Of all the modern forms of servitude, none is more humiliating or in the final analysis crueler than national indebtedness to a hostile foreign power.It is particularly dangerous for a nation which only after World War II achieved a fragile form of independence. National indebtedness is a road that leads to ruin. It has a long, long history dating back many centuries.
In ancient times, it was easy to recognize the naked tyranny of a Caesar. It was quite another matter to understand that Croesus--the symbol of wealth and usury--was as merciless and oppressive as any Caesar.
"The class struggles of the ancient world," said Marx in the first volume of Capital, "took the form chiefly of a contest between debtors and creditors." That struggle lasted for centuries. It ended, as Marx says, "in the ruin of the plebeian debtors. They were displaced by slaves." (Progress Publishers, p. 135.)
If there is any one single cause of the setback for socialism in Poland, it is the magnitude of Poland's wholesale indebtedness to the imperialist creditor countries.
Of course, it is not the indebtedness alone that has allowed the hitherto counterrevolutionary Solidarity movement to become the governing group. But the indebtedness is the summation of all the domestic and international problems which Poland has faced and which arise out of an entire historical period.
Threat from bankers
It is easy enough to recognize the threat from the U.S. when the Pentagon dispatches a naval armada into the Mediterranean or the Caribbean. The oppression is less understood when international bankers arbitrarily cut off credit or impose an embargo on imports from an indebted country. Only last week we saw, not the invasion of a naval armada, but the spectacle of hordes of International Monetary Fund officials, bankers, brokers, foreign exchange speculators, and finally huge delegations from the U.S. Congress descend upon Warsaw to greet the new governing group in Poland.
As a country that was oppressed for centuries, Poland's long struggle for sovereignty and national pride was recognized all over the world. More than a century ago, it attracted the greatest attention from the progressive and democratic forces, and none were more in the forefront of the struggle in Europe for the independence of Poland than Marx and Engels.
Today there is great celebration in Poland that "freedom" has been achieved with the appointment of a Solidarity adviser as prime minister. But the real celebrations are taking place in the dining halls and palaces of the financial oligarchies of Wall Street, Lombard Street, Frankfurt and the Bourse. They now have complete political and economic domination over Poland.
Of course, for some time knowledgeable circles of imperialist finance saw the Polish economy as securely in the hands of the IMF and the bankers of the U.S., Britain, France and West Germany. But it was on Aug. 17 that the financial oligarchies completed their political domination of Poland. On that day General Wojciech Jaruzelski, a member of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers Party (PUWP) and president of Poland, nominated Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a cohort of Lech Walesa, to be prime minister. This meant that both the economic and political levers were now in the hands of the bankers.
It is indeed a shocking development and a cause for the deepest concern in all the progressive, working class and communist parties all over the world.
For advanced and class-conscious workers, and for communists in particular, it is most important to clarify the situation, to explain why it has happened and not accept the bourgeois interpretation.
Unfortunately, this is made much more difficult by the confusion in the international communist movement, especially by the role of the bourgeois reformers in the Soviet Union, as well as that of the Polish communist leaders over a period of time.
If there is any political party in Poland that should have understood how to avoid the peril of becoming enslaved to the oppressing imperialist powers, it seems to us it should have been the Polish communists--because of their long tradition of Marxist education, their exposure to the experiences of other countries, and most of all the history of their own country with its struggle between the landlords and the peasants, the workers and the capitalists.
And yet they have succumbed to what must have seemed a tempting solution to the grave problem of dealing with a bourgeois opposition whose principal support was the Western imperialist bourgeoisie. This opposition, which prevented an orderly development of socialist construction, arose in 1956 as a consequence of the Poznan insurrection. In one form or another it has continued and grown.
Evidently the party could not foresee that a mere debtor-creditor relationship with international finance capital, particularly in a period of so-called capitalist prosperity, could turn out to be their complete undoing, both as a progressive working class force and as a builder of socialist construction.
However, as Marx explained, the debtor-creditor relationship in ancient times ended up in "the ruin of the plebeian debtors" and in the Middle Ages with "the ruin of the feudal debtors who lost their political power together with the economic basis on which it was established."
Usurers and medieval lords
Polish communists could also learn from the history of the struggle between the Polish feudal lords and the usurers, with whom they were constantly in conflict.
