Polish leaders retreat trom controntation

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In what amounts to a further major climbdown, Poland's Stalinist regime has conceded to a major demand of the country's new independent trade union federation Solidarity.

The Supreme Court has agreed that a clause inserted by a Warsaw judge conceding the leading role of the Communist Party should be removed from the union's statutes, and -in line with a compromise deal-appended to the statute as an annex.

In exchange for this public Give them an inch and they'll take a mile. That is generally true of the employers. It is even more true of the Thatcher government.

And last week they were given far more than an inch by the wretched leadership of 70,000 British Leyland workers.

A completely unrepresentative meeting of BL convenors threw aside the 2-1 vote by shop floor workers for strike action in pursuit of the unions' £17 pay claim-and called off a strike that would have at once become the focal point for an all-out fight against the Tory Within hours the Tories had capitalised on this betrayal. Hoping that the scale of the sell-out would set back and demoralise the whole working class, they moved in at once and announced a savage 6% limit on pay settlements in the public sector.

Miscalculated

This new pay policy-only 10% higher than Callaghan's retreat, the Stalinist leadership has averted the threat of massive strike action on November 12 and thus bought more time to find the means to control the militant Polish working class.

While the dispute has centred on the contested clause, few of the other economic or political concessions made by the government to settle this summer's strike wave have been realised in practice.

As Socialist Press has consistently pointed out, there is no way that the Stalinist bureaucracy in Poland or any of the deformed workers' states can coexist with genuinely independent trade unions.

The very existence of such bodies would be a permanent challenge to the bureaucracy's power and privileges.

The past month has seen, therefore, conflicts within the bureaucracy on the way forward and an escalation of a new stage of struggle as the working class began to demand the full implementation of the September agreements.

Mass strikes have erupted in Gdansk and Lublin on the 6 and 7 November.

In Gdansk public service workers crippled transport and services demanding immediate wage rises for teachers and other workers, while groups of strikers occupied the city's town hall.

In Lublin striking transport workers commandeered buses and organised impromptu meetings on them to explain their demands while on the streets supporters distributed red carnations.

It is in these conditions, against a background of harvest failure and economic chaos, and with the threat of further strikes Cont'd page 2 Polish leader Kania and Brezhnev