Eastern Europe on the brink as 'market reforms' clash with workers' social gains

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Czech workers hold a 10-minute work stoppage in Prague on April 11.

A delegation of Trotskyists finds that workers in Poland, East Germany have many contradictory answers for the economic and political crisis they SOCIALIST ACTION JUNE 1990 13 The irresistible revolutionary upsurge that swept across Eastern Europe last year has rocked Stalinist regimes everywhere to their foundations. These regimes are incapable of solving the problems of their crisis-ridden, bureaucratized economies within the existing framework of planning and public ownership of the basic means of production. It is apparent that they have reached an understanding with imperialism based on solving the crisis by opening the door to capitalist investment.

This requires removing any obstacle to the restoration of market-driven neo-capitalist economic relations. The principal roadblock to the reintroduction of the market as ruler of all economic relations is the social conquests of the workers-primarily the unqualitied right to a job and a guaranteed minimum living standard. Factories must be allowed to go bankrupt, dumping "excess" workers onto the scrap-heap of unemployed. And prices of the necessities of life must be allowed to find their levels in the "free" marketplace.

But the commodity that will not be permitted to rise to the level of its market price is labor power—wages must be kept below the rising cost of living through systematic state intervention. This is the norm of every capitalist society. Thus, the road to capitalist restoration requires that the ruling bureaucracies and their new-found middle-class allies must first break the resistance of the working class to their bitter capitalist medicine.

What are their prospects for success?

Four Trotskyists, two from Europe and iwo from the United States, organized a three-week tour—April 6 to 27-of six cities in three East European countries. One of our aims was to get the opinions of labor and socialist activists on how they think this question is likely to be decided. Our tour included stops in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Leipzig, East Germany, and four cities in Poland.

We hoped to also find answers to some related questions:

a) How deep is the appeal of capitalism which has dramatically surfaced in recent elections in Eastern Europe? Why has the mood shifted so sharply from the antiStalinist-but pro-socialist—mass sentiment widely reported in the capitalist media in the first weeks and months of the anti-bureaucratic mass mobilizations last year? and, b) Why is concrete resistance to the introduction of market relations—notwithstanding the enormous growth in public support for capitalism in the abstractso great in all the bureaucratized workers' states? And related to this is the question: Why is the opposition to the concrete steps toward capitalism even greater within the original borders of the Soviet Union than elsewhere in these societies?

I will state my conclusions at the outset so that the evidence I present can be better evaluated.

What kind of capitalism?

The appeal of capitalism, according to the model which East European workers perceive in Western Europe and the United States, is quite deep. And while workers are well aware of the perils of capitalism, they think this has been exaggerated by the "Communists."1 The current attraction of the economically powerful capitalist states, which are still enjoying an unprecedentedly long period of prosperity, is blinding. Workers in Eastern Europe see only the "high" living standards-relative to their own-enjoyed by major sections of the population in the West. And like most workers in the developed countries, they have come to believe that capitalism, at least in the imperialist centers, has overcome the contradictions that have historically been expressed in outbreaks of massive economic crises.

However, workers in East Europe are well aware of the difference between capitalism in the highly developed countries, such as it appears today, and the nightmare version of "free enterprise" that they see in the backward, semi-colonial world. No one wants that kind of capitalism. Consequently, there is a broad-based fear that the "reforms" which have so far been instituted threaten to take these societies toward a "Third World capitalism"—not toward economic development and higher living standards.

There are mixed beliefs as to why this danger exists. Some think this is because the "Communists" are sabotaging the market reforms to discredit capitalism and preserve their dominant position in these societies.

Others see it is a legacy of what they call "feudal2 socialism" —a creative description of the actual bureaucratic monopoly on political power in the workers' states. According to this view, the privileged "socialist" bureaucrats, who have treated national property as if it were their own, are in the process of transforming themselves into capitalist property owners with legal rights to profits.

