Solidarity — Poland's Independent Trade Union by Denis MacShane, Spokesman Books, £3.50; Poland — the State of the Republic, two reports by the Experience and Discussion Group (DIP) Warsaw, Pluto Books, £4.95.
It must surely be the rapidity and unpredictability of the last year's events in Poland that has prevented their political significance being reflected in the volume of books on the subject, Both these contributions are therefore welcome — MacShane's no-nonsense account of the growth and functions of the first independent union in the 'People's Democracies', and the DIP reports' thorough and scathing critique of the political and socio-economic relations in Poland prior to the 1980 summer revolution. Both will have their special audience — MacShane for the trade union activist, and the DIP reports for the 'experts' on Poland. But it must be said that neither possess the same political insight as Daniel Singer's Road to Gdansk, nor do they adequately convey the extraordinary political importance of Poland's last eighteen months.
MacShane chronicles the previous workers' upsurges of 1956, 1970 and 1976 and the student revolt of 1968, as well as the phases of Solidarity's own development from the signing of the Gdansk Agreement to the registration of the union, from the Bydgoszcz crisis to this summer's relative stability. He examines the major forces which have shaped the Polish drama — the Church, the KOR, the ruling Communist Party, and Solidarity's leaders like Walesa. He also has an interesting chapter on the mass media, detailed accounts of the union's scrupulous regard for internal democracy, and a welcome appeal for international workers' solidarity with this second largest independent union movement in the world.
The background to this exciting development is detailed in the DIP reports on Poland, compiled through an analysis of questionnaires completed by intellectuals and party members in the late 1970s on the state of the nation. The overwhelming sentiment of the report is that the whole of Polish society is malfunctioning in a 'state of extreme moral and physical exhaustion', that all forms of authority particularly the mass media, lack basic credibility and that the inequalities of the system have robbed it of its most powerful argument over the capitalist system. The bureaucratic centralisation of the system is documented along with the resulting sense of powerlessness felt by the Polish people: 'A Polish citizen experiences the meanderings of politics and planning more or less as he experiences changes in the weather, as important changes he must adapt to but whose causes, wholly external, are not worth exploring more deeply, since he has no way of influencing them.'
But the Polish workers have shown that through united independent class action they can influence things; indeed that they can reshape society in a new image. Here is the weakness of the DIP reports in the light of the last eighteen months in Poland, They were able to articulate the profound sense of dissatisfaction with the prevailing system and its stultifying effects on all aspects of Polish life; they were even able to forecast that 'the nadir of crisis' was approaching, 'perhaps more profound than those of the past'; but they were singularly inadequate at pointing to the agency that would point a way out of the crisis.
The need for trade unions to be genuinely representative of the workers, for free elections and mass media, and for the restriction of the 'Nomenklatura' system, are all highlighted: but these changes are always seen as [illegible].
The weakness of his approach becomes most clear in the section on 'Solidarity's Achievements'. Not only is this curiously the shortest chapter in the book, but the title of its first sub-heading gives the game away — 'Health and Safety'. MacShane really does treat Solidarity as if it were just one big new trade union to be welcomed into the international workers' fold, And while this may be done with the most honourable of intentions — to persuade the sceptics in the ranks of our own labour movement of their international duty of solidarity — nevertheless, the result is [illegible] of the dynamic of [illegible].
Poland is not a socialist or communist country, despite the nationalisation of its industry and the state monopoly on foreign trade, But neither is it a capitalist country with all the 'democratic' trappings that normally go with capitalism in the advanced countries. It is a society in transition, where capitalism has been overthrown but the resulting potential for workers' power has been stifled by a huge party and state bureaucracy. The staggering size of this layer is graphically demonstrated by the [illegible] to party appointment — the 'Nomenklatura' — which is reprinted in MacShane's book. The specific feature of this political system is the total monopoly of political power exercised by the ruling bureaucracy over the working class. Any form of independent working class political action threatens the whole political edifice. In other words independent trade unions are incompatible with the system.
The international labour movement welcomed with open arms the new mass union movement in Spain as it emerged from the Francoist dictatorship. But this development in no way threatened to turn world politics upside down in the way that the Polish events have done. The reason is simple: mass independent trade unions are basically compatible with capitalist democracy in a way that they are not for the so-called 'People's Democracies'. And the extraordinary significance of the Polish events is that for the first time for generations the workers of the world are seeing a genuine alternative to capitalism and Stalinism being born in one of the most advanced industrialised countries of the world.
[illegible] from a [illegible] of the existing [illegible] bureaucracy, it is the Polish workers who are now making these same demands and who are using their strength as workers to achieve them, Having started down the road of independent unions, each new confrontation with the authorities and each new congress resolution points to the inescapable conclusion: that the only real way out of the Polish crisis is not for Solidarity to become a better trade union or to seek a liberal wing of the bureaucracy with which to ally, but for it to systematically build the only alternative political power: workers' socialist democracy.