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	Workers Vanguard No. 914	9 May 2008

In Memory of Polish Socialist Ludwik Hass

1918-2008

WARSAW—Professor Ludwik Hass died in Warsaw on April 8. A historian of the Polish labor movement and freemasonry, he was also known as an exponent of Trotskyism in Poland. A member of the prewar Trotskyist Bolshevik-Leninist group in Poland, he was arrested in Lwów in 1939 following the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland and sentenced to eight years in a Soviet labor camp. He later married in the Soviet Union and only managed to return to Poland, with his wife and son, in 1957. In 1965, he was arrested and spent over a year in prison, along with Jacek Kuron, Karol Modzelewski and others, for playing a key political role in influencing an “Open Letter to the Party” signed by Kuron and Modzelewski that included a call for proletarian internationalism and workers democracy. At the time, Spartacist (No. 6, June-July 1966) ran an article calling for defense of Hass and his comrades.

Ludwik Hass had ties with some pseudo-Trotskyist organizations in the West, notably including the United Secretariat of the late Ernest Mandel. Hass’s articles appeared in Revolutionary History and other pseudo-Trotskyist papers in the West. When the cadres who later formed the Polish section of the International Communist League met Hass in the mid 1980s, he opposed the anti-Communist Stalinophobia prevalent in the pro-Solidarność pseudo-Trotskyist milieu. At the same time, he accepted the notion of a “family of the left.” He used to write articles for some Stalinist papers and allowed Stalinist youth organizations to sponsor his discussion meetings. Interestingly, at one such meeting Hass said that his biggest error ever was named Jacek Kuron. At one time a pro-socialist opponent of the Stalinist regime, Kuron had become a leading element in counterrevolutionary Solidarność and served as the strikebreaking minister of labor in the first Solidarność government in 1990. We published a contribution by Hass on the 1990 Polish presidential elections (WV No. 518, 18 January 1991).

Hass played a key role in winning the founding cadres of the Spartacist Group of Poland to Trotskyism, as they then understood it. Their Young Left Movement (RML), which was established in 1988, was an amorphous “family of the left” grouping, composed mainly of members of Stalinist youth organizations. Our future members were known for reviving the forgotten revolutionary internationalist tradition of honoring the “3 Ls” (Lenin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht). Thanks to Ludwik Hass, they succeeded in getting a suppressed copy of the Polish translation of The Revolution Betrayed by Trotsky and in having it published by the ZSMP Stalinist youth organization at the end of the 1980s.

Following discussions in 1989-90, the RML was rejected by the Stalinophobic Mandelites of the misnamed Current of the Revolutionary Left (NLR), one of the groups that shared responsibility for supporting the forces of the capitalist counterrevolution in Poland. It was Ludwik Hass who in July 1990 introduced an RML cadre to an ICL representative then visiting Warsaw. The ICL comrade brought with him copies of the May 1990 “Letter to Polish Workers” by the ICL’s German section (translated in WV No. 504, 15 June 1990), which warned of the counterrevolutionary threat represented by the Solidarność government and called for a return to the perspective of proletarian internationalism personified by Rosa Luxemburg.

The result of that meeting and ensuing discussions with the ICL was programmatic agreement and the establishment in October 1990 of the Spartacist Group of Poland. The SGP/ICL had a difference with Ludwik Hass regarding the counterrevolutionary character of Solidarność, which was evident from the time of Solidarność’s first national congress in September 1981. At that point, we raised the call “Stop Solidarność counterrevolution!” Hass claimed that the decisive change in Solidarność’s class character resulted from the government’s later crackdown in December 1981. In reality, the imposition by the Stalinist regime of Wojciech Jaruzelski of a temporary state of emergency, which we defended at the time, spiked Solidarność’s counterrevolutionary bid for power. The SGP also rejected the notion of a “family of the left” as counterposed to the conception of a Leninist vanguard party.

Some time after the counterrevolution of 1989-90, Hass told the SGP that the ICL had been right about the class character of Solidarność. But, expressing his Polish nationalism, he said that this was simply a fluke and that “we here know better our own backyard.” But our position was the result of an analysis based on the Trotskyist program of unconditional military defense of the deformed and degenerated workers states and the struggle for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracies, as documented in the October 1981 Spartacist pamphlet Solidarność: Polish Company Union for CIA and Bankers, which was published last year in Polish by the SGP.

Despite his programmatic revisionism, Ludwik Hass did play the role of teacher and catalyst of Trotskyism in Poland, and he contributed to the rebuilding of the continuity of Trotskyism there, broken by the Stalinist blood purges and the Nazi occupation. We will remember him for that service to the proletarian cause.