The rise and degeneration of Polish Solidarity
BY CHRIS SLEE
Twenty years ago, on August 14, a strike began at the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk, Poland, which led to the birth of the independent Solidarity trade union movement. This movement went on to play a crucial and contradictory role in the restoration of capitalist rule in Poland at end of the 1980s.
The initial issues that sparked the shipyards strike were wages and the sacking of a militant worker, Anna Walentinowicz. The strike quickly spread to other workplaces, reflecting the widespread discontent with the system of bureaucratic "socialism" established in Poland in the late 1940s.
The authorities were forced to negotiate and, in an agreement signed at Gdansk on August 31, conceded a list of demands including the right to form independent trade unions. Solidarity was formally established as a trade union on September 17.
Solidarity developed into a mass social movement challenging Poland's Stalinist regime. It was violently suppressed in December 1981 when martial law was declared by General Jaruzelski, who held the posts of Communist Party first secretary, prime minister and defence minister.
Remnants of the movement continued to organise illegally, re-emerging into legality in the late 1980s. The movement was then converted into a right-wing political party which won the elections in June 1989 and formed a government that set out to restore capitalism.
How did a movement that grew out of a working-class struggle against Stalinism become an agent of capitalist restoration?
Solidarity's leadership
Part of the answer lies in the ideological limitations of the leadership. Lech Walesa, the main leader of the Gdansk strike and subsequently the central leader of the union, was a militant worker, but also a socially conservative Catholic. The same was true of many other working-class activists in the union. The striking workers at Gdansk sang hymns and held mass in the shipyard.
Religious beliefs do not necessarily prevent political leaders from playing a progressive role. But the fact that the dominant section of Solidarity's leadership belonged to a church committed to the defence of private property, and hailed its right-wing social teachings, was a problem. It became an even bigger problem when this leadership became the government of Poland and began to implement those teachings.
Another component of Solidarity's leadership was a group of intellectuals who had been active in KOR (the Committee for the Defence of the Workers), an organisation that had carried out solidarity with workers' struggles during the 1970s.
The key figure in this group was Jacek Kuron. In the 1960s he and Karol Modzelewski had called for the seizure of power by the working class. But by the time Solidarity was formed, Kuron had modified his ideas, replacing the perspective of revolutionary overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy with one of gradually reforming the state under pressure from mass organisations and struggles.
At that time, Kuron's perspective was still one of reforming the socialist state rather than restoring capitalism. Pressure for reform came mainly from Solidarity, which was then a mass workers' movement imbued with the idea that workers were entitled to control the factories and play a leading role in society.
But after this movement was crushed by Jaruzelski's repression, Solidarity's leadership (including both its Catholic and "leftist" components) adopted a perspective of capitalist restoration. (Kuron himself later became minister of labour in Walesa's pro-capitalist government). The adoption of a policy of capitalist restoration by Solidarity's leadership was made easier by the confused political outlook of most Solidarity activists.
Mixed consciousness
During 1980-81, Solidarity grew to include 10 million members. The consciousness of the activists was mixed. They fought for immediate economic demands (e.g., wage rises) and democratic demands (e.g., freedom of speech). They also struggled for control of the factories, in many cases voting the factory directors out of office and replacing them with new ones.
These demands and struggles represented a progressive response to Stalinist bureaucratic rule. Yet there were also some less progressive elements in the workers' consciousness.
In addition to the socially conservative attitudes promoted by the Catholic church, many workers were impressed by the relative prosperity and democratic rights existing in the advanced capitalist countries and failed to see that the prosperity and freedom of a few imperialist countries is based on the exploitation and repression of people in the Third World.
Not understanding imperialism, they failed to solidarise with Third World struggles for national liberation. While expressing a general sympathy with workers everywhere, most did not take much interest in workers' struggles in the West. Solidarity's newspaper had hardly any international news.
