POLAND - BUILDING SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY
Rule, James B.
I left Warsaw after a recent eight-day stay impressed above all with the fluidity of the situation and the lack of precedent for what is taking place. Yet about several important things I...
...They know exactly what they are up against, yet they will not give up...
...Some sectors of the economy may find little demand for their contributions, while others find themselves wielding extraordinary market power...
...Now even the most reactionary Party hacks might be unwilling to stand as Moscow's viceroys over an occupied Poland...
...People blamed government mismanagement or attempts to wear down the popular will to resist...
...In 1968, students demonstrated against the regime, only to be beaten and arrested...
...Thus the deepgoing conviction that decentralizing the economy and depriving this privileged group of its stranglehold would solve both political and economic problems at one stroke...
...In 1970, government announcements of price rises for basic foodstuffs provoked strikes and violence from workers, ultimately propelling Gierek into power...
...And this has to mean some form of participation in the exercise of power...
...As July's Party congress shows, they are beginning to insist on their say...
...A less sweeping plan, apparently enjoying broader support in Solidarity circles, would institutionalize the submission by workers' representatives of plans and demands relating to economic life...
...If it associates itself too much with the workings of the system, the result could be even worse...
...The long-term vision is persuasive— more efficient production and distribution, coupled with freedom from the meddling of central bureaucrats...
...Everyone in Poland has personal experience of the wastefulness of the economy—obtuse production goals in industry, irrational pricing systems for consumer goods or bizzare staffing patterns in the workplace...
...During this period political forces both within the old elite and the movement have been testing one another, seeking to establish positions for the consolidation of power...
...It would be misleading to say that these outbursts are the work of Solidarity...
...This is what the regime seems to fear from a general strike—a strike that actually ends up running the economy, bypassing the entire apparatus of state control...
...It would be comforting to believe that the only threat to these goals comes from reactionary forces—what is left of the Old Guard in Poland and the nervous "friends" in the Soviet bloc...
...Under this plan, organized workers, led by Solidarity, would simply take over the economic life of the country unilaterally, in a kind of coup d'iconomie...
...But the Party as a whole, even in its more democratic form, is on the defensive...
...Do they believe themselves more likely to be threatened by continuation of the Polish experiment, or by the military, economic, and political complications that would arise from an attempt to stop it...
...The old system is too deeply discredited, and the Poles have learned too well that they can stand up to it...
...party and the "worker...
...they occupy and control the workplace...
...It obviously aims at enabling Solidarity to walk a thin line between turning its back on economic policy and accepting a degree of responsibility that could be compromising...
...Such plans would go regularly to government agencies for implementation, while workers' organizations would monitor them...
...By 1976 the divide-and-rule policy was losing its effectiveness...
...Second, no force can now put the political clock back to where it was before August 1980...
...If Solidarity continues to restrict itself to an opposition role, it may begin to lose the grass-roots confidence it has won...
...One of the most acute commentaries I heard was by an economic historian serving as adviser to Solidarity...
...Its leaders learned quickly —or seemed to know a priori, since they hardly had time to learn from experience—when to press harder and when to relax their pressure...
...Perhaps it is a commentary on the national character that, while I could find no one willing to admit to optimism, everyone seemed determined to press on with national renewal...
...The more profound question is what new economic arrangements Solidarity and its supporters will seek...
...No one in Poland is contemplating the reinstitution of capitalism, as far as I could tell...
...Concrete historical experience has taught the lesson that no class or sector can flourish unless all flourish...
...For years the Communist regime has cultivated mistrust between workers and intellectuals...
...The next moment, amid nervous laughter, people are discussing whether the new models of Soviet tanks have devices to make them impervious to Molotov cocktails—or, with no laughter at all, how to provide for one's family in the event of invasion...
...The effectiveness of the threat of a widespread or general strike arises largely from what such actions could demonstrate about the economy...
...For the moment, time seems to be on the side of the Poles...
...SOLIDARITY AROSE as a movement of opposition and self-protection...
...Institution of market relations and economic decentralization would obviously call into question the system of subsidies supporting such inefficient agriculture...
...The idea of making unions the source of economic policy and the means of its supervision, while leaving implementation formally in the hands of state agencies, is intriguing...
...Now this group will no longer abide being tarred with the same brush as their elite comrades...
...These unsettled conditions obviously provided no basis for economic recovery...
...The Committee for Defense of Workers (KOR) was formed, and a vigorous underground movement began providing both workers and intellectuals with information otherwise unavailable through the controlled media...
...The Poles keep anticipating the worst but pressing on with their plans...
...Most of the more than 3 million Party members enjoy neither the power nor the special privileges of the elite...
