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Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, Vol. 2 No. 6, January–February 1979, pp. 10–11.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
During the last quarter of 1978, in worsening economic conditions and amid signs of renewed political tension, there are some indications that the Polish Party leadership may be attempting to prepare the ground for a shift in political tactics.
The most overt signs of political tension were two demonstrations involving thousands of people in Warsaw and the northern port of Gdansk. The Warsaw demonstration took place on 11 November, the 60th anniversary of the creation of an independent Polish state in 1918. After the celebration of Mass by Cardinal Wyszynski in front of a crowd of many thousands, a large number of the participants marched, apparently spontaneously, through Warsaw to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The Daily Telegraph (13 November) reported that a crowd of about 5,000 participated, repeatedly singing the national anthem and shouting religious and nationalist slogans. The Times of the same day reported chants of ‘Respect Human Rights’, while an account given to Labour Focus mentioned frequent references to Katyn, the place in the Soviet Union where thousands of Polish officers were massacred, apparently by the Soviet security police, during the Second World War.
The second, and in some ways more remarkable, demonstration took place in Gdansk on Monday 18 December. The Social Self-Defence Committee (KSS-KOR) and the Movement for Human and Citizens’ Rights (ROPCIO) had called this demonstration to mark the 8th anniversary of the gunning down of hundreds of striking shipyard workers by the Gomulka regime in 1970. According to Le Monde of 20 December, some 4,000 people marched to the shipyards and laid wreaths at the place where the first killings of workers occurred. After the participants had dispersed peacefully some 20 people were detained by the police and 15 house searches were carried out, but there has been no news of anyone being brought to trial. Although the demonstration was not a response to any current policy of the regime’s it was a very significant event, indicating a degree of influence on the part of the civil rights opposition which must give cause for concern in ruling circles.
A further political development that must be worrying the regime is the continued peasant resistance to the new pension laws. These laws, which amount to an additional tax which bears heavily on the poor peasants, have provoked widespread refusals on the part of peasants to pay the pension contributions. In the last two issue of Labour Focus we have reported the creation of peasant defence committees in the central and eastern provinces of the country. On 14 November the KSS-KOR reported the creation of a further self-defence committee in southern Poland. At the same time the number of peasants refusing to pay their contributions has risen from a quarter of a million in May to 480,000, or 15% of the total number of farmers in October 1978, according to The Times of 5 October. The tradition of an independent peasant movement remains strong in Poland and the authorities must fear the link up of such a movement with working class action in the future.
These political events have been taking place against a background of increasingly severe economic difficulties. Regular travellers to Poland report that the supplies of meat and other consumer goods in Warsaw have deteriorated markedly since a year ago and that consumer shortages are reminiscent of the last period of Gomulka’s rule. The special ‘commercial’ shops established two years ago to sell meat at higher prices than the subsidised normal outlets increased their prices at the beginning of June by 20%. Despite this shortages subsequently became severe in these shops also and the authorities instituted yet another, third tier of food retailers with even higher prices. Frustration with the consumer shortages is being more openly expressed within the better-off sections of the population and there seems to be no end of the crisis in sight.
The government has failed to solve the country’s balance of payments deficit and it now faces a critical shortage of hard currency with which to repay Poland’s very substantial credits from the capitalist world. 1979 and 1980 are the years when a large part of the credits gained in the early 1970s are due for repayment and there has been talk in Western financial circles of Poland having to seek a rescheduling of its debt repayments. According to the Financial Times of 30 November, Poland’s hard currency balance of payments deficit this year will be 1.1 billion dollars and the Polish Ministry of Finance estimates that the deficit will still be running at between 500 and 700 million dollars in 1979.
If the government does have to seek a rescheduling of its debt payments then the normal practice in the capitalist world would be for international financial circles to require the defaulting government to impose stringent measures of domestic ‘retrenchment’, in other words attack working class living standards. And this would mean risking the sort of confrontation with the Polish working class which the Party leadership has desperately tried to avoid since the strike movement of June 1976.
