Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-09-26-Speech-1-076"
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"en.20050926.13.1-076"2
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"Mr President, the Socialists of the 19th and early 20th centuries saw it as the ideal that human society should be based on the equality of all people and on their mutual solidarity; that people should not be made subordinate to the state or their employer, and that we should be free to make our own choices and organise society from the bottom up.
They were aware that, in a society in which one group oppresses the other, nobody – not even the oppressors – can be really free. This belief would certainly have led those old Socialists, including their great thinker Karl Marx, to applaud the Polish workers’ protest in the 70s and 80s of the 20th century. Any authoritarian regime that skimps on wages and benefits while favouring a small group of people deserves to go under as a result of mass protest.
Normally speaking, workers’ protests are directed at big business’ desire for profit or at a government that considers itself to be right-wing. That was certainly not the case in Poland, where the state was founded upon Socialism, the intellectual legacy of Marx, common ownership of the means of production and the equality of all people. That state was not the product of the working class struggle, but of the way in which, after the Second World War, the victors shared out the military spheres of influence .
The people experienced the reality of that moment as the complete opposite of what Socialists claim to pursue. That is one of the reasons that in the mid-80s, I was a speaker at a meeting in the Netherlands for solidarity with the suppressed independent trade union in Poland. I have never shared the opinion that workers should be content with their leaders when these call themselves Socialists or Communists.
Meanwhile, people holding strongly differing opinions talk about Solidarity’s legacy, both inside and outside Poland. To one group, it represented the return to the Conservative Poland of the Pilsudski period between the wars; to the other, it was a necessary step towards the replacement of the caricature of Socialism conceived after 1945 by a real, Socialist democracy.
The former opinion appears, for the time being, to have the upper hand; while not deploring this outcome, I do consider the resistance to unacceptable rule an inherent right of all people, and Solidarity an inspiring example."@en1
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