The document presented here is a peculiar one. And that is for two reasons. Firstly, because of its context; it is an analysis and critique of so-called “really existing socialism” written in 1989 as that system was collapsing. Secondly, because of its author, Wsiewołod Wołczew (1929-1993)*, who first came into public consciousness in the early 1980s as one of that system’s most rabid defenders.
Wołczew and the Katowice Party Forum**
Wołczew’s first moment in the limelight came during the acute political-economic crisis in Poland in the early 1980s. As a result of a strike wave and growing “Solidarity” movement the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza, PZPR) scheduled Ninth Emergency Party Congress to be held July 14-20, 1981. The lead-up to the Congress saw mobilization of hardliners (known as “hardheads”, twardogłowi, or “the (Party) concrete”, beton (partyjny)).
The largest and best organized hardliner organization was the Katowice Party Forum (Katowickie Forum Partyjne, KFP) assembled under political patronage of Andrzej Żabiński, member of the Politburo and First Secretary of the local Voivodeship Committee (and therefore head of the largest regional Party organization in Poland). Wołczew was the main theoretician, organizer and public face of the Forum.
The first meeting of the Katowice Party Forum took place on May 15, 1981 and gathered about a hundred people. The program was adopted, four resolutions were passed and the newspaper “For Socialism” (“O Socjalizm”) was established. The gathered attacked “Solidarity” as a counterrevolutionary movement and demanded its ruthless suppression. The substantial part of their criticism was aimed however at the party-state leadership who they accused of rightist opportunism. In its programmatic declaration the KFP thundered: “The entire party and its individual members, under the pressure of foreign ideological influences, which have always been supported and patronized in the past and currently by right-wing opportunism and bourgeois liberalism in the ranks of the party itself, have lost the ideological, political and programmatic compass of the fight for socialism.”.
In the resolution “On Party matters”, Forum members warned of the factionalism and party’s degeneration: “Day by day, liberal-bourgeois, Trotskyist-Zionist views, nationalism, agrarianism, clericalism, class solidarism, and particularly anti-Soviet views and sentiments cultivated by the right-wing are spreading more and more widely in the party. (…) These circumstances call into question the real ability of the Congress to restore the Party’s Marxist-Leninist character, cohesion of ranks, and ability to lead the working class in the process of socialist construction. If the struggle against all opportunists in the party and the right-wing in society is not resolved in the near future, it may lead to the complete loss of the PZPR’s leading role and of all the achievements of socialism in Poland. We strongly protest against the impunity and freedom of revisionists and factionalists in destroying the party. We call on the communists in the Central Committee and the Politburo for clear ideological and political self-determination”.
According to the attendees, the party proved to be incapable or unwilling to solve the crisis. Wołczew was of the opinion that the discussion in the party was focused primarily on the effects, not the causes, of the crisis. Another discussant, in turn, believed that the term “renewal” was overused: “if one constantly talks about renewal or even embellishes it with the adjective ‘socialist’, and at the same time does not clearly state that it can only consist in better practice of socialist construction – it becomes a screen for forces that have little to do with significant renewal.” The KPF participants treated “renewal” as a slogan used by opponents of socialism.
KFP presented its program in the proclamation “What kind of renewal are we for?”. In economic matters, they emphasized the material needs of the proletariat. They advocated “a fair division of national income according to the quantity and quality of work”, “setting an upper limit on basic wages and limiting income from sources other than one’s own labor”, “shaping market production to meet the needs of an average working person and his family”, “democratic and fair distribution of scarce goods, but not on the basis of price-gouging”, “increasing funds for social protection of people with the lowest incomes, invalids and pensioners”, “subjecting the housing economy to thorough social control”, “equal access of all working people to the achievements of national culture, education and science”, “taking into account the interests and needs of the young generation in the policy of the party and the state” and “class-based treatment of socialist democracy as a democracy for the working class and working people”. They also expressed concern about the prospect of the restoration of capitalism, speaking out “against the legally sanctioned exploitation of working people by the small-capitalist sector, speculators, as well as others appropriating an undue part of the national income”, “against various forms of reprivatization of health care, education, services” and “against furthering dependence of Polish economy on the capitalist division of labor”.
