The word "solidarity" occurs twenty-eight times in this book. Not once does it refer to the trade union of that name.
That sentence is the whole problem of the 1981 edition of Problems of the Communist Movement, and it needs to be handled carefully, because the obvious accusation is not quite the right one. The copyright page reads: "First printing 1975 / Second printing 1981 / English translation revised and supplemented". This is not a book commissioned in 1981 and written past the Polish August. It is a 1975 book sent back through the shop. The question a reader is entitled to ask is what the revision actually did — and the answer can be established from internal evidence, because the text dates itself repeatedly.
It dates itself late in 1979. The foreword is new: it announces that "the present edition of the book Problems of the Communist Movement (the first appeared in 1975) has been revised to take into account more recent world events," reports that "Communist parties are active in 94 countries," and lists the events the revisers had in mind — "whether it is the revolution in Portugal or the national uprising in Iran, the victory of revolutionary democracy in Ethiopia or the defeat of imperialist agents in Afghanistan." Statistical series have been carried forward to 1977 and 1978. There is discussion of the 1977 Soviet Constitution, of the Trilateral Commission's membership in 1978, and of the third of Jimmy Carter's energy programmes: "July 1979 witnessed the birth of a new energy programme of the US government, the third in recent years." The most recent hard datum in the book is a strike count for "the first four months of 1979." Layered on top of that is a thin coat of 1981: Brezhnev's report to the Twenty-Sixth Congress, delivered in February 1981, is cited four times, and the Central Committee resolution on the 110th anniversary of Lenin's birth (1980) once.
So the revision is real and it is datable. Substantively the book was brought up to the middle of 1979; the 1981 element consists of new footnotes to a new Brezhnev speech. And that has a consequence the publisher can hardly have intended. The year 1980 does not appear in this book at all — not once, in some 115,000 words. Poland appears four times: as the source of the 1952 constitution, twice in tables of socialist achievement, and once in connection with the treaties recognising the postwar European frontiers. The adjective "Polish" does not appear. Neither does Gdańsk, Wałęsa, Solidarność, martial law, or the Polish United Workers' Party. A book issued by the Soviet state's export publishing house, in English, in the year of the Solidarity congress and the December coup, contains no trace of either.
The two appearances of Poland in the statistical tables are worth setting down, because they are what a reader in Lagos or Lima was given instead. "In 1978 industrial output was 22 times higher in Bulgaria than in 1951, 8.3 in Hungary, 8.4 in the GDR, 13 in Mongolia, 14 in Poland, 29 in Rumania, and 7.9 in Czechoslovakia." And: "By comparison with 1960 in 1977 real incomes were 1.8 times higher in Bulgaria, 1.6 in Hungary, 1.8 in Poland, 2 in Rumania, 1.7 in the USSR, and 1.6 in Czechoslovakia." Those figures were compiled at the top of the debt-financed boom that Edward Gierek had run on Western credit since 1971. By the time they were printed in English the meat queues were back, the loans were unrepayable, and the strike wave had produced the largest independent workers' organisation ever to exist in the Soviet bloc. Poland is present in this book only as a growth rate.
No author is named anywhere — not on the title page, not in the foreword, which speaks throughout of "the authors" in the third person plural. Progress issued it as the anonymous product of a collective, translated from the Russian by David Skvirsky. Its institutional address can nevertheless be read off its citations. Brezhnev is named twenty-nine times. The other standing authority is Boris Ponomarev, cited from his 1978 Progress volume The Living and Effective Teaching of Marxism-Leninism (A Reply to Its Critics) and introduced in the text as "Candidate-Member of the Politburo and a Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU" — that is, the head of the International Department, the body that ran relations with foreign communist parties. The strike statistics come from the Institute of the International Labour Movement of the USSR Academy of Sciences. This is a handbook produced by and for the apparatus that handled the fraternal parties, and its object, as the contents page announces, is method: "A Leninist Analysis of the Socioeconomic Conditions of the Socialist Revolution and Contemporaneity", the methodology of Lenin's theory of imperialism, the general crisis of capitalism and its present stage, state-monopoly capitalism, the theory of the socialist revolution, the paths of revolution, the party, and — in a final chapter whose last section is headed "Ways of Surmounting Differences" — the relations between communist parties.
