Mexico rally marks birth of Solidarnosc

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Larry Cooperman, (center) a National Committee member of Socialist Action, addresses Aug. 30 rally in Mexicali, Mexico, commemorating the signing of At 10 am on June 17, 1984, the underground radio station Zwyciezymy (We Will Win) put out its third broadcast. This radio station is the voice of the Provisional Coordinating Committee of Solidarnose miners in Upper Silesia, the country's main coal mining centre. Among other points, the 8 minute broadcast criticised the Jaruselski regime's coal marketing policy and deciared its solidarity with the striking British miners. Here is the complete text of the relevant parts of the broadcast, first published in Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, (Vol. 7, No 2, 'The underground Provisional Coordinating Committee of Solidarnose miners vigorously protests against the present policy of the Polish People's Republic on the management of our major source of wealth, coal. Selling it on foreign markets at competitive prices (i.e. at less than world market prices) is first of all a violation of the Jastrzebie agreements (August 1980) in which it was clearly established that coal is a national resource which must be used rationally. The above-mentioned pricing policy transforms investment in the mines into a straight economic loss.

'Secondly, the Polish government's policy blatantly contradicts official propaganda that declares respect for the miners' dignity and endeavour. Thirdly, coal distribution and trade is organised outside of any social control. The Polish government has no right to behave like a mine owner and to dispose of the national wealth as it pleases. Only the damned capitalists and dictators act in this way. Fourthly, the Polish government's policy in this field affects the basic interests of brother miners from other countries who lose their jobs as a result of it.

'We hope the party authorities and parliament - who say they represent the "To the striking miners of Great Britain: The underground Provisional Coordinating Committee of Solidarnos miners sends you fraternal greetings and our support and solidarity for your struggle for the right to work. We know from our own experience what it means to lose a job. For this reason we will do everything possible to support your struggle, including in action. The protest we have sent to the Polish government and parliament is an initial measure taken in support of your The technical material for Radio Zwyciezymy was donated to Upper Silesia Solidarnage by West European Sulidarity with Solidarnsoc Committees, as a resul of collections made among workers and in the trade unions.

SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 1984 The following speech was given by Larry Cooperman at a rally in Mexicali, Mexico, on Aug. 30 to commemorate the signing of the Gdansk accords in Poland. The rally was organized by the Mexicali Committee in Solidarity with Solidarity.

On behalf of Socialist Action, I would like to thank you for the invitation to speak at your event. The subject of Poland and Polish Solidarity remains very important to us in the United States. For us, Polish Solidarity has been and is a reminder of the "socialism we want."

It is the most powerful weapon that we have against the lies of the U.S. government and its allies that socialism equals tyranny, equals dictatorship, equals exploitation.

I have to mention that there have been various misconceptions about Solidarity that have been purposely spread by people who are challenged by the idea of a society run not just in the name of, but by the working class. Whether it was Brezhnev or Andropov, on the one hand, or Reagan on the other, they all said the same thing. They said that Solidarity was a pro-capitalist movement; that its aim was to restore capitalism in Poland. And so, Reagan claimed to support Solidarity and Brezhnev was opposed to it.

But Edward Lipinski saw it differently. Edward Lipinski is a 95-yearold socialist, who was a member of Poland's Communist Party even before World War II. After the war, he was one of Poland's most famous economists. In 1959, the Polish government decorated him with the "Order of the Banner of In 1981, Edward Lipinski gave an important speech to the Solidarity Congress:

«The defense of socialism is a question of principles, a question of political views.... Socialism, as defined in the classic works of socialism, was to be a better, postcapitalist economy; freedom broader than in capitalism; the creation of conditions in which everyone would be given an opportunity to develop universally and have unlimited access to the products of culture and civilization.

"However, they created a socialism with a faulty economy, an incompetent economy, a wasteful economy, and it is this socialism that has led to an economic collapse unparalleled in the course of the last hundred or two hundred years....

