Down With Court Sentences of Polish Communists!

The following was written by our comrades in the Spartakusowska Grupa Polski.

MAY 15—On March 31, four members of the Communist Party of Poland (KPP) were sentenced in absentia by the court in Dabrowa Górnicza, in southern Poland, to nine months of community service and fines for propagating a “totalitarian system of state.” Their alleged “crime”: publishing “contents referring directly to the idea of a communist system of state and to Marxism and Leninism…which, in the context of historical experience, is a negation of democratic values” (trybuna.eu, 28 April). The next day, the lower house of parliament, the Sejm, unanimously adopted a law banning the use of names for buildings, streets and squares that “commemorate people, organizations, events or dates symbolizing communism” (trybuna.eu, 4 April).

The attack on the KPP represents the most serious attempt to criminalize communism in bourgeois Poland since the ban on “communist symbolism” in 2010, which was overturned by the Constitutional Tribunal after being in force for a year. It is in the class interest of all workers organizations to demand: Down with the convictions of the KPP activists! Down with the ban on communist ideas and all moves to eliminate communist symbols—especially monuments to the Soviet soldiers who liberated Poland from Hitlerite fascism!

These attacks are taking place under the rightist one-party Law and Justice (PiS) government, the clericalist successor to the Solidarność counterrevolution that overthrew the Polish deformed workers state in 1989-90. The assault on the right of leftists to organize goes hand in hand with heightened threats against Jews, Roma and immigrants and coincides with the government’s drive to ban abortion completely. It is also a part of the PiS’s efforts to consolidate authoritarian rule, in accordance with the reactionary traditions of the Polish bourgeoisie in the interwar period.

While we differ programmatically with the reformist-Stalinist KPP, we insist that the government’s vicious vendetta against communism targets not just this party but the democratic rights of all leftist and working-class organizations. At bottom, by attempting to outlaw Marxist views, the government seeks to outlaw the right to organize and to rob the working class of the only program through which it can become conscious of its class interest in replacing this capitalist system with workers rule—the first step toward building a socialist future.