WEEKLY HIKE READY Events moved with extraordinary speed.
bled to hear the Prime Minister announce, Within 24 hours a spontaneous movewith exports.
The regime's subsequent attempts to After bloody repression had failed to - price sreeze and consurtanon The chain of events which led the • such Soviet loans are now gimes of Eastern Europe after revolutionary upsurges - Gierek launched his new economic strategy. His aim was to make the bureaucracy acceptable to the Polish masses by providing a rapid rise in living standards. The workers must be persuaded to accept consumer durables as a substitute for proletarian democracy.
For five years the bureaucracy has bought massive quantities of consumer goods from the West and increased the workers' wages to pay for them; it has also borrowed billions of dollars from the capitalist world to build up new Polish industries, Gierek gambled on only one thing: the continued boom of the capitalist world to pay polands debts by flooding Western markets But the capitanst economy wen into crisis and tierek s surategy was pulled apart: Western Europe's infla-ttion jacked up Poland's import bill. while its recession destroyed hopes of big Polish exports. The oil crisis has led the USSR, Poland's oil supplier, to push up its oil prices.
The result of all this? By 1975 the Polish bureaucracy was caught in an economic vice. The consumption demands of the Polish working class had rocketed; the average household was expecting a steadily rising flow of washing machines, cars, holidays and wage increases - all on the basis of a freeze on food prices. But at the same time, the balance of payments deficit with the capitalist world was also soaring and capitalist bankers were demanding overdue loan repayments. Something had to give.
Throughout last year rumours of price rises spread across the country.
The regime's hope that rising living standards would drown political grievances had been turned on its head The overriding political question had become living standards: if the regime could not produce the consumer goods at stable prices, what good was it:
At the Party Congress in December, Cierek could not deny the possibility of price increases. So he had to invest the other part of his political capital "consultation', which has been a contin ual theme of his era. The political weakness of the Polish bureaucracy in the face of the working class has made such populist demagogy necessary to block the struggle for workers democ гасу. At the same lie, using ayu; standards have, up to this year, made such 'consultation possible.
Since the fateful meeting with the striking workers of the Baltic ports in January 1971, Gierek has returned to the sanctor mo lewer Lan LWCLYC similar discussions with mass meetings ol workers, similar talk-ins nave beer held in the other main working class centres during the last five years a style of rule unthinkable for the bureaucracy in the USSR. And even the edited version of these discussions broadcast from Warsaw, reveal some frank talking by the workers But confronted by the need to raise food prices by 65 per cent, the regime lost its nerve on 'consultation" Which bureaucrat would stand up in front of thousands of workers and 'consult' them on such rises? Not Edward Gierek!
So last week the populist substitute for workers democracy was cast aside •Prices were not even on parnament s agenda last Thursday when the Prime Minister interrupted procedings to announce the increases. The Polish bureaucracy hoped to pull a fast one on the Polish masses. But the Polish working class was ready and waiting, and it responded with extraordinary speed.
It remains to be seen whether the Polish workers can follow up their resolute mass action by struggling to demand that food prices are fixed by their own workers' delegates, and not by the bureaucrats of Polish Stalinism. One tning is sure, the workers or ostov. Kiev, Riga and other cities of the USSR who have been protesting against the food crisis in the Soviet Union over the last few weeks will be listening to the news from Poland with rapt atten-