Today marks the 33rd anniversary of the strike and occupation of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland, which sparked the formation of the independent Solidarnosc trade union and, ultimately, the collapse of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe.
Seumas Milne and Andy Newman are among those who still haven’t quite grasped what that was all about.
Equally clueless are rightwing union-haters in the US who, if they ever thought about it, would have a hard time reconciling their loathing of organized labor with the fact that it was trade unionism which did as much as anything to bring down the Communist system in eastern Europe.
