Fifteen Years of Capitalist Counterrevolution: Cynicism, Unemployment, Clerical Reaction

Right Wing Wins Polish Elections

WARSAW, October 24—The recent parliamentary and presidential elections in Poland took place in the immediate aftermath of the obscene celebrations of the 25th anniversary of clerical-nationalist, anti-communist Solidarność, the spearhead of imperialist-backed capitalist counterrevolution in the former Soviet bloc. The 15 years since the triumph of counterrevolution in Poland in 1989-90 have been marked by the impoverishment of the mass of the working population and the rise of Catholic reaction. Vicious anti-communism and anti-woman bigotry, virulent anti-Semitism and Polish chauvinism—all the old garbage of Marshal Pilsudski’s interwar Poland has come back.

While big Polish cities have an urban petty bourgeoisie that profited from capitalist restoration and can afford the expensive Western-style cafés in Warsaw’s Old Town, official unemployment figures have remained around 20 percent for several years. German TV reported last year on the conditions of the 15,000 miners who were thrown out of work by the closure of the state-run coal mines in the southern Polish town of Walbrzych. Desperate to survive, many former miners risk their lives—and some die—digging for coal with picks and axes in biedaszyby (literally, shafts of the poor) as in pre-World War II capitalist Poland. What they earn from selling their coal is three or four times more than unemployment benefits and ten times more than welfare payments.

Voter turnout was the lowest since the 1989 elections that brought a capitalist government to power: only 40 percent voted in the parliamentary elections, and around 50 percent in the first round of the presidential ballot. The low turnout reflects the deep cynicism with which Poles regard the capitalist politicians who have ruled since 1989, as one capitalist coalition replaces another every four years, often falling apart when it gets voted out.

The Solidarność-derived government that took power in 1989 dismantled Poland’s collectivized economy and implemented an economic “shock treatment,” which destroyed the bulk of the social welfare Poles had enjoyed under the deformed workers state—from virtually free health care to cheap, subsidized housing to pensions one could live on. In line with Catholic “family values,” the right to a safe and free abortion was abolished. The Solidarność government was booted out by an enraged electorate. But the capitalist government that replaced it, led by the ex-Stalinist, social-democratic Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), reversed none of these reactionary measures. In fact, the SLD—a bourgeois workers party, organizationally based on the working class but with a pro-capitalist leadership and program—proved to be a reliable tool for continuing to consolidate capitalist rule. It carried out mass deportations of Roma (Gypsies) in 1996 and welcomed the invitation for Poland to join NATO. Having frustrated the hopes of its predominantly working-class electorate, the SLD got voted out of office in 1997, to be replaced by a government of Electoral Action Solidarność (AWS). Meanwhile, SLD leader Kwasniewski remained as president, presiding over Poland’s entry into NATO in 1999.

When the SLD resumed office again in 2001, it continued the anti-working-class measures of AWS. The SLD government supported the blood-drenched U.S. rulers’ invasion of Iraq in 2003, committing 3,000 Polish troops to the imperialist occupation force. This move was motivated by the Polish bourgeoisie’s worries over the close relations developing between imperialist Germany and Russia. In the name of maintaining Polish “independence,” the Polish ruling class has become the lackey of the imperialist U.S. Having again done its duty for Poland’s capitalists and again deceived its working-class base, the SLD underwent a number of splits over corruption scandals in 2003-04 and paved the way for another right-wing victory.

Poland will now be ruled by a parliamentary coalition of the Civic Platform (PO) of Donald Tusk and the Law and Justice Party (PiS) of the twin brothers Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski. Lech Kaczynski, who won the presidency yesterday in a second round of voting, advocates a “Fourth Republic,” a strong presidential state subject to even greater church influence. In propaganda sent to parish priests just before the elections, he boasted of his struggle “in defense of the Catholic faith” and against “expressions of demoralization”—a reference to a gay and lesbian “Parade of Equality” that, as mayor of Warsaw, he banned last June. While slightly more liberal on social issues, his defeated presidential rival Tusk is a strong exponent of “free market” austerity.