...In a situation as fluid and desperate as the present, such a quasianarchosyndicalist move might well enjoy enormous immediate popular support...
...Nearly everyone, except the old party-state elite, seems to support the movement's goals...
...But it is no longer possible to speak of the Party as a unified force, for the same creeping democratization that has affected nearly all other institutions has taken root there as well...
...But the potential for conflict among the goals of the Polish movement is considerable in itself...
...Faced with a choice between scorched earth on their Western frontier and an aberrant political situation, the Soviets may then choose the latter...
...This might ultimately afford more efficient mechanized, largescale agriculture, but the human costs of such a transition would be staggering...
...Are they hoping that Polish economic reform will succeed, so as to relieve them of further strain to their own economy from a bankrupt client...
...But people are desperate to try some form of market economy, with greatly increased responsibility for individual managers or workers' councils in the setting of production goals and norms for 405 work...
...MANY PROFOUND CHANGES in political and economic life are already well advanced...
...orders are taken only from the strike leaders...
...408...
...The percolating democratization of the last year has often taken the form of reclaiming democratic possibilities made moribund in recent decades...
...A VISIT TO POLAND is bound to be emotionally fraught...
...Yet the intentions of the Soviets seem no clearer in Warsaw than they do in New York...
...Farming is largely unmechanized...
...In its short lifetime, Solidarity has orchestrated industrial actions involving nearly the entire working population, steering a shrewd and delicate course against provocations and trickery by its elite antagonists...
...But I believe that the Poles have as good a chance of retaining their democratic and egalitarian principles as any people who have ever made a revolution...
...I do not think any of these problems insoluble, though I am unsure how seriously Solidarity supporters have taken them thus far...
...When the shipyard workers in Gdansk in 1980 made their revolutionary demand for independent unions, cooperation from the universities was quickly offered and accepted...
...People now expect the organization to take some definite role in putting the economy back on the rails...
...No one in Poland appears to know the answers...
...What are the maximum permissible differences in remuneration...
...the majority of lower-level members, though identified with Party policies by other Poles, until recently have had little influence over policy...
...This would obviously represent an unusual blend of political and economic forms, but perhaps no more eclectic than those found in Yugoslavia, Mexico, and other countries...
...In academic circles, as elsewhere, the emotional juxtapositions are brutal...
...One can envisage all sorts of democratic possibilities for resolving such problems, but all would seem to require some degree of central control over economic activity...
...Any new arrangements will require some sort of accommodation between Solidarity and the Party...
...As often happens, a regime that made itself immune to opposition also insulated itself from warnings of danger ahead, and ultimately united its own people against it...
...But it is difficult to imagine any way out of the current economic disaster without some sharing of responsibility for a single program between Solidarity and the regime...
...Third, though no one can doubt the democratic sentiments underlying the Polish movement, these are still far from crystallized into permanent, viable institutions...
...Ultimately responsible for such practices, people believe, are the cadres of central bureaucrats whose raison d'etre is their control of economic life...
...The churches have been unusually full in recent months, I was told, because of an influx of nonbelievers determined to show support for their country's renewal in any way they can...
...What areas of the economy should receive new investments...
...What such institutions may be, and what they will have to accomplish, is of utmost import for the future of democracy and socialism...
...The housing situation, at least in major cities, is disastrous by Western standards...
...Resolving potential contradictions such as these will require agonizing choices, choices that can only come through establishing new balances of power among different elements of Polish society, and indeed among different elements of the movement headed by Solidarity...
...Yet Poland ought to be more prosperous...
...They, too, will most likely support economic decentralization, and thereby seek to reduce the old elite's power...
...As the economic situation continues to deteriorate, leading to the brink of actual hunger for some, the need for a coherent economic program grows acute...
...No one seemed to attribute the shortages to work stoppages over the past year...
...The regime has already made a few gestures of decentralization—derided by its critics as efforts to decentralize blame without decentralizing power...
...Even a group of police officers during my visit was seeking to form an independent association, to dissociate themselves from outsiders who, it was claimed, had acted in the name of the police against Solidarity...
...Yet when a Solidarity member is elected to the Politburo—as happened in July—one realizes that the power monopoly is fading fast...
...Prices of foodstuffs would rise, yet farm incomes would drop...
...These events began in Gdansk and left an undetermined number of dead, while the universities remained for the most part uninvolved...
...Or do they welcome economic chaos in Poland as a "lesson" to other East European countries...
...During my visit, long lines were chronic for meat, gasoline, cigarettes, in addition to spot shortages of such things as beer and washing detergent...
...In strikes organized by Solidarity, workers do not simply remain off the job...
...Decentralization could well make them even more so...
...The choices are delicate indeed...
