Kania Sacked as Polish Bureaucrats Lose Patience

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ONE OF the most blackcomic traits of the Stalintwist the meaning of words - to elevate the art of cant to new heights undreamed of even by our own ruling class.

The Central Committèe of the Polish United Workers Party at its latest plenum, the fourth since the Extraordinary Congress held in July, set itself the goal - believe it or not -of pushing back "totalitarianism' , which according to these gentlemen is threatening Poland.

Appeasement

This alleged totalitarianism is the responsibility of Solidarnosc, with its demand for the formation of a national economic council of the PUWP and the union to disuss Poland's impasse.

To facilitate its crusade against totalitarianism, the CC has ousted Stanislaw Kania as General Secretary of the PUWP.

Kania took over the reins of power after Edward Gierek's well-timed heart attack in the wake of the August occupations last year. For years the head of Poland's secret police, with an undoubted ability to further his career, it seems he could not survive this final crisis over his handling of the independent and militant workers' movement. His appeasement of Solidarnosc was found distasteful by a large part of the Central Committee.

Gwiazda and Bogdan Lis Demands at the Plenum included the total banning of all strikes for a period of three years, as suggested by Kociolek - First Secretary of the Warsaw PUWP apparatus.

It is very difficult to imagine such a ban being inforced without a major test of strength and perhaps a bloody showdown. The Plenum backed down from the more extreme proposals, yet it made a decisive shift to a more hardline attitude against the workers.

For the first time in a Stalinist-ruled state, the Party and government are headed by the same person - who is also a high-ranking military figure.

General Jaruzelski, minister of Defence since 1968, was elected head of the Party by 180 out of 184 votes. Although his acceptance by the Party's top functionaries was fairly overwhelming, (he also got the highest number of votes for the CC at the PUWP July Congress) splits continue in the bureaucracy.

Nationalist

Kania's resignation, which followed the CC's condemnation of the chaotic state of the economy and the Party's dealing with it, was accepted by only 54% of the Committee's members. The split between those desiring cooperation and incorporation of Solidarnose into the running of the country fon the bureaucracy's terms) and those who fear the entire process has already gone too far has only been tentatively resolved by the election of the General.

Jaruzelski will play a balancing role within the Central Committee and the Party's other leading bodies, and the Stalinists also hope that they will now be more able to play the nationalist card.

Jaruzelski, head of the armed forces, the supposed guarantor of Polish sovereignity, can perhaps now be elevated to the heights of a national saviour.

With the winter months, approaching, with Poland's GNP estimated to be a catastrophic 25% down on last year, with only about two weeks coal reserves, the bureaucrats hope the General will be able to appeal to the Polish nation to desist from strikes, to resume Saturday working, and to agree to price increases, all in the name of national salvation.

His oft-vaunted refusal to use the Polish army against strikers in 1970 and 1976 will be severely tested in the coming weeks.

The Stalinists are also pushing to put their own house in order for the confrontations ahead.

Kania, before his r esignation, boldly admittec Ithat 'the lack of confidenc = has paralysed the party from inside and nobody can believe in a Party that does not believe in itself."

Purge

To overcome the paralysis of will; the Stalinists have embarked on a wholesale purge from their ranks of those they consider fifth columnists.

Already Bogdan Lis, a Gdansk worker, and for the past year no.2 to Walesa in Solidarnosc, and a member of the PUWP since 1976, has been expelled from the The same has occured to Bratkowski, President of the Polish Journalists' Association, for his leading role in the struggle for the democratisation of the country's media.

The tentative relaxation within the PUWP is now over.

Last July it was trumpeted throughout the world that a Solidarnose member, and a woman - Zofia Grzyb - had been elected

by Alexis Carras

by the Party's Extraord inary Congress to the Politbureau. She had been a PUWP member for over two and a half decades,

and the Party had nothing to fear from such a promotion. Now even this relaxation is over.

Grzyb and the other 10 Politbureau members who were in Solidarnose have simultaneously announced that they are quitting the union because of Solidarnose 'becoming a political organisation hostile to the Party and socialism"

Falsa

Of the three million members of the PUWP, an estimated one million are in Solidarnosc. But Kania at the Plenum defiantly declared, "One cannot at the same time belong to the Party and to an organisation hostile to it'; the PUWP is "not obliged to be a Party of three million members.

The time has now come for one third of the PUWP membership to choose between their future careers in the ruling party, and the workers' movement.

Whatever the cost, the Stalinists have now firmly set their eyes on regaining total control and shoring up their tattered authority. In this light, Walesa's statement in Paris that the reshuffle in the PUWP did not represent a qualitative hardening of the Party's and government's attitude to the union is alarming and false.

The Party is set on a course of regaining the initiative. The workers' movement must respond in kind. IMPERIALISM'S agents in West Africa watch nervously the developments in Sierra Leone as they prepare to go to the aid of the murderous and corrupt Stevens regime.

The massive popular support for the general strike called by the 22 unions and 250,000 members of the Labour Congress forced the traditional capitalist response to the voice of the • people -bloody repression.

The entire labour leadership; union militants and many journalists and students were arrested.

The unions were banned, and armed gangs of the regime's thugs physically smashed the opposition press and broke up workers' organisations.

These gangs along with the army and police have also been responsible for over 60 deaths as they smashed up anti-government demonstrations that occured throughout the country.

In an attempt to consolidate their repression, the regime has been forced to concede many of the workers' demands.

However the 50% increase in pensions, and the payment of all back pay and wages with no deductions for the strike, will go nowhere towards satisfying the workers who face annual inflation of 215%, and whose initial demands, besides calling for the "total overhaul of the economic system" • were such that no neo-colonial regime could grant without the overthrow of the capitalist system itself. Their struggle continues bloodied but by no means crushed.

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