The imposition of martial law in Poland opened up a new phase in the extraordinary developments in Poland over the past two years. Oliver MacDonald argues that these events pose fundamental programmatic and strategic questions for socialists, in particular signalling the end of official Polish Communism as a movement with any sort of working class tradition.
The class character and role of Solidarity
It should be evident to all but the blind that Solidarity has been a mass, working class movement, based primarily on the industrial working class. This class character was shown tragically by the nature of the resistance that occurred after the military coup of 13 December. Open, active resistance came almost exclusively from the industrial workers and the miners, and it came massively and heroically. Even from the scanty reports that we have received, it is clear that every big plant in the country and all the main industrial centres were gripped by occupation strikes, despite the military junta's threats of execution for people engaging in such defiance. In the face of such evidence, it is contemptible to hear anyone calling themselves socialist trying to suggest that Solidarity has been in some sense an 'anti-working class' force.
At the same time, Solidarity was never simply a trade union, although many of its leaders, especially in the early days of its growth, sought vigorously to squeeze this great proletarian social movement into a purely trade union mould. If Solidarity had been simply a trade union it would not have grown so swiftly and massively, considering all the risks attendant on joining the organisation — Solidarity was recognised legally only in November 1980 and in its early days members were subject to considerable harassment. The movement expressed the national, democratic and egalitarian aspirations of the Polish workers. The industrial workers saw themselves as leading the entire nation in a movement to gain effective control over their own destiny. They saw Solidarity as the instrument through which all the people's hopes and interests could be defended.
This did not mean that the workers saw Solidarity as formally taking power. On the contrary, for most of the time when Solidarity was able to openly exist, its members hoped that the Communist Party leaders would continue in office while respecting the will of the only really authentic institution of the working people.
Those socialists who are suspicious of the national and democratic aspirations of Poland's workers only betray their own narrow, bureaucratic outlook. They for example fear that a movement for greater national autonomy could jeopardise the international position of the Soviet Union. The reverse is the case. One of the biggest threats to the Russian workers historically has been the smouldering discontent of working people throughout Eastern Europe over the humiliating and oppressive political control exercised over their destinies by the Soviet bureaucracy. While the consequent divisions between the Russian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish and East German workers continue to exist they provide a field day for imperialism in Eastern Europe. The rise of Solidarity offered the possibility of restoring real harmony and unity between the Russian and Polish peoples on the basis of allowing the Polish people to order their own affairs.
As to how this would have occurred if Solidarity's demands had been implemented, the Polish people would have made a giant leap towards a genuinely socialist and democratic society, a society with a nationalised economy under genuine popular control. Only sectarians can object that the workers' battle to exercise effective working class control over the economy was not phrased in Marxist terminology, a terminology utterly discredited by the oppression which it had served for so long. The productive forces in Poland under Gierek were being strangled by the bureaucratic dictatorship. Solidarity's demand for genuinely democratic control from below was the prerequisite for the development of the Polish economy.
The Communist Party: an instrument of a bureaucratic caste
The Polish events have yet again put to the test the character of the regimes in Eastern Europe. Many socialists in the West have tried to believe that these regimes are in some sense socialist, working class regimes, however distorted by bureaucratic privileges and authoritarian methods of rule. It is certainly true that for the nationalised economies of Eastern Europe to function, it is necessary for the regimes to enlist disciplined co-operation from sections of the working class through drawing workers into the Communist Party. In Poland in the late 1970s some 46 per cent of the Communist Party's membership were thus officially classified as workers. And the Polish events have yet again demonstrated that in a crisis involving independent working class action, the rank and file membership of the Communist Party responds to the movement from below, tends to join it, and seeks to re-orient the party leadership. This was shown in the growing rank and file 'anti-apparatus' movement inside the PUWP between the autumn of 1980 and the summer of 1981. But the Polish crisis has also revealed the inability of such rank and file [illegible] to capture the centres of power within the Communist Party. It demonstrates that in essence these parties are subordinated to a state/party bureaucratic caste able to operate entirely autonomously from the party's rank and file. The military coup of 13 December demonstrates in the most dramatic and brutal way the autonomous grip which this bureaucratic caste has over the states of Eastern Europe. The coup demonstrates the readiness of this caste [illegible] altogether from the structures of the Communist Party itself and [illegible] naked force not only against Solidarity and the working class but against its own party membership.
