Poland's Limited Democracy
SHANOR, DONALD R.
PRESSURE FROM WITHIN Poland's Limited Democracy BY DONALD R. SHANOR Gdansk Warsaw's reaction to the wave of unrest here in January and, more recently, to the strike by textile workers in Lodz,...
...Another charged that tickets were not on sale early enough in the morning, allowing many passengers to ride free...
...Then came complaints about working conditions...
...The shipyard workers sought Politburo changes as well, and got them, but the bus drivers and streetcar operators do not possess their national economic leverage...
...More refined forms of participatory democracy could be observed in the weeks after the violence had subsided, when the 18,000 workers of the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk and thousands of others held daily meetings and took the job actions that have, if only temporarily, made the Polish system of government relatively responsive to the people...
...The initial task of the new organization was to collect the grievances of all the garages and then present a unified list to the municipal authorities...
...Why should they have it any better...
...During this four-hour process, most of the regular appointees were ignored, including the trade union representatives and Party workers, for had they been doing their jobs in the first place there would have been no need to strike...
...By receiving the delegations of the Gdansk and Lodz workers, and by going part way in fulfilling their demands, the Gierek-Jaroszewicz regime may have found one possible approach to limited democracy in Poland: keeping alive some of the spontaneous organizations that have risen up in the shipyards and factories, and giving them a role in decision-making--if not in the Politburo, at least at the local level...
...But since People's Poland has existed, each change has taken place in a tragic way, in that we tear our leaders from their pedestals...
...Donald R. Shanor reports on East Europe for the Chicago Daily News...
...They do have some legitimate gripes, like waiting seven years for housing...
...We must create a means of retiring our leaders at a time when we can still value and praise them...
...In the meantime, the tram motormen and conductors and the bus drivers were in their garages, choosing committee members and spokesmen, and formulating demands...
...In Hungary three years later, the workers' councils became more powerful than the government and, at least on Csepel Island, outlasted it...
...Such channels for criticism not only could keep the local lunchroom and toilet facilities in order but might head off a repeat of the Gomulka blunders...
...Party chief Edward Gierek asked for his resignation following calls for his ouster from the Gdansk shipyard workers, who accused him of misrepresenting their cause...
...They make good money...
...PRESSURE FROM WITHIN Poland's Limited Democracy BY DONALD R. SHANOR Gdansk Warsaw's reaction to the wave of unrest here in January and, more recently, to the strike by textile workers in Lodz, shows again that a Communist system begins to behave somewhat democratically only in a time of crisis and upheaval...
...Similarly, Prague's 14th Party Congress, held in 1968 with Soviet tanks literally outside the gates of the factory in which it met, proved to be the most democratic in Czechoslovak Party history...
...Several tram crews grumbled about the lack of toilet facilities at the end of long runs...
...They could not explain, however, why it took a strike to prompt such action on their part after 25 years of Communism...
...But what about us...
...I had to wait longer, all my generation did...
...Decisions to raise prices were, in fact, discussed twice by the Politburo, but they were not really discussed in depth...
...The importance of social problems and working conditions has considerably increased in our public life over the past few days," the Warsaw daily Zycie Warszawy said with a certain amount of understatement...
...In each instance, the rebels acted in accordance with Party statutes: They elected their own leaders, made decisions without asking permission from the top, and brought pressure to bear on the higher levels of authority...
...Considerable resistance already has been noted, as in this reaction from a middle-aged Warsaw bureaucrat...
...Next were the political demands, calling for leadership changes on the local and regional levels...
...Although the forms of democracy, from trade unions to elections, exist in Gdansk as in Moscow, they seem not to function until the pressure of events removes the artificial controls clamped on them...
...the transport workers earned around $70 a month at official exchange rates, a third less than the shipyard employes...
...Ironically, early last month Kociolek himself was torn from his pedestal...
...In the course of a hasty visit to his old constituency after the rioting, he said: "We must remember in the future that the blame lies on the entire former Politburo and the entire Central Committee...
...But, as many Poles have been saying since December, there must be a middle course between unrestricted political freedom and dictatorship of the Gomulka pattern...
...This has negative social, educational and political consequences...
...Still, no one--least of all the workers themselves--is sure that democracy is going to extend much beyond the trade union level, or even that the concessions gained thus far are here to stay...
...Pay figured prominently on the lists...
...In the Kozuchow clutch factory, the newspaper reported, "dining premises for 100 employes were occupied by a technological supervision office, forcing the workers to lunch in a cloakroom...
...Yet Gomulka's dismissal as Party chief was a product of the rawest expressions of public opinion: the strike, the protest march, and eventually the riot...
...The dining room was recently restored in that plant as a result of intervention by a trades union labor inspector...
...While Westerners were not permitted to enter the yards during this period, they were able to witness a strike that could not be concealed...
...Since the shipyards and factories of the area are spread out in an arc of several miles along the Bay of Gdansk, thousands found it impossible to walk to work...
...instead of accepting the higher work quotas assigned to them, they struck...
...The most spectacular consequence of this democratic process in Gdansk and Szczecin, of course, was the removal of Wladyslaw Gomulka, who had shown himself unresponsive even to the limited democracy of the Politburo...
...We must provide some system of rotation for all leading Party and government posts...
...Perhaps the best statement of the need for some kind of democracy in Poland was made by former Gdansk Party leader Stanislaw Kociolek...
...This was also true in East Belin in 1953, when the construction men in Stalinallee ignored the committees established for them by the Party and spontaneously created their own...
...They clustered in front of the station (one of the scenes of last December's rioting), vainly hailing the humpbacked Warszawa taxis that drove by already full, or stopping private cars and delivery trucks...
...They can't expect the national leaders to solve all their problems from lunchrooms to prices...
...His words could be mistaken for those of an American counterpart facing student or Negro demands: "What do they want...
...On a dark morning before seven, all the city's cream-and-red streetcars and buses suddenly disappeared from the main street in front of the railway station, just as vast numbers of commuters were arriving on their way to work...
...It would be impossible for the present regime to introduce Western-style democracy to Poland for a number of reasons, primary among these being the widespread unpopularity of the Communist party and the geographical position of the country, wedged between the Soviet Union and Germany...
...One driver wanted to know why the buses were always so dirty...
...There are many other examples of the concessions workers are able to win under current conditions in Poland...
...The Gdansk idea soon caught on in other parts of the country...
...The most notable of these, surely, came last month in Lodz when a strike by textile workers induced Premier Piotr Jaroszewicz to meet with their delegates and finally to rescind the 20 per cent increases in food prices that ignited December's uprising...
...They joked about the toilet situation, promising it would be remedied...
...Party and government officials here reacted to the complaints with a mixture of concern and annoyance...
Vol. 54 • March 1971 • No. 5
