Poland: why alliance with farmers is vital for working class
A reply to Workers World Party
THE MILITANT FEBRUARY 6, 1981
By Suzanne Haig
Inspired by the upsurge of millions of Polish workers, working farmers have established their own organization, Rural Solidarity: Reported to have 600,000 members, it is receiving aid from the workers movement.
Communist Party chairman Stanislaw Kania has attacked Rural Solidarity, which has not yet been recognized by the government. In an effort to prove the union is led by counterrevolutionaries, Kaniawas reduced to charging that "in some of these biographies, we find an ancestry traceable to the landed gentry" -a class which has not existed in Poland since the end of World War II.
Such attempts to drive a wedge between the farmers and the working class are not surprising. The overthrow of capitalism in Poland after World War II benefited most farmers. Landlordism, massive rural unemployment, and near starvation were eliminated. Electricity was brought to the countryside and major progress was made toward ending illiteracy. But the living standards of Polish farmers have not kept up with those of city workers. The parasitic caste that rules the country has placed a low priority on producing consumer goods and agricultural equipment. Mismanagement, privileges for government and Communist Party officials, a staggering debt to the imperialist banks, and the absence of democratic involvement of working people in planning have led to serious economic difficulties. The workers and farmers are challenging the oppression they suffer under this misrule.
Workers & farmers alliance
The emerging alliance between the Polish workers and the working farmers is key to advancing the struggle for democratic rights and equality. Without such an alliance, no workers state can advance toward socialism.
But to the Workers World Party, an ultraleft sectarian organization in the United States, the struggle of the oppressed classes in Poland is anathema.
The right to form a union and the other gains won after the August strikes have "set back the clock of socialism," party leader Sam Marcy wrote in the September 12 Workers World.
"….What the workers have gained economically and socially," he charged, "is at the cost of
legitimatizing a bourgeois opposition," in which he lumps together the reactionary Catholic Church hierarchy with union leaders, dissident intellectuals, and working farmers. Without resolute government action against the workers and farmers, Marcy believes that this "bourgeois opposition" will "seize the political initiative and urge the workers to move in a bourgeois restorationist direction. To the Workers World Party, the Polish workers are allying with their class enemy when they support the working farmers. The substance of Marcy's argument is that farmers have the Polish workers state by the throat and are choking it to death.
"Aside from the small state sector in agriculture," he wrote on September 12, "capitalist farming prevails throughout Poland. It has been getting steady, consistent, and ever-larger infusions of subsidies from the government, that is from the hides of the workers.
"This is true even though . . . small, private farming is inefficient and largely responsible for the poor state of food production in Poland."
Marcy never bothers to explain why Polish workers, who know a lot about the economy, don't join him in blaming the problems on the working farmers.
The solution, proposed in the November 14 Workers World, is for the Polish government to "launch a struggle to collectivize the countryside."
Capitalist threat?
Do Poland's working farmers represent a threat of capitalist restoration? Are they the enemy of the workers?
There are today 3.5 million private farmers in Poland. Their farms are not capitalist enterprises with thousands of acres and dozens of workers. The average farm is 12.5 acres. Only one-sixth of all private farms are more than thirty acres, and most of these are cultivated by a single family.
Does the presence of so many small farms constitute an immediate threat to the workers state, as Marcy claims? Hardly.
Marcy makes the error of confusing the potentiality of small farmers to accumulate large tracts of land and hire wage workers-thus threatening the planned economy-with what is actually the situation in Poland today. In the 1920s Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky warned that the millions of small farmers constituted the "fundamental source of the capitalist tendencies in Russia. "At the time, the Soviet Union was still overwhelmingly agricultural. The industrial sector was very weak, still suffering from the devastation of the civil war. And a class of rich farmers hiring wage labor appeared, which demanded an end to the monopoly of foreign trade and was hostile to the working class.
Forced collectivization
Even under these circumstances, Trotsky opposed forced collectivization, as had Lenin from the beginning of the revolution. He believed the government should take measures that would win the poor farmers to support the workers state against the rich farmers. The Stalin leadership, however, went ahead with forced collectivization, which led to an economic and social catastrophe in the countryside. Poland in 1981 bears little resemblance to Russia in the 1920s. Poland is now a major industrial country-among the top fifteen largest producers of industrial goods in the world. Its working class has grown steadily, gaining enormous social weight, while the percentage of the population employed in farming has declined steadily.
More than one-third of the farms are cultivated by farmers over sixty years old without heirs intending to farm. The young are leaving for the city to working the factories.
Many of these farmers still use plow horses. Few have tractors.
The working farmers do not view themselves as capitalists or even consider it possible to accumulate much property. The demands of Rural Solidarity indicate this. A rich landowner, or an aspiring one, would not be demanding better medical and social benefits and a guaranteed income.
This is why they are fighting-not because they are producing large surpluses and want to be free form the fetters of the planned economy in order to amass huge profits. They are demanding a share of the benefits of a planned economy. And the workers recognize the justice of this demand.
The farmers' main demands assume the existence of a nationalized, planned economy.
The farmers make about 75 percent of the average wage of non-agricultural workers. They are demanding higher prices for their produce from the government and full compensation for crop failures that their living income will be equal to the average worker.
The farmers are asking that the unused land belonging to the state farms be distributed to those farmers whose possessions are too small to provide them with a decent standard of living.
Workers World claims that since 1956 the farmers have been increasingly subsidized. Are they getting lavish handouts?
