going to be possible to tackle the relationship of forces that exists both inside Poland but also internationally in the context of growing Cold War and class polarisation in the world? Where are the points of support for Solidarnosc, for the Polish workers not just immediately but also in the longer term? As Trotsky said: 'The greatest crime of Stalin was not what he did, but to do it in the name of Socialism'. This is still working itself through Poland and the other countries of Eastern Europe. The whole experience of the Polish workers teaches them that those who speak in the name of Communism and Socialism are their mortal enemies. They don't see the western Left, they see on television, in the media, in books, in the factories, on the housing estate, every day, day in day out, Jaruzelski and the so-called Communists. This means that it is exceptionally difficult for them to work out where their points of support are, which has created a great degree of political differentiation within the working class.
Some sections respond in a purely nationalist, romantic way, saying: 'We can do it ourselves, we don't need international allies, we can by some special qualities innate in Polish people defy the relationship of forces and overthrow the oppressive yoke.' Secondly there will be people following a traditional response of those in Eastern Europe suffering national oppression to look for a strong power abroad which will somehow sweep across Europe and save them. In the days of Pilsudski it was France, for Ukrainians in the 1930s it was Germany, and so on. There will be currents in Poland who in some way look to the Americans and economic sanctions, perhaps even a military showdown, to find a way out. This of course overlooks the basic realities of any military showdown, where the West would be the first to use nuclear weapons and against places like Poland and East Germany. The third option is the left option in one form or another, and which must be proven to the Polish workers by the deeds of the western Left, so that they can see who are their real allies in the struggle for their democratic and social aspirations.
The other difficulty facing the Solidarnosc activists is how to assess the real relationship of forces in Poland today. There has been considerable disagreement on this within Solidarnosc. Some have argued that a short term uprising of the Polish workers could be victorious, or at least a better way to go down to defeat than a long slow agony. On the other hand are those who have argued there is no possibility of an uprising because of the real strength of the military and the support it has from the upper middle class elements and other forces who did not look to Solidarnosc. For example at the moment there are people who are making quite a lot of money out of the black market, private enterprise, even some people in agriculture. But if there is not the immediate perspective of an uprising then what perspective can be offered? Those opposed to the short term uprising approach have had considerable difficulty in elaborating a practical long term strategy for confronting the regime. One idea for example was for a very loose self-defence arrangement. The problem is that such an approach which worked in the 1970s is not so easy when one is talking about an organised working class movement which cannot operate in such a loose and disorganised way. My own view is that Solidarnosc and the working class movement in Poland has had to try and work out a practical way of continuing to engage in albeit limited forms of struggle with the perspective of re-emerging much later in the form of a second Gdansk, a second strike movement which would make a new set of 21 demands. In this longer term perspective it would be very important to combine the political demands of the working class with attempting to take up the social and economic problems which the working class faces today. The key thing is to give the workers an alternative to either passivity and acceptance of the regime, or an immediate uprising.
There are of course other trends with a great deal of influence who basically argue that the only realistic alternative is to accept the framework of Jaruzelski and to negotiate on the basis of the existing relationship of forces the best deal possible. This has gone hand in hand with the idea that it is not possible in the geo-political conditions of Poland for there to be any basic democratic change. The argument therefore continues that those who think this is possible are objectively provoking violence and further repression, losing any possibilities for concessions from the regime, however small. The problem with this perspective is of course that it hasn't worked up till now. All the Church's initiatives in this direction have failed, though the latest one with Walesa and the Papal visit is the boldest to date. What concessions the regime is likely to offer, unless through the continued pressure of the resistance movement and outside solidarity, will of course be those enabling the workers to participate in the institutions of their own political oppression.
By banning Solidarnosc and at the same time by not having any possibilities over the next five or ten years of offering the Polish workers a better material way of life, the regime has effectively ensured that the traditions of Solidarnosc will be looked back upon by the Polish workers as their authentic traditions, and they will also see the crushing of those traditions as being the work of Jaruzelski, the Soviet leadership and nobody else.
OLIVER MACDONALD is the editor of Labour Focus on Eastern Europe.