Poland: Czerwony Front Congress 2025 – revolutionary hope in the heat of class struggle

From 22 to 23 November, our best congress to date took place in Wrocław. With over 50 participants, including guests from the Revolutionary Communist International (RCI), it was the largest, most inspiring, and most professional event we have ever organised.

[Originally published in Polish at czerwonyfront.org]

The first day began with a bang: a session devoted to the life and ideas of Ted Grant. The unbroken thread of Marxism has brought us to where we are today, and both the Polish section of the RCI and the Polish working class have much to learn from comrade Grant, who mastered the method of dialectical materialism. 

This method, together with his unshakable faith in the historic power of the working class, helped him overcome the difficulties of working and living as a communist at a time when the forces of Marxism were at their most fragmented. Postwar economic growth, the dominance of reformism, and the Stalinist character of communist parties around the world created difficult conditions for spreading the ideas of genuine Marxism. 

Ted Grant, however, was not only able to predict the global crisis of the 1970s, contrary to the propaganda of capitalist success and the defeatism of the left at the time, but he was also able to devote himself fully to building a truly revolutionary workers' party. This is despite facing adversity, as well as the mistakes of the so-called ‘leaders’ of the workers in the Stalinist parties, in the degenerated Fourth International, and in the reformist trade unions. Ted Grant was the only one who understood the development of capitalism after the war.

This included the significance of Bonapartism and the colonial revolutions, the Tito-Stalin split and the Chinese revolution, as well as the nature of the Eastern Bloc regimes, including the Polish People's Republic. 

In the face of intensifying bourgeois propaganda, we are also faced today with the task of reaching a Marxist understanding of the significance of Trump and the role of China, the real reasons for the war in Ukraine, the prospects for the Middle East, the ‘Gen Z’ revolutions, and many other momentous events. This legacy – a genuine understanding of Marxism – is the legacy of our organisation.

The next session was devoted to world perspectives. Led by comrade Francesco of the International Secretariat of the RCI, it painted a picture of the organic and universal crisis of capitalism. Everyone present in the room felt that they could spend another week discussing the matter and still only scratch the surface of the staggering chaos currently unfolding around the world.

After the introduction, delegates spoke on topics related to the situation in the Caucasus, Venezuela, the so-called Gen Z revolutions, and the growing polarisation and resulting outbreaks of class anger. These are not just interesting facts, but elements of the prevailing period of wars and revolutions that we must fully understand in order to act and strive to change this world for the better.

All of this is having an increasingly direct impact on Poland. The Polish economy is stagnating, workers are being laid off, industrial production is at a record low, debt is rising, youth unemployment is the highest in the EU, public services are being cut back, housing is in chaos... we could go on and on. The prospects for Polish capitalism have never been worse. 

An in-depth analysis of the Polish economy – closely linked to the German automotive industry, food exports, and the chemical industry – shows how dangerous the situation will become for the ruling class when its foundations are shaken by the deteriorating situation in Europe and the world. Each of these areas is rife with contradictions, as well as imperialist conflicts such as between Germany and China, Ukraine and Poland, and... Israel. 

It has recently come to light that Poland supplies as much as 90 percent of the TNT used to manufacture bombs that Israel uses to strike Gaza and Yemen. This explains the hypocrisy of the Polish ruling class on the issue of the genocide of Palestinians, and the intensification of state propaganda, which is already struggling to get its message across about acts of ‘Russian’ sabotage. 

The greatest threat to Polish workers remains Polish capitalists. These worsening conditions are met with an increasingly strong reaction from the working class. This year we had the longest strike in the private sector in the history of Polish capitalism (At the Jeremias factory in Gniezno), and during our congress another huge strike was taking place at the Valeo automotive factory in Chrzanów.

The time has come for us to focus on building a party that will be able to intervene in the coming period of intensified class struggle. This task necessitates that we take a closer look at our history in order to understand the magnitude of the reckoning that the Polish working class must make with its native capitalists and Western imperialists. 

