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State, Labor, and the Transition to a Market Economy. Agnieszka Paczyńska
Читать онлайн.Название State, Labor, and the Transition to a Market Economy
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isbn 9780271069968
Автор произведения Agnieszka Paczyńska
Жанр Учебная литература
Издательство Ingram
Following the election the PPR quickly moved to consolidate power. In October 1947, facing imminent arrest, Mikołajczyk fled the country. In December 1948 the PPR merged with the PPS, forming the Polish United Workers Party (PZPR).2 By 1949 the new regime had abolished all independent political parties and organizations and began the process of Stalinization, sending thousands of political foes to prison or into exile. The PZPR, led by first secretary Bolesław Bierut, also expanded the police apparatus extending surveillance over the population and the party itself. In March 1949 it created a special department within the Ministry of Security and charged it with the elimination of all opposition forces that may have penetrated the party. Within the next couple of years, in the name of the “battle for revolutionary vigilance,” numerous high party dignitaries were expelled from the PZPR. Others were incarcerated. The PZPR also moved to transform the Polish economy, nationalizing industry and instituting central planning mechanisms. At the same time that the PZPR was busy eliminating its political rivals, it also sought to appeal to the rural and urban poor with promises to undertake revolutionary socioeconomic restructuring of the society.
Containing political opposition and mobilizing support also meant that the party had to extend control over organized labor, which had become increasingly militant in the 1930s. It entrusted Edward Ochab, a high-ranking party official, with formulating a plan to reshape union organization. In June 1949, a centralized trade union organization was formed, headed by Politburo member Aleksander Zawadzki, with branch unions subordinated to the Central Council of Trade Unions (CRZZ). Gradually, the number of branch unions was reduced from the prewar high of about three hundred to twenty-three. Forty-nine councils were established at the national level along with about thirty thousand factory councils.3 The party wanted to ensure that all workers joined the organization and the CRZZ membership quickly expanded. By 1949 it had 3.5 million members. In 1954 membership swelled to 4.5 million, leaving only 750,000 workers in state-owned enterprises outside union structures.4
In 1949 new labor legislation codified the hierarchical structure of labor organizations and defined the rights and responsibilities of the unions. At the lowest level, the factory unions were responsible for the administration of various social programs, such as those of health and recreation, that had been newly extended to workers. They were also responsible for ensuring cooperative relations between company management and employees and for fulfilling national economic plans. Additionally, they were expected to work closely with party cells that had been established in all firms to promote the ideological education of workers.5 At the national level, the CRZZ was guaranteed consultative powers in designing national development plans and wage policies.6
The suppression of political dissent, the expansion of the party apparatus, and the centralization of labor organizations under the PZPR’s control thus seemed to ensure that working-class activism would be channeled to support the new regime. The changes in economic policies provided further incentives for workers to remain within the new regime’s coalition of support. These changes ushered in a period of unprecedented social mobility, opening previously inaccessible opportunities for educational and professional advancement. Peasants left the countryside in large number to find employment in the expanding industrial sector. Blue-collar workers moved into administrative and managerial posts and staffed party bureaucracy, local administration, and central government ministries.7
The 1956 Confrontation
Worker support for the regime proved to be more conditional than the PZPR had anticipated and was predicated on continued improvement in living standards. Within a few years of coming to power, however, the regime was facing a growing economic crisis, making it difficult to meet these worker expectations. Further, conflicts that had simmered within the PZPR from its inception presented challenges to devising a response to the crisis. The main disagreement pitted those within the party leadership who advocated a national development path and were skeptical about the wisdom of transplanting such Soviet ideas as farm collectivization, against those who argued that the Soviet model should be closely replicated in Poland and pushed for acceleration of the industrialization program. In the late 1940s, this second group, led by Bolesław Bierut and Hilary Minc, appeared to gain the upper hand when Stanisław Gomułka, leader of the “nationalists,” was forced to resign from the party.
However, the push for agricultural reform proved futile. Peasants increasingly rebelled against forced collectivization and food production plummeted. As the economy began running into trouble by the mid-1950s, discontent among industrial workers grew as well. Workers’ grievances concerned primarily wages, production norms, and working conditions but also dissatisfaction with the performance of trade unions in representing their interests within companies.8 At the same time as discontent among workers grew, with the death of Stalin in 1953, political repression eased, press censorship weakened, and political discussions became increasingly open and often critical of the PZPR’s policies. Critical discussions also took place within the party itself, with democratic reforms now openly mentioned. This political opening and the growing economic crisis for the first time since the establishment of the Communist regime presented workers with an opportunity to challenge the state and demonstrated that the labor institutions set up by the PZPR were hard pressed to contain and manage growing worker discontent.
Tensions boiled over in June 1956 when worker protests broke out in Poznań. The initial demands focused on working conditions at the Cegielski factory. When the PZPR responded with threats, workers marched to the city center, where they were joined by students and workers from other enterprises. The demands turned political and the demonstrators clashed with the security police, threw Molotov cocktails at police headquarters, and stormed party offices. Eventually, the PZPR called in an estimated ten thousand soldiers, who dealt brutally with the protesters. Official sources claimed that fifty-three were killed. However, foreign press put the number at two thousand to three hundred and two thousand arrested.9 Although the protests were put down by force, concessions were immediately extended to workers to bring them back into the fold.
The 1956 workers’ demonstrations proved to be a harbinger of future conflicts between the regime and labor, conflicts that would gradually tilt the balance of power between the two. This first eruption of discontent also signaled how the party elite would seek to control labor opposition. While repression was deployed in this instance and would be used in future encounters as well, those within the party leadership who viewed repressive measures as the preferred response never gained full control of the party apparatus. Rather, they were always forced to contend with the faction supporting an indigenous development path. This faction believed that social groups, whether peasants or workers, needed to be offered positive inducements to remain supportive of the PZPR and advocated offering substantive concessions in exchange for that support. When those were deemed insufficient, this faction was also prepared to consider procedural concessions as a way to diffuse labor opposition, with the understanding that once the immediate crisis was over, these procedural concessions would be withdrawn. At the same time, labor protests tended to exacerbate internal conflict within the party, thus providing a window of opportunity for labor to extract concessions.
During the first few decades when the PZPR had material resources at its disposal, it was still able to withdraw some procedural concessions by extending more material inducements. Over time, however, as economic crises became more frequent and those material resources increasingly scarce, procedural concessions became more difficult to abrogate. In other words, over time labor organizations gradually succeeded in acquiring more legal prerogatives and valuable experience in confronting the state, which gave them a say in the day-to-day management of state firms and, by the 1980s, a greater say in national economic decision making.
The bloody clashes in Poznań intensified tensions within the party. While the reformists within the Central Committee wanted to continue the democratic reforms begun earlier, the conservative faction that dominated the Politburo resisted these changes. Eventually, appealing to the disaffected public, the reformers gained the upper hand and