The role of the Soviet bureaucracy
With or without Poland's proximity to the Soviet Union, the bureaucratic caste in Warsaw would have resisted tooth and nail the working class upsurge in Poland. But it is very unlikely that they would have succeeded. Ever since August 1980 there has been systematic Soviet pressure on the Polish bureaucracy to go onto the offensive against the workers and break the back of Solidarity. The 13 December military coup was carried out with the closest co-operation of the chiefs of the Soviet Army. The KGB has been massively intervening in Polish politics throughout the entire crisis. Since the creation of Solidarity, the real battle has been that between the Polish workers and the Kremlin. The Polish workers were absolutely right to grasp the national character of their struggle.
The events in Poland give the lie to those on the left in the West who continue to imagine that the Soviet leadership has changed its spots and is ready to go along with any amount of domestic change in Eastern Europe provided it is not 'right-wing' and provided that it will not produce a government which is pro-American or 'neutral'. What dismayed the Soviet leadership was precisely the working class character of the movement in Poland, the fact that it presented a mortal threat to bureaucratic power and privilege throughout the region.
At the same time, the Polish crisis demonstrated that the Soviet leadership was extremely reluctant to invade the country against the Polish government of the day. It, of course, has the military power to wipe the Poles off the map, but it understood the massive political price it would have to pay for such an invasion. There are two possible explanations for why the bureaucracy delayed so long before unleashing violence against the Polish labour movement. The first is that the bureaucracy acted with restraint so long as the labour movement remained 'moderate' and under bureaucratic hegemony. The other is that it would not strike militarily until the labour movement had been weakened, thrown back on the defensive, divided and separated from various middle class layers. There is overwhelming evidence that the second explanation is nearer the mark. Ever since November 1980, when the Soviet leadership had second thoughts about military invasion by the Warsaw Pact, the Kremlin embarked upon a policy of political destabilisation and economic strangulation in Poland. This carefully orchestrated campaign, making Polish politics lurch from one nerve-wracking confrontation to another, was conceived as a prolonged softening-up process in preparation for a crack-down to crush the independent labour movement.
Was there an alternative way out?
In future years, the Polish people and the left in the West will debate the painful question of whether there was a way by which Solidarity could have avoided the current crack-down. We will not argue this point in detail here, confining ourselves to a few general points.
There are many arguments to the effect that the Soviet Union lays down certain limits on change in Eastern Europe which must not be overstepped. This banal argument doesn't get us very far, certainly not beyond 15 August 1980, the day after the mass strike movement began in Gdansk. Solidarity vastly overstepped the Kremlin's 'limits' simply by establishing itself as an independent movement. The problem should rather be turned around the other way: were there limits that Solidarity could have imposed on the bureaucracy beyond those that it did establish?
There are those who believe that the coup was produced by the absence of one vital ingredient — 'goodwill'. If only there had been more of this and less 'extremism' on both sides, so the argument runs, all could have been well and an 'historic compromise' could have been achieved with national accord breaking out through the good offices of Jaruzelski, Glemp and Walesa.
When any profound social conflict explodes into violent confrontation such as the coup in Chile or the current Polish crisis, there are always those who believe that such events were produced by accident, misunderstanding or the wrong psychological approach on someone's part. All such explanations have the enormous advantage that they release their proponents from drawing any theoretical or political conclusions from what has happened. No general conclusions can be drawn, they argue, because it was all an historic mistake! Marxists, on the other hand, are inclined to see violent conflicts in any society as the product of explosive social contradictions between antagonistic social forces. It is scarcely possible to deny the reality of this social antagonism in the acute struggles in Poland over the last 17 months. The so-called 'extremism' of such party leaders as Stefan Olszowski was in reality a consistent political expression of the social interests of the bureaucratic caste. And the 'extremism' inside Solidarity was not so much a product of small political groups but rather a relentless pressure for real solutions from the mass base of Solidarity.
There were hopes on both sides in the successful negotiation of a National Unity Front between the government and Solidarity in the months before the coup. But no serious observer of the Polish scene from any quarter could have doubted that such a 'national unity' would have been no more than a lull, a temporary halting of the open social struggle, or more likely simply a new form of continuation of the social struggle. Jaruzelski and Solidarity both approached such a front from the angle of horses and riders: Jaruzelski insisted on being the rider, in other words he saw the Front as a means of pushing Solidarity back and down onto all fours. Solidarity saw the Front as a means of ensuring that it could block any measures that the government tried to take that would be against the vital interests of the workers. The Front at best would not have been a solution to the basic problems, just a new way of posing them. And in the event the negotiations on the Front were used by Jaruzelski as a screen of hope behind which the forces of reaction could prepare themselves.