It is that last subject, not Poland, that the book was revised to fight about. The 1975 original had been written into the argument with the West European parties; the 1979 revision keeps it there. "Eurocommunism" appears exactly once, in quotation marks, and only as something invented by others: "the anti-communist interpretation of 'Eurocommunism' is given as confirmation of this 'struggle'." The reader is told that a difference among fraternal parties may be discussed, or, where there is "a clear departure from the Marxist-Leninist guidelines," must be "combated resolutely and consistently." A companion volume in this series, M. I. Basmanov and B. M. Leibzon's The Revolutionary Vanguard (1977), conducts the same quarrel by proxy against expelled dissidents. This book conducts it by category.
The most consequential passage in the volume was written for other purposes and fits Poland exactly. Discussing the choice of state form, the authors observe that the enemies of socialism have learned not to attack the workers' state openly but to hollow it out:
In 1921, for example, the inspirers of the Kronstadt counter-revolutionary mutiny advanced the slogan "For the Soviets but without Communists" in an attempt to overthrow the power of the working class. Essentially a similar demand was put forward by the leaders of the counter-revolutionary uprising in Hungary in 1956. In Czechoslovakia in 1968 also the reaction did not demostrate openly against the state and did not seek to change the form of power by force.
Kronstadt, Budapest, Prague: a single sequence in which every attempt by workers in a socialist country to organise outside the party is by definition the work of "the enemies of socialism and their foreign inciters." No Soviet troops enter this narrative, in 1956 or in 1968; no Hungarian or Czechoslovak worker has a grievance. The schema was in print in English, on the shelves, at the moment that the Gdańsk shipyard strike committee was drafting its twenty-one demands. Nothing needed to be added to this book to explain Solidarność. That is the point. The silence about 1980 is not a gap; the machinery for reading 1980 was already installed, and the reader who absorbed Chapter Three would meet the Polish August with the interpretation prepared.
Elsewhere the book supplies its own commentary at its own expense. Chapter Two quotes Lenin's definition of a revolutionary situation in full: "when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the 'upper classes' ... when the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual ... when, as a consequence of the above causes, there is a considerable increase in the activity of the masses." That is a description of Poland in the autumn of 1980, and the authors set it out as a tool for analysing capitalist countries only. The word "solidarity" runs through the same chapters as the highest value of the movement — "the international unity and solidarity of the Communists in the common class struggle" — while millions of people in a socialist country were assembling under that word and are not here.
On the older record the book is, as its companions in this series are, mostly quiet. Stalin is named once: "In the prewar period there were some unjustified restrictions of democracy and violations of the law connected with the Stalin personality cult," followed by the Central Committee resolution of 30 June 1956 as the sufficient reply to anyone who raises the matter. The year 1937 occurs once, inside the bracketed dates of a volume of Dimitrov's selected works. There is no Left Opposition, no famine, no trials, no Comintern history to speak of, no Nazi–Soviet Pact, and no Fourth International — that organisation is not named, though "the Trotskyite theory of 'permanent revolution', which does not recognise the revolutionary potential of the peasants as an ally of the proletariat," is dismissed, and Trotsky himself appears chiefly to be convicted, on Lenin's authority, of "political adventurism" in 1905.
The economics does. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise, and a reader told that everything here is worthless will misjudge the book and the period.
Chapter One is a serious attempt to read the crisis of the 1970s, and much of it is checkable and correct. The collapse of the postwar monetary order is recorded plainly: "In the course of its development the Bretton Woods capitalist monetary system, based on the undivided monopoly of the dollar, collapsed." The 1974–75 recession is identified as the deepest of the postwar period, which it was. Stagflation is described without the label and without embarrassment — the novelty, the authors say, is that "the drop in production and the growth of unemployment are combined with the uncontrollable rise in inflation," a combination that was at that moment demolishing the Phillips curve in Western economics faculties. The figures are specific: officially registered unemployment in the United States rising from 2,800,000 in 1969 to 6,326,000 in 1978, in Japan from 590,000 in 1970 to 1,260,000. The rise of the transnational corporation, the structural crises in energy, food, raw materials and the environment, the failure of national state-monopoly regulation and the turn to coordinated management through bodies like the Trilateral Commission, founded in 1973 — this is a coherent account, and its sources are open ones, including the United Mine Workers of America and Harry Bridges of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union. The authors also refuse the crudest version of their own doctrine: communists, they insist, "have never predicted the 'automatic collapse' of capitalism," and the Twenty-Fifth Congress is quoted conceding that capitalism "still possessed considerable reserves."
