Tunes! co-operation bureaucrats: Warsaw Pact commander Marshall Kulikov was known to be in warsaw last weekend.
The martial law measures they have introduced made by the workers in the last 16 months: civil rights suspended, six day working reintroduced, a night curfew, the banning of all union activity and gatherings, military courts and the death penalty for those disobeying military instructions, including sectors of the civilian population.
Worse, have been rounded up, have been broken up. and all press links with the outside world cut to cover the sion.
Although the bulk of Solidarity's national and regional leaders are in jail or under house arrest like Walesa, fighting back. A national co-ordination was being set up in the Gdansk shipyards as we went to and spreading. But with the Military Committee set on a course of smashing the union, any workers' resistance will be fiercer repression -security forces or from Soviet and Warsaw Pact tanks.
The Kremlin, which still has blood on its hands from the invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, has expressed its strong approval of the crackdown. Warsaw Pact countries have followed suit.
The response of the imperialist powers has been equally predictable. intervention' was how described the Tories' mild remarks were made by the Reagan administration. This is hardly surprising. As one London banker explained in last week's Sunday Times: 'Speaking only would be a good thing if Russia invaded, because then she would be obliged to honour Poland's debts'.
Gone are Ine. days media rallied to the cause of workers. the rule of the bureaucrats than with an emerging workers' power. The only real friend of the Polish workers is the international labour movement. It is on its shoulders that the full responsibility for solidarity How taus In the next few days and weeks the Polish workers will need the maximum support in their confrontation with the armed might of their bureaucratic rulers. This is a struggle for power. All intermediate solutions such as governments of national unity can only mean in the present context the crushing of the independent activitv of the Polish workers Socialist Challenge calls for the unconditional alease Lech prisoners in Poland, for an end to military rule and for the restoration of all civil and union riahts. Anv moves towards militarv intervention by Warsaw Pact troops must be opposed.
We appeal to all our readers to campaign as vigorously as possible to build a massive solidarity campaign with the Polish workers.
particular the Labour leaders should be forced to lead this campaign. We would propose the following simple resolution for discussion at every labour movement body and workplace to stimulate an enormous campaign of marches, rallies and This branch/ meeting. expresses it.
branch/meeting full solidarity We call for the ending of military rule and all restrictions on Solidarity's right to organise, Walesa and all union prisoners. We demand that there should be no external military intervention into the Polish crisis.
Socialist Challenge r17 December 1981, page 2 of the Soviet overturn at a stroke all the gains may at least 3000 Solidarity activists factory occupations the represthe Polish workers are the strikes were met with yet either from the Polish Other 'Strict nonLord Carrington Similarly approach.
as a banker, sion.
when Western the Polish They feel much more at home with Solidarity tne and the Party and TUC expresses with the Polish workers.
and for the release of Lech own and politica/ launched the military ofdefend their crumbling The totalitarian regime lea by the Communist Party had seen its rule systematically undermined by emergence genuine workers' power. They have turned to the naked force of and security forces. Next they Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops.
From the formation ol independent union movement Solidarity, major confrontation was inevitable. The bureaucrats regime was only able to defend enormous material and political privileges by retaining complete MORODOIV of political power over the working cass While it rested on collectivised property Tedtions the regime in no way oe sorking people ests working people There was workers' democracy before the emergence of guenay there and consequently was no workers' planning of the Rather Courtly regime relied on its network of party members in the enterprises The result iS well-known: bureaucratic corruption and mismanagement, and Stalinist represThat's the Polish workers rebelled in summer 1980 to set up independent unions to fight for their own interests. Crisis But the Polish system has no room for such independent activity by the workers. Al every stage the workers' struggle for their rights led to a further crisis for the regime and collapse of their power. Almost consciously the Polish workers were drawn increasingly to challenge the overall power of ine bureaucrats.
Solidaritv never called for a return to capitalism, challenged the basic economic structures of the system. It did fight for better conditions for its members and was confronted by the regime with economic LOIS responded by demanding workers' control over the through the establishment of workers' self-management councils Solidarity demanded the right to its own press to counter the lies of the ourcaucialy was creasingly led to challenge the regime's control over the whole media.
Solidarity drew up its proposals for economic reform and found this blocked by the Polish It therefore demanded the right to stand its own canEVENTS are moving very quickly in Poland, and all communications are cut as we go to press. But the following is already clear.