Solidarity could only have guaranteed its security by systematically unifying the mass movement round the perspectives for breaking up the bureaucratic apparatus and, either taking the power itself, or ensuring the formation of a broken-backed Communist Party government, whose capacity to resist Solidarity had been crushed. If Solidarity's leaders had adopted such an alternative strategy and tactics it could have prevented the Polish bureaucracy from being able to successfully carry out a domestic military coup. This would then have presented the Soviet bureaucracy with a choice between an open invasion against the Polish People's Republic and an economic blockade. If it had chosen the former there could have been long-term, sustained mass national resistance. If it had chosen the latter strategy, then the question would have been whether the Western labour movements could have been mobilised to force their countries to give huge economic assistance to the Polish workers. Given the state of political awareness in the Western labour movements about the significance of the Polish struggle and the attitude of the Western European bourgeoisies, it is an open question as to whether Poland's workers could have expected effective economic and political support from the West. For throughout the entire Polish crisis we have had the following paradoxical state of affairs in many Western European countries: inside the labour movement there was a fear among many socialists that perhaps Solidarity was in some way at least 'objectively' an aid to the Western bourgeoisies in their NATO campaign against the USSR; while within those bourgeoisies themselves there was strong support for the efforts of the Soviet and Polish bureaucracies to get on top of Solidarity and break the workers' movement.
The future course of events in Poland
The Stalinist bureaucracy must entirely break the will of the Polish working class in order to secure its own future. The industrial workers' fierce, open resistance to the coup over Christmas has been beaten back by wave after wave of terrible repression. But passive resistance remains strong and Solidarity's organisation is not crushed. Unless and until this is achieved — with the clandestine forces of Solidarity left as an isolated fragment without any organisational links with sections of the masses — all talk of Kadarisation in Poland is nonsense.
There is a sickening discussion in the Western bourgeois press over whether it would be better for Jaruzelski to crush the Polish workers or for Moscow to do it. The Americans would prefer Moscow to crush the Polish workers because then they could break up West Germany's detente with Moscow and step up re-armament. The West German bourgeoisie wants Jaruzelski to do it for the opposite reason: so that they can say it is a purely internal Polish business that should not affect their relations with Moscow.
For the international labour movement, the issue is exactly the reverse: not how the Polish workers should be crushed, but how to aid them in throwing back their Soviet-Polish oppressors. It still cannot be ruled out that continued working class resistance will blow apart the military-bureaucratic junta and re-open a phase of mass political struggle in Poland. This we must hope and work for: down with the Jaruzelski-Brezhnev oppressors of the Polish workers! Unconditional solidarity with Solidarity and the mass resistance movement! This is the only internationalist, working class response to the Polish crisis.
But from what we know of events in Poland the working class has suffered a serious defeat and the military-bureaucratic caste will be able to survive the coming months. It has the backing of the neighbouring bureaucracies, of the Western European bourgeoisie and at the very least the passive neutrality of the Catholic Church hierarchy and a big part of the middle classes in Poland.
It will never be able to crush the tradition of Solidarity among the Polish workers. This tradition is now indestructible. We must do what we can to try to ensure that it will also not be able to crush the organised resistance movement: official labour movement material and moral assistance to this resistance movement will be vital over the whole of the next period.
One of the biggest issues will be how the regime intends to permanently break the thousands upon thousands of leaders of the movement. Kill off a few thousand in addition to the hundreds already dead? Put them in concentration camps for years? Export them to the West? It is not an easy question.
Another issue is what sort of channels the regime is going to establish in order to enable potential collaborators to pass over to the side of Jaruzelski with as little pain as possible. But before such channels can be securely put into place, the regime itself must reconstitute its own apparatus locally as well as nationally. In the first instance this apparatus can only comprise the corrupt and the mad-dogs of Stalinism, people ready to sink their teeth into whatever seems likely to gain Pravda's approval. These elements do not of course make for competent administration and their role will later be reduced to make way for more agile figures, such as those who read the wind wrongly and opportunistically tried to ingratiate themselves with the working class over the last six months.
But if the resistance continues strongly, the mad-dogs will have to be kept on and their incompetent revenge-style of bureaucratic rule will create problems for the central bureaucracy. Some of them are also likely to get bumped off by nationalist-terrorist groups, and others will find girders descending on their heads in steel plants. Such events will certainly not encourage the others to keep cool heads. Still, this is the price Moscow must be prepared to pay to hold on to power when official Communism is regarded as a stinking, filthy hangman by the workers.