Then comes the sentence that undoes it. Of the strengthening of the imperialist state and the military-industrial complex: "All this is just a flash in the pan." Four pages of measured analysis are cancelled by a reflex. The book cannot let a finding stand if the finding is uncomfortable, and that is the same disability, in the economic register, that produces the silence about Poland in the political one.
It was written as the events happened, by people who regarded the Polish workers neither as counter-revolutionaries nor as a Western asset, and it is locatable.
The Fourth International's press was covering Poland before this book's first printing. "POLAND: The Bureaucracy vs. the Workers" appeared in Inprecor no. 22 for 27 March 1975 — the year the first edition came out — tracing the subordination of the Polish trade unions to the state administration from 1947 onwards and the promises made and withdrawn after the Szczecin shipyard strikes. Three years later Cyril Smuga's "Polish Bureaucrats Try Price Increases on the Sly" (Intercontinental Press vol. 16 no. 30, 31 July 1978, translated from Rouge) described the two-tier market in meat and housing, the "commercial" shops at double the official price, and an average monthly wage of 4,168 zlotys. That is the economy the tables in this book render as real incomes 1.8 times higher than in 1960.
On the strike wave itself, Smuga's "How Polish Strike Wave Began" ran in IP vol. 18 no. 32, 1 September 1980, setting out Gierek's Western borrowing and the withdrawal of the 1971 concessions. Oliver MacDonald — the pen name of Peter Gowan — and Jo Singleton examined the other institution in the field in "Catholic Hierarchy and Stalinist Bureaucracy" (IP vol. 18 no. 35, 22 September 1980). The Fourth International's own assessment, "Polish Workers Confront the Bureaucracy" (IP vol. 18 no. 40, 27 October 1980), called the August settlement a victory of historic significance and itemised it: "the right to organizations of its own, the right to strike, the partial lifting of censorship, access to the mass media." The judgement was not uncritical — "Poland: Advance of the Workers and the Bureaucracy's Reply" (IP vol. 19 no. 11, 30 March 1981) is largely an argument about the suspension of the March general strike over the head of Solidarity's own national commission — and it was not naive about what was coming. "Defend the Political Revolution in Poland!" (IP vol. 19 no. 18, 18 May 1981) reported 200,000 troops on manoeuvres and quoted the report to the PUWP Central Committee plenum of 29 March 1981: "what we are seeing is no longer pressure on the government, but an open struggle against our party, the state, and socialism — it is already a struggle for power." By November, "Poland: the workers councils and self-management" (IP vol. 19 no. 41, 9 November 1981) was analysing the workers' councils as a situation of dual power.
Then, on 13 December 1981, General Jaruzelski declared martial law, and the union that had enrolled close to ten million members was suppressed. The Fourth International's statement, "Solidarity with the Polish workers", ran in IP vol. 20 no. 1, 18 January 1982, and named what the programme of the coup consisted of: "suspension and destruction of the independent trade union controlled by the workers themselves; elimination of the right to strike; abolition of the free and uncensored workingclass press ... and the proclamation of martial law."
Read Problems of the Communist Movement against that, and its interest becomes precise. It is not a book that lies about Poland. It is a book whose method had already decided what Poland could mean, printed in the year Poland disproved it. Its economics could see the collapse of Bretton Woods and the return of mass unemployment in the West with considerable clarity, because those things were happening to somebody else. Its politics could not see ten million workers in a socialist country organising a union, because the category into which such people had to be placed — the inspirers of Kronstadt, the leaders of 1956, the reaction of 1968 — had been fixed in advance and could not be revised by any event. That is what "revised and supplemented" turned out to mean.