Why workers should back Palestinian cause-p.5

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Russian troops at the ready "Put your house in order-or we'll knock it down for you". This was the blunt warning lurking beneath the diplomatic wording of a letter sent by the Soviet Communist Party to its Polish sister party last week.

The 7-page letter was effectively a call on pro-Moscow hardliners within the Polish Communist Party to oust the present Party leader Stanislaw Kania and to implement an immediate crackdown - On political opposition both inside and outside the Party.

If no such crackdown took place, the letter tacitly suggested, then there would be no alternative but an invasion.

Compromise

But Kania stood his ground against this attack. While himself promising to launch a crackdown on political opposition, he defended his own approach of seeking to defuse Solidarity's demands through reform and compromise.

And his stand won the backing of the most influential forces on the Polish Central Committee. The Moscow line succeeded in enlisting the support primarily of the disgruntled and isolated Stalinist old guard, almost all of whom have already been stripped of their positions and rejected by those party members they are supposed to represent.

In what amounted to two separate votes of confidence in the Kania leadership, the pro-Moscow faction secured the backing of little more than 20 out of the 120 CC members at the meeting.

Rebuff

Kania's support came largely from the provincial parties, factory representatives and the military-those still holding office and feeling it necessary to respond to the feelings of the rank and file.

This rebuff to an unusually open move by Moscow to influence the Polish Party poses Brezhnev with a major headache as the date for the Polish CP congress looms ever closer.

His initial letter had been prompted by the growing recognition in the Kremlin that the pressúre of the working class is now placing a question mark over the reliability of the Polish Communist Party itself.

Seasoned Stalinist stalwarts are finding themselves defeated by militant opponents in the elections of delegates to next month's party congress.

Álready over one-third of the Polish CP's 3 million members have joined the Happier times: independent union Solidarity -leaving the old "official" unions nothing but an empty shell.

150,000 Party members have resigned in disgust at their leaders' opposition to Solidarity.

But others have taken the fight into the Party itselfoften with devastating results for the old bureaucratic Party chiefs.

Party meetings are beginning to seethe with political debate as sections of workers begin to raise demands for democratic reforms and accountability of their leaders.

Hopes of either drawing the Solidarity leaders into the apparatus of the state or seeking through an influx of party members to exert some control over Solidarity have been dashed.

The militancy of the working class keeps Solidarity leaders Under constant Kania with Brezhnev pressure while the same militancy within the working class membership of the Communist Party has helped bring about the purge of over 70,000 party bureaucrats since the mass struggles began last August.

Small wonder therefore that it is the crumbling control of the leadership over the Party which is the major focal point of the criticisms and threats in Brezhnev's letter. It complains for instance that:

"In the past period the situation inside the PUWP [Communist Party] itself has become a subject of particular concern. Little more than a month remains before the Party congress. Despite this, it is the forces hostile to socialism who are more and more setting the pace in the campaign for the election of delegates and of the leadership bodies.

OF It is this analysis which underlies the repeated assertion in Brezhnev's letter that "anti-socialist", "anti-communist" and ' "anti-Soviet" forces are gaining the upper hand in Poland:

"They are carrying out a struggle for power and are already winning it."

There is an open call for the reimposition of full-scale censorship:

"We called particular attention to the fact that the enemy had gained control of the mass information media which, for the greater part, had become instruments of anti-socialist activities and which were being used to undermine socialism and disorganise the party."

The letter complains that Polish leaders Kania and Jaruszelski, even after verbally agreeing with Moscow's criticisms, had done nothing to change their "policy of concessions and compromise":

"One position after another was surrendered without taking into account the documents of the last Central Committee plenum, drawing attention to the counter revolutionary threat.

The fact that the same Kania and • Jaruszelski have now secured a substantial vote of confidence from the Central Committee poses problems both in Warsaw SUPPLEMENT and in Moscow.

The Warsaw leaders now have to make good some of the pledges they have just made to crack down on political dissidents and reimpose censorship.

They have talked of tightening restrictions on the possession and use of private duplicators and on unofficial publications.

Situation They have announced plans to get industry working six days a week by the introduction of shift worka move likely to be resisted by many militants.

But for Moscow the new situation is also bleak. They have not simply failed to oust Party leaders they find unacceptably weak: they have in the process demonstrated for all to see how weak is the popular base of their most loyal followers.

The letter may have attracted a group of Polish Stalinists prepared • to endorse an invasion: but the isolation of these leaders from the masses also confirms the huge scale of popular opposition such an invasion would confront.

But it would be wrong to conclude that their political weakness in Poland will force the Moscow leaders to take no action.

On the contrary, the more tenuous bureaucratic control becomes in Poland, the more the Moscow leaders are forced to contemplate desperate military measures to crush the forward movement of the Polish masses.

The fact is that-just like the Polish bureaucrats-the power and privileges of the Kremlin leaders rest not on their ownership of factories or other means of production but on their ability to retain their control over those means of production through police terror and repression of all forms of political opposition.

This is why the Kremlin bureaucrats look with horror at the emergence of Solidarity as the organised expression of the demands and self-confidence of the Polish working class: and why they look with dismay at the success of Solidarity's challenges to the power of the state.

They fear that the momentum of the struggles in Poland will permanently undermine the power of the Polish Stalinist leadershipand spread across Poland's borders into other deformed. workers' states and into the USSR itself.

In Poland alone it is estimated that some 750,000 of the 3 million-strong CP occupy full-time party posts carrying varying degrees of power and material privilege. The numbers of such bureauCont'd p.2, col 5.

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MIST PRESS, Thursday 18 June, 1981