The Polish Workers
W., M.
The Polish Workers The Polish workers fought for themselves and their families and won a victory for all of us. In coming issues of Dissent we will try to report extensively on the social basis...
...their fight is not over...
...In coming issues of Dissent we will try to report extensively on the social basis and political meaning of that victory...
...Already, no doubt, party bureaucrats are plotting the destruction of the new trade unions, for no power is so threatening to the Communist party as the organized power of the workers...
...No government that rules unopposed will be "correct," or even decent, for long...
...All honor to them...
...Clearly, the power of the Soviet Union is more limited than it looked (especially to American neoconservatives) only a few weeks ago...
...In Eastern Europe, Russian imperialism is highly vulnerable...
...In the face of the most advanced forms of repression, they have used, and used successfully, the oldest weapons: human solidarity and steadfastness...
...Their success is fragile and uncertain...
...So there is room for maneuver, room for intelligence and courage, even in the age of superpowers and centralized bureaucracies...
...Similarly, the totalitarian regime is vulnerable...
...Leftists in the West have sometimes forgotten that simple fact of*political life, but no one is likely to forget it who has actually to live under a government that claims to be immune from criticism, all-powerful, and ideologically correct...
...And even the modern state, with all its technology, instant communication, advanced weaponry, and computer planning, still requires some minimal degree of consent and compliance from its subjects—and can't survive without it...
...W. q 380...
...What are we to think of their enemies...
...Advances are made in this country, and in that one, often at unexpected times and in unexpected places...
...Even here, where the right of opposition is firmly established, large numbers of workers are still unprotected by unions of their own...
...In fact, it isn't easy anywhere, even here in the United States—despite the complacent praise heaped on the Poles by Carter and Reagan...
...Now the Polish workers show the way...
...Nationalism and religion and, we can now see, the historic traditions of social democracy: all these are possible bases of opposition and resistance...
...It remains now to build the institutions of freedom and to bring into them the mass of Polish workers...
...Here (we are about to go to press) it is only necessary to pay tribute to the men and women of Gdansk and Szczecin and Lodz and the mining towns of Silesia who defied their masters and the foreign masters of their masters and testified so bravely to the value of freedom...
...Without legal opposition, socialism can never be anything but a pretense and a new form of tyranny...
...Given the geography of Poland, that won't be easy...
...Social selfdefense is a difficult business, a long and continuing struggle...
...Force can always be brought to bear, certainly, but the use of force is costly, and more costly the more often it is necessary...
...But look at what has already been achieved...
...Against all the odds, against the supposedly growing, almost hegemonic power of the Soviet Union, against the totalitarian regime, against the modern state, a few hundred thousand workers have, for the moment at least, prevailed...
...Independent unions, social self-defense, the end of censorship: it is above all the right of opposition that the Polish workers have asserted, the essential right of a liberal society...
...Its structures of control are far less pervasive than they would have to be to September 4, 1980 sustain indefinitely a corrupt, brutal, and inefficient government...
...And freedom is still the most dangerous creed of all...
Vol. 27 • September 1980 • No. 4
