Documents of anti-Stalinist Polish opposition

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In 1980, millions of Polish workers, farmers, students, and intellectuals Challenging the bureaucratic caste at the helm of the Polish state, they demanded an end to of political power by the ruling Stalinist party and the establishment of genuine forms of Various political traditions came together in this gigantic workers' upsurge. Most of them nationalistic and antibureaucratic-though not pro-capitalist. There were also various currents In this issue, we are reproducing statements from two other pro-socialist currents in the Polish antibureaucratic opposition. The excerpts of the trial statement by Edmund Baluka reflect the important influence of the views of Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International on a wing of the Polish workers' movement.

The excerpts from the draft platform of the newly formed Workers Opposition reflect a current associated with the "state capitalist" political tradition. This current holds the view, which in our analysis is incorrect, that Poland is a capitalist society, with the Polish state acting as the prime capitalist force.

In Poland, as Baluka says in his trial statement below, capitalism was abolished soon after World War II. A workers' state—albeit bureaucratically deformed from the outset—was established on the basis of nationalized property and a planned economy. This represented a big step forward for the workers' movement.

Whatever their shortcomings, these currents represent an important development in the struggle for socialist dynamic mass working-class movements in history-Solidarnosc.

management and workers' control over production.

that were openly pro-socialist.

In previous issues of Socialist Action we have reprinted articles from by Fourth Internationalists in Poland. democracy and workers' self-management in Poland.—The Editors Edmund Baluka is a worker at the Warski Ship Works in Szczecin. In 1972, two years after the massive strike wave that swept the Baltic ports, he was fired from his job for having been the president of the Szczecin Strike Committee. Further persecution forced him to flee Poland.

In 1980, Baluka returned to Poland and was a delegate to the founding regional and national congresses of Solidarnosc, quickly becoming one of the country's best-known antibureaucratic fighters.

In September 1981, Baluka founded the Polish Socialist Workers Party (PSWP), a party "dedicated to the struggle for socialism and democracy."

On June 3, 1982, Baluka was arrested and sent to the internment camp at Wierzchowo. After a prolonged hunger strike, he was transferred to the Koronowo prison.

On April 11, 1983, Baluka's trial opened in Bydgoszcz. He was accused-and sentenced-for violating Article 123 of the Penal Code, which prohibits the "use of violence to overthrow the system of the Polish People's Republic."

Baluka was freed in the summer of 1984 along with most of the other Solidarnose leaders under the government's amnesty decree. He was later reimprisoned and again freed after numerous hunger strikes and a largescale international campaign for his release.

The following are excerpts from Baluka's statement to his trial in April 1983.

Gentlemen, The use of the charge of "violence" in the case against me is absurd. To publish what one thinks and to say what one believes deeply to be true is not the same as using violence. • I am accused of slandering and offending the Polish people, the Polish People's Republic, and its system and governing bodies. This is equally unfounded.

I have always been proud, am still proud, and will always be proud to be Polish. I am proud of the values and history of the Polish people.

But I am not proud of the government and the state authorities. Nor am I proud of the way the word socialism is being used today, even though socialism ha been my entire life's goal.

I refuse to submit a loyalty oath to the current state powers. But I declare that I will always remain loyal to a government that works to advance the "interests and will of the working masses," as stated in Article 8 of the Polish Constitution.

I declare that I am a socialist and that I never carried out any action—nor will I ever—that could do harm to the socialist system, either in Poland or in any other country.

There is not—nor will there ever be—in my political program any formulation calling for the use of violence to overthrow the socialist system.

My goal is to destroy the system of structures of the state political apparatus, which, in my opinion, are antisocialist structures.

The governmental structures of political authority are based on the doctrine of Stalinism. They are based on the repression of the Polish workers, as was made clear in Poznan in 1956, in the Baltic Coast cities in December 1970, and on Dec. 13, 1981 [date that martial law was instituted].

Today we are told by the official party propagandists that the "violence" in 1956 and 1970 was the result of "deviations" and "errors" in the exercise of political power. I disagree.

I believe that the official violence against the millions of Polish people is proof of the continuity of the of the most the monopoly workers' selfwere strongly in Solidarnosc Polish Inprecor, a magazine published Stalinist regime. It is not the result of deviations or errors in an otherwise properly functioning apparatus.

The declaration of martial law in December 1981 shows how far the ruling powers are willing to go against an entire people which is clamoring for changes in the way power is exercised in Poland.

Socialism can be reformed, yes, but not Stalinism—not the bureaucratic system of government.

Gentlemen: The Polish Socialist Workers Party (PSWP) is fighting for the word socialism to regain the credibility and respect it deserves. This is a difficult task given what Stalinism has done to the name of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

In our country there are no longer any capitalists. This has been the case for over 40 years. And yet there is a dictatorship; a dictatorship over the proletariat. The PSWP will struggle to destroy the monopoly of political power of the ruling Polish Unified Workers Party [the ruling party of General Jaruzelskil and thereby destroy the dictatorship it exerts over Polish society.

