Forerunner of Solidarnosc chronicled in Lipski book

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KOR: A History of the Workers Defense Committee in Poland, 1976-81, by Jan Josef Lipski, translated by Olga Amsterdamska and Gene M. Moore, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1985, $39.95.

Solidarnosc, the Polish trade-union movement born in the strikes by millions of workers in the summer of 1980 and continuing underground today, is, like the revolution in Nicaragua and the struggle of Black South Africans, one of the great and inspiring social movements of our time.

It is naturally of particular interest to Poles, but it has universal importance as a struggle against oppression, with lessons for others around the world, including those of us here in the United States.

The most important forerunner of Solidarnosc was the KOR, the Workers Defense Committee. Jan Josef Lipski, one of the leaders of KOR, has given us a book which is a remarkable record of its activities and ideas.

It is more a chronicle than a history, as Lipski says himself, and its many lists of people, activities, and particularly of acts of repression—firings, beatings, and mur -ders-are depressing, tiring, and tedious. But despite the rather tedious style, Lipski: has written a book which allows us to get a glimpse of the Polish opposition that is very different from the picture presented by the reactionaries of either Moscow or Washington.

Origins of KOR

The Workers Defense Committee (KOR) had its origins in the strikes of 1976 when thousands struck against food-price in -creases and then marched on Communist Party headquarters and burned them to the ground. There are no exact records, but in the repression that followed between 10,000 and 20,000 workers were fired, 2500 were arrested, and 500 were found guilty of more severe crimes and either sent to prison or fined.

Those who came to form KOR had come from a number of resistance movements in Poland. They brought with them various ideologies, but they were primarily from "left and liberal" circles, as Lipski puts it. At the intellectual and political center of this movement was Jacek Kuron, an opponent of the bureaucracy and defender of democratic rights.

Most of KOR's work was of two sorts: relief work, helping the victims of state repression, and publicity, exposing the "lawlessness" of the Polish state.

Above all, KOR, and Solidarnose in particular, came to be a struggle of the working class against the bureaucracy, a struggle for socialism in a so-called communist society.

On the issue of nationalism, Lipski writes, "Nationalist attitudes were rare among the activists of KOR, and where they did occur they were rather moderate. Thus, anti-Russian feelings were rarer than Alice Walker elsewhere. A Russian dissident was more than an ally for a member of KOR; to a large degree he was almost one of us."

Lipski argues that KOR members were patriotic without being nationalistic; that is they took pride in their country without being chauvinistic. In fact, KOR was imbued with a spirit of internationalism. The intellectuals and workers in KOR and later in Solidarnosc saw themselves as struggling against the "Soviet Empire" together with the people of other "com -munist" nations. But they also saw them -selves struggling against repression with people around the world and expressed their soldarity with the disappeared in Argentina and Chile.

Lipski-a socialist

Perhaps the most interesting part of Lipski's book deals with worker organ -izing, because it was that work which later gave rise to Solidarnosc. And it is fascinating because it so closely parallels the work of revolutionary socialists of the late 19th and early 20th century. For example, KOR's newspaper Robotnik (The Worker) was named after a similar paper put out by the Polish Socialist Party between 1884 and 1906.

"Robotnik was meant to be read by workers...to organize workers," writes Lipski. And though the paper was largely concerned with the specific problems of workers, "it was remembered that these interests were and should be broader than just factory, wages, prices, work safety and health conditions and that the worker was also a citizen who wanted to know about issues of concern to the nation, society, and the state, and in the future to influence these matters, to be a participant."

Lipski ends his book by writing, "1 would like to add one more word here-socialism, and I would not be alone among the KOR activists in this."

It is clear from Lipski's book that KOR was neither a "bunch of counterrev - olutionary hoodlums," as is so often claimed by the Polish and Russian Communist parties, nor a group of people fighting to become part of the so-called "Free World," as claimed by Ronald Reagan.

It was a movement of intellectuals and workers aiming for a genuine democratic socialism. And if the movement has been stopped and forced underground for the moment, it has not been destroyed, and Lipski shows us the great resources of courage and idealism which have allowed it to survive and may one day lead it to prevail.

The complete version of this review first appeared in The Free Press (Jan. 9 1986), a community newspaper published in Chicago. It is reprinted with the permission of the author.

shown in relationship and Celie.

Walker's writings involve a complexity of vision focusing on three main themes, racism, sexism, and poverty and how these affect the Black community—her com -munity. Her novels are rooted in history. She is able to relate the qualities of her characters' relationships with the larger sweep of history.

And by critizing her community she also takes reponsibility for it. In her latest book, "Black Feminist Criticism," Barbara Christian writes, "Walkers' insistence on locating the motivation for struggle within the self led her to examine the definition of nigger, that oft used word in the literature of the late sixties.

"Her [Walker's] definition is not gene -ralized but precise: A nigger is a Black person who believes he or she is incapable of being responsible for his or her actions, who claims that the white folks are to blame for everything, including his or her behavior."

So the charge that Black men are

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