Then there is the economic crisis. This is very useful to the bureaucracy when the main task is strangling the workers' movement. You can starve the workers out by sacking them from work and thus denying them ration cards while supplying a lot of the food through the factories rather than the shops. This is the tactic at the moment, apart from in Warsaw itself where foreign journalists and dignitaries are living. Elsewhere, the bureaucracy is prepared to disrupt production as much as necessary to crush the workers. While the struggle is on, to hell with economic recovery!
But for the middle classes and for the less determined sections of the workers, there must be some economic improvement if the bureaucracy wishes to stabilise its rule. And in conditions of international economic crisis and heavy strains on the Soviet and other Eastern European economies, this is not going to be easy. If it doesn't happen, then there is going to be continued ferment and unrest even if Solidarity's clandestine resistance organisation is crushed. But the bureaucracy has reason to hope for substantial help from the capitalist classes in Western Europe.
Over all, if the military-bureaucratic junta is successful in crushing the workers, then we will see the emergence of the CP again and the withdrawal of the army leadership to the background — though probably not out of the political arena altogether — over the coming months. There will then be a long period of attempting to consolidate the satellite institutions of the bureaucracy locally and nationally, and this will last for years. Then there will, of course, be an attempt at Kadarisation.
As we have argued, the fundamental reality of the Polish crisis has been the struggle between the bureaucratic state-party apparatus of Moscow-Warsaw on the one hand and the industrial workers on the other. Any illusion that there can be a middle way when the military-bureaucratic apparatus has launched terror against the workers is ridiculous. All political currents in Poland must base themselves on one or other of these two forces. Until this battle has been decisively won by either side no 'compromise', intermediate, 'liberal' regime is possible. On this question of principle, there is no difference whatever between Rakowski, Jaruzelski, Olszowski and Siwak. There is confusion and difference of opinion only on tactics for enforcing the principles of the counter-revolution. Rakowski and Siwak can perhaps argue the toss over such matters as the sentence that should be meted out to Edward Gierek — a man guilty of far less crimes against Poland's workers than the sickening hypocrites of the Rakowski type now presiding over the worst terror seen in Poland since the Nazi occupation during the war.
Our defence of the rights of the Polish people is unconditional
The upheaval in Poland over the last two years has taken place against a darkening international background primarily caused by the renewed drive for world hegemony on the part of US imperialism both under Carter and then Reagan. The US war preparations pose a real medium term threat of global war and of a regional nuclear war in Europe. This US drive has led to an enormous mass movement throughout Europe against NATO's nuclear re-armament, undoubtedly the most positive political development in European politics at the present time. But the menace of Reaganism and Thatcherism sometimes leads socialists into a superficial response which involves ignoring every political question except the nuclear threat, or worse, a response which involves supporting all those who publicly oppose the US policy — for example the Soviet leadership itself. Solidarity did not loudly oppose Cruise and Pershing missiles, Brezhnev did: therefore... so this superficial reasoning goes. And this line of thought is but a short step from the following: let us strengthen the main organised bulwark against the USA, the Soviet leadership, against everything that appears to weaken it, such as the struggle of the Poles for national rights and democratic rights.
On the other hand, an equally fallacious line of reasoning is pursued by some of those who are most deeply committed to Solidarity. It is easy for them to start playing down the menace [illegible] see the USSR as the main threat to the working people of Europe.
Both approaches ignore the most fundamental fact for a socialist: that lasting peace, democratic rights and economic progress in Europe require much more than successfully blocking Cruise and Pershing, and much more than successfully blocking Soviet intervention in Poland. They require international socialism, a united socialist Europe embracing both halves of the continent. This historic goal will not only mark the culmination of European history, it will also mark the beginning of the end of the power of US imperialism and the threat of war that it carries.
It is in the perspective of this positive historic objective that socialists should view both the upsurge of the Polish working class and the growing peace movement in Europe. Both these movements have been powerful levers in the struggle for a united socialist states of Europe. It would be utterly self-defeating for socialists to try to use one of these levers against the other or to see one as detracting from the other. Insofar as the working people of Poland gain their rights and win control over their own affairs, this would be a springboard from which the workers of surrounding countries could leap forward towards power.
The one great benefit which socialism and only socialism provides is that it enables all the economic, social and political oppressions of the existing world to be overcome. This is what enables the socialist movement to root itself indestructibly in the mass of people, because only socialism brings full democratic control, full national equality and full social equality into being. Those socialists therefore who oppose or remain neutral over the national and democratic struggles of the Polish people in the name of international tactical requirements of the struggle for 'socialism' are cutting their own throats. The real task for socialists is to find the way of combining and uniting all the disparate and often superficially conflicting progressive movements in Europe into one common river of advance.
