Solidarnosc

What it has come to: Symbolic protest met with calls to truncheon protesters

Submitted by akai on May 16 2012 08:17

Lech Walesa has said that unionists protesting against raising the retirement age should have been clubbed and Members of Parliament from the ruling ''Civic Platform” party want to sue them for ''forced overtime”.

While the Parliament was voting to raise the retirement age, Solidarity organized some symbolic protests. Symbolic because you cannot fight this war by avoiding strikes at every time. Instead of even a symbolic one-day general strike, or thousands marching the streets, a few hundred unionists came out.

Poland 1980-1982: Class struggle and the crisis of capital - Henri Simon

Submitted by Steven. on Apr 15 2012 13:14

Henri Simon's brilliant and detailed account and analysis of the militant working class struggles in Poland from 1980 to 1982 which were a major contributing factor to the downfall of the USSR.

The work details the factors that led to a rank-and-file workers' movement in Poland that struggled to win a greater share of the surplus value being taken away from them by the state-capitalist ruling class of Poland and even, in some cases, forge new organizational forms for production and distribution.

The role of the individual and the group in the creation of work cultures - Stan Weir

Stan Weir compares wildcat strikes in Poland and San Diego and their basis in the 'informal work group'.

At the time of this writing (August 1980) two large shipyards separated by eight thousand miles have been closed by illegal strikes. The fate of the sit-in at the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin shipyard in Gdansk and of the pre-revolutionary development it has initiated is still undetermined. The National Steel and Shipyard Company of San Diego, California, however, is running again.

History of ten years - Encyclopedie des Nuisances

Analysis of the outbreaks of class struggle in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Poland that took place between 1974 and 1984, published by the Encyclopedie des Nuisances in 1985.

History of Ten Years – Encyclopédie des Nuisances

Outline for a Historical Depiction of the Progress Attained by Social Alienation

Solidarnosc: trade unionism in Poland - Subversion

Submitted by Kronstadt_Kid on Aug 31 2010 22:05

Subversion look at Solidarność's role in the uprisings which preceded the end of Stalinist rule in Poland.

The 1980 workers’ uprising in Poland was not the first time the working class there had fought back against state capitalism. ln 1956, 1970 and 1976 workers had taken to the streets when the state had tried to impose cuts in their standard of living by raising food prices.