www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, July 2004Jacek Kuron (1934-2004)Jacek Kuron, a lifelong Polish dissident who was once a revolutionary activist, died on June l7 at age 70. Considered by many to be the godfather of the Solidarity movement that exploded in Poland in l980 following the Gdansk shipyard strike that catapulted Lech Walesa onto the Polish scene, Kuron had earlier attracted national attention in l964, when he and Karol Modzelewski wrote "An Open Letter to the Members of the Polish United Workers Party," a Marxist analysis critiquing the Communist Party. The analysis exposed that Poland was a state-capitalist society and called the ruling class a "red bourgeoisie." Following imprisonment for three years for this attack on the party, Kuron continued his opposition to the party and its policies. In l968 he became a leading activist in student protests against the government, and was again imprisoned for three and a half years. He was one of the founders of KOR (Committee to Defend Workers), an organization mostly of intellectuals that supported workers prosecuted after they had rebelled in Radom and Ursus in l976. KOR was critical in establishing close cooperation between workers and intellectuals, and led to the establishment of the mass union movement, Solidarity, which swept the nation in 1980. KOR was dissolved, despite the objections of many, in light of Solidarity's success. Solidarity had the national power. The question was, would it take it. The Polish Communist Party recognized this challenge to its power and moved to crush Solidarity, declaring martial law in l981. At this point, Kuron, who by this time had abandoned Marxism and feared a Russian army attack, advocated a "self-limiting revolution." Kuron was again imprisoned. Solidarity, however, was not dead. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, it swept into power. Kuron became labor minister, and now as part of the ruling bureaucracy opposed strikes by the workers and farmers who protested the privatization imposed by the government. The tremendous revolutionary promise for a new social human reconstruction that Solidarity had inspired in 1980, had been transformed into its opposite--an oppressive capitalist regime. While no one can deny the many great contributions made by Kuron in his revolutionary years, the substitution of his own "self-limiting revolution" instead of following the aspirations of the Polish workers and farmers in Solidarity, and his own bureaucratization afterward, remain serious and critical failures. --Andy Phillips |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
