Thoughts on the class
consciousness of
Polish workers
AFTER twenty years of frequent struggles and some significant victories, atter having contributed decisively to the overthrow of the bureaucratic regime, the Polish working class now seems disarmed faced with the attacks made against it during the last two years. There has been a very noticeable drop in the standard of living, a stunning rise in unemployment, privatizations and closures of enterprises and a challenge to the existing right to housing with the new law that authorises eviction for delay in rent payments while rents have spiralled. The effects of the transition back to capitalism constitute a serious challenge to the status of workers that had existed for the period since the war. A few years ago, just one of these attacks would have sparked off a mass protest. Today, the traditional combativity of the Polish workers has given way to disarray. The very strong feeling of workers' solidarity which emerged into the open with the liberalization of the regime after August 1981, has disappeared giving way to sectoral solidarity, if not the search for individual solutions. In adversity, the Polish working class lacks faith in its own strength.
This leads us to pose the questions of the particular way class consciousness is formed in societies where, like that of post-1948 Poland, much of the fruits of the overthrow of capitalism were confiscated by a parasitic bureaucratic
90 International Marxist Review layer. The decade opened by the coup de force of General Jaruzelski in December 1981 was marked by a series of defeats of the working class: the destructuring of the organizations it created during the revolutionary rise of 1980-81 and a wave of repression which, although not spectacular (there were after all few deaths in comparison with the examples of other counterrevolutions, were nevertheless massive and terribly effective (there were thousands of political sackings during this period).' However, the disarray which followed the democratic victory in 1989 and the introduction of capitalist relations in the economy cannot be explained only by the accumulation of defeats in the previous period. It is, quite on the contrary, the replacement of the traditional opponent (the bureaucracy and its form of rule) by a new adversary — indefinable and incomprehensible for those who still look at reality with a schema inherited from the past — which makes it possible to try to explain the current situation. The establishment of Stalinist dictatorship: a break in class consciousness
Polish historians have for years insisted on describing the Stalinist system in Poland as an imported product, that was illegitimate from its very conception. It is true that the establishment of the bureaucratic regime — which was confirmed by the fusion of the two political parties identifying with the working class (the Polish Socialist Party (PPS)? and the Polish Workers' Party (PPR)3) within a monolithic organization named the Polish United Workers' Party (PUWP) in 1948 and the banning of all the political and social organizations which might escape its control - owed a lot to the omnipresence of the Soviet army after the defeat of the Nazis. But this is a rather one-sided view. The last years of the war were marked in Poland as elsewhere by a wave of social and political radicalization which reached its high point with the August 1944 rising in Warsaw.4 After the Liberation, workers' councils bloomed spontaneously in many factories and it was these bodies who made the first steps towards re-establishing production. Finally, the Polish Resistance — majoritarily pro-Western — advanced a project of social transformation which was in many respects much more advanced than that of the Stalinists. In 1944-45, the Polish urban population was therefore undoubtedly won in its majority to the idea of a socialist transformation of the country. It was the existence of this feeling which makes it possible to explain how a small Sta-
Poland: Thoughts on consciousness 9l linist party managed to dominate a large section of the toiling classes between 1945 and 1948, despite its lack of national legitimacy. The programme of the PPR could in fact in many ways seem to be a particular form of representation of the workers' interests. Terror and the excessive centralization from the outset could be justified by the scope of the transformations in course and the existence of (few but armed) opponents of these changes. Finally, during the immediate post-war years, the reconstruction of the country was seen as a necessity by the majority of the working class. The Stalinist party-state had been able to respond to this aspiration — with both good sense and the national dignity destroyed by the Nazis — by offering an organized approach. The youth brigades were one of the favoured methods of Stalinist recruitment within the new working class and among young people more generally.
Before 1956, the Polish working class, its opinions and its social status had not really been studied. Sociology had been proclaimed a "bourgeois science" and access to the enterprises was forbidden to researchers. However, in 1945-51, a survey was made in three textile factories in Lodz. One of those involved, the sociologist Hanna Swida, published the results in 1989.5
These seem quite representative of a minority section of the working class of this period, those who had been workers in private enterprises before the war. In fact, both because of Nazi repression and the social promotion of the post-war period, the Polish working class had been largely renewed during the first decade of Stalinist rule. Extensive industrialization has brought a young and low-skilled workforce of peasant origin into the factories while a good number of workers surviving from before the war had been drawn into the economic and administrative apparatus of the new state.
Those who had not changed status had in general a low opinion of the new regime. They compared their wages, their work hours and their place within the enterprise with what they had known before the war — a period of relative capitalist prosperity. And these comparisons were so many testimonies against the new order. They did not mince their words:
They came to meetings and shouted in anger: 'It is in the workers' state that we have to work iwelve hours per day! So why did we fight against the capitalists! Even the capitalists did not dare impose this on us. We are not slaves!' And so on. They protested against the bad quality of the raw materials, which prevented them from reaching their targets. While under capitalism the thread was good — they cried — under socialism it broke all the time. But the disappointment with the new regime nevertheless did not lead to a collective revolt. Having poured out all their anger, after having collectively had a go at the management of the enterprise, they submitted to the rules.