In Poland, the feudal lords employed Jews not only as financial advisers but also as managers of the large estates. The latter often proposed austerity measures which the feudal lords were eager to palm off on the peasants. The easiest way out was to blame the usurers and to instigate pogroms in the villages against the Jewish community--not, of course, against the financial advisers and the managers of the huge estates, and certainly not against the lords themselves. What seems to have been an endemic anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe had its origin in this relationship.
Just as the medieval lords and the church steered the anger of the peasants away from their oppressors and turned it against the Jewish villagers, so today the bourgeois elements and the church have steered the mass anger over price increases and hardships away from its real causes, the indebtedness, and turned it against the communists.
The insurrection of 1956
The insurrection of 1956 posed the problem in the starkest form possible of how to deal with a bourgeois opposition which, although formidable because of support from the reactionary Catholic hierarchy and its imperialist connections, was nevertheless manageable from the viewpoint of revolutionary Marxist strategy. After all, the levers of power were all in the hands of the government and the party.
While the recalcitrance of the bourgeois opposition made socialist construction difficult, this was not insurmountable. The opposition lent itself to being gradually disintegrated once the party and the government took an undeviating course toward socialist construction.
Even as late as the middle sixties, Poland had risen from the ashes of the Nazi assault and was rapidly becoming a middle-sized, modern industrial country--the tenth industrial power in the world.
However, instead of taking a class position in relation to the building of socialism, the party instead sought an easier road, one that apparently intended to avoid a collision course with the bourgeois opposition and at the same time to strengthen socialist construction. This road was to borrow heavily from the West, which presumably would open its arms to Polish exports while extending billions of dollars of credit to smooth the road for the purchase of technology.
As the communists should have known a long time ago, the result was to tie themselves to the chariot wheel of international finance capital.
The amount of detailed information that the banks demand is on such a vast scale as to make almost superfluous the various imperialist intelligence agencies that do investigative work for political purposes. The banks demand not only written statements but also long and exhaustive interviews with key economic officials, from whom they elicit all kinds of information which operates to deprive the borrowing country of its economic and political autonomy.
In the seventies, this went so far that on Jan. 26, 1979, the New York Times carried a front-page story which proclaimed that the Western imperialist banks were virtually controlling the Polish economy. Entitled "Poland, in Bid for Loan, Will Let West's Banks Monitor Economy," the article said:
"As part of an effort to obtain a major new loan, Poland has agreed to permit Western banks to monitor its economic policies, American bankers say. They regard the concession as a historic breakthrough in financial relations with the Communist world. ...
"To persuade the banks to agree to the financing, Poland has already had to announce a strict new budget for 1979 and provide its creditors with comprehensive new information on its financial situation.
"Moreover, the banks involved in the new credit will henceforth track the progress of the Polish economy, much as the International Monetary Fund monitors the economies of non-Communist countries in financial distress."
The progressive and working class movement and the socialist countries gave this development very little attention, if any. Actually, this was a signal to the bourgeois opposition in Poland to commence broad political activity to destabilize the country until a leadership was established suitable to the banks. It was soon thereafter that the Solidarity-led strikes began which were deliberately designed to move the crisis from the economic to the political arena.
By the late seventies, Poland was already a country more or less divided economically between the private sector, which was growing relentlessly, and the socialized sector. One was in combat with the other in a ceaseless, merciless war. The tragedy is that successive Communist administrations refused to deal with this acute contradiction, the burden of which fell squarely upon the workers.
For a while it seemed that there was only one certain solution, and that was to resort to the capital markets of Western imperialist finance.
But by the eighties, the magnitude of the problem was becoming clear. Here's what the "Theses of the Central Committee of the PUWP for the Tenth Congress of the Party" said in March 1986:
Relations with the developed capitalist countries depend in a considerable degree on solving the problem of our external debt. It amounts to 30 billion dollars. Its character is complex. Its main part accumulated in the seventies. Since the beginning of the 1980s, the debt increased because of accumulated interest resulting in a large degree from the policy of high interest rates imposed by some capitalist countries. The situation deteriorated due to restrictions imposed on Poland and maintained, which cost our country more than 15 billion dollars and obstructed development of our economy, export, reduction of indebtedness.The government tried to change course.