Despite their differences, Tusk and the Kaczynski twins will easily get along because what they have in common is being Solidarność counterrevolutionaries of the first hour. While Tusk founded the Gdansk Solidarność Student Committee, the Kaczynskis were second in command to Solidarność leader Lech Walesa on the August 1980 strike committee in the Lenin Shipyard, out of which Solidarność originated. When Walesa became the first president of capitalist Poland in 1990, he chose the “evil twins” to be his vice presidents.

Capitalist Heritage of Solidarność

The government and the entire political spectrum in Poland from left to right celebrated the 25th anniversary of Solidarność—each in its own way. The government organized celebrations in the city of Gdansk, which included a concert by French pop star Jean-Michel Jarre in the former Lenin Shipyard. Former SLD president Kwasniewski, who was a member of the ruling Stalinist party in 1980, paid his respects to Solidarność’ fight for the “overthrow of Communism.” In July, the Parliament proposed a “Day of Solidarność.” Western statesmen joined in honoring Solidarność’ counterrevolutionary services in the anti-Soviet Cold War, as the European Parliament also made August 31 a “Day of Freedom and Solidarność” and recognized Solidarność’ contribution to the eastward extension of the imperialist European Union.

At the same time, former Solidarność luminaries Andrzej Gwiazda and Anna Walentynowicz boycotted the official celebrations and organized their own festivities. Gwiazda had been Walesa’s right-hand man in 1980, and Walentynowicz was the crane operator whose firing sparked the August 1980 strike/occupation in the Lenin Shipyard. They hypocritically protested the sell-off of the shipyard, whose workforce has shrunk from 15,000 in the 1980s to 3,000 today. The September issue of Poland Monthly quotes Gwiazda: “What we see in Poland today is the opposite of Solidarity’s ideals. Now people realize that they have been fooled. They thought that the name ‘Solidarity’ and the name ‘Walesa’ meant something, but now they realize that it all ended in 1989.” The rabidly anti-communist Walentynowicz even claimed at the “independent celebrations” that “Walesa had been directed by the communist SB security service from the very beginning” (Warsaw Voice, 7 September).

Joining the praise and celebrations for Solidarność are self-proclaimed socialist groups in Poland and all over the world. Zbigniew Kowalewski of the fake-Trotskyist United Secretariat (USec), who was a delegate at the 1981 founding congress of Solidarność, wrote: “The purpose of the noisy ceremonies of the anniversary of the birth of Solidarność is to hide its real nature—a workers’ revolution conducted in the name of authentically socialist values” (International Viewpoint Online, September 2005). This is typical of the fake left’s cover-up of Solidarność counterrevolution and their own support for it.

Born during the strike wave in the summer of 1980, Solidarność initially drew on legitimate worker grievances. Three times earlier—in 1956, 1970 and 1976—workers’ upsurges had brought the Polish deformed workers state to the brink of proletarian political revolution. But Solidarność was a departure from those earlier pro-socialist struggles. Polish workers felt betrayed by the lies of Stalinist leader Gomulka, who was in power from 1956-70, and his successor Gierek. Gierek ruinously mortgaged Poland’s wealth to Western bankers and also ruinously drained the economy to subsidize the landowning peasants.

When workers exploded in struggle in 1980 in response to rising prices and shortages of food and other consumer goods, they looked to the powerful Catholic church as the recognized opposition to the discredited Stalinist regime. Though the Gdansk strikers initially sang the “Internationale,” this was soon replaced by the old national hymn, “Oh God, Who Has Defended Poland.” Walesa declared himself at every opportunity to be a true son of the Polish church. Walentynowicz, when asked if she was a socialist, said that she was a believer. Many of the “dissidents” were openly reactionary—virulently nationalist, anti-communist, anti-democratic and anti-Semitic (despite the fact that there were few Jews left in Poland). Former leftist Jacek Kuron, whose Workers Defense Committee (KOR) braintrusted Solidarność, was a social democrat who supported peasant struggles for private property and claimed that “the Catholic movement is fighting to defend freedom of conscience and human dignity.” When Solidarność gained power in 1989, Kuron became the first labor minister of a now-capitalist Poland. One of his first acts was to smash a May 1990 rail strike. And Kuron was the darling of the Western left, the “socialist” face of Solidarność reaction.

