The Shattering of Bureaucratic Power in Poland - Jonathan Horelick

The universal crisis of totalitarian bureaucratic society is now wholly visible. At one and the same time, the complete deterioration of the global alliance of bureaucratic power and the finished coexistence of two camps once apparently irreconcilable, mark the troubled times in which the bureaucracy can no longer explain itself away.

The prevailing atmosphere of common disequilibrium among rival bureaucracies has its roots in the defeated Stalinist past from which the bureaucracy as a whole can neither emerge completely nor return. No matter how arbitrary, the liberal bureaucratic denunciation of monolithic Stalinism--that excess of terrorism which applied to the bureaucrats themselves--has caused an irreparable loss of ideological infallibility from which the entire bureaucratic state order has never recovered. From Peking to Belgrade, the furtive masters of state capitalism maintain their monopoly over the whole of society and moreover all expression according to fatigued ideology when ideology still forms their one proprietary basis as a class. Now the ideological fragmentation which tends to accompany the bureaucracy outside Russia concludes as a fatal chapter in counter-revolutionary history.

After nearly twenty years, the new liberty acquired by the imported counterrevolution has proven to offer only ephemeral victory for the fledgling Party-State free to duplicate in its own way the totalitarian archetype, as sovereign heir to its explosive contradictions. From Maoism and Titoism to Castroism and Gomulkaism, the partial reform of totalitarian society has epitomized the bureaucratic lie with every dissimulation of “socialist reconstruction.” In Yugoslavia, Poland and Czechoslovakia, the auxiliary dictatorship has always encountered the contradictory injury run in the course of its bureaucratic inheritance. This dictatorship has torn apart the Stalinist doctrine in different ways--and its theory of “socialism in one country”--in order to reestablish some fragmentary alternative which finds application in its own totalitarian manner. The recalcitrant bureaucracy has actually magnified the mode of totalitarian administration in denouncing its ideological corollary. Henceforth, on one Caribbean island, miniature China courtesy of Russian good will, the “socialist man” is evolving by way of an immense army of vigilante squads dispatched by block and massive labor camps which absorb thousands of dissidents at a time. There, in the first rebelling Party of the Cominform, we see the sudden reproach against “nationalism ““class enemy” that it now becomes, and the overt return to orthodoxy in a country decentralized supposedly according to a “socialism of the managers” years ago. In the largest dogmatic Party of all in Asia, bureaucratic incapacity at the level of preliminaries has been confirmed: that is to say, in agrarian production. In the mother of bureaucratic domination, popular revolt transpires within whole regions of the country.

The revolutionary masses have arrived in turn at the point of total confrontation exactly where official Stalinism had dissolved in liberal bureaucratic illusion long ago: that is to say, in Poland. There, bureaucratic power has witnessed a unitary practical opposition emerging without distraction. Let us first address the general features of that revolt before revealing its particular origins. The famous revolutionary outbreak of the 14th of December, 1970, the “December Revolt,” rejected above all the normal functioning of bureaucratic society according to its concentrated exploitation. There, the bureaucracy showed that it was unable to develop the ensemble of productive forces without bringing about the radical awareness of the producers themselves. In eliminating most vestiges of private property and condensing the market economy in one essential commodity, social labor, bureaucratic state capitalism merely intensified the opposition of classes and installed an advanced proletariat on its own terrain--as in Poland--deprived of illusion. In Poland, the radical masses answered the degeneration of state power to the point where it could no longer support its own domination except through a neuter image; in the words of Minister Cyrankiewicz, a “scientific-technical revolution.” The proximity of an economistic dogma to immediate material development laid the ruling class open to brutal demystification with the slightest error of judgment. In Poland, the manifestation of the error and its consequences simply revealed how long the bureaucracy which existed there had constituted a threadbare power.

