Globally there is a productive capacity to feed everyone, and yet 16 million people in the Horn of Africa face starvation. The effects of drought in parts of northern India have meant millions more facing the same prospect.
Whether explained by the effects of global warming or deforestation - both results of capitalist production - there have been devastating floods this year in a number of countries. In Mozambique hundreds died and 300,000 were forced to leave their homes. In Bhutan, Bangladesh and India, floods have caused the deaths of hundreds and at least 5 million homes have been destroyed. There have also been lethal floods over the past year in China, Brazil and Russia.
In 1998, when Hurricane Mitch hit central America, 10,000 died and 2 million were made homeless. Last year, when cyclone Orissa hit eastern India 10.000 died t eastern India 10.000 died or disappeared. The far more limited effects of hurricanes when they hit the east coast of the US show that they’re not inevitably catastrophic. In July in the Philippines heavy rains caused the collapse of huge mounds of rubbish in one of the shanty town areas of Quezon City. Hundreds died because poverty forces them to earn a ‘living’ by camping next to this toxic mountain and rummaging through it for scraps to sell. In Venezuela mudslides caused a similar disaster. In Nigeria 300 people died after an oil pipeline explosion: here again it was poverty which has led people to try to syphon off oil for sale on the black market. People don’t die just because it rains or there’s a strong wind, it’s because of the conditions they live in, and the desperate need to be near any available source of income or water. Christian Aid have estimated that within 20 years 75% of the world’s population (mostly in the poorest countries) will be at risk from drought or floods.
In the wake of such disasters, and also the experience of refugees from imperialist wars, comes disease - typically cholera, malaria or dengue fever. The possibility of epidemics is exacerbated by population movements, poor sanitation, water contamination and the disruption of an already poor infrastructure. In thedy poor infrastructure. In the case of Hurricane Mitch there was already a cholera epidemic in parts of the region when it struck. As for AIDS, the fact that 11 million people, 80% of those who have died, have come from Africa almost speaks for itself. A virus, like the wind or the rain, is neutral, but the conditions in which people subsist have an enormous weight in determining whether you live or die.
But it’s not just in the ‘underdeveloped world’ that the lethal nature of capitalist society takes its toll. The seriousness of ‘global warming’ has been emphasised by the appearance of a mile-wide stretch of water at the North Pole. In the summer a heatwave with previously unheard-of temperatures hit parts of the Middle East and the Balkans. In Rumania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Turkey and Greece dozens of people died. Certainly, the heat was exceptional - contributing to record numbers of forest fires across the region, and states of emergency declared in many parts of Greece, for example. But the reason the heatwave was fatal for so many is attributable to conditions in the cities, the extent of pollution and living in low-cost buildings erected with no consideration for the climate. Earthquakes in Turkey have also demonstrated the inadequacy of accommodation built on the cheap.
The US has also been affected by forest fires this summer - the worst for 50 years, with some 11 states in the west affected and 6 million acres destroyed. Even with 20,000 civilian and 2,000 military firefighters, with 150 aircraft, in an operation costing $15 million a day, there are some fires that they just can’t put out and are relying on the snow that will come later in the year. A particularly alarming demonstration of the potential for the damage to escalate occurred when fire raced through Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington. Hanford, a former site for the production of nuclear weapons, has the largest store of nuclear and hazardous waste in the US. The fires got dangerously close to stores of waste from plutonium production for nuclear weapons. An emergency was declared until the wind changed and the flames went in a different direction.
Above all, when you look at the state of the capitalist world, it is the proliferation of wars which shows the system’s fundamental nature. The wars in Angola, in the Congo (where half a dozen countries are involved), the wars between impoverished Ethiopia and Eritrea, in Sierra Leone and many other parts of Africa, in Afghanistan, Kashmir, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and across Asia (where both India and Pakistan now have nuclear weapstan now have nuclear weapons), in the Middle East, against the Kurds in several countries, in Chechnya and elsewhere in the Caucasus - these are just some of the multiplicity of current wars, places where ‘peace’ is only a pause between conflicts. The big powers, far from being neutral or ‘humanitarian’ forces, are often caught red-handed at the heart of the barbarity. In Iraq, over the last decade over 1.5 million have died as a result of the imposition of sanctions. Since December 1998 the US and Britain have continued to bomb Iraq on an almost daily basis. Britain alone has averaged 10 tonnes of bombs a week over that period. The results of the ‘humanitarian’ intervention in Kosovo are also plain to see: an economic and ecological calamity in ex-Yugoslavia and beyond, and no end to the mutual slaughter between ‘ethnic’ gangs, each one backed openly or secretly by the different occupying forces vying to impose their influence in the strategically important Balkans area.