"This socialism of waste, this socialism of prisons, censorship and police, this socialism has been destroying us for 30 years, as it is doing with some other nations....

"Yes, there are anti-socialist and anti-revolutionary forces.

But, in my opinion, it is their socialism that is anti-socialist and anti-revolutionary."

Purists oppose Solidarity

There are always those, who under the guise of Marxist purism, point to the ties of Solidarity to the Catholic Church for proof of its "reactionary" character. Yet, they forget that it was the top officials of the Catholic Church who counseled against any confrontation with the Polish regime, who condemned the "violence" of the strikers, who called for an end to the strikes.

This is not to deny that the Church also provided material support and refuge to the strikers, or that the Catholic Church was the only institution independent of the government where the workers could speak freely. But what defines a movement is its objectives. And there is no movement anywhere in the world that fights for more freedom, for people's power, for a workers' self-managed economy that is reactionary.

Those purists who talk about the reactionary character of Solidarity and its ties to the Catholic Church should ask themselves how it is possible that— over 30 years after the Red Army chased the Nazis out of Poland, over 30 years after heavy industry was nationalizedhow it is possible that 10 million workers could become anti-socialist or anti-revolutionary? Is the CIA SO all-powerful that it could corrupt 10 million workers in Poland? Is the Polish workers' state so weak that it must rely on threats of Soviet intervention and massive arrests and police repression?

If the Solidarity movement was reactionary, why did it attract the majority of the working class base of the Polish United Workers Party (PUWP)? In 1979, 46 percent of the members of the ruling party were workers, and most of these worked in the large factories. By the time of the May 1981 congress, 11,000 proposals had been sent in by "For us Solldarnosc Is a reminder of the soclalism we want."

rank-and-file members urging the democratization of the Party. After the defeat of the party reform movement, 500,000 workers resigned from the Party over the next six months.

No, the only thing that is threatened by Solidarity are the privileges of a small bureaucracy which controls the PUWP and the Polish state. It is the living standards of this group which have risen far above those of the working class even as they have mismanaged the economy. It is the working class which pays for their errors—their decision to tie the Polish economy to trade with the recession-ridden West. It is the Polish bureaucrats who amassed a foreign debt Summer 1984, London). people - explain what is really going on.

struggle.' 50102 the Gdansk Accords in Poland.

of $30 billion to the imperialist banks. And it is the interest payments on that debt which keep Poland in serious economic straits.

That's why the Wall Street Journal noted that, if the Soviet Union were to invade Poland, at least the banks would be assured of full interest payments on the debt. That is why those of us in the United States who are socialist supporters of Solidarity demanded the cancellation of Poland's debt to the U.S. banks. We recognized that the U.S. government, while mounting a propaganda campaign about the evils of socialism, was more interested in having its banks paid off, since a default by Poland would threaten the financial stability of the world banking system.

The U.S. government supported the military coup in Turkey, which resulted not just in the banning of all trade unions, but in a repression far worse than that suffered by Solidarity in Poland.

Solidarity supports British miners The British miners' strike has settled once and for all this question of the supposedly progressive nature of the Polish government and the supposedly reactionary character of Solidarity. In Britain, there is a class line drawn between the British miners and their supporters on the one hand, and the British government and its supporters on the other.

And it does not matter whether you call yourself a socialist as the Polish bureaucrats do. It does not matter whether you have read all the Marxist classics. The only thing that matters is whether you are fighting to defeat the government's attempt to destroy the miners' union. And it is the so-called socialists, the so-called communists, the so-called Marxist-Leninists of the Polish regime who are on the side of the British capitalists. It is they who have been shipping coal to the British government during the strike.

The only force in Poland which has condemned this anti-working class action is Polish Solidarity-not the church, not the government. Only Polish Solidarity draws the class line between the exploiters and the exploited, between rich and poor, between boss and worker.

The so-called purists, speaking in the language of Marxism, tell us that in the United States we cannot defend Solidarity. They say that, however noble the aspirations of Solidarity, we would inevitably fall into line with Reagan, the anti-communist defender of Solidarity. Our answer is simple: International solidarity has no borders which it is afraid to cross.