Our party advocates the creation of workers' councils ...Stalinist twists and turns (continued from page Charles De Gaulle was pushed into the head of the government in France. Maurice Thorez, who was the head of the French Communist Party, became a minister in the French cabinet. The same thing happened in Italy, where the Italian Communist Party accepted the role of a subordinate part in a coalition government.

'Reading, writing, and no striking' Here in the United States, of course, the Communist Party always reduced every one of these turns to a caricature. It drew the logical conclusion from Stalin's perspective of permanent post-war peace. If Stalin's postwar pacts with imperialism nullify the law of the class struggle, then what use is there of unions retaining the strike weapon? And therefore, the American Stalinists proclaimed the era of the permanent no-strike pledge.

One of their supporters in the National Maritime Union even published an article in Collier's Magazine called "Reading, Writing, and No Striking." He was going to convert the National Maritime Union into an educational institution to teach the workers how to read and write. That was going to be the function of the The Stalinists made themselves a laughing stock in the whole labor movement, because, in fact, one of the in the factories. These councils should have a decisive influence in the financial and economic affairs of the factory. And on the basis of these factory councils, there should be a national workers' council to administer and control the economic and political affairs of the state.

This is the socialism we are fighting for. Socialism cannot be decreed or imposed by laws or violence.

The following are excerpts from the draft platform of the Workers Opposition, a coordinating committee of the editorial boards of four underground journals involved in the antibureaucratic struggle in Poland.

The political struggle that has been going on in Poland since 1980, which has been generally termed a fight between the society and the regime, is primarily a class struggle.

It is essentially a struggle between the working class, which is subjected to economic exploitation and deprived of all political or economic power, and the bureaucratic state power, which is based on the Polish Unified Workers Party [the ruling party], as well as on the military and police machine and the economic and administrative apparatus.

Only the working class has the capacity to overthrow the bureaucracy, and it is only thanks to it that the social groups can liberate themselves from the yoke of the bureaucracy.

The fundamental aim of our struggle is to get the working class to transform itself from an object into a subject. This will only be possible through a system of generalized sell-management. Such a system would involve self-management councils in the enterprises, linked together on the regional and national scale. Selfmanagement, a form of direct political and economic democracy, will thus become the principal factor in organizing social and political life.

The transformation of the working class from an object into a subject is only possible through revolutionary changes. The belief in the possibility of a compromise with the bureaucracy is a dangerous illusion that could prove fatal. In fact, there is no way to reconcile the introduction of a system of selfmanagement, that is, the realization of the interests of the working class, with the domination of the bureaucracy.

Pluralism is necessary within the workers movement in order for it to be able to develop politically. The right of the workers to organize freely in clubs, groups, currents, and political organizations has to be defended.

The Polish working class is not isolated in the struggle. It has friends and allies abroad. They are the workers of the entire world. The Polish workers' movement can and must draw on the strength of international workers' solidarity. The differences between East and West cannot hide the fact that the workers of both camps are linked by common interests, by a common struggle for a common end—-the trans formation of the working class from object to subject-against common enemies.

The indispensable precondition for the liberation of the working class is for it to lay the economic foundations of its liberty, that is, socialization, outside of the state and in the framework of a system of workers' selfmanagement, of the means of production that are today statized.

The aim of the revolutionary workers movement, flowing from the essence of the social relations against which it rebels, is not the reprivatization of state property or giving it autonomy, but to genuinely socialize it.

biggest strike movements that this country has ever seen broke out in 1945-46.

The biggest unions, in steel, auto, rubber, electrical, one after another, went on strike. In response, this led to the enactment of the anti-labor Taft-Hartley law by Congress in 1947.

Also in 1946, Winston Churchill delivered his well-known Fulton, Mo., speech which initiated the Cold War with the Soviet Union. In a panic, the Soviet bureaucracy executed another pseudo-left turn. It was now convinced that a war was imminent. So much for the period of permanent class peace envisioned by the Stalinists.

As part of this "left" turn, the coalition governments that the Soviet bureaucracy had established in Eastern Europe were summarily ended. It didn't take more than a wave of a hand to put an end to these bourgeois figures that the Stalinists had dredged up from the gutter somewhere, resuscitated, and put in office, pretending that they represented something.

The real power was in the hands of the Red Army, and the Communist Party exiles who had returned from the Soviet Union to reestablish the Communist Party in these countries. That was the real power. And so out went the bourgeois coalitionists, and what we later came to designate as deformed workers' states were established.

Much more could be said about the betrayals of the Stalinists since the end of World War II. But for the sake of this lecture, wè will conclude here.

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