We made a tremendous effort diametrically changing proportion between import from and export to those countries. Over the past decade import surplus over export, totalling annually almost two billion zlotys, increased income for distribution. At present, our imports are more than a billion dollars worth less than exports. Only for that reason we have nearly three billion dollars yearly less for distribution than in the 1970s. ...We hold the opinion that debt servicing cannot be carried out excessively, at the expense of economic development, reduction of the standard of living. It is possible only under conditions of production growth and export development. Materialization of this requires understanding and realistic cooperation on the part of creditor countries, restoration of normal finance-credit relations by them, giving up of all form of restrictions and obstructions for development of mutual cooperation on the part of some states. [Pages 27-28.]
Asking for "understanding and realistic cooperation" from finance capital is like asking tigers to become vegetarians.
There is nothing as significant for understanding the Polish situation as the relationship of the Polish indebtedness to the imperialist banks. When the post-war rebuilding of the economy was started in Poland, it was oriented toward a socialist society. Whether one regards the rate of development as slow or fast, one thing is incontrovertible. Poland was regarded as moving in the direction of becoming a developed industrial country. But what is it now?
Now it has the international status of a Third World (neocolonialist) country, very much analogous to that of Argentina, Brazil or Mexico.
When Jaruzelski took over, declared martial law and arrested some figures from Solidarity, it was not really an effort to stamp out the bourgeois opposition, merely to intimidate them. The Polish government did not try to reverse the economic concessions that had been granted to the bourgeois opposition or to repudiate the debts to the imperialist banks. It didn't even suspend them or reduce the interest. The reality is that it left the situation as before, encouraging the bourgeoisie to continue their work of sabotage.
Solidarity instigated absenteeism to sabotage the economy. It became a maxim in Poland that workers pretend to work, managers pretend to pay wages. All this destabilized the party and developed a sense of cynicism. The reality was no one knew where they stood any more. On the surface, Jaruzelski had a strong hand. In reality, he was disintegrating the influence of the party.
The constant shuffling and reshuffling of economic advisers and technicians was in itself enough to cause deep concern and leave the rank-and-file communists completely at sea. Galloping inflation and shortages were grist to the mill of the bourgeois opposition, while the hardship was greatest on the workers. Demoralization was the predictable result.
It doesn't matter now whether there are communists in the Cabinet or not. It's no answer to say that the military and police are in the hands of Jaruzelski. That might be significant in the event of a violent attempt at counter-revolution, but is of no help in rallying the masses to the cause of socialism at a time when the economic structure is pulling in a capitalist direction.
The Jaruzelski regime is a classical example of a Bonapartist dictatorship, a regime that tries to conciliate irreconcilable class forces. More than that, it has tried to reconcile two diametrically opposed social systems, the system of socialized industry and the basic means of production, versus the private or bourgeois sector of the Polish economy.
By relieving himself of the chairmanship of the Party and taking over the presidency under the new constitutional system, Jaruzelski elevates himself to the role of an arbiter between the classes.
Looking at in traditional terms of capitalist development, one might think that Solidarity, representing the trade unions, therefore represents the working class. That's what many of the workers believe and that has to be taken into account.
But the reality of the situation is that the Solidarity leadership is an imperialist-inspired, -engineered and bought leadership that is as subservient and servile to the interests of U.S. imperialism as any neocolonialist bourgeois leadership.
There is a difference, however, between the IMF treatment of the governing groups of Argentina, Mexico or Nigeria, and the way it conducts itself with the governing group in Poland.
In the oppressed Third World countries, the U.S. and the IMF in particular are exceptionally careful when imposing harsh demands on the debtor countries not to provoke massive working class resistance, for fear it will lead to the overthrow of the neocolonialist leadership and a socialist revolution. In Poland, however, their whole policy has been to encourage resistance to the leadership, including sabotage and subversion of the economy.
Is it possible for a right-wing bourgeois party to take over the Polish economy and leave the socialized sector intact?
Some might think that there is a kind of reverse historical precedent for this. In a number of capitalist countries--Britain, France, Greece and Spain, for example--socialist parties have taken over the reins of government and left the property relations intact. True, they nationalized some industries. But the bourgeoisie was compensated for any purchases the state made of the means of production. So that the basic relationship between workers and bosses remained the same.
