The Polish Communist Party, in disarray after its defeat in June elections, said Monday it will abandon traditional Marxist-Leninist dogmas and form a European-style socialist party at its congress next year.
Tadeusz Fiszbach, a reform-minded Communist who sympathizes with Solidarity, told the plenary session of the Communist Party's Central Committee the new party will return to the "sources of Polish socialism."The Communist Party, formally known as the Polish United Workers' Party, is scheduled to convene its 11th Congress Jan. 27.
Communist officials said the party will vote itself out of existence and then establish a new social democratic party based on European models.
Fiszbach said the new party will "use the European social cultural achievements, but it will dissociate itself from the dictatorship of the proletariat and democratic centralism."
The dictatorship of the proletariat and so-called democratic centralism are concepts that form the foundation of all communist parties in the East bloc. They are based on an orthodox interpretation of the writings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Communist Revolution in Russia.
The concepts have been used as a justification to supress the so-called enemies of socialism and allowed power to accumulate in the hands of a small ruling elite without any system of checks and balances.
Aleksander Kwasniewski, a young party reformist, said the new Polish socialist party will have to adapt itself to a new situation under which the party monopoly no longer exists and the other political parties will operate.
The information pamphlet distributed to Western reporters before the Central Committee meeting said there are 36 parties, political clubs and organizations now in operation in Poland.
It said they have a socialist, christian-democratic, ecological and nationalistic character and all of them can compete for the parliamentary seats during free elections slated to take place by 1993.
Following the landslide win in the partially free parliamentary elections on June 4, Solidarity formed the first non-Communist-led government in the East bloc since World War II.