In the crackdown at least 3000 Solidarity activists at a national and local level have been arrested. The Na tional Commission of Solidarity was arrested after its meeting in Gdansk on Saturday arrested in their hotels late at night. Other key Solidarity leaders were arrested outside Gdansk, leader Zbigniew Bujak, who was arrested in Warsaw.
workers significant scale have been the response to the military repression. On Wroclaw smut down works in Krakow and Katowice, but in both places the strikes seems to have been broken by troops.
officials present at the Krakow plant were arrested.
Gdansk shipyard, Solidarnosc, its 37 regions to urge delegates to come to Gdansk and ser madona sarke committee In Warsaw the Fiat Polski plant is closed, as is the Ursus tractor plant.
strikers were ejected by riot police.
Precision Instrument plant was shut down and the occupiers placed a crane across the entrance. The complete closing of all communications, together with the closing of Reuters agency on tuesda)
preventing Western journalists witnessing troops evic ting strikers from the factories Martial law suspends all transport and other key personnel under direct mılitary command. There is a curfew from 10pm to 6am. All persons over 12 years need identity cards.
All trade union activity is banned, as are all gatherings except religious ceremonies.
law can be punished with the decth penalty or years of morisonment The charged under martial law regulations in Lodz.
didates in the national and local elections.
every SLeD took the workers further down the road to establishing their own power and overthrowing the ruling bureaucracy. The regime's own power base the ruling had been ravaged by the crisis. Almost third of its three million members joined Solidari. ty, and hundreds of thousands members deserted the party after the defeat of the democratisation current, the special party congress this summer.
the party discredited by revelations ot corruption and Illas. desertions the regime turned to two other institutions shore up power. General Jaruzelski was made prime minister and then party leader as the army was drawn into the centre of Polish politics.
Patrols Conscuption was tended and army patrols stepped uo through the custom the people to army's presence.
Polish Army has among Polish people whose hollansm and respect I01 their army's role is strong.
It is also army more than 50 per cent of conscripts, many of whose members are in Solidarity.
• most of them were like Warsaw occupations and strikes on a limited but Monday all production in Poznan and Workers occupied ine steel All union nistoric Dirin place of is occupied. Solidarity has sent couriers to Warsaw National Library hundreds of The Swierczewski morning is aimed at civil rights and places Breaches of martial first Solidarity leaders have beer takeover for the Poles to "turn the other cheek'. regime had tried to establish a government ot national unitv with the Church, The Army. the ruling Communist Party and Solidarity. The aim was to force Solidarity a minority force in the government to take responsibility for the crisis and to discipline its own militant members.
Although some union moderates influenced by the Catholic hierarchy in cluding Walesa toyed with this idea as a wav out ot the crisis the manoeuvre W as transparent to The Gdansk shipyards - birthplace of Solidarity the union leadership to accent. As the union's malor regions announced their intention to contest next Spring's local and as they developed the workers' self-management councils, the negotiations for a government of national unity broke down It was then that the regime decided on military force to crush the workers. Plans were laid Ine were brought in to advise. It is unc ear now muca warn ing the imperialist powers given folding crackdown, although uncannily Chancellor Schmidt was in East Berlin for talks at the time of the military takeover. The West German prime minister was last in East Germany for talks eleven years ago, the time that the Polist dorn in December 19104t workers revolt was There is no going back the days before the militarv coun. While the regime may have hoped to split Solidarity and to win its moderate leaders to a 'compromise' deal involving drastic curtailment of the union's rights in return for *participation an authoritarian government, that perspective looks in. creasingly unlikely The Polish rulers have opted counterrevolution, and bloody counter-revolution Demonstrators outside the Polish Embassy last weekend necessary The decisive question now is whether Solidarry, with their sa Solidarity, tional leaders imprisoned. can develop a strategy and tactics to lead the Polish workers, farmers and to challenge for power.
twelve million workers and farmers organised Solidarity and Rural Solidarity have learned to rel on their own strength and organisations over the past months. ferences naturally emerg ed over the best : way fight for the workers' interests.
It is no secret tha Walesa and moderates were strongly influenced by the Catholic hierarchy and hostile to any notion of the workers taking power. Such political tendencies began to develop into embryonic pontical partie. past few months, with the growth of the right wing nationalis KPN, Jacek Kuron's Clubs for a Selt governing Republic, and other, more socialist currents.
These latter forces concentrated on the development the workers' organs of workers' power.
will be these councils and the national strike coordination which will play the key role in fighting to
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cities in an attempt to Photo: ROY CUCKOW