Reprisals Against Strike

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Brutal sentences were handed out last week in Warsaw and Radom to workers involved in the June 25th strikes and demonstrations which forced the. Polish regime to withdraw - overnight - the massive increases in food prices they had announced the day before.

In Radom, (an industrial city sixty miles south of Warsaw, where mass demonstrations attacked Communist Party offices and opened up the luxury appartments of local bureaucrats) six workers were jailed for terms of six to ten years after a secret "trial"

"TRIAL"

And in the first of the Warsaw "trials" seven workers of the Ursus tractor plant got sentel ices of three to five years.

One of those who received the longest term was a young worker, Miroslaw Chmielewski, accused with others of ripping up a main railway line running near the plant.

Further secret victimisations are certainly due or already in process.

The Stalinist bureaucracy in Poland is desperately trying to recover from one of the biggest blows struck at them by the working class since the war.

Their dilemma is sharply expressed in the fact that while they are blaming "the disturbances" of June 25th on a handful of "hysterical hooligans in a state of drunkeness" in practice they faced a strike movement which forced them, within hours, to capitulate on price increases totalling thousands millions of pounds.

And reports now show that it was indeed a national strike move ment. There were important stoppages in the cities of Poznan and Wroclaw.

In Warsaw, as well as the Ursus works, there were strikes at the Karol-Swierczewski Steel Works, at the Tewa transistor factory and -perhaps most important of all - at the Zeram motor plant, the centre of preparations for armed resistance to the threatened Soviet invasion of 1956.

At Plock there were demonstrations at the petro-chemical works, which process oil piped from the Soviet Union. And there are also reports of action in the Baltic ports of the Gdansk area, scene of the strikes and demonstrations against similar price rises which toppled Gomulka and brought Gierek's group to power in December 1970 and January 1971.

Such a national movement reflects the profound social contradictions of the deformed workers' state in Poland.

RS The Stalinists' version that food prices are artificially low ber cause workers have been protected from inflation since 1970 is a cynica I lie.

PRIVILEGE

While prices in state shops have been controlled, supplies have been diverted more and more into the black market and into the inumerable "privilege" shops in which party and state functionaries can get whatever they want - while ordinary workers must queue for hours for inferior produce or pay through the nose, on the black market. The strike wave was not at all against socialism or the state control of prices, but on the contrary, against the bureaucratic deformations and prostitution of the planned economy to serve the greed and arrogance of the Stalinist caste.

Western Stalinism has reacted with lick-spittle hypocrisy. The Italian Communist Party has sent a note to Gierek expressing "preoccupation" after receiving an appeal from thé Polish oppositionist Jacek Kuron, himself jailed by the regime in 1965 and 1969.

The labour and . trade union movement in Britain, and in particular the British Communist Party, must take up the defence of the workers who face repression and long jail terms in Poland for the "crime" of opposing price-rises and Trade union branches "and Trades Councils must demand that the Polish government must release those jailed and drop the dozens of secret "trials" that are still pending. [Polish Embassy - 47, Portland Place, London WI..