Poland: for months now, the name has signified hope. Hope given back by the Poznan revolt to all those, maybe numerous but solitary, who do not agree or no longer agree to look in Stalinism for traces - even deformed - of socialism. Hope given back to those who persisted in waiting till the voice of East Berlin demonstrators, the voice smothered so quickly, reverberates in some other place in the world; till the proletariat shows what it does to oppressive and exploitive regimes labelled "socialist".
Poland remains a country of hope. The destruction of Budapest; murder, detention, banishment or silencing of Hungarian Freedom Fighters; the disbandment of Workers' Councils, and the omnipotence of the police - all these acts, attesting to the fury of a threatened Power, did not suffice to re-establish order in Stalin's universe. In Warsaw, the regime put in place during October days still lasts. At the heart of the world encircled by the Iron Curtain, still called "Soviet" by habit or derision, surrounded by deadly regimes, the Poles continue to defend their freedom day in, day out.
But for how much longer? The Soviet pressure does not ease off. The USSR is left with a government aiming to restore a power which owes nothing to the revolutionary forces which created it. A thousand signs attest to a renewal which, only a year ago, we did not dare hope for; yet another thousand signs already point to an increasing inflexibility of the state, the party, and political thought. A strange sloughing, indeed: the old skin, cracked and disjointed, comes to life again in interstices of the new skin; time moves in both directions simultaneously. The metamorphosis has already fixed the indelible forms, but forces at work are constantly changing their mutual relations.
WITH NAKED EYE
I feel obliged to bear witness to this renewal. Although, in Paris, we know that the police dictatorship is dead, that prisons have been emptied of political prisoners, that privileges for senior bureaucrats have been abolished, that within the party and in the press opinions are voiced, that suspicion and fear have been chased away from conversations - on the ground, each moment we are bombarded with signs of freedom, all the more dazzling that it has been stifled for so long.
Claude Lefort "Socialism Or Barbarism" (Socialisme ou Barbarie), Volume IV (9th year) March - May, 1957 | |