Therefore, the second day began with a session devoted to the history of the birth of the Solidarity movement (Solidarność), which rose in the 1980s to lead the most decisive attempt at carrying out a political revolution in the Eastern Bloc. 

It was not a counterrevolution or a coup d'état, as capitalists and Stalinists alike try to paint it as, but an attempt worthy of our greatest admiration to wrest control of the country from the Stalinist bureaucrats. Its failure rests solely with its petty-bourgeois, vacillating leadership. But the real situation of dual power that existed in some cities is not something that can be erased from the memory of the Polish masses. The more the current situation reveals the urgent need for the working class to seize power, the more workers will look back on their previous battles and the legacy of real workers' power. 

Knowledge of the history of this period should be essential for every young activist who has only experienced life in capitalist Poland, with weak trade unions and relatively low social resistance to attacks by the ruling class. This state of affairs will not last forever, we can be sure of that! 

In a way, echoes of the methods of the August 1980 revolution were reflected in the 2019 teachers' strike, which saw the formation of strike committees and the centralisation of strike authorities against union bureaucracy. The Polish working class, robbed by bureaucrats and then finished off by the restoration of capitalism, will finally demand what is theirs.

The next session was an organisational report and resolution, the purpose of which was to summarise and draw conclusions from our past year of building the organisation, and set tasks for the coming period. Over the past year, we have clearly grown in numbers – it is possible that in the first months of 2026 we will celebrate the addition of the 100th member to our organisation. The map of Poland is slowly running out of places where we aren’t active!

The last few months have been a period of intense work for us, from demonstrations and meetings to solidarity rallies and support for strikes. Our comrades have understood that the time has come to be bold, to strengthen our branches, and to take our activities even further onto the streets, to look into the eyes of an increasingly radicalised youth with a revolutionary newspaper in our hands. 

In the coming year, we will speak even more boldly and loudly about the fact that in order to stop the growing effects of the climate catastrophe, to end the genocide in Gaza and Sudan, to move away from xenophobic, far-right policies towards migrants, to have any prospect of a better life at all, capitalism must be destroyed. And we will not look for excuses to back down. The time has come to boldly move forward towards the historic task of organising the first revolutionary party in Poland, the likes of which our country has not seen in over a century.

We want every person who joins us to be educated and familiar with the Marxist method / Image: Czerwony Front

This year, we reorganised our approach to publishing to ensure a steady stream of high-quality articles and online content, and we established an editorial board for our newspaper, which now oversees the work on Revolution. We also emphasised that a deep understanding of Marxism remains the foundation on which we build. 

We want every person who joins us to be educated and familiar with the Marxist method, so that each of our members is able to put forward perspectives and know what to focus on in order to be as effective as possible in building the organisation. Our organisation is not a university where passive students listen to this or that ‘professor’. We are building a party of active and well-prepared Marxists. Only such a party can have any hope of overthrowing capitalism.

What we need is to awaken revolutionary optimism in the face of widespread defeatism amongst much of the left. That is why we unashamedly focus on strengthening our understanding of revolutionary theory and, to that end, on our newspaper. We fought to achieve our goal of publishing a newspaper every two months, and we now have all the tools – and political commitment – to achieve that goal. 

While last year we sold only 80 copies of the newspaper in a similar period, we have now increased our circulation to 500 copies every two months. Why? Because Polish youth are hungry for a genuine, revolutionary press, free from capitalist lies and academic pomposity, but full of lively class struggle!

Above all, it is the contribution of our comrades – many of whom spoke at the congress for the first time – that confirms our conviction that we are ready to fulfill our historic role. Each of the speeches confirmed that our focus on the ideas and methods of Marxism is correct. This leads to a clear understanding of our main goal – to transform the enormous accumulated potential into a revolutionary reality.

There are no shortcuts in our work. We will achieve our goals by picking up the pace and overcoming all obstacles in our path. This year's congress confirmed that our organisation has almost everything it needs! The only thing missing is you – change that and join us!