Is Poland Socialist?

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All socialists find themselves continually confronted with the problem of the 'communist countries.

Whether it's right wingers yelling at us to "get back to Russia" or people genuinely interested to know the difference between the Soviet Union and our policies for socialism, the question crops up all the time.

The purpose of this article is to explain our criticisms of these regimes and to look at the historical background, showing how the socialist revolution of 1917 degenerated into repression.

All workers and socialists must have been impressed by the strength and determination of the Polish workers in their huge strike wave this summer.

By using the traditional weapons of their class-solid strike action combined with occupations of their factories and shipyards-these workers have shaken the government, overthrown Prime Minister Gierek and wrested major concessions from their rulers.

They returned to work undefeated and the Polish Communist Party is still reeling from the shock waves.

Although they used the same weapons as workers in this country, although they encountered similar problems of leadership, the Polish workers were not fighting similar capitalist bosses.

Their struggle is against rulers who claim to govern in the name of the working class, who claim that there is no need of independent trade unions, since the "socialist" state is based on the needs of workers.

The Polish strikes expose starkly the basic contradiction of the Stalinist regimes of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

These so-called "socialist countries" are governed by bureaucratic elites who have usurped power from the working class.

In order to maintain their privileged positions as minority rulers, they have to suppress even the most elemental rights, crush their opponents and yet still maintain the fiction that they rule on behalf of the working class.

In order to understand the nature of the Polish and other Eastern European regimes, it is necessary to go back to the 1917 revolution in Russia.

Enormous gains were made by the Russian masses after the overthrow of capitalism.

Socialist revolution did not just mean the nationalisation of property and booting out all the factory bosses-although this was an essential part!

It also meant that real power in the country was seized from the hands of the bosses and the Duma (parliament) by the Soviets (i.e. workers? councils).

These soviets were composed of delegates from all working class and peasant organisations and from the rank and file soldiers.

A similar organisation in Britain today would have delegates from trade union branches, working class political parties, black organisations, women's groups, tenants' associations, etc.

These Soviets-led by the Bolshevik Partyran the country. They decided how transport and production was organised, how food and other supplies were distributed and so on.

All delegates were democratically elected and if the members of the organisations which elected them disagreed with their delegates' actions they could recall them at any time.

Despite the fact that the economy was ravaged by war and famine, advances were made towards reorganising many aspects of social life.

To use the position of women as an example, of course women's liberation could not and did not miraculously happen overnight.

But despite the backwardness of the country -and the backward positions of even many Bolshevik Party members, steps were made.

Abortion was legalised-an important decree, since abortion was at the time, the only effective -if hazardous and unpleasant-form of birth control.

Communal dining rooms were widely established-largely because they provided the best means of rationing food in a period of acute shortage, but also as a step towards lightening the burden of housework on women.

Trotsky describes the plans that were made on Revolution Betrayed.

"The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, creches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanitoria, moving pictures, theatres, etc. The complete absorption of the house-keeping functions of the family by institutions of the socialist society, uniting all generations in solidarity and mutual aid, was to bring to woman, and thereby to the loving couple, a real liberation from the thousand year old fetters.

When Lenin and the Bolsheviks led the working class to power in 1917, they fully expected similar revolutions to erupt throughout capitalist Europe in the aftermath of the devastating 191418 war.

They thought the spark. Women shipyard workers at Gdansk The Communist International was founded to provide the leadership necessary for these uprisings. But these hopes were never realised.

The young socialist state remained, not just astate from all the imperialist nations who but under military and economic fought on the side of the Whites in the Civil War.

Despite a massive increase in production under the new planned system, the economy remained close to ruin.

It was these two factors, isolation and economic devastation that were crucial to the emergence of a state bureaucracy As Trotsky points out, shortages lead to queues and queues need policing; these are the conditions that easily give rise to the development of bureaucracy.

After Lenin's death in 1923, there was a prolonged struggle within the party over questions of democracy and economic development.

Instead of fighting for women's rights the Stalinist regimes promote sentimenta images of Motherhood & Family Lifeas in this Soviet poster.

ALLE Stalin began to climb up the party hierarchy and came to represent the new breed of bureaucrat that was springing up at all levels.

Since the Communist Party were now firmly in power, all sorts of self-seeking careerists joined to feather their own nests.

Under Stalin's direction the conditions of membership were relaxed to allow these people in. Supervision of politically hostile technicians was relaxed and managers gradually replaced workers' committees in the factories.

Stalin also made a virtue out of international isolation: he developed the notion that it was necessary to build "socialism in one country"and, by implication, accept capitalism everywhere else.

Deals were struck with imperialism, and the Communist International became no longer an organisation for building revolutionary parties, but rather-with the aid of repeated purges of leadership-reduced to the role of a tool of Stalin's foreign policy.

As far as women were concerned, Stalinisation resulted in the reversal of all the gains that had been made.

The Bolshevik policy of replacing the family in order to free women from household drudgery was anathema to the Stalinists.

With their deep conservatism, the idea of liberating youth and women through the replacement of the family horrified them.

Furthermore they desperately needed to establish authority and discipline among the nation's youth, and the family provided the ideal means:

"The most compelling nature of the present cult of the family is undoubtedly the need of the bureaucracy for a stable hierarchy of relations, and for the disciplining of youth by means of 10,000,000 points of support for authority and power.

Abortion Abortion became illegal in 1936. Although it is now legal again, contraception is virtually unobtainable in the USSR.

Women are seen almost entirely as child-bearers: (although almost all women work outside the home as well.

"Motherhood" became exalted-women get medals for producing a large number of children in much the same way that factory managers get bonuses for overfulfilling their production quotas.

International Women's Day, once the celebration of the strike of female textile workers revol pan, as no the in the doon 1907 that sickening display of sentimentality about femininity.

Take this quotation from Pravda of 8 March 1976 (quoted in Labour Focus on Eastern Europe):

"The warmth of the female soul, the solicitude of wives and mothers makes the Soviet family strong, loving and attentive. Women raise their child-the future builders of communism-to be healthy of body and ideologically firm of mind, to be worthy citizens of the socialist fatherland. The nation is grateful to you, women, for your great and noble work."

A proper examination of the position of women in the Soviet Union requires a separate article -suffice to say here that women suffered particularly as bureaucracy and savage repression settled on the Soviet Union, destroying the fragile workers' democracy and crushing all liberating experiments.

It was these events of the 1920s, as bureaucratic rule was established, that determined the nature of the Soviet Union today.

Indirectly, they are also at the root of the system prevailing in the countries of the Eastern bloc.

Army

In all essential respects, these regimes were created by the Red Army forcibly extending the Soviet system.

Thus all these countries are built on a betrayal of the socialist revolution.

The socialised property-a major gainremains intact however: there are virtually no capitalists or private profit-mainly among peasants and farmers-in the deformed workers' states.

The rhetoric of socialism also remains, but it is mouthed by conservative bureaucrats who have more in common with our own right-wing trade union leaders than with the working class.

Elaborate and extensive repression is necessary to preserve the bureaucrats' material privileges-since the whole edifice is built on corruption and special privileges.

Since the economy is not based on workers' needs but on clumsy, bureaucratic mismanagement, and increasingly linked to the crisis-ridden capitalist economies, these countries are lurching into economic chaos.

So repression is also necessary to quell workers' resistance to the lowering of their living standards which is beginning to happen throughout the bloc.

In Poland this hasn't worked-and the Polish working class has not only demonstrated its own strength but also, without realising it, pointed to the need for a new, political, revolution to overthrow the bureaucrats and re-establish workers' democracy on the basis of the nationalised property relations that flow from the 1917 revolution.

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