running the system efficiently or democratically.
At the same time the predominant forcin policy of the Kremlin and major communist parties, seeking a "peaceful coexistence" with capitalism - and therefore opposing or restricting revolutionary struggles- has helped keep the stalinist states isolated, compounding
While the working class has been beld back, capitalist inroadsand "market" mechanisms are being encouraged, creating precisely the kind of confusion that led to Thatcher's reception in Gdansk, and stoking up new crises for the future.
A 'socialist' system that creates the Illusion that individual and political rights and freedoms, economic dynamism and enhanced living standards are to be found only by the import of capitalist ideas and methods does nothing but miseducate a whole generation of
Even now, behind Gorbachev's courtship of West German chancellor Kohl, of Thatcher, Reagan and Bush Is the craving for western technology to boost the flagging soviet economy: that's why Gorbachev is also removing the top limit on the size of capitalist investments in the USSR. Though few cast European bureaucracies have felt sufficiently confident to offer anything like the liberalisation of Gorbachev's glasnost, similar economic moves are taking place elsewhere in eastern Europe. Even in China, new figures show the much larger than expected growth of private enterprise as a major element in the economy. Neil Kinnock and the TUC leaders are not the only ones to have effectively given up on socialism and embraced the "market" Instead!
So the answer to the Polish riddle is much less complicated than it may first appear: Polish workers hate the Polish state because it is nor a genuine workers' state which they control, but something qualitatively different; a grotesque, bureaucratised deformation - a parody - of a workers' state. Many of them see Thatcher as a figure of freedom primarily because they see Jaruzelski as an oppressor.
The chief counter-revolutionary force in Poland today is not the working class — which has shown its strength in struggle after strug gle, and must be the driving force for any socialist perspective - hut the state bureaucracy, which keeps the working class in chains and
The solution - in Poland and other stalinist-ruled states - must be a class struggle solution, building on the workers" instinctive and healthy opposition to burcaucratic power and privilege. This means developing a new leadership in the Solidarnose current based on a clear, internationalist and proletarian programme for the revolutionary overthrow of the bureaucracles and the establishment of genuine working class power as a foundation for workers' management of the economy and solidarity with revolutionary struggles. Laterestingly, It is on the kind of forces ignored by the western press -the left of Solidarnosc, including the Polish Socialist Party, that such a new leadership can begin to be built.
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VIRAJ MENDIS has become a symbol in the fight against the immigration laws. That is why the Home Office wants to deport him. For the last two ycars Viraj has been in sanctuary in the Church of Ascension in Hulme, Manchester to avoid being deported to Sri Lanka. The Viraj Meudis Defence Campaign has become the best known anti-deportation campaign in the country. But the Home Office (backed by sections of the press) are determined to go ahead with the deportation despite widespead fears for his safety in Sri Lanka.
All legal procedures to keep