Hardline anti-Solidarnosc bureaucratic militant Olzowski was the first to offer the carrot of a new National Front to the Walesa-Glemp axis.Having lured Solidarnosc’s leadership into negotiations, Jaruzelski proceeded to play on the divisions in Solidarnosc’s ranks. In the face of a mass exodus out of the Stalinist official unions, mass recruitment to Solidarnosc among rank and file party members and universal hatred and contempt for the corrupt and discredited Gierek regime, the Stalinists had no immediate alternative to the official recognition and registration of Solidarnosc.But the concessions wrung from the regime—on pay, on union recognition, on Saturday working—and the new self-confidence of the working class could only have been defended and extended by the working class finally destroying the political power, repressive apparatus and economic privileges of the bureaucracy: by political revolution. ZOMO had rehearsed the “Eighteenth Brumaire” of General Jaruzelski.The coup was carried though with bloody precision.
Whatever the claims of the KPN leaders, a capitalist Poland would inevitably become a semi-colony of western capitalism. This call was strengthened after riot police broke up the Warsaw Fire Academy sit-in in early December.
Instead the Stalinists braced themselves to apply military force against Solidarnosc.In late November the police raided Kuron’s meeting called to establish the social democratic clubs. In doing so, they broke the mold of Soviet-bloc countries by creating a means of challenging rule from above; their achievement was the beginning of the end of Of necessity it would struggle to build the nuclei of fraternal parties in the other degenerate workers' states as a partt of a rebuilt revolutionary communist internaional in the tradition of Lenin and Trotsky.Rural Solidarnosc mobilised both the oppressed poor peasants and the richer rural farmers against the regime. On a world scale the Catholic church is inevitably committed to the maintenance of the exploitative order of capitalism and to the destruction of those “godless” states that have overthrown the private property that the church sees as sacred.
For the IC(FI), “democracy” is given no class content. They were able to pose as intransigent opponents of the bureaucratic tyranny without their reactionary and anti-working class programme being challenged by a revolutionary internationalist party.We see no evidence that those elements who opposed Walesa’s collaborationist leadership—Jurcyczk, Rulewski, Gwiazda—differed qualitatively from Walesa in programme or perspective. In this case, their fear of the “impurities” of Polish workers’ consciousness drives the iSt into support for Jaruzelski and the Stalinist bureaucracy.In various declarations the USFI failed to raise the question of revolution against the bureaucracy. (Trygodnik Mazowze No13, 12.5.82) and has called for agitation amongst the soldiers and police. This is the objective of the military coup.
As such he is unable to give a proper retrospective on their legacy, instead speculating on what the events would mean for the future of Poland. Revolutionary Marxists recognise that the Polish workers must organise for an uprising and must seek to break the morale and loyalty of the troops and police.