The evolution of Gomulkaism was after all the simple evolution of its own destruction as well as its transcendence by the revolutionary opposition which walks its own path. The contradictory mixture of radical historical sources and progressive illusion which formed the base of Gomulkaism also lay at the heart of the revolutionary crisis which ushered in its downfall. After this eclectic ideology has fallen, there is no binding option which can fill the void of bureaucratic reality. The seeds of its dissolution were sown in its formation. Gomulkaism reemerged after an initial suppression by the rival Stalinist faction between ’48 and ’56--as the illusory product of proletarian insurrection. The armed rebellion of popular Poznan against the existing Stalinist regime served subsequently to defend the Gomulkaist alternative against external domination and secured its international legitimacy. When the Russians left Poland in October, 1956, the new bureaucracy was only prepared to abide temporarily by the festive orgy of criticism which had broken out in conformity with the spirit of tolerance implied by anti-Stalinism. Henceforth, the autonomous regime showed nothing over fifteen years but an absolute identity with all the arbitrary crimes associated with its predecessors. The “Polish Road to Socialism” gave nothing new to the proletariat, except Polish expropriators.

To its very end, Gomulkaism conveyed an eclectic dogma more and more intensely, talking Yugoslavian here, acting Russian there, falling silent then suddenly reversing to the former at the moment of total disequilibrium. As for its contents, nothing but the private ownership of land was assured after 1956. Recoiling against its own exposure to “bureaucratic excesses,” the new regime advanced formal internal modifications in respect to the Party which it wanted to balance and redeem and with time the State apparatus and regional bureaucratic structures which it cared to harmonize and integrate. The conjunction between social democracy and state communism attempted between ’46 and ’48 reawakened fully in the new period in the framework of an internally fluid dictatorship. The hierarchy itself retained its fixed supremacy and the official guarantee of particular elites continued to stabilize itself through automatic purges from the top down. The particular strategy of Gomulkaism bubbled in a “middle course,” as median between “orthodoxy” and “ revisionism.” One can say that Gomulkaism performed the heart of its bureaucratic function in its initial phase. Certain ephemeral concessions appeared through the course of its first three years: purging the Stalinist clique completely, yielding intellectual liberties and free communication and granting formidable wage increases. The sweeping tokenism allowed time for bureaucratic reconsolidation.

Good intentions displayed, the bureaucracy proceeded to stigmatize and destroy the remaining revolutionary tide. Censorship was reinvoked at the same time that scattered residues of autonomous workers’ organizations were suppressed. The editor and then the whole staff of the revolutionary journal Po Protsu were thrown out of existence. The street demonstrations which responded to the totalitarian revival were smothered. In 1957, the striking street car drivers of Lodz were subdued by police violence. By 1958, the Workers Councils which had risen of their own accord in Poznan now had their relations with the State mediated by “arbitration committees,” thus reducing them to a secondary body of the well-integrated Trade Union. At the Fourth Trade Union Congress, the following year, the Councils were wiped away completely in the framework of the so-called Workers Self-Governing Congress which consisted of an amalgamation of the Trade Union Works Council, the Party Committee of the enterprise and Council delegates whose decisions were subject to the approval of plant management itself. By 1959, rigorous production quotas were reintroduced in keeping with tougher days. The severe reduction of real wages followed. In 1960, six old Stalinist officials reappeared in the government. Everything then which the bureaucracy, released in crisis was retracted in the aftermath. “The main thing,” announced Gomulka, “is that the Polish people learn to work hard and everything else holds secondary importance.

Complete radical opposition began to stir in turn. A new polemic reached extreme proportions in the Communist Party itself beginning in 1965. The young revolutionary intellectuals were no longer willing to tolerate the showcase bureaucracy evoked by Gomulkaism. The celebrated denunciation of Kuron and Modzelewski advocated “the victorious anti-bureaucratic revolution.” Later, in 1968, the Polish students began to agitate at the universities and in the cities, in the form of an opposition to the prevailing organization of life which simply demanded “socialism in the facts.” Thus, the “December Revolt” had not introduced but synthesized the revolutionary process. All the universal qualities present there confirmed the abundance of historical experience lived by the Polish masses in the radical past, an experience which frames their perspective today. In December, the populace battled a counter-bureaucratic illusion which could no longer hide in the external preoccupation with Soviet imperialism. The elementary falsehood then exposed itself. Through the sudden turmoil, the Gomulkaist regime nullified the origins of its own justification, calling in futility for the Russian Army which knew better than to come.