If we really want to defend the Central American revolution, we must counterpose our vision of socialism to Reagan's anti-communist campaign. If the workers of the United States, if the fighters against U.S. intervention in Central America allow Reagan to be the only voice claiming to support Solidarity, then his propaganda campaign will succeed. And the association many American workers make between socialism and tyranny will be reinforced.

It is the Stalinists of Poland, of the Soviet Union, and of other countries who have created this terrible misconception about socialism. And it is the imperialists who reinforce it in order to discredit socialism. Solidarity, the Workers Party in Brazil, the Central American revolutionaries, and thousands of others are part of an international battle, whether they are conscious of it or not, to create a vision of socialism entirely different from what exists in Poland.

The socialism we want is based on the democratic self-management of the working class. It has no need of armed forces that are used against its own working class. The socialism we want represents not more prisons, not more secret police, not the bureaucratic mismanagement of the economy, but rather the vast extension of human freedom. •

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S.A. pamphlet + one-year subscription I SUBSCRIBE NOW: $1 for 3 MONTHS Sociallsi Action, 3435 Army Sl., Rm. 308, San Francisco, CA 94110 SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 1984 6 The following is reprinted from the July 16, 1984, issue of Internati nal Viewpoint, a twice-monthly maga ine published under the auspices of the Fourth International.

On May 28, 1984, Peter Uhl was released from prison, five years exactly after his arrest along with several other dissidents who had just set up the Committee to Defend the Unjustly Accused (VONS). At the VONS trial on Oct. 23, 1979, Uhl received the heaviest sentence-five years in a maximum security prison. On the eve of his release he was the only one, out of the five convicted in 1979, still in prison. The four others were Vaclav Havel, Jiri Dienstbier, Vaclav Benda, and Otta Bednarova.

It was Uhl's ninth year of imprisonment since the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968. He paid dearly for his commitment to workers' self-management and democratic socialism, argued during the Prague spring of 1968.

In the mid-1960s, Uhi lived in France where he met the group of communist student activists around Alain Krivine, who were soon to form the Revolutionary Communist Youth (JCR). In their bitter opposition to capitalism as well as Stalinism, Uhl found an echo of his own preoccupations.

On returning to his own country he began to advance the struggle against the cancer of bureaucracy. This was not done in the name of a return to bourgeois "democracy" or to achieve greater delegation of bureaucratic powers in order to present a more "human face" as Dubcek proposed. It was done in the name of socialist self-management and democratic workers' power.

In the aftermath of August 1968 he was very active among students and took part in the organization of the students' general strike in Prague, when it was occupied by Soviet tanks. It was then that, along with other comrades, At its August National Committee plenum, Socialist Action adopted a goal of obtaining 500 new subscriptions to our paper by November. In order to achieve this goal, we are offering a reduced-rate copy of "In Defense of Revolutionary Continuity"-Socialist Action pamphlet by by Dianne Feeley & Paul Le Blanc A Socialist Action Pamphlet $4. French demonstrators in 1983 demanding Peter Uhl's release.

he helped to set up the Revolutionary Youth Movement (HRM).

The HRM program The program of this movement expresses clearly the anti-capitalist and anti-bureaucratic beliefs of its founders:

"We live in a system," they stated, "where capitalist relations of production and the capitalist mode of production have been abolished but where the construction of a democratic, socialist society has not even begun. Spurred on by the aim of opposing any abuse of communist ideals and by the belief that it is our duty and our right to fight effectively for these ideals against all those who ridicule and abuse them, we proclaim [the foundation] of the Revolutionary Youth Movement.

«We are convinced that the way forward for the Czechoslovak people and for the population of the USSR-and all the so-called Dianne Feeley and Paul LeBlanc-to all those who purchase a one-year subscription to Socialist Action.

For this limited period only, readers can obtain a one-year subscription to our paper plus one copy of this 76-page pamphlet for only $8.