A society falling apart
These, then are aspects of the current state of capitalist society. Capitalism does not just mean the buying and selling of commodities, but all the social relationships that flow from a system of production based on the exploitation of wage on the exploitation of wage labour. Once a factor of progress and unification of the world economy, capitalism has been historically obsolete since the early part of the 20th century. Its historical senility has been demonstrated by the replacement of the old business cycle of boom and bust with the devastating spiral of world economic crises and world wars that began in 1914.
After the period of reconstruction that began in 1945, capitalism plunged into a new global economic crisis at the end of the 1960s. This crisis has been deepening inexorably for decade after decade, posing once again the historical alternative between war or revolution. With the ruling class unable to impose its final solution, a mobilisation for world-wide inter-imperialist war, and the working class not yet able to mount a revolutionary offensive against capitalism, there is a social stalemate, which has pushed capitalism into a state of decomposition. It is this falling apart of capitalist society, this descent into chaos, that lies behind the increase in imperialist antagonisms, and the greater frequency and more debilitating effects of each successive disaster.
The state is the main enemy
Capitalism, therefore, has not just passed its sell-by date - the assed its sell-by date - the stench of its decomposition is becoming noxious. In this process the capitalist state acts as a force to try and maintain the rule of the exploiting class. It is the state which is at the centre of all economic, social and military questions.
In the name of ‘anti-capitalism’ and the ‘campaign against globalisation’, people all over the world, in Seattle last November, internationally on May Day and on September 24 in Prague, have been encouraged to protest against institutions such as the World Trade Organisation or the International Monetary Fund. These bodies undeniably have their place in the network of bodies in which the ruling class defend their system of exploitation and fight among themselves for the spoils. But the fundamental weapon of their domination remains the capitalist state. Supposedly ‘supranational’ bodies like the WTO or IMF function either as tools of the biggest capitalist states or as battle grounds for their rivalries.
In opposition to capitalist class rule there is only one potential force - the working class. And the power of the working class lies in its position at the heart of the capitalist system, as the class which creates the vast bulk of value in society. When workers strike they take away the labour power ey take away the labour power that capitalism depends on for its very existence. When workers struggle they immediately come up against the state power of the bourgeoisie. When workers discuss their struggles and how to take them forward there are the beginnings of an independent class consciousness. The campaign against ‘globalisation’ is a protest by a variety of different forces, with a range of different class interests - including some for whom ‘anti-capitalism’ really means support for the nation state and bourgeois democracy against ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘undemocratic’ bodies like the WTO. The working class, by contrast, has no country, no nation state to defend, and it is the only social force which has a direct interest in destroying the capitalist state, throwing down all borders and creating a world-wide human community. In this issue of WR there is an article on the mass strikes in Poland 20 years ago. Such struggles give a glimpse of the potential power of the working class. As an example it is still absolutely valid today, and for the future.
WR
Revolutionaries are anything but indifferent to the atrocious end of these young conscripts, trapped in a steel coffin at the bottom of the sea, just as they are not indifferent to the tragedies which are unfolding all over the planet, the massacres and famines, the death of refugees by drowning or asphyxiation, or all the other manifestations of the barbarity of dying capitalism. But they are also required to keep a cool head in order to understand the messages which the bourgeois media try to instil in the minds of the exploited, messages aimed at getting them to accept this barbarity. In particular, they have to denounce the attempt to convince the workers of the most advanced countries that they are in many ways lucky because "it’s much worse elsewhere, and above all in the former ‘socialist paradises’".
Here are just some of the messages they have broadcast this ages they have broadcast this time.
First message: "The Russian fleet constitutes a huge threat to the environment. This is further proof of the chaotic and criminal character of the ‘socialist’ regime which used to run Russia".