This derives from a widely held perception that individual bureaucrats have so far been the main beneficiaries of privatization— carving out for themselves junior partnerships in joint venture privatizations of publicly owned enterprises. The bureaucracy's program of "market socialism" thus seems to many workers to be a form of capitalist restoration which will leave workers totally empty handed.

Looking for a piece of the action Many of those we spoke with believe that the bureaucratic rip-off of state property is a big danger. But at the present time, they believe it can be blocked only by finding some way to distribute shares in the workplaces to the workers. As they presently see it, if capitalism is the only way out, they want a piece of the action.

They repeatedly told us that so-called worker self-management has been tried but it ran into two problems: In the first place, a shortage of new capital for upgrading the technology; and in the second, the failure of self-management to provide an incentive to work hard.

By "self-management," however, they meant the system tried in these countries at one time or another of establishing a façade of workers' control. Such a system allowed some control over economic decisions in the workplaces, but restricted it exclusively to isolated enterprises.

This type of "self-management" is fraudulent. It leaves real control on all levels of the Rod Holt economy—municipal, regional and national—in the hands of the bureaucratic dictatorship, which continues to exercise absolute control over all the nation's resources.

In Poland, forms of self-management were instituted during the height of Solidarity's upsurge. In the context of the mass worker mobilizations in that turbulent period, it represented a first experiment with workers' control. . After the mobilization was crushed with the imposition of martial law in December 1981, self-management was tamed and co-opted by the bureaucracy and used by it to try to regain a measure of confidence from the defiant masses of workers. Bureaucratically controlled "self-management," however, continued to deepen the economic malaise and served only to sharpen worker opposition to the bureaucracy.

Unfortunately, in the absence of a revolutionary proletarian party with a coherent alternative program, the evolution of consciousness toward revolutionary socialist perspectives that began in 1980-81 has been temporarily halted.

This explains why many workers in these societies have concluded that the only realistic solution to a limping and decaying economy will be through the importation of Western technology and capital. This implies some form of privatization. Underlying this is the widespread realization-an indisputable fact of life-that desperately needed capital from the imperialist countries will not be forthcoming if there are any restrictions on the profitability of foreign investments.

And given the current relative passivity of workers in the major centers of world capitalism, the alternative to capitalist-driven modernization—material aid coming from a victorious socialist revolution in one or more of these countries-seems to be an unrealistic and utopian dream.

Current contradictory mood

The current mood of workers we met is highly contradictory. It reflects, on the one hand, the defeat of the reactionary Stalinist utopian scheme of building "socialism"3 in (continued on page 14)

JUNE 1990

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(Above) Many Polish farmers are saddled with turn of the century technology.

Polish workers (shown here in 1981) look upon Solidarity as a social movement 14 SOCIALIST ACTION JUNE 1990 (continued from page 13)

one country, or in any combination of backward countries. This realization is a momentous gain which cannot be over-emphasized. But for the time being the "failure of socialism" also serves to put wind in the sails of the imperialists.

In any case, an explosion of discontent with the course toward capitalist restoration is rapidly building up. The bureaucatic regimes are in a "Catch 22": Workers will not give up their social conquests until they see evidence that capitalist-fueled modernization has begun and there is hope for a better life to come. But capitalists will not meaningfully invest-and modernize the economy-until market relations have been put in place!

One advocate of capitalist restoration gave an illustration of the enormity of the task: "You cannot develop a market economy and attract foreign investors if you can't get a telephone call through or receive a fax." Another noted that it will cost East Germany, alone, "more than $500 billion to upgrade its infrastructure to West German levels." Investments on such a scale will not be made until market conditions are firmly in place.

But the market cannot prevail if commodity prices continue to be administered; that is, if commodities are not allowed to express their values at prices determined by the laws of commodity exchange. This includes everything from food, clothing, and shelter to the price of labor. And there's the rub!