In commenting on the outcome of the Gdansk shipyard strike, we raised the call in our headline, “Fight Clerical Reaction! For Proletarian Political Revolution!” (WV No. 263, 5 September 1980). We wrote of the agreement that ended the strike:

“Insofar as the settlement enhances the Polish workers’ power to struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy, revolutionaries can support the strike and its outcome. But only a blind man could fail to see the gross influence of the Catholic church and also pro-Western sentiments among the striking workers. If the settlement strengthens the working class organizationally, it also strengthens the forces of reaction. Poland stands today on a razor’s edge.”

Solidarność consolidated around a program for capitalist counterrevolution at its founding congress in September 1981. This was demonstrated by its calls for “free trade unions”—a war cry of Cold War anti-Sovietism—and for “free elections,” which would have meant capitalist restoration under the guise of parliamentary government (which is what happened in 1989-90). Solidarność was actively supported by a wide range of reactionary forces, from the Vatican under Polish Pope Karol Wojtyla (aka John Paul II) to union-busting U.S. president Ronald Reagan and Conservative British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Joining them were the pro-imperialist AFL-CIO labor bureaucracy and anti-communist social democrats like the German SPD, which acted as conduits for CIA funding and provided other material support to Solidarność.

The international Spartacist tendency, precursor to the International Communist League, raised the call “Stop Solidarność Counterrevolution!” (see WV No. 289, 25 September 1981). To the anti-socialist program of Solidarność, we counterposed the call for trade unions independent of bureaucratic control and based on a program of defending collectivized property. The demands raised in our articles—for strict separation of church and state, for collectivization of agriculture, for canceling Poland’s debt to the imperialist bankers, for military defense of the USSR against imperialism, for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy—constituted the programmatic core of what a Trotskyist internationalist vanguard party would have raised in the struggle to defend the Polish workers state against imperialism and capitalist restoration. We stressed that Polish workers needed to appropriate the proud traditions of the Polish communist movement. We pointed to the example of the internationalist Jewish woman fighter Rosa Luxemburg, who was murdered at the instigation of the German SPD during the failed 1918-19 German Revolution, which she help lead. We also pointed to the Pole Feliks Dzerzhinsky, Luxemburg’s comrade in the Polish revolutionary workers movement, who joined the ranks of the Russian Bolsheviks and went on to lead the Cheka—the Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage—after the October Revolution.

Our support for Stalinist general Jaruzelski’s suppression of Solidarność’ counterrevolutionary bid for power in December 1981 was an application of our unconditional military defense of the deformed and degenerated workers states against capitalist counterrevolution. At the same time we warned that the Stalinists were capable of selling out the Polish deformed workers state—which they eventually did in 1989-90. It was the impact of our Trotskyist program in opposition to Solidarność counterrevolution and our struggle against the capitalist reunification of Germany in 1989-90 that propelled the militants of the Young Left Movement (RML) in Poland toward the ICL. This resulted in the establishment of the Spartacist Group of Poland, a sympathizing section of the ICL, which existed until 2001. In contrast to the Polish “left,” who all hailed and supported Solidarność counterrevolution, the SGP exposed and opposed the clericalist, nationalist, capitalist-restorationist program which Walesa, Walentynowicz, Gwiazda, Kuron et al. stood for from the beginning.