Quite so, but it’s not just the Russian navy that’s falling apart. The British navy has at least 11 nuclear submarines waiting to be decommissioned, rusting away in the Rosyth and Devonport dockyards. It must wish it could use the old method of decommissioning used in the 50s and 60s - that of scuttling them off the coast of Japan and leaving them to rot on the ocean floor! Indeed, the whole nuclear industry internationally has been one disaster after another, from Three Mile Island in the US, to Sellafield in Britain, to the recent accident in Tokaimura in Japan. There can be no greater testament to the destructive and wasteful nature of decadent capitalism than the use of nuclear technology.
However, these nuclear submarines, stuffed with radioactive materials and falling into decay, are just a caricature of a system which is incapable of averting catastrophes. Russia has indeed had its fair share of disasters, from Chernobyl to the recent fire in the Moscow TV tower, but the long-term damage to the but the long-term damage to the environment, in particular the greenhouse effect and the hole in the ozone layer, is largely down to the most advanced countries, beginning with the USA. We can see how concerned the advanced countries are about the effects of their military adventures on the Iraqi or Yugoslav populations who ‘benefited’ from their bombs and their low-grade uranium shells in 1991 and 1999. The NATO bombing of Yugoslav oil-refineries and chemical plants has left the river Danube as one of the most polluted in the world, constituting a menace to many other Eastern European countries.
Second message: "The inability of the Russian authorities to rescue the sailors trapped in the submarine shows how little they care for human life. It’s different over here".
To support this idea, there was much stress on the fact that it was Western divers who succeeded where the Russians failed – in entering the Kursk. On French television there was an interview with a French submariner who explained how he and his comrades would have been able to save themselves if the same accident had happened in their ship.
It’s true that the Russian authorities don’t care a jot about the lives of the young workers in uniform mobf the young workers in uniform mobilised to ‘defend the motherland’. The example of Chechnya illustrates this quite clearly. But they are by no means alone in this. After all, the British and Norwegian divers who went down there are not military men specialising in looking after the safety of the sailors of the war fleet, but employees of an enterprise which specialises in the maintenance of oil platforms, an enterprise which equips and trains them in the interests of profit. For their part, the French authorities didn’t express a great deal of compassion when in January 1968 and March 1970 the sinking of the submarines Minerva and Eurydice left a total of 108 dead.
Third message: "The Russian authorities have shown in this affair that they are having a hard time breaking with the methods of secrets and lies inherited from the ‘Communist’ period. It’s totally different in the truly democratic countries".
On British television there was an interview with a member the British rescue team who explained how they could have saved lives if it wasn’t for the delays caused by the secrecy of the Russian military. This takes the biscuit. The culture of secrecy is not at all exclusive to the Russian leadership or the former ‘Red Armyor the former ‘Red Army’. It won’t be until 2018 that the results of the inquiries into the above two French submarine disasters will be released! This secrecy is typical of all military institutions, whether they belong to ‘totalitarian’ or ‘democratic’ states. Do we have to be reminded of the flood of lies which washed over us at the time of the Gulf war in 1991? This was supposed to be a ‘clean war’ with its ‘surgical strikes’, but in fact this was a very dirty war in which thousands of Iraqi soldiers were buried alive, a war which experimented with weapons even more cruel than the gas used by Saddam against the Kurds. This time it was the turn of the NATO military to experiment on their own troops as well. The investigations into ‘Gulf War syndrome’ have also come up against military secrecy and so far the cause of the syndrome still remains a mystery.
On the question of military ‘accidents’ we give the floor to a NATO general following the bombing of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999: "For the cock-ups, we had a rather efficient tactic. Most often, we knew the exact causes and consequences of these errors. But in order to anaesthetise opinion, we said that we would carry out an inquiry and we only revealed the truth 15 days later, when they no lo15 days later, when they no longer interested anybody. Opinion can be worked upon like anything else" (Le Nouvel Observateur, 1/7/99). What the Russian authorities have shown is that they have a lot to learn from the leaders of the great democracies, who are specialists in the manipulation of public opinion.
The cynicism, cruelty and barbarity revealed by the Kursk affair are not the monopoly of the regime which presently governs Russia, which is indeed a worthy heir of the one which ran the USSR before 1990. They are characteristics of the whole of present-day capitalist society, a society in open decomposition, subject to growing chaos and posing an ever-greater threat to the survival of humanity. Fabienne.
