Peter Gowan Archive | ETOL Main Page
London Focus on Eastern Europe, Vol. 1 No. 6, January–February 1978, pp. 13–14.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The much heralded Party Conference that took place in Warsaw on 9–10 January failed to produce a new strategy for tackling the country’s economic crisis and revealed continuing disagreements within the Polish CP leadership on how best to move forward.
After the strikes of June 1976 and the government’s cancellation of large food price increases, 5 Party commissions were set up to prepare new proposals on economic policy. But instead of unveiling the fruits of their work, Party leader Gierek avoided any reference to their recommendations in his keynote speech on 9 January. And at a press conference the following day, the official spokesperson admitted to Western correspondents that disagreements remained on how to proceed on the economic front.
Since June 1976 the economic situation has in many ways deteriorated. To relieve the food shortage and ease inflationary pressures the government had hoped to rapidly expand agricultural output. Yet Gierek told the conference that agricultural production has actually declined by 3½% since 1975. At the same time the government’s industrial strategy is threatened by high debts to the capitalist world estimated at more than 10 billion dollars. Furthermore, the Party weekly Polityka estimates that the trade deficit with the West was cut in 1977 by only half the planned amount.
During the 3 months before the Party conference Gierek held an unprecedented number of meetings with foreign leaders in order to find external sources of economic support: he met the Shah of Iran, Brezhnev, Giscard d’Estaing, Schmidt, Andreotti and finally Carter. But the results seems to have been quite meagre. Even Carter’s 200 million dollar loan will be immediately swallowed up in grain purchases from the USA – and this in a country which Gomulka had planned to be self-sufficient in grain by the early 1970s.
In comparison with the capitalist world, of course, Poland’s overall economic growth looks extraordinarily impressive: industrial production up 20% in two years. And the kind of cut in working class standards that the government would like to carry out to pay for its own past errors is probably not much greater than the cut in British workers’ living standards since 1975. But ever since 1971 the Party leadership’s bid for popular support has rested primarily on its promise of uninterrupted increases in living standards. Thus all the current economic difficulties pose a deeper overriding problem: how to avoid fresh outbreaks of popular discontent and find new sources of authority for the Party apparatus.
In response to the problem, one influential current within the Party favours the introduction of a new package of liberalization measures. Such ideas have been canvassed cautiously by Polityka, whose editor, Rakowski, is believed to be closely in touch with Gierek’s own circle. The most dramatic demonstration of this pressure for liberalization was the publication of a letter to Gierek signed by none other than Edward Ochab, the former leader of the Party ousted by Gomulka in October 1956 and head of state in the early 1960’s. The letter, also signed by such leading 1956 liberals as Morawski, puts forward a series of concrete proposals: to jive new life to the so-called Democratic Party and United Peasant Party – up to now purely appendages of the CP nationally; the reanimation of Parliament, the trade unions, the local authorities and the organs of “workers’ management” in the factories. The letter also calls for the freeing of the “sane forces” of society which at present cannot express themselves because of the “bureaucratic machine which provokes hypocrisy and the absence of initiative in the lower rungs of the Party organization”. Calling for respect for the rights of minorities, the letter repeats a formula used by the Dubcek leadership in Czechoslovakia in 1968, declaring that the leading role of the Party should be maintained but that it should be based not on institutional controls but on mass popular support.
Against such liberalizing currents, powerful forces within the Party apparatus wish to find a political basis for a more rigidly authoritarian political regime. In Czechoslovakia or East Germany such currents still talk about ‘proletarian internationalism’ and the link with the USSR, but such slogans have long since been replaced in Poland by appeals to chauvinistic nationalism, anti-semitism, Polish Catholicism and anti-intellectual sentiment.
The strength of this current within the Party apparatus was shown in December when Zycie Warszawy, the daily of the Warsaw Party Committee, attacked Rakowski, the editor of Polityka, for “revisionism” in an article on decentralization. Zycie Warszawy could have used such anathemas against a man so close to Gierek himself only with the backing of forces at the very summit of the Party.
Gierek’s political stance at the Party conference indicated an attempt to steer a middle course between these two wings of the Party hierarchy. In a gesture towards the Party liberals he called for the establishment of local committees to combat bureaucratic abuses, adding that no problem was too sensitive for open debate in Poland today. But both these ideas are likely to meet with a good deal of scepticism while all the controls from above remain in force.
Much more serious are Gierek’s efforts to establish a new basis for relations with the Catholic hierarchy. On 29 October Gierek had a meeting with Cardinal Wyszynski – the first such publicized meeting for many years. Then at the beginning of December the Party leader met the Pope in the Vatican. A witness at the meeting told the International Herald Tribune (16 December 1977) that Wyszynski “virtually wrote the Pope’s speech, if not that of Mr. Gierek”.
The Polish Church has flourished as a popular force since the 1940s. The number of monks and nuns per head of the population is, for example, considerably higher than before the War. Wealthy, and able to practise its religious activities throughout 11,000 parishes, the Catholic Church maintains a University of Lublin and has considerable influence within the intelligentsia and other layers of the population. At the same time the Church hierarchy has not been notable for progressive views on social matters. While attempting to place itself at the head of popular movements for greater political rights, the hierarchy has, in the past, used such movements as bargaining counters in its efforts to wring extra institutional privileges for itself from the Party leadership.
Wyszynski gave an indication of what he wants on this occasion when he returned from Rome in December. He called for greater respect for Christian moral values, especially in the schools, suggesting that he wants the Party to sanction religious education in state schools and calling for greater church access to the media. On this basis, the Church hierarchy would presumably cease to support the secular forces of the opposition outside the Party.
A sign that negotiations are quite far advanced was given when Mrs. Carter met the wily Cardinal: Wyszynski told her that Mr. Gierek is “a righteous man”.
A new agreement with the Church would accomplish a number of tasks for the Party leadership: it would buttress the regime’s political base, without requiring any significant liberalization of political structures; it would give the leadership some extra support from Western governments, and it would also give a freer hand in dealing with the more left-wing oriented currents within the unofficial opposition. There are indeed some indications that before the formation of the Movement for Human Rights last spring, the Party leadership was looking for ways of increasing the weight of more Catholic and nationalist-oriented currents within the opposition, in the knowledge that such currents would be amenable to pressure from the Church hierarchy in the event of an agreement with Wyszynski.
Peter Gowan Archive | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 15 February 2023