However, there are vast differences between social democratic parties taking over the reins of power in capitalist countries and an anti-communist, bourgeois grouping taking over in a socialist, or workers' state, as it is often called. The differences are deep and profound.
The socialists who took over had no intention of expropriating the means of production. While they are socialists in name, they are actually bourgeois parties that historically have won the allegiance of the workers. Nowhere, not even after the 1945 election which brought the Labor Party to power in Britain, was there a suggestion of expropriating the bourgeoisie and eliminating them as a class. The bourgeois order was to remain.
Is there an analogy to Poland? Are the CP leaders rationalizing that perhaps an anti-communist governing group will go no further than the social democrats in changing the relations of production, and will be restrained by the considerable influence of the Communist Party (PUWP) and its allies?
Do they think that the bankers and industrialists who have burdened the country to an almost unendurable extent and brought about inflation and economic dislocation will be any more generous with Solidarity?
Or will Solidarity try to sell off the means of production to the bankers to whom the country is mortgaged? Does the state have the authority to sell them? Is that not unconstitutional?
The imperialist bourgeoisie want a soft landing. They're relying on evolutionary processes to continue to discredit the communist officialdom and the socialist achievements, and reduce the country to small-scale production. Where the means of production are clearly in the hands of the banks, they can of course pour in billions to develop industry for export, as in south Korea. However, all of this requires new funding by the imperialist banks, which are fearful of extending themselves too far under the Polish conditions.
Bush and the CIA
The Bush administration, following the line of its predecessors, Democrats and Republicans, wants to cultivate a strong, pro-imperialist governing group, preferably a diversity of them, all beholden to the Wall Street imperium. Bush, it should be remembered, is a former CIA director. When he went to Poland in July, it is said he brought with him $119 million in pledges from the U.S. government to tide the country over its most acute period of economic dislocation.
But that is not all. This former CIA director, now president, has virtually unlimited authority to dispense huge funds for covert operations which are not subject to oversight by congressional committees. He doesn't have to answer to anybody in the U.S. government, except in the case of a mishap or some gross miscalculation. What he came with was not just a check from the U.S. government; he came also with graft to be passed out to the multitude of Solidarity politicians who will now be in executive and legislative positions.
How naive it is to believe that it is solely ideological affinity that holds together this most servile grouping and binds it to the chariot wheel of Wall Street finance. The fact that the two bourgeois parties which had been allies of the PUWP moved over so swiftly after Bush was there indicates that many palms were greased to smooth the ideological changeover. It's an old Yankee custom, learned well on several continents.
One phase in a long struggle
If the economic situation is not resolved, or is resolved by the liquidation of the socialist sector of the economy, it will bring on all the chaos of capitalism and impel the workers to struggle, not with the Jaruzelski-Solidarity coalition but against it. But that remains to be seen. In the meantime it is necessary for the workers and the international communist movement to see this as merely one phase in the long protracted struggle between capitalism and socialism.
Imperialism is still riding the wave of an offensive, which began with the technological restructuring of the world capitalist economy, starting in the U.S., Japan and West Germany. This revolution in computers, electronics, etc., gave them a tremendous advantage and made it possible to extend their sway. At the same time, the imperialist bourgeoisie attempted in every way to either isolate the socialist countries, or to impose its will through economic and financial devices.
A worldwide anti-labor, anti-socialist, racist campaign has been underway, extending from Smyrna, Tenn., to Howard Beach, N.Y., to Warsaw, Poland to Maputo in Mozambique. U.S. imperialism made its greatest inroads in China, but that has been hurled back and communists the world over, instead of being indifferent to or attacking China, ought to review the lessons involved. It is more germane than any other lesson derived from the current international situation.
This worldwide struggle between capitalism and socialism, between imperialism on the one hand and the working class, the oppressed masses and the socialist countries on the other, spans an entire historical epoch and encompasses historic victories that have changed the face of the world and that capitalism will never dislodge.
But there are also the inevitable setbacks, of which the Polish situation is a very serious one. A momentary stabilization of capitalism on the basis of the super-exploitation of the masses, both at home and abroad, has unquestionably added momentum to the reactionary worldwide drive. However, the broader tide of history is against capitalism. The collapse of capitalism and the victory of the worldwide socialist revolution is absolutely inevitable.