This is no easy task, as we can see if we remember that the Sandinistas have supported the Jaruzelski coup and if we also remember that many people in Eastern Europe totally fail to grasp the vital need to give unconditional support to the national liberation movements in the Third World. It is a task that requires more than propaganda: it requires organisation, and adequate tactical skill on the part of socialists so that they can find the shortest practical route to international unity. But such tactics must be geared to achieving real unity on the basis of the progressive aspirations of each section of the working class throughout the world.
Our support for the Polish people's right to self-determination is unconditional. This support is in no way altered by the fact that in the event of a war between the USA and the USSR we would unconditionally defend the rights and future of the Russian workers. What it does mean is that we would have nothing to do with the pro-American political forces that would want to use the oppression of the Poles in the service of a war to crush the Russian people; nor would we have anything to do with pro-Kremlin forces that wished to use the issue of defending the Russian workers as a means of justifying and perpetuating Kremlin domination of the Poles.
Eastern and Western Europe after the Polish crackdown
With such general considerations in mind, we must consider the present international context of the Polish crisis and how it will affect political developments in Eastern and Western Europe in coming years. The underlying problem that Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union have faced for more than a decade has been the general decline in the rate of growth of the Eastern European and Soviet economies. In essence, this decline is linked to two basic features of these economies: the barrier to their growth imposed by the fact that they remain surrounded by a world capitalist market that continues to possess a higher level of productivity of labour than Comecon; secondly, the rule over these societies by bureaucratic castes which makes impossible the voluntary mobilisation of the working class in economic life, and which also blocks the development of a rational division of labour and co-operation within Comecon.
With the impossibility of the Soviet bureaucracy voluntarily liquidating itself and its satellite bureaucracies, there has been no chance of resolving the second problem. The result was to push the regimes more and more towards participating on the world capitalist market in order to stem the economic stagnation. And given that rising living standards are a traditional mechanism for ensuring political stability for the bureaucratic castes in Eastern Europe, this has acted as a growing spur to participation in the world capitalist economy. The most dramatic example of this economic swing towards the West was the policy adopted by the Gierek government in Poland. But it applied also to the Hungarians and the East Germans. If this policy was pursued to its logical conclusion it would lead to the break-up of Comecon and the pulling of some Eastern European states inexorably into the imperialist economic sphere, with all the potential repercussions for international politics and for domestic social arrangements that would follow.
In the field of economic policy, the Soviet leadership in the 1970s did not block this Eastern European turn to the West by administrative fiat — it was, after all, making the same turn itself. But it did try to campaign and offer economic incentives to Eastern Europe for greater Comecon integration. These incentives basically boil down to sacrificing Soviet domestic growth for the sake of the continued Soviet political hegemony over Eastern Europe.
The Soviet leadership has been prepared to develop an economic relationship with Eastern Europe that gives the Soviet economy almost a classical colonial relationship with the economies of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary; the Soviet Union supplies these economies with raw materials at prices generally much cheaper than those on the world market; and in return the Soviet economy imports manufactured goods from Eastern Europe of a quality largely considerably inferior to those it could obtain on the world capitalist market. True, the Soviet economy has the advantage of the fact that this trade is carried on in roubles rather than Western currencies. But overall, the arrangement involves an unfavourable set of exchanges for the Soviet economy in world capitalist market terms.
The second response of the Kremlin to this pressure from the world capitalist market was to take measures to ensure greater political co-operation from the Western European bourgeoisies — in essence a guarantee that they would not try any monkey-business in the Soviet sphere designed to destabilise Soviet political control there. This was a central feature of Brezhnev's so-called 'peace programme' unveiled at the start of the 1970s.
What has happened during the last decade has been that the Hungarian, Polish and East German economies have become deeply involved in economic relations with the West and particularly with the West Germans. So great has this involvement become that both the Poles and the Hungarians have applied this winter to join the IMF — evidently against Soviet wishes. Further, under Carter and then Reagan, the Americans have turned towards a policy of causing political trouble for the USSR in Eastern Europe, as well as trying to pull the West Germans in the same direction. The Polish crisis has brought all these problems to a head, for the Kremlin. If it sharply pulled the Eastern European economies away from their deepening economic relations with the West, this would either create a gigantic strain on the Soviet economy in its efforts to fill the vacuum; or it would lead to a dramatic economic crisis in the Hungarian and East German economies, or it would do both. And in Poland both would certainly occur. On the other hand, if the Soviet leaders allow the economic trends of the 1970s to continue in the new political atmosphere of the 1980s, a point could come where a government in Bonn closely aligned to the US would have the economic and political leverage to prise some of the Eastern European states out of Comecon altogether.