After the announcement of increases in meat prices workers responded in many plants with spontaneous strikes. On July 1st the workers of Tczew near Gdansk and the Warsaw suburb of Ursus downed tools. At Ursus, general assemblies were held, a strike committee was elected and common demands were put forward. During the following days the strikes continued to spread: Warsaw, Lodz, Gdansk...
By making quick concessions through pay increases the government tried to prevent a further extension of the movement. In mid-July the workers of Lublin went on strike. Lublin is located on the railway line which links Russia to East Germany. In 1980 this was a vital supply line for the Russian troops in East Germany. The workers’ demands were: no repression against striking workers, withdrawal of theing workers, withdrawal of the police from the factories, wage increases and free elections of trade unions.
While in some places the workers resumed work, in other enterprises more workers joined the strikes. At the end of July the government hoped to extinguish the strikes by using the tactic of negotiating with the workers factory by factory. But on August 14th the movement was on the rise again: the tram drivers of Warsaw and the shipbuilders of Gdansk came out on strike. And in other towns many more workers joined the movement.
What made the workers strong ...
The workers had drawn the lessons of the struggles of 1970-71 and 1976. They saw that the official trade union apparatus was part of the stalinist state and always took sides with the government whenever the workers came forward with their demands. This is why it was vital that the workers in the mass strikes of 1980 took the initiatives themselves. They did not wait for any instructions from above, but came together and held meetings in order to decide themselves about the time and focus of their struggles. This could be seen clearest at Gdansk-Gdynia-Zopot, i.e. the industrial beltopot, i.e. the industrial belt on the Baltic Sea. At the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk alone, some 20,000 were employed.
Common demands were put forward at mass meetings. A strike committee was formed. At the beginning, economic demands were put into the foreground. The workers were determined: they did not want a repetition of the bloody crushing of the struggles as had happened in 1970 and 1976. In an industrial centre such as Gdansk-Gdynia-Zopot it was obvious that all the workers would have to unite in order to make the balance of forces tip in their favour. An inter-factory strike committee (MKS) was formed, which was composed of 400 members, two delegates for each factory. During the second half of August some 800-1000 delegates met. By forming an inter-factory strike committee the usual dispersal of forces was overcome.
Now the workers could face capital in a united way. Every day there were mass meetings at the Lenin shipyards. Loudspeakers were installed to allow the workers to follow the discussions of the strike committees and the negotiations with the government delegation. Shortly afterwards microphones were installed outside of the meeting room of the MKS, so that workers attending the mass meetings could directly intervene in the discussions of the MKS. In the evenings the delegates . In the evenings the delegates – mostly equipped with cassette recorders to record the debates – went back to their plants and presented the discussions and the situation to factory assemblies, giving back their mandate to the general assemblies.
This allowed for the largest number of workers to participate in the struggles. The delegates had to hand back their mandate, they were recallable at any time, and the general assemblies were always sovereign. All of these practices are in total opposition to the way unions function.
As soon as the workers from Gdansk-Gynia and Zopot joined, the movement spread to other cities. In order to sabotage contact between workers, the government cut the telephone lines on August 16th. The workers immediately threatened further extension of the movement, if the government did not re-establish phone lines immediately. The government gave in.
The general assembly of the workers decided to set up a workers’ militia. Previously consumption of alcohol was widespread with workers, it was collectively decided to prohibit alcohol consumption. Workers were aware that they needed a clear head to confront the governmentar head to confront the government.
A government delegation met the workers in order to negotiate. They met in front of the entire general assembly and not behind closed doors. The workers demanded a new composition of the government delegation because their leaders were only from the lower ranks. The government gave in.
When the government threatened the workers of Gdansk with repression, the railway workers of Lublin declared that if any of the workers in Gdansk were physically attacked or hurt in any way, they would paralyse the strategically important railway line between Russia and East Germany. The government grasped what was at stake. Its war machine would have been hit at a most sensitive spot – and during the Cold War this would have been fatal.
In almost all the major cities workers were mobilised. More than half a million workers, they were the only force in the country capable of confronting the government. What gave them their strength was:
The extension of the movement was the best weapon of solidarity – instead of only making declarations, the workers were going into the struggles themselves. This made it possible for a different balance of forces to develop. Since the workers struggled so massively, the government could not impose its repression. During the strikes in the summer, when the workers were confronting the government in a united manner head on, not a single worker got beaten up, let alone killed. The Polish bourgeoisie realised that it would have to weaken the workers from inside the movement.
