What's everyone's opinion of the Polish Solidarity movement? Was it a positive or negative force, or a little of both?

I only ask because I'm currently learning about the Soviet bloc states and their relation to labor. And from what I've read, they didn't exactly treat many of the workers with kid gloves, on a few occasions; the massacre of over forty strikers at Gdnask being somewhat indicative of this.

Many workers also participated in mass demonstrations in the 50s as well, in Poland (including a wildcat strike), Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.

Anyway, opinions?

I thought that there would be more interest in this topic...

Your right in that the Soviet bloc had problems in meeting the needs of workers. Even in Russia workers quickly saw the State Planning Commission the same way we in the west see our managers. One has to ask if the USSR was really a workers state why were suits planning the economy?

I think Solidarity was a little of both, on one hand the workers stood up as a class, on the other hand they were unable to reform the system or take the means product, thus resulted became 'meet the new boss, just like the old boss', with workers having to put up with the same suits they fought before but now the suits were capitalists.

Soldarity was totally reactionary, and a CIA front. It's leaders presided over the destruction of socialism and the installation of capitalism.

Here is the motherfucker Walesa crying over Reagan:




The AFT, the CIA, and Solidarność

Even the Orthodox Trotskyists agree:

Solidarnosc: Acid Test for Trotskyism

Anyone who supports this group should be immediately restricted for supporting extreme reactionary capitalist trash.

What do you think about the other worker actions and groups?

I'd also like to add that Solidarity had over ten million members, composed of the genuine proletariat. Even if we conclude that their leaders were reactionaries, this certainly says something about worker satisfaction in Poland, does it not?

Big fucking deal. The Nazis had 8.5 million members, mostly workers. What the fuck does that say about "worker satisfaction in Germany"?

In the 1980s some of us thought that Lech Walesa and Solidarity were on the verge of fighting for democratic control of production by the workers. Some of their speeches made it seem that way. We got all excited. We were wrong. I was wrong. It turned out to be nothing but a pro-capitalist movement.

Jesus, will you stop being so shrill?

My point shouldn't be very hard to understand. If the socialist governments in Europe were actual advocates of the working class, then organizations like Solidarity would not gain any traction, would they? If workers weren't getting exploited, there would be no draw to ANY reactionary organization. Instead, the situation was one of workers being prodded back to their workplaces at bayonnet point.

I'm not defending Solidarity. I'm trying to analyze the context in which it existed.

But go ahead, curse at me some more.

A good pamphlet of Solidarnosc was pubthe Spartacist League "Solidarnosc: Comany Union for CIA and Bankers", an excellent read I might add. This piece of shit Walesa today is working endlessly for counter-revolution in Cuba with that asshole Vaclav Havel. By the way, Joan Baez had written a song honoring Walesa after the crackdown on Solidarnosc "Happy Birthday, Leonid Brezhnev". I lost a hell of a lot of respect I had for her. Here are the lyrics:

"
Happy birthday, Leonid Brezhnev
What a lovely seventy-fifth
We watched the party on TV
You seemed to be taking things casually
What a mighty heart must beat in your breast
To hold forty-nine medals on your chest
Think of all the gifts that you've got
Some were acquired and some were not
Like a natural talent for marionettes
Who do your dirty work and cover your bets
So with one hand waving free
The other one crushed a budding democracy

Congratulations, Jaruzelski
What a wonderful job you have done
Let me mention to a sane man's eye
You've lost the meaning of compromise
They're comparing you to General Pinochet
It's a dubious compliment at best
Your people are freezing, the workers are bleeding
You've already arranged numerous deaths
The only difference in the camps from the stadiums
Is not much for the doomed all cry
It's only the weather and the songs people sing
Just before they die

Do you hear us, Lech Walesa?
What a terrible price you have paid
For being ahead of your time
Has surely constituted a crime
Oh, Mr. Brezhnev, look
Somebody read the little red book
And took it all seriously
The way you did when you were young and you believed
And you workers and you black Madonna
You're not supposed to utter a word
But the courage of you and your man of the year
Is a symphony the world has seldom seen or heard
Through the Siberian gates of hell
The Pope and the bishops are wishing you well
We see your candles in the park
Hear your fearless promises in the dark
How they cheat and when tried to win
They didn't know that there would always be within you
And we hear you, Lech Walesa
Yes, we hear you, Lech Walesa
Yes, we hear you, Lech Walesa
Yes, we hear you, Lech Walesa"

Very true, but the fact is Solidarnosc represented counter-revolution. Their entire program revolved around Polish nationalism, anti-semitism, and anti-Russian and anti-German chauvinism; as well as anti-abortion, and anti-woman. The crackdown in 1981 was ultimately progressive. Lets not forget that Solidarnosc is/was the only "trade union" that Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II) ever loved.

Well, look at poor Poland today. As someone recently said it's like "the Mexico of Europe".

You could say Lech Walesa and 'Solidarnosc' succeeded where Hitler and the nazis failed i.e. turn the Poles into the slaves of western Europe......

Haha, that song is very clear about its politics. Funny, usually "protest songs" were fairly cryptic, without clearly denouncing anyone. You wouldn't want to offend college liberals, after all.

The history and meaning of Solidarity is a little more nuanced than Stalinist revisionism would have you believe.

