Polish workers set deadline

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have included union demands for the immediate payment of wage increases already agreed, increased supplies of food and the introduction of meat rationing by January 1.

The impact of these concessions on pay and food on Poland's already dislocated and indebted economy is likely to be traumatic.

It apears that the possibility of additional Soviet economic assistance-to enable the Polish bureaucracy to ride out such a crisis-formed one of the talking points in the brief visit to Moscow paid last Thursday by Polish CP leader Stanislaw Kania.

Although the visit took place in the context of increasingly vicious political attacks by East German and Czechoslovak leaders on the unofficial Polish unions-and moves by both regimes to restrict visits from Polish workers-Kania seems to have won the support of the Soviet leadership for his course of action.

After warmly embracing Kania at the airport, Kremlin chief Brezhnev declared his confidence in the Polish bureaucracy's ability to resolve the country's "difficulties"

Such a stance could well arise from new Soviet assessments on the immense difficulties that would be confronted in any attempt to crack down upon the militant Polish workers' movement.

Popular anger

Any move towards an invasion would prompt a huge uprising of united popular anger. Brezhnev at Warsaw Pact summit USA It has become increasingly clear that far from running in advance of the mass movement, strike leader Lech Walesa and many of the other Solidarity leaders are now struggling to restrain their members from further action.

One Szezeein delegate told Solidarity's national committee that in sounding out reactions to the November 12 strike "alert" , only 8 out of 821 factories in the area voted against all-out action if their demands were not met.

Language of force

And the Gdansk praesidium has stressed that the only language the regime understands is that of force.

In these conditions Walesa emerges balancing precariously between his ties to the Catholic Church-which lead him towards seeking a deal with the bureaucracy-and the pressure from the mass movement which first catapulted him into national prominence. As he pointed out last week:

"I keep on changing my mind. When I was simply a worker, I knew what to think."

The Kremlin leaders, like their junior partners in Warsaw, are at present forced to bank on precisely such signs of weakness in the leadership that emerged in the spontaneous mass struggle this summer.

The disbanding of the official trade union federation, and a wave of new clections within the old unions to create an impression of "democracy" together with the mass entry of large numbers of Stalinists into the new unions are moves designed to suck new layers of militants like Walesa into the bureaucratic apparatus of the state or at least confuse sections of workers sufficiently to give the government a breathing space for further manoeuvres.

Not easily fooled But the November 12 deadline shows that workers are not so easily fooled.

Their independent struggles have threatened the very basis of the power and privilege of the Polish Stalinist leaders: it is in the next period that a conscious Marxist leadership is necessary to transform this threat into the political overthrow of the bureaucracy and the establishment of the power of the organised working ciass.

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