The workers at Gdansk demanded that the concessions the government had granted to them would apply to workers in the rest of the country. They wanted to oppose any divisions and offered their solidarity to the other workers.
The working class acted as a central point of reference. Apart from other workers who went to Gdansk in order to establish a direct contact with the striking worontact with the striking workers, both farmers and students came to the factory gates in order to receive the strike bulletins and other information. The working class was the leading force in society.
The reaction of the bourgeoisie – isolation
The danger that the struggles in Poland constituted for the bourgeoisie could be seen in their reactions in the neighbouring countries.
The borders between Poland and East Germany, Czechoslovakia and the USSR were sealed off immediately. Previously Polish workers had travelled every day to East Germany, above all to Berlin, to go shopping (in Poland there were even fewer goods in the shops than in East Germany). But the bourgeoisie wanted to isolate the working class. Direct contact between the workers of different countries was to be prevented at all costs. And there was every reason to take such a measure! In the neighbouring Czech coal mining area of Ostrava the miners also went on strike – following the Polish example. In the Romanian mining districts, in Russian Togliattigrad the workers also followed the Polish road. Even if there were no direct strikes as a reaction to the Polish workers’ struggles, the workers in many countries in the west took up the slogans of their class be slogans of their class brothers and sisters in Poland. In Turin in September 1980 the workers shouted: "Let’s struggle as the Polish workers did".
Because of its scope and its methods the mass strikes in Poland had a massive impact on workers in other countries. Through their mass strikes the workers showed – as they had already done in 1953 in East Germany, in 1956 in Poland and Hungary, 1970 and 1976 in Poland again – that the so-called ‘socialist’ countries were in reality state capitalist governments, enemies of the working class. Despite the isolation imposed around the Polish borders, despite the Iron Curtain, the Polish working class, as soon as it took action, functioned as a massive pole of reference with a world wide impact. Precisely at the height of the cold war, during the war in Afghanistan, the workers in Poland sent an important signal: they opposed the arms race and the war economy by their class struggle. The question of the unification of the workers between East and West, even if it was not yet concretely posed, resurfaced as a perspective.
How the movement was sabotaged
The movement was able to develop such a strength because it spread quickly and because the workers themsel and because the workers themselves took the initiative. Extension beyond the confines of individual factories, general assemblies, revocability of delegates – all these measures contributed to their strength. While, in the beginning, there was no union influence in the movement, the members of the newly founded ‘free and independent’ trade union, ‘Solidarnosc’, soon started to hold back the movement.
Initially the negotiations took place in the open, but it was soon proposed that ‘experts’ were needed in order to work out the details with the government. Step by step the workers could no longer follow and participate in the negotiations. The loud speakers in the halls and in the ship yards, which transmitted the negotiations, no longer worked because of some ‘technical’ problems. Lech Walesa was crowned as leader of the new movement. Solidarnosc (1), the new enemy of the workers, had managed to infiltrate the movement and started its job of sabotage. Solidarnosc completely distorted the workers’ demands. Whereas initially economic and political demands were in the forefront, they now pushed for the recognition of the ‘free’ trade unions, with economic and political demands only to be second on the list. They followed the old tactics: defence of the trade unions, insteaence of the trade unions, instead of defence of the workers interests.
Previously workers in Poland had been clear that the official unions took sides with the state, but now many workers believed that the 10 million strong Solidarnosc was not corrupt and would defend their interests. The workers in Poland had not yet gone through the experience of the workers in the west in dealing with ‘free trade unions’.
Walesa promised that "we want to create a second Japan and establish prosperity for everyone" and many workers, due to their inexperience with the reality of capitalism in the west, had illusions in such a possibility. Solidarnosc, with Walesa at its head, quickly took over the role of playing the fireman for capitalism, trying to extinguish workers struggles. In autumn 1980, workers, protesting against the Gdansk agreement, went on strike again. They had seen that, with a ‘free’ trade union on their side, their material situation was getting even worse. Solidarnosc was already beginning to show its true face. Soon after the end of the mass strikes Lech Walesa was being flown around in an army helicopter, taken to striking workers to urge them to abandon their strikes: "We don’t need any more strikes because they push our country into acause they push our country into an abyss, we need calm".