...Much has been said about the seemingly strange symbiosis of Solidarity and the Church...
...If the legally appointed managers appear, their authority is ignored...
...Polish wages and salaries are significantly stratified now, both among occupations and sectors of the economy...
...And accepting such control will obviously pose problems for a movement whose origins lie in resisting central power...
...And it would presumably leave other, existing institutions to carry out remaining state functions, including foreign relations and relations with other Communist parties...
...WHAT ARE the movement's chances for success...
...In a quasi-totalitarian society, any symbol or institution that appears free of control from the center is ipso facto a focus for all sorts of hopes and potentials...
...For example, the revolution within the Party has consisted of its representatives actually representing, originating political initiatives from below, rather than transmitting pressure downward against those they are supposed to represent...
...Solidarity officials told me that preparations are being made to retain communications and decision-making capabilities within their organization, even if its top leaders are arrested or killed...
...Thus there is no reason to believe that the role of agriculture in an industrial economy will be any less troublesome for some new form of Polish socialism than it has been in any other European country, East or West...
...Like virtually all schemes for economic reform, this would entail 406 considerable autonomy for local decision-making by managers and workers' representatives in individual factories...
...It is common, I was told, for divorced couples to continue living together for years before new quarters can be found...
...A movement that early on sought greater rises in pay for lower-paid workers will, once endowed with a share of power, have hard decisions to make about the growth of wage differentials...
...What follows is based mainly on conversations, in English and French, with Polish intellectuals, including a number of Solidarity advisers and activists...
...Even short of such dramatic measures, everyone is now discussing how central controls are to be loosened...
...It is impossible to imagine a more apt name for the organization leading the struggle than the one it chose...
...The price rises of that year brought labor unrest and were quickly rescinded, but this time workers began receiving help from students and intellectuals...
...Equally agonizing questions surround the place of agriculture...
...As the renewal process gathers steam, it gains ever more credibility and prestige...
...A total takeover of all workplaces in a Solidarity-sponsored action might well make the point that the economy runs better without the dead hand of the central planners than with it...
...And indeed, top figures have vociferously opposed the bolder decentralization plans...
...Far-reaching changes are under way—both in institutions and political culture...
...The impulses underlying these changes are deeply democratic and antiauthoritarian...
...But it has also absorbed billions of dollars of Western investments in the last decade without adequate means to make good on them...
...At length, peasants would be driven off the land...
...ALL THESE SPECULATIONS about the future of the Polish movement, of course, presume that there will be a future...
...For example, a plumber employed in mining may be paid much more than a plumber employed by a school...
...Renewal is breaking out everywhere, as every organization and forum is affected by people's desire for openness and democracy...
...It is hard to know how the Soviets perceive their own interests...
...Such a plan would aim at destroying the power of elite central planners over the economy...
...But any program of economic reform will have to confront what is, by all accounts, considerable hidden unemployment throughout the economy...
...One result, I was told, is that all kinds of meetings are longer and more tedious than before...
...Most Poles seem to make little distinction between democratizing the political system and putting the economy on a working basis...
...He envisaged the emergence of what he termed a "hybrid" political system, an institutionalized sharing of power between Solidarity, Party, and state...
...The history of broken promises and heavy-handed repression is not the only reason for this nearly total discredit of the old system...
...in a day's drive through the countryside I saw scores of draft horses but not a single tractor...
...What kind of program can Solidarity afford to be associated with...
...no one is going to trust the old institutions, however enlivened by recent trends, without an independent counterweight...
...But clearly Solidarity cannot continue indefinitely to play only this part...
...two families sharing an apartment may have little chance for separate flats if the number of rooms they occupy is considered sufficient...
...more precisely, the same sentiments fueling the successes of Solidarity are producing demands for participation and democratization throughout Poland...
...A people whose history has been full of violence and foreign domination, the Poles have no illusions about what an invasion would mean...
...I have heard the figure put at one-sixth, but I doubt that anyone knows for sure...
...They are often nearly invisible, for they arise from the revitalization of institutions and practices that are democratic in principle but lately suppressed...
...Its success in this role won it enormous prestige...
...The quest for solidarity, and the birth of Solidarity, manifest a determination not to be bought off by selective concessions and not to be misled by promises for reform within the existing system...
...Similarly, how will a new, more democratic order cope with conflicting demands from different elements of the population...
...One wonders how long this can go on...
...Thus the historical development of an "independent and self-governing" association to protect the interests of the workers—and not just blue-collar workers but workers in all settings—from the "worker...
...It is axiomatic for the Poles that their closest neighbors have the power to crush them at any moment...
...The soaring prestige of Solidarity has been in inverse measure to the standing of the old stateparty elite...