Pseudo-Left Still Tails Solidarność

In the recent elections there was no candidate representing the working class by running independently of and against the bourgeois parties and candidates. Yet groups like Employee Democracy (PD), affiliated with the British Socialist Workers Party of the late Tony Cliff, urged support to presidential candidate Maria Szyszkowska, a bourgeois liberal who opposes the war in Iraq. PD shares the liberal anti-communist views of Szyszkowska, who criticizes Solidarność today but praises the Solidarność of the 1980s. She opposed making August 31 “Solidarność Day,” asserting that “this would be a rebuff to those who have lost by the transformations,” while stating at the same time: “I do not put in question the striving for freedom of 25 years ago. I admire, e.g., Ms. Walentynowicz, Mr. Gwiazda or the sadly departed Jacek Kuron. They were the pioneers of Solidarność” (www.senat.gov.pl). From a Marxist point of view, any electoral support to this bourgeois candidate was thoroughly unprincipled. Her electoral program did not even purport to speak in the name of the working class, let alone advocate anything socialist. Thus to call on workers to vote for Szyszkowska meant subordinating the working class to a political representative of the bourgeoisie—a form of class collaboration that Marxists oppose on principle.

Szyszkowska failed to get the necessary signatures to run for president. She then got put on the slate of the Polish Labor Party (PPP) in the parliamentary elections, from which she later withdrew. All the groups of the Polish “radical left” promoted a vote for candidates of the PPP, the political arm of the right-wing union Sierpien (August) 80.

Sierpien 80 originated as a split from an outfit called Solidarność 80, led by one Marian Jurczyk. At the 1981 Solidarność founding congress, Jurczyk was one of the most rabid anti-communists, garnering a quarter of the votes as a “radical” right-wing opponent of Walesa. At the time, Jurczyk declared that three-quarters of the Polish Stalinist leadership were really Jews who had changed their names and that “a couple of gallows would come in handy” to deal with these “traitors to Polish society.” Sierpien 80 split from Solidarność 80 claiming to be for “pure economic struggle,” but it was no less prone to populist nationalism, railing: “It doesn’t make sense to oppress a Pole in order to please Italians, Belgians and Spaniards.”

The origin of such reactionary trade unions lies in the fact that with the destruction of the Polish deformed workers state, Solidarność had served its purpose as the spearhead for capitalist counterrevolution. Its peasant sector and many intellectuals decamped, and Solidarność (and its offshoots) became more akin to a trade union in social composition. We observed: “The official Solidarność union now poses as a champion of working-class interests while revving up its anti-Communist demagogy and making overtures to openly fascistic forces” (WV No. 614, 13 January 1995). Taking into account only the latter, we argued one-sidedly in a 1998 article in Platforma Spartakusowców, paper of the SGP: “The function of Solidarność has nothing to do with ‘trade unionism’ of any kind, ‘militant’ or otherwise.” This formulation wrongly denied the fact that Solidarność is both a trade union and a reactionary clericalist organization. It organizes workers at the point of production, sometimes leading defensive economic struggles; at the same time it functions as a political movement closely allied to the Catholic hierarchy and explicitly right-wing nationalist parties.

Sierpien 80’s political arm, the PPP, originated before the March 2001 parliamentary elections as an electoral bloc of the right-wing, anti-Semitic Confederation for an Independent Poland-Fatherland and the Christian-National Union, as well as the fascist NOP. In May 2002, they sent a contingent of Polish miners to Paris to join the fascist Le Pen’s National Front in a march against the European Union.

In 2004, the PPP refurbished its image. PPP chairman Daniel Podrzycki (who died in a car accident the day before the recent parliamentary elections) tried to paint the PPP in social-democratic colors. In the recent campaign they put forward such demands as the 35-hour workweek with no lowering of wages, benefits for all unemployed throughout the whole period of unemployment, separation of church and state, equality of women and men, tolerance and respect for all minorities—national, religious and sexual. The PPP also demanded withdrawal of Polish troops from Iraq. This “turn to the left” is meant to provide the PPP with access to the social-democratic salons—and, no doubt, money—of the Party of European Socialists in the European Parliament. After Poland joined the EU, the PPP toned down some of its Polish chauvinism. But despite all this newfound “leftism,” Sierpien 80 wields anti-communist graphics and rhetoric in its campaign against the SLD.