Even with Solidarity leaders taking responsibility for the Polish government's swift, far-reaching assault upon the administered price system, they are being stymied by growing worker resistance. While Polish workers might be willing to give up the security guaranteed by the planned economy in exchange for an eventual capitalist-driven prosperity, they want to see some positive results first. So far, they have experienced only inflation and unemployment without any sign of a down-payment on promised capitalist development.

The deepening crisis has impelled Lech Walesa to declare at a May 9 news conference, according to the New York Times, that the revolution has stagnated and that he pledged to foment "permanent political war."

What this war was to be directed against, Walesa left highly ambiguous. While his target was implied by his accompanying attack on Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki and other Solidarity intellectuals in the government, he didn't get more specific than accusing them of "muffling" dissent, stating that this had created a "volcano" of dissatisfaction that could erupt at any time. But he gave no real indication of what the nittygritty ends of his "war" might be.

In other East European countries the coalition governments made up of bureaucrats and intellectuals have not yet dared to go as far and as fast toward establishing the rule of the market as in Poland. And Gorbachev, who set into motion the perspective of "market socialism," has so far been stopped cold by Soviet workers who have made clear they will not give up the gains they won in their October 1917 Revolution without a war to the knife.

And even though the workers' states in Eastern Europe were born deformed-never having been fully mobilized and never having experienced a period of full proletarian democracy as did Soviet workers-they too Will not give up their social conquests, which are organically connected to the nationalized and planned economies, without a fight.

democracy and economic justice.

The difference in the origin of their social revolutions-that is, the massive difference in the scale of the independent worker mobilizations which took place in Russia in 1917, in contrast with the post-World War II revolution in Eastern Europe-helps explain why the opposition to "market socialism" is so much more overt in the Soviet Union today than in Eastern Europe.

Solidarity Enterprise Commission The great bulk of our time was spent in Poland—in Wroclaw, Lodz, Warsaw, and Gdansk. In Gdansk, we attended the second national Solidarity Congress. We also had long and informative discussions with our co-thinkers-supporters of the Fourth International—in three countries.

We received what we believe to be a much clearer picture of the current state of working-class consciousness-especially the current political mood of Polish workers. And as was to be expected, the picture we got was complex and contradictory, reflecting the opposing class forces buffeting East European workers and forcing them to grapple with new alternatives in a rapidly evolving historical conjuncture.

In Wroclaw, our co-thinkers there, who are led by Jozef Pinior, a well-known Solidarity leader and activist since 1980, arranged a meeting between our delegation and the Solidarity Transport Enterprise Commission. The worker leaders we met with included the enterprise union President Tomasz Surowiec and Vice President Henryk Borowski, and the president of the Transport Enterprise's Workers' Council, Ryszard Borowski.

They didn't agree on every detail, nor did they give the same emphasis to the different problems. But together they painted the following picture of the economic and political crisis in Poland today:

In the beginning, Solidarity made important gains, concentrating effectively on human rights, liberty, wages, and working conditions. But now Solidarity is increasingly "coming into conflict with reality." Unemployment, which they noted was "artificially provoked," is rapidly increasing. Clearly, they understood that unemployment was the bitter medicine which flowed from the Tadeusz Mazowiecki government's policy-the so-called Balcerowicz4 Planwhich is based on the swift reintroduction of capitalist market relations and eventual largescale privatization.

Each one had mixed and contradictory views on this big question. The Workers' Council president, for instance, said the following:

"Solidarity is unable to solve the problem of unemployment." They all-too-often "take half-measures." This is because Solidarity is only "partially our government." (This, it was clear, was not merely a reference to the Stalinists in the coalition government, but also to the middle-class politicians, headed official representatives of the union in the government.)

He went on to say, "There are solutions [to the problems of productivity] other than unemployment, but the nomenklaturaS still has the power to block them." This was a reference to the widespread half-truth, trumpeted by both the bureaucracies and imperialists, that there is no incentive to work hard in the publicly owned workplaces. 6 While a solution to this problem was subject to debate wherever we went, the Workers' Council president went on to claim that the "problem lies in management." The solution, he argued, was to create "open competition" between manager candidates, and to "select managers" on the basis of their "program"; that is, on the basis of how they proposed to organize production in the given enterprise. And, he argued further, "management must be under the direct supervision of the workers and their Councils in each enterprise."