Certainly the repressive legislation then in force placed the stakes very high for the risks of collective action.? But what was above all a brake on mobilization was the disarray caused by lack of perspectives. The worker militants from before the war who had not been integrated by the new regime had deeply internalized the failure of their struggle against capitalism:
They said that the factory should belong to those who worked in it., that the surplus value should not go into the pockets of the factory owner but belong to the workers. The director and the administrative staff should be paid out of this money. They would then be the employees of the producers' collective. Thus the workers would direct the director and not the reverse. This is how they imagined socialism before the war. So, we could think - they said — that one day finally we would win against the Poznanskis and the Biedermans [local capitalists from Lodz] and finally justice would reign. And now we no longer have any hope.
In fact they did not have any interests and their way of living was like that of the lumpen
The establishment of Stalinist rule, fraudulently pretending to be socialist,.
created a deep rupture in working-class consciousness. The most conscious and combative layers were marginalized or integrated. The newly proletarianized layers suffered from the clash between the aspirations they had had on leaving the countryside for the town and the reality of their new status.
Although official propaganda lauded the working class as an abstract, every worker suffered daily insults to their dignity. The atomization of the workers in a situation where all social life had been taken over by the state did not
The only big strike movement in this period was that of March 1951 among the coal miners in the Dabrowa Gornicza basin, who had been able to maintain a tradition of independent workers' organization. Moreover, following the strike, the PUWP organizations in the mines concerned were severely purged — it was decided that they were too marked by the tradition of the
Unlike capitalist exploitation and oppression, always transformed into money relations, Stalinist oppression and the specific forms of exploitation linked to this this form of rule were directly obvious. They were the direct result of the concentration of power in the hands of an all-powerful, everpresent but elusive apparatus where decisions were always taken "higher up", outside the control of those who responsible for implementing them who had not choice but to do so or to lose their post. The way in which they were given legitimacy "in the name of the working class" was in contradiction with the way they were implemented (by the naked force of the political
92 International Marxist Review
We are going to live like this until we die, our children and same fate.
As for the young people:
proletariat. I think it was the effect of the lack of perspectives.
PPS.
grandchildren will know the make it possible for them to understand the new situation.
Poland: Thoughts on consciousness 93 police who never had to give account of itself even to the party of the working class.? Any attempt at opposition was thus seemed fated to fail immediately.
The young poor peasants who had become proletarians could not but identify this form of domination with what they and their parents had suffered as day-workers in the countryside, which was still strongly marked by semifeudal social relations before 1945. They only knew about capitalist exploitation from Stalinist propaganda which presented this in black and white and evacuated any notion of the specificity of capitalist exploitation. Thus they could not become aware of the specificity of their status as proletarians in relation to the status of other oppressed groups in society. Official language thus developed a separation between the largely mythical and abstract working class for those who were supposed to be part of it, and the "remnants of the previous propertied classes" also mythical, particularly as any form of opposition or even of criticism, wherever it came from was immediately considered as emanating from these "remnants". This bureaucratic vision of society, based on the "theory" of the aggravation of the class struggle as socialism won its victory over the "remnants" in question was in conflict with reality as experienced by the workers. For them, the social division appeared to be that between the leaders and the led, between the privileged minority (often seen as the hand of foreign Russia) and the rest of society — or indeed the society, identified with "the nation". 1956: the junction between the "deStalinized" party and the new working class
For the Polish working class to return to independent activity, the allpowerfulness of the Stalinist police apparatus had to be challenged within the bureaucracy itself, during the process known as "deStalinization". '° This process, which culminated in the big strike of the Poznan workers in June 1956 and in the workers' councils movement in 1956-57 came from within the party apparatus, from the new intelligentsia. These layers were broadly identified with the Stalinist model and had participated in creating it. But, contrasting what they were saying with reality, they realized the schizophrenia of the situation. In 1955, the journal Po Prostu went beyond the first steps to liberalization to become the centre of revolt of those who had been supposed to be the ideological warriors of the regime.' Rapidly stepping over the limits of reporting and discussions concerning only the intelligentsia, it
94 International Marxist Review started on social criticism. This evolution found a response among the young generation of worker militants of the PUWP, who were however a small minority of the new Polish working class.
The spontaneous June 1956 strike, which took on an almost insurrectional character without however the emergence of a workers' leadership, showed up the lack of contact between the working class and what called itself "their regime" '. Although crushed by the tanks (Jozef Cyrankiewicz, the prime minister at the time, stated that "Every provocateur, every madman who dares lift his hand against the people's government can be sure that the government will deal with him"'), the Poznan workers' revolt marked nevertheless an acceleration in the decomposition of the Stalinist regime. It also indicated, for the first time on such a broad scale, what was the potential strength of industrial workers under this regime. It was this feeling of strength, understood in a confused fashion in 1956, which was the main phenomenon marking workers' consciousness in Poland for the future.