The PPP organized an electoral bloc with the bourgeois liberals of the Anti-Clericalist Party of Poland, the bourgeois Greens, Solidarność-derived social democrats from the Polish Socialist Party and the ex-Stalinist Communist Party of Poland (KPP). The candidates of these parties ran on the PPP slate, which got less than 0.8 percent of the votes. Judged by its political program and history, the PPP is a bourgeois formation. To call for a working-class vote to these Polish nationalists and clerical reactionaries amounts to betraying the interests of the Polish proletariat.

Among the groups supporting PPP candidates is the Group for the Workers Party (GPR), Polish section of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) of Peter Taaffe. The GPR supported Grzegorz Kupis, a PPP candidate in the town of Radom, highlighting the fact that he is a tram worker and member of Sierpien 80 and more “radical” than the PPP. (The PPP slate listed him as a candidate of the Polish Ecological Party, the Greens.) The Revolutionary Left Movement (NLR), which describes itself as fraternally allied with both the USec and the thoroughly Labourite and anti-communist British Alliance for Workers Liberty, called for critical support for the whole PPP slate and for Podrzycki in the presidential race. They described the PPP coalition as a “great chance” to gain a hearing among workers, which would supposedly make it easier to “build a strong leftist formation in the future that would express the voice and the interests of the employee class in Poland” (www.marksizm.of.pl). Similarly, the Cliffite PD described the PPP program as “the most interesting, the most leftist electoral program” and anointed Podrzycki an “anti-capitalist” (www.pd.w.pl). Just as in the 1980s, all these groups promote illusions in the “left wing” of Solidarność reaction.

The Internet publication Platforma Proletariacka (PP), which first appeared in September 2002 and claimed that it “continues the work which was carried out by the Spartakusowska Grupa Polski,” advocated a vote to Szyszkowska’s presidential bid, but withdrew its electoral support when her candidacy on the PPP ticket was announced. When sympathizers and supporters of the ICL in Poland denounced this unprincipled support to a bourgeois candidate in a 4 September statement as “a desperate desire to exist on a ‘political scene’ saturated with the reactionary climate of post-counterrevolutionary Poland,” PP responded in a 6 October statement: “While the perception of Maria Szyszkowska as a liberal bourgeois candidate is quite correct, the conclusion [of not supporting Szyszkowska] is contorted and unfounded!” In other words, PP passed off as principled supporting a liberal bourgeois democrat who is outspoken in her admiration for the anti-communist founders of Solidarność. This constituted a repudiation of the ICL’s principled stand for working-class independence from the bourgeoisie and its representatives. In a 13 October statement, PP recognized that it had committed a “deadly error” and added, “In this way we—unwittingly—stood in the ranks of the ‘Solidarność’ left.”

In counterposition to the Polish fake left, the SGP consistently refused to vote not only for candidates under the banner of Solidarność, but also for the SLD, which never ran on the basis of class independence. In Platforma Spartakusowców, the SGP called for building a Leninist-Trotskyist party—a “tribune of the people” mobilizing workers and minorities in defense of the right to free abortion on demand, to defend immigrants against racist deportations and to mobilize to stop fascist, anti-Semitic provocations. The SGP opposed Poland’s entry into the European Union—an imperialist bloc directed against the working class and all the oppressed.

Our perspective is to build in Poland and other countries revolutionary workers parties, which will provide leadership in the struggle for socialist revolutions in capitalist countries and for proletarian political revolutions in the deformed workers states China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba. Our record of fighting against Solidarność counterrevolution and defending the Trotskyist position of unconditional military defense of the degenerated and deformed workers states constitutes the programmatic basis for a revolutionary organization in Poland!