They also expressed a hard law-and-order agenda which conflated opposition activity, bureaucratic abuses and common criminality. They advocated “severe and fair accountability and punishment of those responsible for deviations from the ideological and moral principles of socialism, those guilty of abuses, violations of the law and the rule of law, regardless of party affiliation, functions held and the nature of activities”, condemned „unjustified attacks on honest party members and its activists, (…) campaigns of slander and calumny against party activists”, “challenging court judgments” and “customarily sanctioned bribery, patronage and bureaucracy”. They also took a hard stance “against violating the principles of the rule of law, against tolerating crime and common hooliganism, against obstructing public order and justice bodies in fulfilling their constitutional obligations”.
Concerning the internal party policies, the hardliners declared themselves “against eliminating workers from party and trade union leadership” and “against discrimination and limiting the freedom to express views based on Marxist-Leninist positions”. They also demanded a party-wide purge of rightist opportunists and “political chameleons who, often changing their views, spearhead each subsequent renewal and avoid responsibility for their previous activities”.
Such rhetoric led the KFP towards a confrontation with the party leadership. The official press attacked the KFP as dogmatic factionalists violating the principles of democratic centralism. At the 11th Plenum of the Central Committee (June 9), hardliners put forward a motion to dismiss the First Secretary Stanisław Kania: 24 activists were in favor of Kania’s removal, 89 against.
Undeterred, in an open letter to delegates to the 9th Congress the KFP appealed: “We believe that there can be no unity in the party with people who openly or covertly challenge the assumptions of Marxism-Leninism, with right-opportunist and social-democratic forces”.
However, the hardliners were defeated at the Congress. Both them and the reformist faction failed to elect most of their members to the CC (including Żabiński who lost his seat). The Congress also decided to liquidate all non-statutory organizations in the party. In mid-August 1981, the KFP’s Programmatic Council announced that the current structure was being transformed into the Marxist-Leninist Seminar at the Voivodeship Ideological Training Center of the Voivodeship Committee of the PZPR in Katowice.
The most lasting, if unintended, effect of the KFP’s activity was the imposition of martial law on December 13, 1981. This move by the centrist party leadership was aimed not only at the suppression of “Solidarity” but also of intra-party opposition, as well as proving to the leadership in neighboring countries that the situation was under control. That last consideration was especially important considering that that KFP’s activities were related with sympathy by official press of “fraternal” countries. Its documents were printed in Ostrava in Czechoslovakia and its activists were in close contact with ruling parties in other Warsaw Pact countries.
During martial law the ruling junta under Jaruzelski’s leadership clamped down on the opposition, while at the same accelerating the process of capitalist restoration. Żabiński was purged from his position as First Secretary of the Voivodeship Committee and KFP milieu was sidelined. The most publicly notable episode in Wołczew’s life came to an end. However this didn’t stop him from theoretically analyzing further the crisis of “really existing socialism” i.e. bureaucratically degenerated and deformed workers’ states.
Wołczew’s mature analysis
This was analysis was contained in the article “Some remarks on the sources and premises of the current crisis of the world system of socialism” written in February-March 1989 and published as a pamphlet by the Association of Polish Marxists. In it Wołczew argued that roots of the crisis lay in 1930s USSR, when as a result of low level of economic and cultural development power was monopolized by the ruling “managing stratum”.
He stated that final victory of socialism is possible only at a global level. That goal was however undermined by the managing stratum that protected its economic and political privileges at the costs of erosion of “sprouts of socialism” within the existing social formation. In effect this stratum became an agent of capitalist restoration.
This analysis bears a striking resemblance to the one put forward by Leon Trotsky half a century earlier. It comes however from a man who just couple years earlier fear-mongered about “Trotskyists” in the ruling party.
