Talking Solidarnosc

Solidarnosc, the Polish workers’ free trade union, was born out of crisis. In the late 1970s, Polish production was falling, foreign debt was rising. There were food shortages, and other goods were in short supply. From July 1980, the government tried to throw the burden of the crisis on to workers’ living standards. The result was a growing wave of strikes and occupations.

The wave became a tsunami of workers’ revolt.

At least three and a half million workers joined in simultaneous factory occupations. Inter-factory strike committees sprang up to coordinate the strikes. In Gdansk, over 600 occupied workplaces sent delegates to a joint committee at the Lenin Shipyard. Down the coast at Szczecin, the number was over 700.

These committees gave Polish workers an immense sense of their collective power. They rapidly added the call for political rights — above all the right to independent self-governing unions — to their economic demands. The committees were also intensely democratic.

At Gdansk, all the negotiations with the regime were conducted in front of microphones, so everyone in the shipyard and beyond could listen in.

The workers’ movement itself inspired the rest of Polish society. Students on every college campus built ‘Solidarity’ unions. Three million small farmers joined ‘Rural Solidarity’. Tenants on housing estates built new democratic committees. Even queuing shoppers formed instant democratic committees to ensure fair treatment for all. There was, one Polish writer reported, an "orgy of popular participation".

With hostility, but also powerlessness. Every effort they made to limit the movement seemed only to inspire it further. Poland in the winter of 1980-81 looked like a country enjoying dual power, where there was one centre of government from above, another controlled by the workers, from below.

This was very unstable. Such a situation can’t last forever.

The crisis came in late March. The police beat up Solidarnosc activists in the town of Bydgoszcz.

The national union called one of the most effective four-hour general strikes in history. And they said they would follow this with an indefinite general strike, from March 31.

But at the last moment, the union’s leader, Lech Walesa, went on TV and cancelled the general strike. He did this without even consulting the rest of the union leadership. The Catholic Church had twisted his arm.

Solidarnosc members were dismayed and demoralized. Attendance at meetings dropped. Yet the pressure of the economic crisis meant that, after a pause, strikes started again. Only now they were "unofficial" — the national union did not support them. Walesa rushed around Poland being a "fireman", damping down the resistance.

Meanwhile the regime was preparing its forces for a counter-attack. In December 1981 they declared martial law, and locked up the union’s leadership.

By no means. But to prevent it, the union leadership needed a different approach.

After the general strike was called off, a more radical wing did develop inside the union. It criticized Walesa’s bureaucratic leadership. Some started developing ideas for workers’ direct management of the economy.

But the radicals lacked political clarity. They never offered a clearly worked out alternative. They, like Walesa, failed to warn of the impending catastrophe and to offer a solution.

It was very hard for real socialist voices to gain a hearing in Eastern Europe in that period.

Confusion was not limited to the Polish left.

Many socialists and trade unionists in the West refused all-out support to Solidarnosc, because they still believed there was something "socialistic" about Poland. One of these was Arthur Scargill, the British miners’ leader. (The Polish regime rewarded his "loyalty" three years later, supplying scab coal to help break the miners’ strike in Britain.)

Plus, this was the Cold War. Western conservative politicians — including Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher — claimed to support Solidarnosc. This was the greatest hypocrisy, of course. While they were weeping crocodile tears over the Polish workers’ movement, Reagan was smashing the air traffic controllers’ union in America and Thatcher launched an anti-union offensive in Britain.

It is important to recognize that the Polish defeat was much less serious than that

suffered by the Chilean workers eight years before. General Pinochet’s regime murdered thousands of Chilean trade unionists and socialists. In Poland, General Jaruzelski’s forces killed less than 60. Plus, Solidarnosc continued to organize underground, and on quite a mass basis.

There was a reason. Though Jaruzelski had won in the short run, his regime lacked support from every sector of society. Within a few years, he was opening negotiations again with the opposition. Poland was among the first East European countries to abandon so-called "communism" in 1989.

Almost its first act as a new government was to allow unemployment to soar, breaking the back of working-class confidence.

The most vital thing to recover is the vibrant and democratic creative organization of the working class, organizing itself in a mass strike. Rosa Luxemburg wrote about that a hundred years ago, and the Polish workers proved she was right, on a scaleshe could not have imagined.

The other lesson is that every great movement spontaneously generates tendencies to compromise and to contain its own militancy. Unless socialists are on hand to argue for a different way forward, such tendencies will lead even the most brilliant movement into the sand. Socialists need to recognize, celebrate and spread the best practice of Solidarnosc even today.