But the Solidarity president and vice president at this meeting seemed to disagree; they suggested that the problem was less a result of management than it was of the form of property ownership.

The Workers' Council president politely, but vigorously, disputed their view. (We got the impression that there was a long-standing difference of outlook between the heads of the Workers' Council and of the union.) He declared that social ownership was not the problem and that "there was no possibility of reprivatization" of the economy because Polish workers are for "the continued socialization" of all major enterprises.

He also thought that a way to gain greater control over the enterprises would be through the municipal "self-governing bodies" which were to be elected on May 17. This, he seemed to be saying, was a step in the direction of overcoming the limits placed on workers' control and self-management by the government's policy of restricting it to isolated enterprises.

He then developed a contradictory line of thought. He said: "The problem is not who will own the enterprises—we want to be exploited in a socially useful manner. Up to now we have owned everything but have nothing." He concluded his thinking on this matter with a clear statement in support of the government-led campaign to encourage foreign investment—a view which seemed to be shared by everyone we talked to both advocates and opponents of privatization.

He went still further along this opposite path when we asked him what he thought of the administered price system which kept the prices of basic commodities very low, guaranteeing a basic minimum living standard for all workers? He answered allegorically: "I want my friends to be able to afford the cinema, but I don't want to have to pay for it."

I don't believe that any contradictions we perceived were the result of faulty translation. Rather, they are entirely an expression of changing mass consciousness in a rapidly evolving situation. Moreover, these transitory conceptions are greatly conditioned by the pro-capitalist program of the almost exclusively middle-class political spokespersons for Solidarity.

Three interviews in Lodz In the next city we visited, Lodz, we had three separate interviews arranged by Zbigniew Kowalewski, who was part of our delegation and our interpreter during the Polish part of our tour.

[Zbigniew was a founder and leader of Solidarity in Lodz in 1980-81. He was out of the country when martial law was declared in December 1981 and when Solidarity was subsequently driven underground. He had been unable to return until the resurgence and relegalization of the union. Now his perspective is to help build a section of the Fourth International in Poland.] We met first with President Longin Chlerowski of the Lodz Transport Enterprise Commission of Solidarity and with Vice President Waclaw Krygier. Chlerowski is also a member of the Solidarity regional leadership.

We started our conversation by posing two questions:

• How do you see the resolution of the current economic crisis? and, • What are the most pressing issues you expect will be discussed at the national Solidarity Congress scheduled to begin in a few days in Gdansk?

He apparently had a sense of what our questions might be and proceeded to describe the background to the current differences in Solidarity at length. He started with almost a blow-by-blow description of the founding of Solidarity in 1980. It soon became clear that he believed it necessary to trace the origin of the disputes back that far so as to establish his credentials as a founder and ongoing Solidarity militant.

The August 1980 general strike that led to the formation of Solidarity, he said, started in his workplace here in Lodz (the City Transport Enterprise). Soon after Lodz workers struck, the Gdansk shipyard strike began. The Lodz strike committee could have won their original wage demands, he declared, but their political demand for the right to organize their own union caused the Labor Ministry to break off negotiations.

The Lodz Strike Committee voted to continue their strike until a resolution of the Gdansk strike. There was a settlement in Gdansk on Aug. 31 and Lodz workers returned to work on Sept. 2. They then proceeded to begin the process of transforming the 100 or so enterprise strike committees in Lodz into a citywide strike committee, and then into a union.

Andrzej Slowik was elected president? of the Inter-factory Committee (the citywide strike committee). When the strike committee was formally established as a union soon after, Slowik was elected president of Lodz Solidarity. Following this he was also elected president of the regional Solidarity organization.

