Walesa steps in to direct attacks on Polish workers

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Power sharing between Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski (left) and Lech Walesa (right) will mean increased austerity.

Poland should be a nation rejoicing—or you might think.

Following massive strikes in 1988 against the economic austerity measures imposed through agreements with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Polish government decided to legalize Solidarity and to negotiate with it.

The government, headed by General Wojciech Jaruzelski, realized it had no legitimacy to push through its unpopular economic "reforms." It needed to directly involve Solidarity in the stepped-up attacks on the workers' standard of living.

In April 1989, the "round-table agreements" were signed by leaders of the Polish United Workers Party (PUWP, the ruling Stalinist party) and Solidarity leader Lech Walesa. These negotiations led to the legalization of the banned independent union and an agreement to hold rigged parliamentary elections in June in which Solidarity could participate.

The rigged elections were intended to guarantee the Stalinist bureaucracy's full control of the government, with Solidarity—at most —becoming a minority partner in a Stalinist-led coalition.

Solidarity-led government

Despite the fact that Solidarity was allowed only 35 percent of the seats in the Polish Assembly (the Sejm), the working people of Poland used the elections to strike a blow against the ruling PUWP.

Solidarity won all of the seats alloted to it in the Sejm as well as 99 of the 100 seats in the newly created Senate. Voters crossed out the names of Stalinist candidates running unopposed, preventing many from achieving the majority of votes needed to win the election.

Following the electoral rout of the PUWP, Stalinist Prime Minister Czeslaw Kiszczak proved unable to form a government and was forced to step down. After weeks of skirmishes over the number of ministries to be allocated to each of the governmental allies, Solidarity leader Tadeusz Mazowiecki was elected prime minister on Aug. 24.

Under the final agreement, the PUWP would hold the powerful Interior and Defense ministries, and Stalinist leader Jaruzelski would remain in the office of president. All other ministries could be held by Solidarity. This "partnerlike cooperation," the first of its kind in any workers' state, was made possible only after Soviet President Gorbachev called Mieczysiaw Rakowski, head of the PUWP, to insist that he place no obstacles to the formation of a Solidarity-led government.

Solidarity, which the Stalinist bureaucracy tried to smash in 1981 with martial law, was now at the helm of the Polish state.

While it is undeniable that most Poles have been encouraged by the new political openings of the past few months, it is equally clear that great uncertainty and anxiety prevail. The reason is that the new government will have to sink its foundations in the shifting sands of the Polish economy.

At a Solidarity rally on Aug. 20 in Gdansk, which featured Lech Walesa and new Prime Minister Mazowiecki, part of the crowd began chanting "We need bread, not a prime minister."

Indeed, Poland is burdened with an enormous foreign debt of $40 billion and a stagnant domestic economy. Inflation has hit a rate of 100 percent a year. The government's decision to lift price controls on food products on July 30 resulted in prices of meat, cheese, and milk jumping as much as 500 percent. People are reportedly out in the streets as late 2 a.m. searching for affordable and available ingredients for a meal.

Workers responded to the price hikes with massive strikes throughout Poland's major industries. Thousands of railworkers in Silesia and Gdansk staged hour-long strikes during the first week of August. Similar strikes were launched by bus drivers and telecommunications workers. One-hour protest strikes continued after Aug. 11 in over 400 factories. • The leadership of Solidarity supported the one-hour strike tactic as a means to register a protest-but not to force the retreat of the austerity measures. They denounced the workers who sought to extend the strikes. Solidarity's accepted role in this framework is to make the austerity more acceptable to the workers and to prevent destabilizing protests.

Same economic framework

The fact is that Walesa and the majority of the Solidarity leadership (known as the "Working Group") accept the same economic framework as the Stalinists. The basis of the "round-table agreement" between Walesa and Jaruzelski, for example, was that privatization of industry and the loosening of price controls are necessary to attract the intervention of Western capital.

Everyone in the new Polish government— from the PUWP, to Solidarity, to the lone millionaire elected to the new senate-agree that the only solution to Poland's economic problems is the increased introduction of capitalist market mechanisms—which will mean more austerity and a dismantling of state control over industry.

The French financial journal La Tribune de l' Expansion characterized this aspect of the "round-table agreement" in its June 9 issue: '"The new economic order defined by this agreement seeks a greater reintroduction of market mechanisms into Poland. ... According to the document signed by Jaruzelski and Walesa, the march toward marketization of the economy will specifically entail the suppression of the monopoly and state control over the means of production; the partial or total privatization of numerous state industries; the development of stock-issuing corporations, and its corollary, the creation of a stock market by 1991; restrictions on the role of central planning; the reduction of state subsidies to national enterprises; and the determination of prices according to the laws of supply and demand."

The article concludes: "This agreed-to package of reforms resembles a veritable restoration of capitalism."

Jaruzelski and the PUWP were prompted on this pro-capitalist course by Soviet leader Gorbachev, who, in a public letter to the summit leaders of the seven most advanced capitalist countries on July 14, openly called for the greater penetration of capitalism into (continued on page 15)