Polish Stalinists endanger nationalised property

Scan page 3

Riots by Polish workers in defiance of price increases in 1970 New official figures published by the ruling Polish Stalinist bureaucracy have revealed that the problems of the Polish economy are even more dramatic than previous information had shown.

The Polish economy has suffered for three decades under the hand of bureaucratic rule which has both prevented the economy from producing in response to the needs of the working class and excluded the working class from managing the social property.

The result has been chronic failure to supply social needs and growing working class resistance to bureaucratic oppression while the state budget and international balance of payments move further into deficit.

Price increases

On two occasions in the last three years the bureaucracy has tried to rectify these economic difficulties by cutting workers living standards through sharp price increases in basic As we go to press all the signs are that a virtual General Strike will take place this coming Tuesday in Dublin.

This is despite the fact that the Irish Congress of Trade Unions has opposed the strike and suggested instead "demonstrations and other protest actions"

Among labour movement bodies which resisted ICTU pressure were the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers Union, the National Busmen's Union, the Dublin Council of Trade Unions and Carlow Council of Trade Unions.

of tax The cause of the strike is the PAYE system of taxation. Workers hit by inflation are increasingly annoyed about the level of tax they are expected to pay.

Denied any principled lead from union bureaucrats, workers' anger has focussed on the diversionary target of tax concessions being made to small farmers.

. In reality both the working -all tommo Polish leader Gierek goods and other consumer goods.

These actions have provoked instant and immense workers' resistence to the point of insurrection.

The bureaucracy has been forced to retreat in order to survive and has increasingly turned to imperialism for help in resolving the economic contradictions which result from the existence of bureaucratic rule itself. victims of exploitation by imperialist-owned banks and monopolies and by the Irish capitalist class.

Interest charges

While the exploitation of the workers takes the open form of wage labour, the exploitation of the small farmers takes place more'discretely through high interest charges on bank loans, huge profit margins on farm supplies and machinery, and the hefty profits made by capitalist distributors and food manufacturers, who pay out rock bottom prices for farm produce.

In the struggle against capitalist exploitation in Ireland the small farmers need to be won as allies, not enemies of the working class through a programme of demands related to their special problems.

This means the fight for the opening of the books of the banks, suppliers, transport firms and food processors and distributors to committees of workers and small farmers-and the fight on the basis of the figures revealed for action to force their nationalisation, without compensation under workers' management.

It means including among workers demands for jobs, listine In particular, it has encouraged the entry of imperialist capital in joint ventures and has borrowed money on an enormous scale to finance the unbridgeable deficit in the balance of payments.

But this only leads to further contradictions as the obligation to pay the interest and repay the loans eat into Poland's stagnant earnings of foreign exchange.

Extent of problem

It is the staggering extent of this problem which is exposed in this week's figures.

According to a report in the Financial Times of figures supplied by the Polish ' State Bank, Handlowy Warszawie, Poland's debt repayments this year will amount to well over 50% of total earnings of free foreign currency.

This is a situation worse than that of even the most indebted of the semi-colonial countries with the possible exception of Peru.

In order to meet these obligations• the Polish bureaucracy is negotiating a sociai services, the call for cheap credit to small farmers and the elimination of the network of capitalist exploitation that feeds off them.

The scale of the mass movement shows the willingness of Irish workers to fight the bourgeois Lynch regime-but also the crisis of leadership that they face in their struggle.

Last Sunday some 50,000 demonstrated in Dublin and union after union has thrown its weight behind next Tuesday's strike.

Lynch policies

Feeling on tax within the Irish working class is a reflection of the growing resistance to the economic policies of the Lynch government. The ICTU was last week meeting the government to discuss the Congress's draft plan for a new "national understanding" which would govern "job creation, job protection, industrial development, pay, social welfare, taxation and various other matters."

(Irish Press, March 15)

This plan is the ICTU leadership's proposal to replace the newly expired National Wage Agreement.

Having tried to stop the PAYE strike, the ICTU leaders new loan on the Euro-dollar market.

One condition of this loan is that previously secret Polish economic statistics will be revealed to the imperialist banks (though not, of course, to the Polish working class).

Reports in "Western financial centres" that "western banks were now being given the power to monitor and intervene in the Polish economy in exchange for the $500 million financing" may well, as the Financial Times says, be untrue. sions with the goveri iment would not be about PA rE as such because they did no : wish ministers to feel they were meeting the unions duress.

conflict The Irish Post Office strike is just one of the number of important disputes which are either taking place at the moment or are pending.

In all these disputes the rank and file have found themselves in sharp conflict with the leadership of the ICTU and its social contract plans, as well as their own union leaderships.

In the Post Office strike, the union leaders have tried to direct the membership into the dead end of "selective" strikes.

After a one-week strike, POWU leaders took most of their members back to work, leaving Dublin postmen out for a further 48 hours.

However 148 Tralee postmen refused to go back to work, and were joined by the Dublin postmen after the 48 hour action finished.

The pressure from such rank and file action resulted in a further national action which was supposed to last a week but which has continued :_ Jet:_'e.1..

But such reports are not accidental because this monitoring and control is exactly what the imperialists want as part of their objective of destroying socialised property forms in Poland and the other workers' states.

Matter of time

It such conditions are not being imposed yet it can only be a matter of time before they are.

The startling new information, therefore, is a clear pointer to one of the ways Only a few days after the Peruvian military dictatorship ended the last state of emergency, it has imposed another one.

This time it is in an attempt to cope with a new outbreak of mineworkers' resistance to the anti-working class policies of the regime which have cut real wages in half over the last three years.

Intimidated

During the attempted general strike last December most of the copper miners were physically intimidated from striking by the full-scale military occupation of the mines and miners' residential areas.

Now it is the mineworkers who have been the first to take advantage of the temporary withdrawal of the military to launch an all-out strike:

So far 'the regime has used the new state of emergency to send the military back (but without so far 11.- 1---1- 1in which the bureaucracy, by suppressing all elements of workers democracy and workers' management of the economy is assisting tendencies towards the restoration of capitalism within the deformed and though up to now the extreme case, is not qualittatively different from the USSR and the deformed workers states. work) and to arrest the main mineworkers' leaders.

Among these is Victor Cuadros, one of the principal leaders of both the copper miners' union and of the Maoist-dominated leftwing electoral alliance the Peoples Democratic Union (UDP). :

Cuadros is in fact one of the four UDP deputies in the Constituent Assembly.

His imprisonment is yet another proof if any were needed of the hypocrisy of the regime of General Morales Bermudez when it talks of its democratic intentions.

The strike itself, however, shows that despite its contempt for democracy the military dictatorship has virtually lost the ability to hold the Peruvian mass struggle in check.

As the class struggle continues to sharpen in Peru the crucial question is the construction of a Trotskyist leadership capable of offering an independent programme tọ the mass movement.

Scan page 4

Wednesday the internal regime and the mistaken and downright reactionary political positions developed on most issues today.

We have shown in detail

----- pull-quotes -----

degenerated workers' states, In this respect Poland,