Stalinist spending cuts

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A cutback in public expenditure on all fronts, 5% less jobs by the end of 1981, 10% reductions in the supply of equipment and stationery to . administrations and 20% parking spaces at workplaces, a freeze on advertising expenditure, office • modernisation and a cutback in streetlighting.

That is the list not of axewoman Thatcher but of axeman Gierek, Stalinist boss of Poland.

The cuts are the latest efforts of the Polish Stalinist bureaucracy to balance its shaky economic books.

The failure of the Polish "socialist planned economy" is chronic. For years the bureaucracy has unsuccessfully tried to force reductions in workers' living standards in order to force the working class to pay for bureaucratic privilege, defence spending, the vast cost of maindinine a huge repressive apparatus and the consequences of the inability of bureaucratic methods to develop the full potential of the productive Several times the leaders have tried to inflict such attacks by sharp increases in prices.

But each time they have done so, the hostile reaction of the masses, especially in the workers' uprising in 1976, has made this impossible. They have been forced to retreat ignominiously.

Upturned hands

And they have retreated into the arms of the imperialist bankers who have, through private banks and the IMF. poured billions of dollars into the upturned hands of the Polish bureaucrats.

Poland now owes $7 billion and its debt servicing this year will take over 50% of its export earnings.

With the capitalists becoming tighter-fisted, the bureaucracy is now forced to try massive public spending cuts.

This, they hope, will produce the needed cuts in workers living standards in a less