In the Five Year Plan of 1970, the traditional masters of Warsaw fatally imposed the formal husk of reformism without delivering the goods. The imposition of technocratic reform from above acted as the veritable stimulus of revolutionary crisis. The formalist bureaucracy had tinkered with the surface of technocratic modernity since the first days of the National Economic Council under the direction of the noted social-democratic economist, Oscar Lang. This eclecticism tended to integrate new strata at the base of production into the bureaucracy by extending the partial mechanism of market economy. The founding of more autonomous industries according to the profit motive and more direct relations between costs and prices simply intended to intensify the day to day rhythm and volume of production. Nothing was to change, however, in content, at the moment of full application. The bureaucrats still showed their preference for heavy industrial investments as opposed to the extension of consumer goods. In keeping with the spirit of supply and demand, the technocratic novitiates retained the stationary level of wages which existed already for ten years and yet intensified simultaneously the barometer of prices for necessities without regard for the fixed declining penury of the producers themselves. By the same awkward logic, the old party hacks now chose to reduce the price of scarce, luxury items on behalf of the immediate masters of the workers: the technocrats. Consequently, the oppressive effects of the internal modernization of bureaucratic power, that is to say, the harmonization of the central political bureaucracy charged with the task of ideological decisions and the regional and local managers responsible for the immediate supervision of productive relations, found echo in the cohesion of its opponents. The proletariat recoiled subsequently against every level of the hierarchy, from the plant management at the workplace and the regional apparatuses of the Party to the political apex of the State. The authentic owners of social surplus value, once considered sinful “to contemplate,” carried out an initial critique of their own of the political economy without mediation.

Again, the practical rejection of the slightest detail imposed by the totalitarian bureaucracy had the effect of calling the whole of social life into question and releasing the total prospects for its revolutionary reconstruction. Six days of unrelenting confrontation formed what is known as the “December Revolt.” In their explosive spontaneity, the radical masses abandoned those intermediary organs which normally expressed and canalized opposition. Acting of their own accord, the populace burned and destroyed every architectural symbol of power which stood in its way, from Party headquarters in Gdansk to the municipal police building in Szczecin. In Gdansk, Gdynia and Szczecin, pillaging ran rampant. Sixty shops in Gdansk alone were burned and looted. In Szczecin, police cars were overturned and destroyed and vast crowds were heard shouting “Gestapo” as they battled with the police and committed acts of arson. After the first few days, the troubles spread as far as Lodz, Poznan and Katowice. In all this, the workers played the decisive part in radical initiation at each succeeding interval of crisis. The dock workers of Gdansk formed on the morning of the 14th the very first violent demonstration in the center of the city which was joined immediately by vast numbers of women as well as students. By Wednesday, the 16th, the government denounced “anarchist and hostile forces” and swiftly dispatched 53,000 special militia to the first revolutionary zone of Gdansk. The Warsaw bureaucrats knew the importance involved in deploying vast regiments of anonymous soldiers to an area in which popular insurrection had restrained the use of arms by local forces from which elements of sympathy and direct support could eventually be drawn. Under the heaviest risks, the populace demonstrated the highest spirit of bravery as great in many ways as that displayed once in Poznan. At a time when the whole international bureaucratic order preferred to enjoy its power calmly and to show itself to be the worthy adversary of private capitalism on the marketplace, the bureaucracy had to resort to the maximum of repression in all its history: 45 killed, 1,165 wounded. From these days, the bureaucracy salvaged its class domination not by conciliation but by force in order to terminate the military phase of an unresolved antagonism.

Despite the practical demystification cemented in the popular masses when the smoke had cleared, political methods were still available at first to the bureaucratic class, in correspondence with the immediate level of the antagonism and its absorption in particular points of contention. The changing of elites within the Party substituted the mirage of an internal bureaucratic conflict within itself for the actual external antagonism. Quite simply, the ideological turnover arrived post festum. In the masquerade, the old ally Gierek now made his singular debut in the most fashionable, democratic, anti-Gomulkaist garb. The bureaucracy as a whole simply had grasped the opportunity to publicize an inveterate “self-critique,” tearing out and segregating a part of itself with which every previous crime and mishap was associated in turn. Since the very beginning of the Bolshevik State model, the bureaucrats have always been as arbitrary with each other in their furtive internal domain as they have to be with the outside world. The incident simply displays all the bureaucrats “going with the wind,” reversing positions in appearance, in trying to preserve the sinecure of bureaucratic authority itself.

