[South African state forces pa Poland's strike wave…]

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South African state forces pa Poland's strike wave shows no signs of abating.

On the contrary: in the last week workers have taken indus trial action in support of wage and other demands in yet more cities.

The upsurge of the working class is now more of a nationwide phenomenon than even in the previous risings of 1970 and 1976.

Last week the workers of the Baltic connurbation of Gdansk, Gdynia and Sopot-the scene of some of the most dramatic events in 1970-entered the stage in a way which is deeply ominous for the Stalinist In these cities the workers organised a disciplined halfhour "warning strike"

Their representatives said that if the warning was not heeded and wage increases granted then all out strikes would begin.

In this game of cat and mouse it is the bureaucracy and not the working class which is the mouse.

In other cities, such as Wroclaw in Lower Silesia, workers have sharpened the political point of their wage struggle by demanding the same wages and material privileges as the police and army.

Rejected

It was in Wroclaw, too, that the workers showed how far they had gone in breaking out of the institutional straightjacket in which the bureaucracy tried to confine them.

They firmly rejected the efforts by the leaders of the official bureaucratic "trade unions" to put themselves at the head of the struggles in order to divert them from their inexorable assault on the political power of the bureaucracy.

So far, that bureaucracy has been forced to cave in on every one of the mounting demands of the working class.

There is now chance whatever present agitation US peter out at some It has shown itself to be powerless. It is looked to with contempt by the vast majority of those whom it rules.

Not only in Poland but throughout the Stalinist-ruled states of Eastern Eurone the ruling caste knows that this situation must be reversed or it will spread like wildfire as it has done through Poland.

So it was not surmising that Polish Party Secretary Edward Gierek rushed off for a rapid 'holiday' in Moscow to ask his Soviet masters what to do.

Arrests

As growing numbers of militants are subjected to arrest, interrogation and intimidation, Polish radio has issued scarcely veiled threats that if the agitation does not subside the Soviet army will intervene.

Poland's "friends", it says, are concerned by what happening.

At present there is every sign that these threats are producing not the terror which is intended but contempt and greater resistance.

In Poland today the political revolution against the Stalinist dictatorship is underway.

But a great danger is posed by the continued strength of the Catholic Church, With its readiness to exploit the situation for the building of a reactionary movement, designed to destroy the nationalised basis of the Polish economy.

It : is vital that in their struggle for political independence from the Stalinist bureaucracy-whether right or "left"Polish workers build and strengthen workers' councils as a direct counter to the existing state apparatus.

At the same time a Trotskyist leadership must be built to carry through the conscious struggle to defend the progressive property relations in Poland while fighting for the overthrow clearly no of the parasitic and reactio of the parasitic and reactionary that the bureaucracy that feeds off 1 bureaucracy that feeds off these can simply gains. gains.