Zbigniew Kowalewski: 'Polish workers fight for workers' power'

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Zbigniew Kowalewski is the author of "Give Us Back our Factories: Solidarnosc and the Struggle for Workers' SelfManagement in Poland." He will be touring the United States this fall. See tour schedule on page 7.

I think it is necessary to remember that 50 years ago, at the very moment the Fourth International was being founded, thousands of partisans of revolutionary socialism and internationalism were being exterminated by the Stalinist terror apparatus in the concentration camps of Vorkuta.

I think it is useful to remember that 35 years ago, some months after the death of Stalin, in the camp of Vorkuta and in other concentration camps, tens of thousands of detainees waged a heroic strike that shook the Stalinist regime.

At about the same time, the working class of East Germany launched a general strike, a strike that was smashed by Soviet tanks.

Thirty-five years ago, the epoch of the anti-bureaucratic revolution began, as confirmed by the mass armed uprising of the Hungarian working class in 1956 and the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968, both of which were suppressed militarily by the Soviet Union.

But you remember what happened in Poland in 1980-81: a powerful uprising of 10 million Polish workers, self-organized in Solidarnosc, the first free trade union in the Soviet bloc. This movement, which was followed by farmers, students, and intellectuals, was able to wage giant mass struggles and factory occupations, to build the power of the workers' councils in the factories.

They were fighting for what the First National Congress of Solidarnosc called a "Self-Managed Republic" —that is, a state based upon socialized property and managed by the workers themselves with the fullest workers' and people's democracy.

Last April and May, 20,000 steel workers of Nowa Huta, supported by student masses in the city of Cracow and followed by the youngest workers of the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk, raised the banner of the defense of the standard of living of the toilers, standards brutally attacked in the framework of the so-called economic market reforms of the regime.

A new generation of radical workers and students is emerging in Poland, struggling under the banner of Solidarnose for bread, union freedom, and political democracy. On the basis of the radicalization of this young generation, a first independent class-struggle workers' party, the Polish Socialist Party (PSP), has been formed.

The PSP aspires to be a political party of free unionists, of Solidarnosc activists, who fight for socialism against the anti-working class, anti-socialist power of the bureaucracy.

Be confident in the Polish working class and youth! Today they are fighting for a sliding scale of wages and union freedom. Tomorrow they will be fighting for workers' and people's power!

And they will be joined by the masses from other Eastern European countries and Rvan Socialist Actior from the Soviet Union itself. They will be joined by the people of Soviet Armenia, who are fighting for national freedom.

With international socialist support, the Polish, Eastern European, and Soviet workers will overthrow and destroy Stalinism. And be sure, this will occur long before the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Fourth International!