strike wave in Poland rocked the Jaruzelski regime, argues ZBIGNIEW KOWALEWSKI. stuggle tenaciously. Lessons of the Polish INTERNATIONAL 100 per cent rise in wages to compensate for the rise in prices, and a sliding scale of managed to demobilise the striking workers by conceding significant wage The Nowa Huta strike committee played an exemplary role against this tendency. Tis central demands were for a In several factories the burcaucracy strike movement Inowroclaw. Then it spread immediately to the largest factory in the country, the two weeks there. At the Lenin shipyard in THE STRIKE movement, which began in Poland on 25 April and finished on 10 May was the strongest and broadest since It began by paralysing for one day the public transport system in Bydgoszcz and Lenin steelworks in Nowa Huta, Te lasted the December 1981 defeat.
between various groupings of Solidarity, for the extension of the strike. This tront played an important role in unleashing the In the Lenin shipyard, the Icadership of the strike was weak. Lech Walesa took an involved in the strike committe. In Nowa activists contributed to the shape of the In Cracow a united front was formed the Independent Association of Students (NZS), of pacifists, socialists and national- ists, to mobilise the masses in solidarity with the workers in Nowa Huta and call the steciworks after 1981, they too became Huta, this combination of old and new student mobilisation. Taking the form of fierce street battles, one of the gains of the 1980-81 revolution — demonstration of some 10,000 people, the young people, under the slogans of soli- darity with the workers of Nowa Huta and it lasted until dawn next day. In response including those in the education and health sector and pensioners. This could has reached a new level. On 3 May Cra- cow was the scene for a combative majority of whom were students and wages for every worker in the country have laid a basis for ovcrcoming the dis- Thirdly, the student-worker alhance — persed nature of the social struggles. spreading the strike. lence to crush the strike and the morale of The spirit, symbols and ideas of Soli- in at least a dozen other large enterprises which were brutally repressed by the police, and by student mobilisations in For the first time since 1981 the bureau- cracy violently repressed workers inside a factory. During the assault on the Lenin steelworks the clite troops of the ministry of the interior used bloody physical vio- Short strikes or other protests occurred accompanied by street demonstrations, in several rcgions. The strikes Gdansk, it lasted nine days. several cities. the strikcrs.
ambiguous and passive attitude to the defence of the standard of living of the masses and its expectations of the possibil- ional rival Andrzej Gwiazda. As a result of was confined to a minority: only ten per cent of the shipyard workers continued the - mainly the younger workers, who The national leadership of Solidarity was paralysed, not only by the arrest of its members by the police but by its attitude to the economic reforms of the regime, its night of the strike was marked by a ferce argument between Walesa and his tradit- the weaknesses of the leadership, the strike initially vacillating attitude. were very radical. declared a general strike. Movements of workers of Nowa Huta, the strike move- ment went on to call for free trade unions The general assembly of the Cracow works and the savage repression of the striking workers, the universicy students solidarity with the workers in struggle Fourthly, the immediate socio- economic demands made by the workers took on a strong transitional dynamic. From the detence of the standard of living of all Polish workers called for by the to the police assault on the Lenin steci- and secondary school students of Cracow began in the universities in several cities. and the legalisation of Solidarity, sion of this in a mass way was the defeat of The majority wings of the leadership of tion had declared themselves in favour of First, it is cicar that the resistance of the working class to the economic reforms of Jaruzelski is still intact. The first expres- Solidarity and of the democratic opposi- reforms which would allow the economy to be based on market forces. Only the recently-formed Polish Socialist Party darity emerged again as both a relerence: point for, and an expression of, the move- A number of lessons can be learnt from the regime in the November refcrendum. this new experience of'struggle in Poland.
the bureaucratic regime, paralysing It SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 8 July/September 1988 The development of the mass struggle with a feeling of powerlessness. Signifi- cantly, the weekly magazine Polityka, pol- itically close to the Jaruzelski team, had an editorial on 7 May under the headline Faced with the strike in Nowa Huta, Jacek Kuron declared that only the forma- tion of a coalition government with repre- sentatives of the regime and individuals who had the confidence of Solidarity and the catholic church would be able to ward was brief and partial. But it has weakened off the danger of'a social explosion. ity of negotiation with Jaruzelski. 'vicious circle cal leadership has appeared as the main Fifthly, the absence of a coherent politi- weakness of the mass movment in Poland which gave full support to the demands of nomy and political and trade union plu- Students from secondary schools in the city supported this declaration overwhelmingly. In the Lenin shipyard, a general meeting of the strikers rejected any accord with the administration while the regime refused to recognise Solidarity university students adopted a declaration the workers and called for university auto: 14 factories and isolating them from one taming industrial action within individual as anti-worker and called for them to be Nevertheless, the working class, which had suffered considerable reductions in its standard of living, increasing wage diffe- rentials and growing social inequalitics, experienced a contradiction between this Secondly, the tendency towards solidar- ity and the unity of the working class through the process of social resistance continued. The economic reform was di- rected at dispersing resistance and con- condemned Jaruzelski's cconomic reforms fought by means of mass struggle. reform and its class interests.
the Palestinian uprising continues to develop increasingly sophisticatod means of struggle.