Weeks later, the famous meeting held at the Warski Shipyard in Szczecin brought the independent voice of the workers into the open for the first time. On January 25, 1971, Gierek had been forced to arrive from Warsaw to hear the grievances of persevering dock strikers. These grievances were presented by delegates strictly mandated by a unitary base of workers and which under their pressure had become public knowledge. Just as the very context of “negotiations” carried an adverse spirit of mutual compromise, the demands themselves had not ceased to be partial: free speech and complete access to the press, freedom of organizational association improvised during the course of struggle, general reelections to existing workers’ structures, etc. Unlike the revolutionary examples of Petrograd and Hungary, the radical movement still failed to pursue a generalized model of autonomous Councils. Nevertheless, the barren status evoked by the ruling class, compelled to give an explanation for what it had done, also confirmed the radical position occupied already by the workers themselves. In the immediate moment, however, the bureaucracy emerged in tact and exacted the anxious approbation of everything, every particular in the administrative plan and the cessation of residual work stoppages, on the basis of “good faith.” In exchange, the bureaucrats had offered a gesture of “democratic tolerance” which was to inform the workers of the decisions made by power. Though having recognized that “our society is divided into classes,” the insurgents had not acted upon all the consequences implied by their burning dissatisfaction.

During the following March, the class antagonism broke out again. Knowing that the directors of old abuses were hardly going to realize vast changes, the machinists of Lodz--mostly women--invoked their own work stoppage. Another delegation of bureaucrats arrived from Warsaw. Intending to pacify hostilities with their presence, the bureaucrats ended up by being chased away. Subsequently, in acquiring a hundred million dollar loan from its superiors in Moscow, the bureaucracy was finally able to muffle tensions at least ephemerally by retracting those measures which had ignited the total question of power. The timing, however, assured little stability in light of the fact that it was not the old but the new regime which conceded. In retaining some vestige of authority, the new regime completed the formal aspects of the Reform--replacing “profit-sharing” for bonuses and leaving immediate decision-making to regional factory associations--with the aim of diffusing bureaucratic responsibility and easing what was felt to be an economic dilemma. But in the autumn of last year, the workers began again to question existing conditions, the conditions of work as well as the veracity of their representative bodies. Without restraint, they have fought the new regime in demanding the release of all those rebels of “December” still imprisoned by the State. At the annual Congress of the Trade Union last November, the brokers of labor value were unable to push through a Uniform Code of Labor under the opposition, in Gierek’s words, of “these demagogues.” Clearly, the bureaucracy could no longer retain the fragile bases of its power by way of an ideology of any kind.

The logic of a dying class reality has only become more and more absurd. In the international reaction of rival bureaucratic Parties to the bloody Polish revolution, eyes merely saddened in order to reinvigorate their fossil polemics. Peking imagined a “crisis” of “Soviet social imperialism” at the same moment that an actual alliance was being prepared in Warsaw itself with the very American ruling class which continued to slaughter the Vietnamese at its own doorstep. Moscow in turn now found in the Maoist clique “more absurd inventions, greater lies.” Each particular mask of opposition, from Paris to Bucharest, had simply revealed the general paroxysm of all bureaucratic dogma caused by the revolutionary disorder in Poland.

The amorphous adaptations and re-adaptations of the bureaucratic title of ideological property shows that the bureaucrats were left speechless long ago. The title is irrevocably charred in Poland where the proletariat disposed of everything associated with the former “October Left” of 1956. The new revolutionary currents have shown that they do not forget. The eclectic radicalism contained in the past, radicalism that failed to distinguish itself from the vague anti-Stalinist opposition which remained tied to the liberal wing of the bureaucracy and a technocratic model of Councils, is dead and gone. Mangled by fifteen years of official institutionalization, the existing appearance of Workers Councils cannot dissuade the new currents from seeking their full, unmediated truth. These currents cannot avoid combating any less the reservoir of inchoate ideology operating within the workers movement which still envisages a “State founded on Workers Councils.”

In struggling to locate and realize its autonomous objectives, the Polish proletariat has come to know that the arduous course of its long historical struggle is inseparable from the totality of its mission. Its practical critique of bureaucracy foreshadows the liberation of truth in the world, as its means and equally its goal.

Text from https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jon-horelick-diversion-number-1#toc37