Slowik headed a leadership team that included, among others, Chierowski, and our co-thinker, Zbigniew Kowalewski. The Slowik team led the workers' struggles in Lodz and played an important role in (continued 15)

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East German steelworker: fears grow over unemployment and inflation.

Poland: Solidarnosc and the fight for workers' democracy (continued from page 14)

Solidarity as a whole until martial law was invoked in December 1981. Afterward, during Solidarity's period of underground existence, this team continued to play the leading role in the region's worker opposition.

Chlerowski believes that the current differences within Solidarity can be traced to the time it was first forced underground. He said that Lech Walesa began to unilaterally appoint a "dual leadership" to the one elected at its first national Congress in 1981 and which had continued to function as the ongoing leadership of Solidarity after martial law had been declared.

Walesa, he believed, "needed people who would carry out his policy." And Walesa claimed the right to do this "because he had been elected president of the union" at that Congress.

More recently, Chlerowski told us, Walesa tried to capture the leadership of the Lodz city and regional organizations. But the traditional local leadership won; Slowik was again elected president in both the city and regional organizations of Solidarity.

He also claimed that Walesa was responsible for the split in Solidarity in Szczecin. Solidarity '80, he told us, is now a separate union. He said Marian Jurczyk, a founding leader of Solidarity, had led the Solidarity *80 split because of an earlier bureaucratic attempt by Walesa to take over the union in that city, too.

"Now," Chierowski said, "Andrzej Slowik is our nominee for president against Walesa." [See report by Rod Holt on the Solidarity Congress in this section.] He summarized his differences with Walesa as follows:

"Walesa is for top-down leadership but we are against that.... Almost from the beginning of Solidarity, Walesa has been in an alliance with the KOR8. And now the KOR is using Walesa to take over Solidarity." He further charged that the "KOR/Walesa combination has put up a slate of candidates" for the municipal government here in Lodz on May 27, "without consulting the union in this city." Chlerowski told us that the Solidarity union here has fielded an opposing list of candidates and that he is a candidate on the latter slate.

We asked Chlerowski what were his differences with the KOR? Here he got into the central questions workers were discussing wherever we went.

"The main trouble with the KOR is that they are for the reform of socialism. We want democracy.... We can't continue on the basis of the 'Round Table' agreement which was signed by the Communists and the deserters from Communism [the KOR intellectuals]—it's the same family.... We don't want to be under the economic or political domination of other countries."

We asked him if "democracy" to him meant privatization?

He answered: "If we remain within the framework of the 'Round Table' agreement, we are on the road to reform of socialism. We are against that. We are for changing the form of property ownership."

He went on to explain his view. He said there are four solutions being discussed in Solidarity: (1) Self-management, (2) Selling the enterprises to private capitalists, (3) Worker stocks; i.e., shares in each enterprise lieved that worker ownership would provide a superior form of exercising workers' control.

He said there were differences on this question on every level of Solidarity and in every enterprise, including in his own. He thought that whatever preference is adopted at the Solidarity Congress, if any, each enterprise will nevertheless "be allowed to make its own decision" on the questions of self-management and the form of ownership.

We asked him what he thought of a planned economy? He answered: "This is not so simple. Some kind of planning is necessary because of the danger of many enterprises, which produce socially necessary products, going bankrupt. So we need some kind of plan or subsidization. But it can't be like the present system. It must be based on democratization."

He explained further: "Formerly steel plants, etc., were built in our localities without consulting the local people so that the central authorities not only planned our economic life but also disrupted and reorganized our social and private lives without us having a word to say about it!"

Besides, he continued, profits from local enterprises were taken away by the national government while "local government coffers, which are supposed to provide for local needs, were left empty."

Chlerowski emphasized and re-emphasized the need for democratic, i.e., local, control. "Some enterprises work well, others don't. But we have no control. People want to work harder for themselves, so that they can make more money and have more things. We want to eliminate everyone being penalized because some people won't work hard."

