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- Subject: NEWS:POLAND ON LABOR DAY
- Message-ID: <1992Sep9.221036.22473@mont.cs.missouri.edu>
- Date: 9 Sep 92 22:10:36 GMT
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- Via The NY Transfer News Service ~ All the News that Doesn't Fit
-
- WW Editorial:
-
- Poland on Labor Day
-
- Is Polish President Lech Walesa a workers' leader? Is Poland's
- `Solidarity' a workers' movement? Asking that question 12 years
- ago, when `Solidarity' was founded, would have brought overwhelming
- "yes" answers from many participants in Labor Day events in the
- U.S. This answer was wrong then, and the latest events prove it.
-
- Workers are on strike all across Poland today. This time the
- so-called Solidarity organization is the government. And the
- government is planning to fire striking workers and break the
- strike.
-
- Walesa is now denouncing strikers and supports their being fired.
- Managers at the car parts factory in Tychy will soon dismiss
- 2,300 striking workers. That factory is special. It's been taken
- over by Fiat, the major Italian auto manufacturer. This
- imperialist enterprise is expected to turn a profit. In
- capitalist Poland, workers are not to share in that profit, nor
- to interfere with it.
-
- What happened to the Solidarity group of the early 1980s, which
- claimed 10 million members? The capitalists--the bosses and their
- intellectual hirelings--were the officers of that movement.
- Though Solidarity may have had a working-class rank and file, its
- political direction came from those anti-communist elements in
- Poland who were thoroughly pro-capitalist. They in turn got full
- backing from the CIA and the Vatican in the drive to overthrow
- the Polish government.
-
- Once these pro-capitalist politicians and wheeler-dealers succeeded
- in throwing out the Polish government -- what the U.S. media call
- the "communists" -- they had no use for the workers anymore. In fact,
- Solidarity no longer claims to be the biggest union in Poland.
- That role is now played by the union with a pro-communist
- leadership.
-
- Officials in the AFL-CIO who supported Solidarity throughout the
- 1980s were playing the bosses' game. There was never a
- possibility that the workers of Poland would wind up better off.
- The only ones to gain were a handful of Polish capitalists,
- mostly speculators, and the big monopolies from the imperialist
- countries.
-
- This clearly explains the seeming contradictions of 1981. Union
- buster Reagan welcomed Walesa while crushing the PATCO strike.
- There was no real contradiction. It just took a few years for
- Solidarity to lose its disguise.
-
- (Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted
- if source is cited. For more info contact Workers World,46 W. 21
- St., New York, NY 10010; "workers@igc.apc.org".)
-
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