It was an authentic, working class movement against the state capitalist regime. It was autonomous, decentralized, a perfect example of how to organize a labor movement effectively in the modern world. Its use of strikes and occupations indicate the continued militancy and ingenuity of the Polish working class. Solidarity utilized symbols and creativity in the course of class struggle, an important piece of revolutionary praxis. It, along with the power of the working class in the Soviet Union, helped bring down the state capitalist regimes of Eastern Europe.

That said, the traditional Leninist and capitalist substitutionism of individuals for movements confuses what Solidarity was and what it ended up becoming. Solidarity was not always Lech Walesa. It became Lech Walesa, and in that transformation, it became reactionary. Walesa was a brilliant organizer and a scummy politician who exploited the working class to get elected and proceeded to lay waste to the conditions of the working class in Poland.

But Solidarity, in its earlier days, was a fantastically progressive force and model for class struggle around the industrialized world. As it progressed, it became more and more a mirror image of that regime it opposed. Like so many resistance movements, it ultimately became co-opted by the forces of state and international capital. It was handicapped also, unfortunately, by the historical and continuing appeals of nationalism, antisemitism and Catholicism to the Polish working class. The revolutionary movement in Poland has long been profoundly nationalistic, in response to historical Tsarist and Soviet invasions, and this nationalism was exploited by the officials of Solidarity to become the new bourgeoisie of post-Soviet Poland.

All in all, Solidarity is a mixed bag: a great example of both how to organize anti-capitalist struggle and how not to organize anti-capitalist struggle. Prol-position has a decent account of class struggle in Poland that's worth checking out.

I think you're overstating the case a bit. It was a workers' organization, and of course one has to side with fellow workers against a privileged caste. I'm with you there.

Also with you: there was a lot more rank-and-file control, and some socialist-democracy tendencies, initially than later. The banning of Solidarity by the regime broke up the rank-and-file organization and let "intellectuals" and bureaucrats play a much bigger role. And, of course, the imperialists and their union bureaucrats sent aid to Solidarity in order to influence it in a pro-capitalist direction; there was no major class-struggle upsurge in the advanced capitalist countries to influence Polish workers in another direction.

And finally: there's no reason to mourn the demise of the Soviet-bloc regimes, despite the hellish market policies that followed. We could wish their overthrow had gone in a socialist direction instead. But it was those regimes' crimes in the name of communism that destroyed that possibility, and the longer they ruled the less socialist consciousness and potential there was. The world workers movement is still recovering from the damage the apparatchiks did, but now that they're gone at least the recovery can start.

The sooner they were brought down from within the better, and at least workers, by fighting them, gained some experience in struggle and organization which were useful in resisting the market and austerity policies.

But Solidarity was, mostly, simply a trade union, with all the limitations of pure-and-simple trade unionism. It couldn't be anything else, with socialist consciousness in the Soviet bloc basically wiped out by decades of bureaucratic rule, so I'm not blaming the Polish workers. And trade unionism is a necessary starting point, as well as something workers use to defend their basic material interests. Even trade union demands, BTW, ran counter to the austerity policies which were promoted by market ideologists and Poland's Western creditors even in the 1980s....

Let's not act as if they were the greatest thing sliced bread, that's all. That'd be overrating trade unionism and trade-union consciousness.

***

Agora77, what can you do, these kind of topics always attract those who seem towish the Soviet bloc regimes had been (or stayed) even more obscurantist, bureaucratic, and repressive.

It should come as no surprise that anarchists will support anything anti-communist, even outright anti-Semitic fascist organizations with CIA connections.

Walesa created the fucking organization, and it was always anti-communist.

Please stop flaming.

Walesa did not create the organization. He was the first secretary of it. It was created by the workers at the Lenin shipyard.

Stop supporting anti-Semitic fascist organizations funded by the CIA please.

Lech Walesa was rabid anti-semitic, sexist, racist homophobe, directly funded by Thatcher and Reagan, who posed as a socialist reformer in order to convince ordinary Poles to support the imperialist takeover of their country.

Enough said.

Solidarnosc did win over about 80% of the Polish working class, but by no means did it represent the interest of the workers. Solidarnosc was a front for the most reactionary elements: the CIA, MI-6, the Vatican, as well as Wallstreet and Frankfurt bankers. Not to mention the only "trade union" Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher ever loved. The Solidarnosc "militancy" was not a struggle for workers but a struggle to bring back the landowners, capitalists, authority of the Catholic church, and the Polish ruling class. You seem to look upon the forces of counter-revolution in Eastern Europe as a triumphant liberation for workers. This is an illusion carried out by many leftists sadly. Your position puts you right up there on the side of Boris Yeltsin, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, George H.W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Pope Wojtyla, and other reactionaries. Solidarnosc was about struggling for capitalism.

Although Solidarity was a counter-revolutionary organization, there were other workers movements in the Socialist bloc which were not counter-revolutionary, for example, the Hungarian uprising in 1956, which was essentially an attempt by the working class to destroy the bureaucracy which had been imposed by the Soviets, and establish a workers state based on democracy, expressed through soviets located in major urban centers. It is unfortunate that this event is so often twisted to make it seem as if workers were demanding the restoration of capitalism.