Volume 29, Number 1 · February 4, 1982
The Polish Revolution
By Leonard Schapiro
The Polish August: The Self-Limiting Revolution with a new afterword, by the Viking Press in April.)
by Neal Ascherson
Penguin (London), 318 pp., £2.50 (The Polish August will be published in the United States, (paper)
Poland Today: The State of the Republic
compiled by "The Experience and the Future" Discussion Group, with an introduction by Jack Bielasiak
M.E. Sharpe, 231 pp., $6.95 (paper)
Lenin's main theory was based on the thesis that left to themselves the workers would never carry out a revolution. Unless the idea of revolution was put into their heads by clever intellectuals ('brought from the outside,' as Lenin put it) workers would content themselves with 'trade-unionist' demands for better wages and working conditions. So far as revolution in the developed, free-market, capitalist societies is concerned he seems to have been proved right. Engels had already pointed out toward the end of his life that the working class was achieving far more by means of the ballot box and peaceful action than it could hope to gain by violence. In advanced societies of the Western world workers organized in powerful, independent trade unions, exercising the freedom available in a democratic system, have won for themselves high standards of living and are for the most part not very receptive to revolutionary appeals. These emanate in the main from intellectuals, cranks, and from those ambitious demagogues who hope to achieve, by hoodwinking the workers to take political action to overthrow the established order, the kind of power for themselves that they cannot hope for under a democratic regime.
Review, 2727 words
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