Bartering for fertilizer
Three-fourths of the country's food is produced by the private farms. Yet the state farms-which make up 25 percent of the farmland-get 75 percent of the subsidies. Small farmers are forced to barter pigs and potatoes to get fertilizer or coal. They lack modem equipment.
They want a fairer distribution of subsidies, a fight they have been waging since the 1950s.Nor are they demanding that this come "from the hides of the workers," but from the bureaucrats 'hides. Among Rural Solidarity's demands is an end to corruption and the expropriation of the hunting lodges and villas owned by party officials. They are also demanding that wage workers on the state farms be allowed to join Rural Solidarity.
The attitude of the farmers toward the working class was summed up by Rural Solidarity organizer Jan Kulasz when asked by a New York Times reporter if the farmers would hold back produce to force recognition of their union.
Said Kulasz, "The workers' and peasants' alliance could not do this. We could not have the children in the cities without milk."
Marcy traces the source of the allegedly growing capitalist sector in the countryside to the "abandonment of collectivization as a result of the 1956 uprising." What actually happened?
From 1950 to 1954 the Polish Stalinist government implemented a series of ruthless collectivization drives, forcing the peasants to give up their land. Few consumer goods made their way to the countryside, and the standard of living did not rise.
The peasants engaged in slowdown strikes, consuming whatever they could produce themselves, and delivering little to the government. Food shortages became acute. Food for the urban population had to be imported. By 1954 six of the most important crops had lower yields than under capitalism in the 1930s.
Following the workers' uprising in 1956-a struggle for economic and democratic rights-the Gomulka regime was forced to drop the drive against the working farmers and decrease the gap in subsidies paid to private as opposed to state farms.
Even with a slight decline in the amount of subsidies received, 80 percent of the collective farms
collapsed.
Even prominent Polish government economists concede that the decline of agriculture can be attributed to the Stalinist policy of forced collectivization. In the Soviet Union, the forcible expropriation of millions of Russian peasants in the late 1920s and early 1930s led to a disaster from which Soviet agriculture has still not recovered. Millions died of starvation after burning crops, eating their seed supplies, slaughtering millions of livestock, and destroying farm implements in a rebellion against this inhumane policy.
Even though Cuba has made significant progress in establishing state farms, the government defends the farmers' right to own their own land and sell their goods on the market for prices determined jointly by the government and farmers.
"Aside from the Polish Communist Party and those sincere and devoted administrators, there is no
organized political force of a progressive character capable of taking the initiative and redirecting Polish society in a genuinely socialist direction." Workers World believes this policy could inspire workers and poor peasants today and end the food shortage. On the contrary, the bureaucracy would literally drive the farmers into the arms of reaction. To win working farmers to support the workers state and to participate in more advanced forms of agriculture, they must be shown that state farms are more efficient and will benefit farmers. Equally important, working farmers must be able to make their decision without coercion and must see that the government is on their side.
Petty fiefdoms
This is not the case in Poland. Small farmers face economic discrimination. Because the state farms are better subsidized, farmers resent them and view them as competitors. The state farms, moreover, are highly inefficient, needing two and one-half times more fertilizer to produce the same amount of food as the small farms.
The farmers hate the state farms because they see that these are not organized to benefit both the workers and the farmers. The bureaucratic farm managers operate them as petty fiefdoms, with lifestyles resembling the despised landlords of the past.
Cuba's policy toward small farmers sharply contrasts with that of Poland.
Even though Cuba has made significant progress in establishing state farms, the government defends the farmers' right to own their own land and sell their goods on the market for prices determined jointly by the government and farmers.
Nor has the government withheld social benefits from small farmers in order to force them to give up their land. Instead, better housing, social security, communications, and education have been brought to the countryside.
In a speech to the first congress of the Communist Party of Cuba in 1975, Fidel Castro summed this up, "The revolutionary policy of unfailing respect for the free will of the working peasant, of effectively assisting and supporting him, is the solid basis on which the peasant-worker alliance today develops, growing stronger and stronger."
Cuban peasant given choice
"The peasantry," he stressed, ''is the ally of the working class. The latter will never use coercive methods against its brothers in the struggle or depart from the use of persuasion, whether this is successful or not."
Cuba has held this position for the past twenty-two years despite the U.S. blockade and serious economic problems.
No wonder Cuban peasants are totally committed to the revolution- ready to fight and die for it. Workers World believes that the workers must look to the Stalinist rulers to end the crisis by crushing the working farmers. "It is, after all," Marcy says, "a socialist government." And he adds,
"Aside from the Polish Communist Party and those sincere and devoted administrators, there is no organized political force of a progressive character capable of taking the initiative and redirecting Polish society in a genuinely socialist direction."
This arrogant and patronizing tone reveals an utter contempt for the working people of Poland. The hatred of capitalism has been burned into the memory of the Polish workers and farmers, who suffered at least six million dead under Hitler's occupation.
They know the misery that capitalism brought them and would fight heroically to prevent its return.
Who defends socialism?
But to Marcy, it is not the workers who defend socialism, but the factory and farm managers, the generals, the cops, and the Communist Party bureaucrats-with their villas, swollen bank accounts, retinues of servants and prostitutes, fancy cars, and special stores.
But they are the most powerful reactionary forces within Poland today-the main obstacle to socialism. Workers World's support for these privileged bureaucrats says a lot about the kind of "socialism" it stands for.
Revolutionary socialists, on the contrary, have full confidence in the ability of the workers and working farmers in Poland to take control of their own destiny. They are the key to the socialist future.
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