Then I believe he came to the heart of his position. He said: "Credits from the West are crucial to progress for us. Any attempt to reform socialism can only block credits and we will not be able to improve our lives."

We asked him a final friendly but loaded question. Who, in his opinion, would Western capitalists prefer in power, the Communist Party or Solidarity? He laughed and said, "I really don't know."

Solidarity leaders at textile plant We met the same day with the nine-member presidium (executive committee) of the Solidarity Enterprise Commission at Pamotex, a sprawling textile plant in Lodz. There were four women and five men who sat us all around a long conference table in their union headquarters next to the plant. They set tea and cookies on the table and settled down for a leisurely discussion with us.

We asked them to tell us about their enterprise commission, their Workers' Council and their relations with it, and about the coming Solidarity Congress.

They were a very self-confident and goodhumored group. They were very polite and patient with us. We showed them our newspaper, Socialist Action. They noted our Solidarnosc-style logo and smiled, pointing to it with a mixture of sympathy ard tolerance and suggested that we find another name for "socialism." Experience with the official "socialists," they told us, has made the word very unpopular in Poland today.

They then began responding to our questions. They told us that there were about 4000 employed at the plant. Of these only 900 or so were dues-paying Solidarity members. This was a big drop from 1980-81, when virtually every Pamotex worker was in Solidarity. They were critical of their Workers' Council. They said it was elected bureaucratically under Communist auspices.

In fact, they said, they had just decided to make a motion of "no-confidence" in the incumbent Workers' Council. This, they said, was an opening shot in their preparations for a new election of that body.

They told us of their underground activity, which never ceased during the period of martial law. One old-timer said he was arrested 12 times in this period and spent some three months in jail.

In relation to the upcoming national congress, they said they had taken part in working up the programmatic positions of the Regional Solidarity organization. They said they hoped Solidarity would be reunited at the congress, ending the division between Walesa and Slowik in Lodz, Andrzej Gwiazda® in Gdansk, Jurczyk in Szczecin, and other local, regional and national leaders of Solidarity.

The Pamotex union leaders were clearly very critical of Walesa and apparently supporters of the Slowik leadership in the Lodz region. They argued that "Walesa's monopoly on power had to be broken" and that "there must be a free debate in Solidarity between all viewpoints." And they continued, "Walesa must decide whether he wants to be president of Solidarity or of Poland."

They were up in arms against a Walesasupported move to amend the constitution which would limit the right to strike. It was necessary, they insisted, to stop Walesa's policy of "eliminating leaders who were too strong." They described a bureaucratization of Solidarity which they deeply felt had discouraged workers from joining the union.

The question of property forms Most of the Pamotex leaders expressed opposition to the takeover of enterprises by foreign investors, going so far as to ridicule a recent visit by a prospective Japanese investor in their plant. "They are afraid that we won't work cheap enough," one said.

Another worker stated, "I'm not against new factories or modernization of existing ones. But we should not let them own the land on which they stand. We should lease the land to foreign investors for 20 years, and at the end of this time the factories should become our property."

At the same time, without flinching at the apparent contradiction, all seemed to be in favor of Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz's plan for preparing the market conditions for privatization as "the only way out." We asked why Polish workers couldn't manage industry as well as the capitalists? They told us, simply, "We have no money for development of the enterprises."

They asked us what we thought needed to be done to solve the economic and social problems of Poland? (I should point out that most of those we met with asked this question and seemed to want to pursue it further than we had time for.)

They listened intently to our cautiously presented outlook. They certainly understood and seemed to sympathize with our ideas about real socialist democracy based on an anti-bureaucratic revolution, workers' control over production and prices, and workers' selfmanagement and control over planning. But when we explained our conception of economic aid coming as a result of the extension of the revolution to the developed countries of capitalism, they only nodded politely.

Discussion with Andrzej Slowik We interviewed Andrzej Slowik, president of Lodz and Regional Solidarity and a candi(continued on page 16)

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Czechoslovakia, and are faced with today