Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics: Opposition and Reform in Poland since 1968

SEVEN: The Poverty of Martial Law: Limping Toward Reform

SEVEN The Poverty of Martial Law: Limping Toward Reform On August 31, 1988, Lech Wal~sa met with Interior Minister General Czeslaw Kiszczak for high-level negotiations aimed at ending a new wave of strikes in Gdansk and elsewhere. Eight years to the day after the signing of the Gdansk Accord, and more than six and a half years since the imposition of martial law, government and opposition were talking again. By the fall of 1988, a neocorporatist option was once again at the center of the political agenda. What happened in the interim to bring this about? Trying to make sense out of Polish developments in the years since martial law is a rather daunting challenge. It is also more than a bit foolhardy, since things are changing so fast that today's wisdom may read like tomorrow's curiosities. And yet it is a challenge worth taking. For insofar as martial law did not resolve the crisis of which Solidarity was only a symptom, the period since then has revolved around many of the same basic questions. The post-Solidarity period can be divided into two distinct stages, with the crucial caesura occurring in September 1986, when the government declared a general amnesty, launched a series of meaningful reforms, and began to recognize the political opposition as a fundamental part of any stable political system. It was the first period, however, that led to this realization, and it is there that we must begin. Organizing an Underground Many of the: union's foreign supporters were surprised by the relative ease with which Solidarity was broken up on December 13, 1981, 149 150 / The Poverty of Martial Law but it really is not much of a mystery. Solidarity was an organization committed to openness and legality, committed to seeking a compromise with the state. If it had prepared for an illegal struggle, it would have been something other than Solidarity. The union rank and file responded to the declaration of martial law with strikes throughout the country, but the strikes were appropriate only to a period that had just ended. lWo factors predetermined the outcome: the workers' time-honored practice of sit-in strikes, and the government's decision to shut off all telephone and telex communication. Strikers in Poland do not set up picket lines; they occupy their worksites. In 1970 the workers left the plant during a strike, and the catastrophic results brought them back for good. And so, when martial law was declared, workers in plants throughout the country dropped their tools and sat down on the premises. The problem, however, was that they had no idea what to do next. Earlier they had gotten instructions from Solidarity leaders. Now most of those leaders were in jail, and those who were not had no way of contacting those on strike. Workers struck in splendid isolation, their only contact with the outside world being radio and television, which reported from day one that most people were accepting the new situation and that things were quickly becoming "normal." There were some clashes, chiefly in Silesia, where miners, often feeling guilty for not having led the way in previous years, now offered resistance to the police, resulting in seven killed at one Katowice coal mine.) Other plants were simply surrounded. The police waited outside while the strikers waited inside-until after a week of sitting around, the strikers left to be with their families on Sunday. Returning a day or two later, they would find the plant under military control, key strike leaders arrested, and no one ready to organize anything . So committed was Solidarity to the principle of free and open communication that when that communication was blocked, the union could offer no reply. But did martial law really solve anything? Could it solve anything? The government could de-legalize and cripple Solidarity, but the same old problems remained. There still needed to be some new political arrangement to mediate the interests of state and society. Martial law meant that the totalitarian tendency was being re-emphasized, but the government was never foolish enough to think that this would solve the problems that had brought about the crisis in the first place. There was The Poverty of Martial Law / 151 never, for example, any attempt to resurrect the idea of the infallibility of the Party. In fact, the Party was hardly mentioned at all in the...