Nonetheless, there are also noticeable differences. While both Trotsky and Wołczew classify the ruling group as a stratum, the latter is inconsistent on this point. Wołczew writes: “In this situation the privileges meant that formally social ownership of the means of production actually found itself in the hands of the ruling stratum, and as a consequence became a tool for the development of its privileges by limiting the satisfaction of vital needs of the society and the capture of a significant part of the surplus product, i.e. by way of of the exploitation of direct producers amended by new relations.”*
This would make the ruling group not a stratum but a class (in this Wołczew’s analysis shares some resemblance to the various theories of “state capitalism”).
Also Trotsky, based on necessity of international socialism, concludes that main plane of struggle is in capitalists countries: “In the last analysis, Soviet Bonapartism owes its birth to the belatedness of the world revolution. (…) A victorious revolutionary movement in Europe would immediately shake not only fascism, but Soviet Bonapartism. In turning its back to the international revolution, the Stalinist bureaucracy was, from its own point of view, right. It was merely obeying the voice of self-preservation. (…) More than ever the fate of the October revolution is bound up now with the fate of Europe and of the whole world. The problems of the Soviet Union are now being decided on the Spanish peninsula, in France, in Belgium. (…) If the Soviet bureaucracy succeeds, with its treacherous policy of ‘people’s fronts’, in insuring the victory of reaction in Spain and France – and the Communist International is doing all it can in that direction – the Soviet Union will find itself on the edge of ruin. A bourgeois counterrevolution rather than an insurrection of the workers against the bureaucracy will be on the order of the day. If, in spite of the united sabotage of reformists and ‘Communist’ leaders, the proletariat of western Europe finds the road to power, a new chapter will open in the history of the Soviet Union. The first victory of a revolution in Europe would pass like an electric shock through the Soviet masses, straighten them up, raise their spirit of independence, awaken the traditions of 1905 and 1917, undermine the position of the Bonapartist bureaucracy, and acquire for the Fourth International no less significance than the October revolution possessed for the Third. Only in that way can the first Workers’ State be saved for the socialist future.”*
Wołczew takes the opposite position: “The main plane of the struggle between capitalism and socialism on a global scale is therefore taking shape within the societies of socialist countries, not outside of them, and has a clearly internal character, as far as its deepest sources and socio-economic causes are concerned. (…) The fate of socialism is decided in the process of struggle for socialist transformations within these countries. These transformations ultimately determine the prospects for the development of the socialist revolution on an international scale”.**
Given Wołczew’s emphasis on internal struggle against the managing stratum, it is noteworthy that he reamins rather vague about the subject and means of this struggle (unlike Trotsky, who clearly stated that a political revolution under the leadership of a vanguard proletarian party was necessary). According to Karolczuk, Wołczew struggled with this question: “Wołczew made several political mistakes. (…) W. Wołczew himself admitted that, among other things, during the Katowice Party Forum he made a mistake by not agreeing to establish a revolutionary workers’ party on the ruins of the PZPR”.
In Wołczew’s defense, it might be argued that by 1989 the process of capitalist restoration was to advanced to conceive of Polish economy and of political tasks of communists within the framework of “really existing socialism” or a bureaucratically deformed workers’ state.
If nothing else, we can marvel that Trotsky’s analysis was so prescient that, even after almost a century, the correctness of other theories of USSR-type societies can by judged merely by their conformity with it. And Wołczew’s work, despite its theoretical shortcomings, remains rich with sociological insights and observations, which could come only from a witness to the analyzed events. For this reason “Some remarks on the sources and premises of the current crisis of the world system of socialism” remains of interest.
Footnotes:
*Wołczew’s biography is contained in Edward Koralczuk’s article in this volume.
**All information in this section comes from: Gasztold P., Towarzysze z betonu. Dogmatyzm w PZRP 1980-1990, Warsaw 2019. While this work, like all works published by the Institute of National Remembrance, has an obvious anti-communist slant, it remains most exhaustive secondary source on the “hard-line” current. On KFP: pp. 152-173.
*Wołczew W., Some remarks…, ch. III.
*Trotsky L., The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?, ch. 11.3
**Wołczew W., Some remarks…, ch. I.
VOLLHANDFRÜHLING 