The Polish coup has forced these problems into the open. Now that the Soviet leadership has regained a secure power-base in Poland, political logic requires a massive injection of Soviet economic aid to revive the economy and pay off Poland's most pressing debts. In this way the Polish bureaucracy can hope to regain some sort of tacit support from sections of the population. On the other hand the Soviet economy is itself very overstretched domestically, and also in the very favourable terms it is offering to other Eastern European economies. So economic logic suggests establishing the right political basis and climate for massive Western economic aid to Poland. However, the problem here is the deterioration in Soviet relations with the USA and the very precarious state of relations between Moscow and Bonn. If the Soviet Union further opens the Polish economy to the West and Bonn then swings back under US hegemony with the present type of leadership in Washington, it could produce a convulsive and dangerous crisis for the Soviet leadership in East Central Europe in the next few years.
If we then turn to the attitude of the imperialist powers towards the Polish crisis and Eastern Europe in its aftermath, we find considerable political turmoil. During the last couple of decades the USA has lost its overwhelming ascendancy within the imperialist camp as West Germany and Japan have grown in strength, outstripping the USA in labour productivity, and engaging in a growing rivalry with the USA in the economic field. In addition, West Germany used the fact that the USA was bogged down in Vietnam and seeking a wide-scale deal with Moscow at the start of the 1970s to break out of its own dependent status vis-a-vis the US through Ostpolitik. By this means West Germany has been able to increasingly assert itself in the field of international politics and to establish itself in a pivotal position between Washington and Moscow — the position that the British fatuously dreamed of occupying until the end of the MacMillan era, and that which de Gaulle temporarily [illegible].
With the American global counter-offensive to re-establish its hegemonic position in all fields, the West German bourgeoisie has been thrown onto the political defensive. It desperately wants to maintain its new, extensive field for economic operations in Eastern Europe and to use Soviet fuel supplies to extend its independence from US-controlled Middle East oil. In the political field its pivotal role in East-West relations depends upon there being some possibility of mediation between Washington and Moscow. If there is head-on general confrontation between the two, Bonn is faced with an agonising choice between knuckling under to Washington altogether and breaking up the NATO alliance as West Germany swings into a new Rapallo with Moscow.
Why the Kremlin has not moved in this direction before now (at least since the early 1950s in its efforts then to halt German re-armament) is because such a move would break the Yalta agreements and open up a period of acute turmoil throughout Europe. Such upheavals would not be at all popular in Moscow, but if the US offensive continues they could become a lesser evil than a re-arming, aggressive USA.
The Polish coup has brought this struggle between Washington and Bonn almost to a breaking point. The US drive to install Pershing and Cruise missiles in West Germany is another flash-point in the same struggle. Washington's sanctions against the USSR were in reality as much directed at Bonn as at Moscow. Reagan has given the impression that he wants to force Bonn either to savage its own economic and political interests or to go with Moscow against the other main NATO powers. Bonn on the other hand is trying to rally the Common Market countries behind the twin banners of continued detente and business as usual with Eastern Europe. So far there has been a patched up compromise. But Washington is playing the Polish crisis for all its worth in a ruthless fashion against its West German ally.
This struggle in the West is, of course, a matter of great concern to the Soviet leadership and one of a number of bold moves by the Soviets could decisively affect the outcome of the Bonn-Washington conflict. But the Soviet leadership does not seem to have made up its mind which moves to make.
Strategic choices facing the Russians
Since at least the beginning of the 1970s and in some respects for much longer, the Soviet leadership has sought to defend its own power internationally through co-operation with the USA. For the deeply conservative bureaucrats in the Kremlin surveying a world in menacing turmoil, the attractions of the prospect of world management by the two super-powers are overwhelming. Through both having an enormous military (nuclear) superiority over all other powers and then agreeing on each others' vital interests and spheres of control, the bureaucratic caste's position can, so they hoped, be shored up, while anybody trying to upset the apple-cart can be accused of threatening 'world peace'! Like other 'mini historic compromises' such as the Italian effort, this world historic compromise between the super-powers rests on the shakiest possible foundations — antagonistic social bases. Harmony at the top is disrupted by class struggle down below and soon enough each partner at the top gets suspicious that the other may be stoking the fires of class struggle in his camp. Compromise disintegrates into confrontation.
