Many British labour movement activists and leaders were hostile to Solidarnosc — most prominently miners’ leader Arthur Scargill. Scargill was — and still is — a Stalinist who believed that police-state Poland was a genuine socialist country. Like many militants, Scargill’s views were reinforced because the Cold War leaders of the Eastern Bloc were in a head-to-head stand off with his own immediate enemies — Margaret Thatcher and the hated US president Ronald Reagan. Large sections of the left and some on the right of the labour movement made the elementary mistake of assuming that their enemy’s enemy was a friend.
During the miners’ strike of 1984-5 the Polish bureaucrats sent coal to Britain to help Thatcher break the miners’ union, the NUM. The underground Solidarnosc organisation in the Silesian coalfields sent the NUM messages of support but said the Polish workers’ movement was too weak to stop the export of coal.
If the British labour movement had helped Solidarnosc more in 1980-1, it would have been better able to help the NUM in 1984.
In the middle of the miners’ strike Scargill commented: “Perhaps I owe Lech Walesa an apology.” But he failed to learn the political lesson.
More understandably (because they had less information) genuine workers’ leaders and movements in the Eastern Bloc sometimes developed illusions in figures like Thatcher and Reagan — making the same mistake as Scargill and assuming that their bosses’ enemies were their friends.
This process was helped by prominent Western Stalinists who reinforced the idea that socialism means the Gulag, prison camp, police-run unions and repression.
Scargill was a regular guest at the Soviet state “union” conferences. By doing so he helped the Polish bureaucracy make propaganda for their fake miners’ “union”. When a genuine miners’ movement emerged in Russia in the late 1980s, it turned its back on Scargill — whom they rightly accused of helping their rulers — and looked to the right-wing, scab British miners’ organisation, the UDM — who had actively backed them.
Now Stalinist Eastern Europe is dead and gone, we are better able to reidentify socialism with international workers’ solidarity, democracy and human liberty.