On 1 November the Morning Star reported that Gierek, in a major speech to senior Party and government officials, had predicted serious economic difficulties and called for tough austerity measures. Opposition circles in Warsaw speak of important differences within the Party leadership over economic policy, and these are presumably connected to the political implications of the various options open to the government on the economic front.
There have been some signs of the possible direction of the thinking of circles around Gierek, suggesting an attempt to win the tolerance of at least sections of the intellectual opposition for a tougher line over working class living standards. The authorities seem to be adopting an increasingly differentiated policy of handling intellectual opposition currents in Warsaw on one hand and working class activists in the provinces on the other. These distinctive approaches can be symbolised in the cases of two men who participated in a hunger strike in May 1977 demanding the release of workers still in jail after the strikes of June 1976. Among the hunger strikers in St Martin’s Church, Warsaw, were T. Mazowiecki, the editor-in-chief of the Catholic monthly Wiez, and Kazimierz Switon, a worker from Katowice. In November Kazimierz Switon was in jail after suffering repeated harassment and brutalities from the police for his activities as a co-founder and leader of the Free Trade Unions Organising Committee in Upper Silesia, while T. Mazowiecki was being invited to participate in discussions on the country’s problems with leading Party officials in the Gierek circle.
The police have been remorselessly hunting down and harassing working class activists involved in the production of Robotnik (The Worker), a fortnightly workers’ paper, and participating in the trade union committees that have been functioning in Katowice and Gdansk. Between January and October 1978 Switon was detained for 48 hours by the police on no less than 12 occasions, and in August he was jailed for 5 weeks on the trivial pretext of failing to renew the licence for his air-gun. On 14 October he was seized by the police and beaten up when coming out of church with his family and was charged two days later with ‘causing a crowd to gather’, getting 2 months in jail for it. Similar acts have been committed by the police on Wladislaw Sulecki, a miner from Gliwice colliery in Upper Silesia and a member of the editorial board of Robotnik. His wife and children were driven to leave Poland and go into emigration in West Germany. The police tried to force Sulecki to do the same, but he has refused. Similar tough action has been taken against peasant activists involved in organising peasant resistance to the Government’s new pension laws which are in effect an extra tax on the poorer peasants. (See the last two issues of Labour Focus).
At the same time, meetings took place in November and December in Warsaw between leading Party figures and currents within the intellectual opposition which the authorities no doubt feel to be the more ‘responsible’ critics of its policy. At the first meeting in November about 100 people discussed the social and economic problems of Poland. According to Le Monde of 21 December, the participants included Rakowski, the editor of the Party weekly Polityka, S. Zawadzki, one of Gierek’s advisers – both of whom are on the Party Central Committee – and such opposition figures as the film director Andrzej Wajda, T. Mazowiecki of Wiez, Wozniakowski of the Catholic University in Lublin and an editor from the Catholic publishing house, Znak. The second meeting, scheduled to take place in December, was apparently likely to involve a representative of the Catholic hierarchy. The circles around Gierek no doubt hope to reach a modus vivendi with the official Catholic opposition thus isolating the more radical wing of the opposition movement at a time when more stringent measures against the working class are contemplated. Before Christmas, Polityka was running a lively debate on the need for greater work discipline and allowing correspondents to raise the suggestion of creating a pool of unemployment as a means of disciplining the working class.
There are indications that some sections of the opposition may be winnable to some measures involving a cut in working class living standards. An analysis of the economic crisis produced unofficially by some economists in opposition circles and introduced by Professor Lipinski, a member of KSS-KOR, accepted the need to reduce working class living standards to meet the crisis. However, this does not appear to be an official KOR position and the programmatic statement from the KSS-KOR which we reproduce in this issue gives a central place to defending the social and economic interests of the working class. This marks a definite development of KSS-KOR’s concerns, beyond the field of civil and democratic rights and it runs parallel with a very vigorous defence of working class activists suffering repression at the hands of the police.
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