...It is hard to see how progress can come without some redistribution of workers from less productive to more productive roles...
...They are enormously brave...
...No one knows...
...This was a rhetorical suggestion, I think...
...One might expect the Party to oppose any such decentralization plan unequivocally...
...Assuming that the present evolution is allowed to continue, does any imaginable set of institutions promise both to defend democracy and to build economic rationality and prosperity...
...Everyone in Poland, for example, wants to see the economy grow more productive and efficient...
...I also had long talks with one full-time Solidarity official and with assorted Poles from other walks of life...
...One moment conversation focuses on books, conferences, promotions—the staples of academic gossip everywhere...
...But it might also strip away the last fig leaf of Communist orthodoxy before the horrified eyes of the Soviets, and so precipitate what nearly everyone in Poland fears most...
...If workers' councils and local managers are free to allocate scarce resources among such competing goals as increasing productivity, raising wages, improving working conditions, or reducing pollution, how will the interests of consumers and neighboring populations be represented...
...People insist on full deliberation before decisions are reached...
...Workers everywhere are insisting on a say in management practice, including the appointment of managers...
...But it would be wrong to imagine that all the forces of change in Poland emanate from these two institutions...
...Or, how will resources be allocated, under conditions of decentralization, between export industries generating urgently needed foreign exchange and other organizations, such as health care, making other kinds of contributions to the national well-being...
...Not even Soviet tanks...
...Thus the Catholicism of Poland, from all accounts, is as much a measure of ethnic and national fervor as a strictly religious phenomenon...
...The cost to the Soviets of an invasion would be staggering...
...How a movement seeking the welfare of all in freedom from excessive state power will deal with such inequities remains to be seen...
...The country has a skilled workforce and a sophisticated scientific and technological establishment...
...The economic situation is ruinous...
...perhaps they are in dispute even in Moscow...
...The Polish army would be likely to join the rest of the nation in resisting an invasion...
...But markets will not spring forth without a period of trial and error, as all elements of a 407 complex economy seek to dispose of their products and services at prices others are prepared to pay...
...This relationship is less baffling when one recalls the importance of independence from the state apparatus...
...It would obviously represent the clear break that many Poles desire with the central bureaucracy...
...Another idea, potentially feasible in conjunction with the above, would be to create something like a new parliamentary body of workplace representatives, to concern itself exclusively with economic policy...
...A significant number of Party members are now members of Solidarity...
...Relations between Solidarity and older institutions would necessarily entail some mixed pattern of conflict and cooperation...
...And everyone knows that poor economic performance goes back much farther than last year's events...
...Solidarity would presumably exercise its greatest say in matters related to work life, while other institutions would concern themselves with foreign policy and other affairs...
...Yet about several important things I am sure...
...None of my experiences in Poland led me to think this lesson is soon to be forgotten...
...Until last year, the Church was the only source of symbols whose independence from the regime was considered self-evident...
...Responding to such needs will not be easy for a movement arising as a system of workers' self-defense...
...Perhaps even more important, in the eyes of most Poles, is the mismanagement of the economy...
...Nor can establishment of markets in an economy until now enveloped in a labyrinth of state regulation be anything but bruising and disorienting at first...
...However lavishly one is received, one experiences some of the strain of a people that has lived for nearly a year under severe threat...
...Blue-collar workers generally stood aside...
...Thus the fear within the regime that a general strike, once begun, might never stop...
...The result of all this is a wide and deep revulsion against central economic planning...
...state...
...One hopes that this can occur without leaving Solidarity unworthy of its well-chosen name...
...Even in a relatively decentralized economy, some key decisions will have to be made by institutions representing the system as a whole...
...Now there are two such sources, and the Poles find it natural that each should sustain the other...
...One sociologist suggested to me that, if this process of democratization went far enough, Solidarity could ultimately afford to disappear—its protective and representative functions assumed by the institutions supposed to exercise them in the first place...
...Perhaps the boldest, most radical answer is a plan under discussion by some Solidarity activists and advisers...
...First, Poland is experiencing a revolution in everything but name...
...For the past year the regime has stumbled from crisis to crisis, seeming to promise first the Soviets, then the domestic opposition anything they sought, simply to buy time...
...What are the responsibilities of industries for environmental protection...
...Solidarity itself now embraces the great majority of all employed persons in Poland—about 9 million members of the total nonagricultural labor force of about 12 million...
...Military action might destroy Poland but still not be able to create the kind of regime the Soviets would like...
...The Poles have concluded that only an organization utterly free of the regime can defend 404 popular interests...
...Discretion by local managers or workers' councils as to allocation of wages could sharpen such differences...
Vol. 28 • September 1981 • No. 4
