counter-revolutionary church conspiracy, they should ask themselves the difficult question: why did Jaruzelski invite her to Poland in the first place? Why is it Jaruzelski who most vocally praises Thatcher's "free market" approach, and his industry minister who praises her hard line against the miners' strike?
The fact is that despite its nationalised economy, far from having developed as a 'socialist' state, Poland is reaping the bitter harvest of decades of bureaucratic misrule. The Warsaw bureaucracy, like those in most of castern Europe, Is composed of 'communists" who have never led or supported a revolution, ruling countries where the working class has never (as it did in the 1917 Russian Revolution) held power in its own hands.
The expropriation of the old cast European capitalists in the years after 1944 was carried out from above by a powerful, bureaucratised state machine, under the watchful eves and guns of Stalin's Red Army. Though the direct subordination to the Kremlin has gradually been relaxed, and certain rivalries and differentiations have occurred, the political base of the bureaucracy in each country remains the suppression of any independent movement of the working class; this means steadfast opposition to any genuine workers" control.
Instead, the bureaucracy itself has been managing the creaking
- A
Poland:
Spot the
and increasingly inefficient economies, following the traditional stalinist conception of seeking to build "socialism" in a single country. The result has been not a defence but an undermining of the pretence of a planned economy; the east European countries have plunged ever deeper into debt with imperlalist bankers, offering ever-greater concessions to encourage major capitalist firms to set up new bustnesses there - with profits guaranteed by the workers" state'. Though the bureaucrats understand that their power and privilege rest on their control of a nationalised economy, and would be eliminated were capitalism to be restored, they are incapable of