For many years the Socialist Workers Party has been the foremost adherent in the United States of the revolutionary perspectives of Leon Trotsky. Recently, SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes has sharply challenged those perspectives, particularly the theory of permanent revolution.

This pamphlet is a response to that challenge. By surveying the history of the Marxist movement and examining present-day realities, the authors demonstrate the relevance of Trotsky's ideas in the "age of permanent revolution. "

peoples' democracies-will be the destruction of the bureaucratic machine, the abolition of bureaucracy at all levels in society and the introduction of a system of selfmanagement. This system of selfmanagement would have to be expessed in all areas of life. In the workplaces, it would be reflected in the political and economic power of the workers' councils.

"A system of self-management will make it possible to exploit the creativity and initiative of each individual; it will create the conditions necessary for the scientific and technical revolution which will put an end to the problems of supply and distribution and the social inequalities that flow from them and will lead, ultimately, to the abolition of the state and its institutions on an international level."

(Information Materially, No. 1/71)

Peter Uhl has always remained faithful to the ideas expressed in this program. This is shown in the Program for Workers' Management and Socialism, which he compiled at the end of the 1970s (published jointly by Stock/La Breche under the title Socialisme Emprisonne, Paris, 1980).

Charter 77

Because of their activity in occupied Czechoslovakia, 18 activists of the HRM were arrested in December 1969. Their trial, supposedly against the "Within Charter 77 Uhl led the leftsoclalist current."

"Trotskyist conspiracy,' was the first under normalization. Uhl received the heaviest sentence-four years imprisonment.

On completion of this first spell of imprisonment, Uhl again took up dissident activity. He participated actively in discussions preparatory to the setting up of Charter 77 and in the elaboration of a tactic of open work to demand the implementation of laws in force in the Czechoslovak republic.

Within the Charter group Uhl was the leader of a left-socialist current. In the spring of 1979 he played a key role in the creation of VONS, defending the notion that the opposition should not content itself simply with exposing injustice and repression but must orgaAcTioN Name.

Address.

City Telephone nize to defend its victims. This initiative earned him his second arrest and conviction, once again with the heaviest sentence, which he served to the end and under such harsh conditions that on many occasions people feared the worst.

The repression of which he was a victim stimulated the development of a huge international defense campaign. This included appeals, petitions, delegations of various personalities to the trial, demonstrations and the production in the winter of 1979 of a playTrial in Prague-by the Soleil theatre in Paris. Amnesty International adopted Petr Uhl, including him in their list of the 15 most representative victims of political repression in the world.

Campaign has impact

Even if this campaign did not produce an early release (as it did in the case of his co-defendant, Otta Bednarova, who became seriously ill and was released before serving her full term as the result of the intervention of various international personalities), it did at least mean that the conditions of his detention were improved and that the authorities did not attempt to prolong his sentence by a new trial as was feared at one time.

In fact, a year ago, Uhl was transferred to a more modern prison near Prague and once again had access to a library and to foreign books. The campaign was able to support his wife, Anna Sabatova, previously a political prisoner herself, and their two children throughout this painful ordeal.

The Czechoslovak bureaucracy is determined to break the will of the dissidents or force them into exile inside the country. Now more than ever, international solidarity is needed to enable the dissidents to operate inside the country.

We have seen very recently, in fact, that the Czech authorities have absolutely no intention of moderating their policy of repression. Ladislav Lis, the first prisoner to be conditionally released (he had to present himself everyday to the Prague police) has just been rearrested and sentenced to three months in prison for having left Prague for the weekend without notifying the police. Similarly, the young worker, Jiri Gruntorad, who served a four-year prison sentence has just been condemned to a further sentence of 18 months.

_ Enclosed is S1 for 3 months _ Enclosed is S6 for 12 months Enclosed is S _contrib tion State Zip

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which screens the exploitation and the rule of the great majority by the few, as

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Solidarnosc supports striking British miners

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