Forces that have little or nothing to do with the hand of Leonid Brezhnev have shaken and weakened the US, so Washington is turning towards confrontation. So far the Kremlin has not irrevocably given up its search for renewed collaboration with Washington. Some advisors there undoubtedly favour its continuation. But the China card has been a dirty blow in Moscow's eyes and so has the new US arms race. And the human rights campaign followed by the US offensive over Poland have all further alarmed Moscow.
The time may be approaching when the Soviet leadership feels it should abandon co-operative efforts with Washington and go on a political counter-offensive by making a serious bid for the West Germans (and the Japanese and Chinese?) If the Russians wished to do so, they could take a number of steps: on condition that West Germany take a 'responsible' line in Poland and Eastern Europe, easing economic strains by pumping in funds, while strongly backing Soviet control of the area, Moscow could 'unconditionally' withdraw SS20s thus enabling Bonn to sweep the board against the Americans in the political battle over re-armament in the West; it could also take a major initiative towards the neutralisation of central Europe or towards further drawing together of the two Germanies; it could also offer massive new investment openings in Siberia with a less stringent limitation of private capitalist investment there. As US pressure mounts on the West Germans, some such moves may become necessary for the Kremlin simply to maintain the stable relationship that it has had with Bonn over the last decade.
A socialist European strategy after Poland
There are those on the left who believe that socialism can be achieved in this or that single European country in a 'cold', stable international framework: socialism and working class power within the framework of NATO! Or socialism and democratic working class power in the framework of a stable Warsaw Pact in Eastern Europe! The Polish crisis on one side and events such as those in Greece, Spain or Turkey in recent years should surely demonstrate that such ideas are a complete illusion.
Another illusion on the left is that even if socialist advance in Western Europe faces bitter opposition from other NATO powers, and above all from the USA, at least it will be looked upon favourably by the Kremlin (there is a similar illusion in Eastern Europe that a democratic version of a planned economy in Eastern Europe will be welcomed by the Kremlin). In reality, the Soviet leadership combines resolute determination to maintain its own control over Eastern Europe with an equally vigorous defence of the West European bourgeoisies' right to rule Western Europe. It does so for exactly the same reason that the West has respected Yalta in the East; a genuinely socialist, democratic workers' state in Western Europe would be no more welcome in Moscow than Solidarity in power would be welcomed in Bonn.
Thus, socialists are not at all in favour of what either Moscow or Washington mean when they speak of the need for 'stability' in Europe. Such 'stability' is a code word for the status quo. Socialism will come to Europe only through considerable political turmoil and upheaval across the continent. And a key strategic necessity in the international struggle for socialism in Europe is the need for a link-up between the workers of Eastern and Western Europe. Such a link up has nothing in common with the anti-Yalta propaganda of NATO which means rolling back Eastern Europe and which could only be achieved over the corpses of workers on both sides of the divided continent.
But the reason why such a link up between the labour movements of the West and workers in Eastern Europe is so vital is that it destroys the main political weapon used by both the Kremlin and Washington against mass movements in their sector: that such movements are the creature of the other super-power (e.g. Solidarity = CIA, CND = CPSU).
There are various weak links in the European international power structure that have appeared at various times: Yugoslavia and the South European road that was visible in the late 1940s with the revolution in Greece, the Tito-Stalin break, and the weak position of Italian capitalism. These could surface again and socialists look with hope at the progress of the labour movement in Greece. Another weak link was the powerful socialist tradition in the Czech working class which surfaced in 1968 and, if consolidated, would have had a gigantic impact on the working class in Western Europe. And then there has been the libertarian, national tradition of the Polish workers producing Solidarity, which could have had a powerful radicalising effect on the labour movements of the West, which in turn could have had a feed-back effect in other Eastern European working classes.
The defeat of Solidarity, if it is successfully carried through by the Jaruzelski dictatorship, is a serious blow to the struggle for socialism in Europe. But it will only be a temporary defeat, and it is vital that socialists in Western Europe seek to use the coming period to ensure that when Poland's workers rise again they will have renewed confidence in the fact that they will have strong support from Western Europe's labour movements — much more so than they received over the last 16 months.
In the meantime, the battle between the imperialist powers in the West and the pressures on the Kremlin may open up one of the biggest sleeping socialist volcanoes in the continent, the biggest potential fissure of all in the pattern of anti-Socialist power in Europe: the German question. If Moscow and Bonn are pushed together by the economic and political pressures discussed above, powerful undercurrents may again come to the surface of working class consciousness in the two halves of Germany, the undercurrents of hope in a United Socialist Germany breaking from both Washington and Moscow and becoming the cornerstone of a United Socialist Europe.
