Polish Leaders with Fire

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The Polish government has conceded the right to a Solidarity trade union to the country's farmers.

They have also conceded weekly television time to Solidarity.

This comes with the request' by Parliament to end strikes for two months.

Solidarity has accepted this since it does not carry the force of law. The leadership also asked the government to make concessions, not made under pressure.

The concessions that have been made are designed both to end the action of the farmers and also to strengthen the more right wing elements around Walesa in Solidarity's leadership.

The farmers agreed to recognise the leading role of the Communist Party in Polish society.

The Polish bureaucracy is clearly playing with fire. The Rural Solidarity development means that there will be another independent body challenging their power -and this will be linked with the working class.

A momentary strengthening of Walesa creates a much greater problem. Potentially the whole of Polish society is opposed to the bureaucracy.

There must now be a struggle to make this new union a representative of the poorer peasants and not just a tool of the richer farmers who will link up with the bureaucracy to squeeze greater exploitation out of The desa si the crisis also has its reflections inside the Polish Communist Party itself.

The ruling bureaucracy is split as to how to deal with Solidarity and much of the rank and file has gone over to the new movement.

We death Worker the los tion of Last Wednesday 500 Communist Party activists from 19 cities met in the Copernicus University of Torun. This is the first major rank and file conference organised of an East European CP.

The reason the conference was allowed must be connected with attempts by the liberal' section of the bureaucracy to outmanoeuvie the hardliners.

This is borne out by the attendance of three Central Committee members (although Kania refused to attend), and the endorsement of the conference by the official Warsaw paper, 'Zycie Warsazawy'.

The attendance at the conference and its decisions shows how quickly such developments can overtake the bureaucrats who at first endorse them.

True the call was made for the removal of pro-Moscow hardliners Olszowski and Grabski. But the criticism at the conference was of the whole of the leadership, as "people fightto stay in their positions"

The demands went up for democracy in the party (non existent since the CPs of the early 20s), and for the full minutes of the Central Committee to be published.

They also demanded direct elections to the July party congress, not the precongress committees which were unrepresentative.

These demands for demo•acy ana for the end ot secrecy are important elements in the transitional programme to political revolution.

But it must be made clear to Polish CP members that the CP is the party of the The vast majority of the leadership rests on its privileges as an elite caste. There is no changing the Stalinist CP. There was even a demand that news of events in Poland be circulated to the CPs in the rest of Eastern Europe. But such a move, unless directed to the masses is an attempt to avert the danger of a Soviet invasion simply by appeals to other Stalinist bureaucracies.

What is necessary is a genuine revolutionary party -a Trotskyist party-to lead a political revolution to overthrow the bureaucratic caste and bring about workers' power through councils such as those that developed last year in the form of the Gdansk Central Strike Committee.