From the very beginning Solidarnosc sabotaged the movement. Whenever possible it snatched away the initiative from the workers, prevented them from starting new strikes. In the summer of 1980 the mass strike movement could reach such proportions because the Polish bourgeoisie, as well as the stalinist regimes in the rest of Eastern Europe, were ill equipped politically for confronting the class other than with repression. This was unlike the west, where trade unions and bourgeois democracy play the role of a buffer. In the context of political backwardness in the capitalist class in Eastern Europe, and in the context of the Cold War, the Polish bourgeoisie was very suspicious of Solidarnosc. However, it was not their subjective feeling, but the objective role which Solidarnosc was to play against the workers, that was decisive. Thus, in 1981 there was a growing recognition in the stalinist government that Solidarnosc – albeit an ‘alien’ body in the stalinist set-up – could play a useful role.
The balance of forces was changing.
In December 1981 the Polish bourgeoisie could finally start repression against the workers. Solidarnosc had done its best to disarm the worone its best to disarm the workers politically – preparing their defeat. While, during the summer of 1980, the workers had not been attacked because of the self-initiative and the extension of the struggles, and because there was no union to disarm the workers, in December 1981 more than 1,200 workers were killed, and thousands of workers were imprisoned or driven into exile. This military repression took place following an intensive co-ordination between the ruling class in the East and the West.
After the strikes in 1980 the western bourgeoisie offered Solidarnosc all sorts of assistance, in order to strengthen them against the workers. Campaigns of ‘assistance for Poland’ were started, and cheap credits from the IMF were granted, in order to prevent the idea spreading that workers in the west could follow the Polish example. On Dec. 13th 1981, the day when repression was unleashed, the West German social-democratic Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and the arch-stalinist GDR leader Erich Honecker met outside Berlin and pretended not to know anything about what was going on. However, in reality, not only had they given their backing to repression, they had also passed on their own experience of confronting the working class to the ruting the working class to the ruling class in the East.
In the summer of 1980 it was not possible for revolutionaries to intervene within Poland due to the sealing off of the borders. But in September 1980 the ICC distributed an international leaflet in more than a dozen countries, which also circulated in Poland thanks to the help of some contacts. In our later interventions in Poland, the ICC always criticised the illusions of the Polish workers. As revolutionaries, we saw that our job was not to share the illusions of the workers, but to warn workers in Poland about their lack of experience in confronting ‘radical’ unions, telling them about the experience of the workers in the west. Even if our positions on the union question was not very popular in Poland, forcing us to ‘swim against the tide’, events proved us to be right.
One year later, in December 1981, Solidarnosc showed what a terrible defeat it had been able to impose on the workers. Subsequently, Lech Walesa became President of Poland. This was an expression of the confidence he enjoyed from the church and the western countries. He had already been an excellent defender of the interests of the Polish state in his capacity as leader of Solidarnosc.
The historical significance of the struggles
In the 20 years that have since passed, many of the workers who took part in the strike movement have retired, become unemployed or been forced into emigration. But their experience is of inestimable value for the whole working class. The ICC wrote in 1980 that "the struggles in Poland represent a great step forward in the world wide struggle of the proletariat, which is why these struggles are the most important for half a century." (Resolution on the Class Struggle, 4th Congress of the ICC, 1980, International Review 26). They were the highpoint of an international wave of struggles, the lessons of which we underlined in our report on the class struggle in 1999 at our 13th congress: "Historic events on this scale have long term consequences. The mass strike in Poland provided definitive proof that the class struggle is the only force that can compel the bourgeoisie to set aside its imperialist rivalries. In particular, it showed that the Russian bloc – historically condemned, by its weakened position, to be the ‘aggressor’ in any war – was incapable of respon– was incapable of responding to its growing economic crisis with a policy of military expansion. Clearly the workers of the Eastern bloc countries (and of Russia itself) were totally unreliable as cannon fodder in any future war for the glory of ‘socialism’. Thus the mass strike in Poland was a potent factor in the eventual implosion of the Russian imperialist bloc." (IR 99). David.
(1) Even if the foundation of a ‘free’ trade union can only be explained by the illusions and the lack of experience of the workers in Poland itself, there is no doubt that organised efforts by the KOR (a partially pro-western oppositional group) were only possible because of help from the west for the systematic construction of Solidarnosc. Despite the enmity between the two imperialist blocs, there was a unity against the working class.