In East Germany such hopes remain strong inside the working class and an underground Marxist socialist culture remains strong. In West Germany, socialist consciousness and organisation is far weaker. But the peace and anti-nuclear movements there contain the seeds of a movement for a united and socialist Germany, and such seeds could grow rapidly in the sort of international conditions that may develop in Europe in coming years.
But for socialist advance to take place and for the labour movement to grow stronger in Western Europe in the immediate period, militant, practical and political support for the Polish workers is necessary. This is vital not only for the Polish workers, but also so that the labour movements in the West should not lose the trust of the broad masses of working people, who are both horrified by the repression in Poland, and, also subjected to a barrage of bourgeois anti-socialist propaganda as a result.
The Polish crisis will further exacerbate the crisis of Stalinism in Western Europe, weakening the hold of the CPs within the working class and strengthening the position of the Socialist Parties within the labour movements of most Western European countries. The main Stalinist party in Western Europe, the French Communist Party, will suffer greatly from the SP onslaught over Poland which is likely to be a protracted offensive as the Polish crisis continues. In addition, the Polish crisis has opened up a deep gulf between the PCF and the Italian CP which has moved further from Stalinism in a major ideological break with Moscow. Thus the PCI will move further down the road of social democratisation. More and more the politics of the Western European labour movements will be dominated by the politics of the Socialist Parties and of left, non-Stalinist trends within them.
As the crisis of German-American relations deepens the Socialist Party leaderships in Europe will themselves tend to divide between those leaning towards the Americans and those tending towards the West Germans. The former will back the nuclear re-armament of Europe and will combine this with a strongly anti-Soviet line. The pro-West German leaderships will on the contrary try to stick with what they call 'detente' — some independence from Washington over global nuclear strategy and the broadening of business with the Soviet Union. These divisions will run both between and within parties in each Western European country.
The workers of Western Europe rightly see the main international threat at the present time as coming from a re-arming of US imperialism. The huge mass movement against the imposition of Cruise and Pershing missiles is the most important and positive international movement in Europe today. If the left can destroy this US drive and go forward towards the entire break-up of NATO this will be the biggest advance for the working class in the East and West for decades. It will be a body-blow to global imperialist strategy and it will also defeat those forces in Eastern Europe hoping to use the NATO re-armament drive to crush all opposition in Eastern Europe in a new Cold War hysteria.
At the same time, a realistic socialist strategy must also involve militant and unconditional support for the struggles of the workers of Eastern Europe against Stalinism. The 16 months of Solidarity's open existence in Poland was a tremendous opportunity for the left in the whole of Europe, but the bulk of the socialist forces failed to recognise it or to respond adequately. The defeat of Solidarity, if it is consolidated, will be a terrible blow to socialist advance throughout the continent. But the lessons of this defeat must not be lost within the Western left. A massive, militant defence of Solidarity in coming months must be combined with a vigorous explanation of the real role of the Soviet regime in relationship to the struggle for socialism in Europe.
Footnotes
(1) It would, of course, be wrong to see the takeover of 13 December as a move by the officer corps of the Polish Army against the civilian leadership of the Polish United Workers' Party. In reality, it was a move by a political faction in both the civilian party leadership and the party elite in the armed forces against not only Solidarity and the Polish people but also the party membership. The centre of decision-making since the coup has been an 8-man directorate comprising 4 civilian party leaders and 4 military leaders, but this body seems to have been constructed after the actual coup itself. Thus, the pattern of the Polish coup is not identical with that of military coups in Latin America which generally involve military officers in consultation with big capitalists or landlords outside the state machine; it has more in common with the sort of military coups that have taken place or been attempted in some Arab countries: for example, coups in Syria in the 1960s organised by the Baath Party with a faction of the officer corps organised in the Baath Party setting up a public military council behind which ruled a shadowy political leadership made up of both civilian and military chiefs of the party. Soviet experience in the Middle East would certainly have made them familiar with this type of operation.
(2) Kadarisation, after the name of the general secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party (CP), Janos Kadar, refers to the process by which an initial savage repression of the working class is followed by a purge of the backwoods Stalinists and a liberalisation from above. The liberalisation in Hungary has also been associated with economic decentralisation and an opening of the economy to the West. But it should also be remembered, that the period of heavy repression under Kadar went on from 1956 until 1962-3 and something like liberalisation only really began to be visible in the late 1960s.
(3) Ostpolitik — West German policy of breaking down the economic, political and cultural barriers to the Eastern bloc, pioneered by Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt.
(4) Rapallo — the 1922 economic treaty between Soviet Russia and West Germany.