the p,ro,posals made by Soviet trade union leaders_as the Poles in the· UN Assembly support the Russian delegates. Nearly all the critics of the Polish Government with whom I talked agreed that the unions are doing a good and useful job in helping to increase production, in rebuilding morale and labour discipline, and particularly excellent work as social welfare agencies. But as weapons of labour in self-defence against a tyrannical State, as a check upon the trend toward totalitarianism, their influence is not decisive and will grow less. The Polish trade unions are hot really free ; the trend is for them to become part cif the State apparatus. They are the junior partner in this corporative State. They certainly cannot strike against the government, which employs the majority of Polish workers. Nor can they use their economic power to alter that government in any basic way. One great difference between the Russian and the Polish revolutions is that in Russia the entire apparatus of the " bourgeois " state was destroyed, and a Soviet system built on its ruins ; in Poland the Communist-Socialist coalition has seized the State, and while the Workers' Councils resemble the Soviets superficially, they possess no real power. And while the present Polish Government resembles the Russian Provisional Government between February and October, 1917, it is improbable that Poland will experience an October revolution. Rather the Communists will gradually seize more and more power-until the inevitable explosion comes. The economic achievements of this Government have been great, according to everyone I have interviewed, including American and British conservatives in the embassies. But as both Zulawski and Mikolajczyk commented, these economic achievements are not due to totalitarian methods, but to the energy, vigour, determination of the Poles to rebuild their nation. Nationalization of basic industries was a necessary and progressive measure, and the achievements would have been even better under a democratic system. · It is ironic that Polish Communists who denounce American imperialism rn Moscow fashion, acknowledge 35 BibliotecaGino Bianco
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