Solidarity lacked a clear program and strategy for overthrowing the bureaucratic regime and creating a democratic worker-ruled society. The organisation's draft program made reference to socialism as one source of inspiration, along with Christianity and democracy.
Solidarity activists carried out a struggle for self-management in many workplaces, but did not have a clear understanding of the need for socialist planning. They had illusions in the army, and did not make any serious effort to win over rank-and-file soldiers.
The shortcomings in Solidarity's program and in the consciousness of its activists were closely related to the ,Oabsence of a revolutionary Marxist party. There were some activists who consciously identified as socialists or Marxists, but these were not organised as a party able to fight for the leadership of the union.
Who was counter-revolutionary?
The emergence of Solidarity in 1980 led to a debate in the international left. Pro-Moscow Stalinists saw Solidarity as a counter-revolutionary force. The Communist Party of Australia (then called the Socialist Party) supported Jaruzelski's crackdown in which a number of workers were killed and thousands arrested. They justified their support for this repression by claiming it was necessary to defend "socialism".
The pro-repression position implied illusions in the willingness and ability of the Stalinist bureaucracy to defend socialism. But Jaruzelski's repression attacked both the organisation of the working class and its hope for a better future. The fact that the repression was carried out by a "Communist" party added to the discrediting of socialism which had already occurred under decades of Stalinist rule.
The repression undermined socialist consciousness among workers and weakened the willingness and ability of the working class to defend the socialist property forms. It helped prepare the conditions for the restoration of capitalism a few years later.
Was the leadership of Solidarity counter-revolutionary during the 1980-81 period, as the CPA said?
While Solidarity was not a consciously socialist organisation, neither was it consciously anti-socialist. As British academic Martin Myant observed in Poland: a Crisis for Socialism (1982): "It advocated equality and was particularly emphatic about the need for an adequate assured minimum income and an end to special privileges for a wealthy minority. Many of the specific demands were, even if the authors of the program avoided making the point, quite incompatible with capitalism.
"The fairest assessment would seem to be that it was neither a definitely and consciously socialist organisation, nor was it anti-socialist. It had grown out of opposition to a particular model of socialism, the failures of which were so dramatic that many people no longer associated anything positive with the term."
Some intellectuals belonging to Solidarity advocated joining the International Monetary Fund. But it was the "Communist" government that actually applied to join the IMF!
During 1980-81, neither the government nor the leadership of Solidarity could have carried out a program of capitalist restoration, even if they had wanted to. This was because the workers would not have allowed it. Workers in the factories were attempting to bring the enterprises under their own control, and would not have accepted handing them over to capitalist owners.
The crushing of this working-class upsurge created the conditions in which capitalist restoration could be carried out with little resistance a few years later. In the demoralisation following martial law, pro-capitalist attitudes were able to become dominant in Polish society.
The setbacks and defeats for the working class and socialist movements on a worldwide scale during the 1980s (the triumph of neo-liberalism and the beginnings of the successful imperialist counter-offensive against Third World revolutions) added to the pressures causing a rightward shift in Solidarity.
The crushing of Solidarity by a "Communist" government was used by capitalist politicians in the West as an example of the "evils" of socialism, and therefore helped them sell their reactionary policies. But, in addition, the defeats for workers in the imperialist countries (e.g., the 1984-85 British miners strike), in the Third World (e.g., the Sandinista revolution Nicaragua) and in other bureaucratically ruled socialist states (e.g., the 1989 Beijing massacre) would undoubtedly have had an impact on the consciousness of activists in Poland. These events would have caused those with socialist ideas to lose confidence, while the more right-wing elements gained confidence.
Today, there is a lot of discontent with the results of the restoration of capitalism in Poland and other former Stalinist-ruled states, but still no mass revolutionary parties with a clear socialist perspective. The lessons of the Solidarity experience will be important for building such parties.
A mass upsurge of working class and popular discontent is necessary but not sufficient. A struggle to win the movement to a clear socialist perspective is necessary.