In September, basing itself on the first manifestation of autonomous activity of the proletariat, the weekly Po Prostu presented a programme for workers' self-government:
The working class, pushed out of the exercise of power by the bureaucratic apparatus, socially alienated during the Stalinist period, is today demanding to play a direct role, it demands this as its right and wishes to win it for itself. If the reactionary, bureaucratic forces manage to stop this process in one factory, in one town, in one region, the ferment will start again in a second factory, in a second town, in another region — and this will continue until the bureaucratic chains are broken, and the decision-making power and control in all domains has passed into the hands of the proletariat. -
This article echoed the emergence of the first workers' councils, initiated by those who organized the PUWP in the FSO and WFM engineering factories in Warsaw. In the autumn of 1956, which culminated in October in big mass demonstration and changes at the head of the party, the independent activity of the working class grew rapidly. The workers' councils initiated by the left wing of the PUWP — these militants of the young workers' generation, mostly of rural origin and often, like the collaborators of Po Prostu, products of the official youth movement of the early 1950s — continued to develop. However, this was not a movement of the whole working class. The workers, like the others, breathed in the new climate of liberalization. But only a minority, often already politically active in the ranks of the official organizations, threw themselves into the movement. Most watched it with cautious sympathy. It was only during the few days of October 1956, when an armed Soviet intervention seemed imminent, that the population as a whole mobilized.
Poland: Thoughts on consciousness 95 What was at stake then was not the power of the workers but national independence. The choice seemed to be between a forced return to Stalinism under the pressure foreign bayonets or maintaining a liberal regime. This is what Wladyslaw Gomulka, the new first secretary of the party, understood perfectly when he came to power and talked of democratization as something which went without saying, and put the emphasis on order, national sovereignty and the responsibility of each individual in the nation state. The new party leadership did not stint on words in its resolutions and presented itself as a guarantor of changes. The speeches were clear: go home, work hard, we will do the rest. This made it possible to marginalize very rapidly the radical anti-Stalinist left, of which many would be integrated and the most resolute broken in the years to come.
Paradoxically, 1956 appears from a distance as the moment of the junction between the bureaucratic party and the working class. Confident in the new leadership of the party-state, the working class regained faith in "actually existing socialism". It did not see Gomulka's normalization as an attack on its own gains and was satisfied with the noticeable improvement in its standard of living which accompanied it. But this normalization was not a return to the Stalinist universe of 1949-54. The new regime, authoritarian as it was, had a much better mastery of the police apparatus and seemed able to control the doses of repression. It was no longer the reign of fear but rather a contract established between an authoritarian regime and the population. This latter benefited reasonably from the slowing down in the rate of investment which made possible a slow increase in the standard of living during the next three or four years.
The workers' councils were the only form of workers' organization which appeared during this period. They remained confined to the factories and did not manage to play the role of self-management bodies. The main decisions continued outside their control. The way the party reasserted control over them in 1958 with the passing of a new law thus passed more or less unnoticed. The workers did not seek to defend their own form of organization.
As we have mentioned, it was the young generation of ideological warriors of the PUWP who had marked workers' consciousness during this whole period. Devoted Stalinists militants in the previous years, seized by doubt and radicalized in the fight against Stalinist reaction in 1955-56, confident in the party's capacity to reform itself, they experienced October 1956 as the fulfilment of their fight. A minority among them — of which the Po Prostu group was part — tried to continue the movement. They were repressed. The majority on the contrary took their revenge on history, hoping to continue the
moment in which it managed to establish a junction between the feelings of the masses and at the needs of the ruling faction of the bureaucracy, seeking to preserve their status as mass leaders and at the same time devoted party members. The new Polish working class, which after a period of observation threw itself into the struggle for democratization, was thus deprived of an independent leadership. The party, having "re-established the link with the working class" once again became the docile instrument of the bureaucracy in power, enjoying for the first time in its history the tolerance if not the sup-
It is significant that in 1956 the organizational traditions of the former
Polish working class only played a limited role. Obviously, they had nourished the thinking of the October left. But the resentment felt by the workers' base of the PPS about the liquidation of this party in its fusion with the Stalinist party in 1948, a resentment which as we have seen was still lively at the beginning of the 1950s, was not expressed at all. There were no significant attempts to create independent workers' political organizations. '3 As for the trade unions, they were regenerated from below, their bureaucratic structure was not challenged and thus their democratization was short lived.
In 1956 therefore all the limits of a new class consciousness in formation against the direct bosses, big or small, and against the Stalinists within the party-state. This state — with its structure and its apparatus — continued to be given a positive value: a Polish state first of all, socialist afterwards. As a
"socialist state" it had duties to them and they had to account for themselves to it. An invisible barrier continued to exist in their consciousness between were its subjects, not actors. They did not aspire to be actors. The division between those who led and those who submitted to the leadership by working remained deeply rooted in the consciousness of the majority. And this predisposition to delegate power, to have confidence in the new leaders and give oneself up their management, was the most striking phenomenon of workers'
The Gomulka leadership very ably exploited these weaknesses in workers' consciousness. In its propaganda it emphasized the identification between the state and the Polish nation, correcting a series of excesses of the previous
96 International Marxist Review port of the majority of workers.
appeared: the workers organize "against the bureaucracy"
themselves and the state. It was not "their state"
consciousness in the period which followed 1956.
The poison of nationalism
", which means both
', it was a "good state". They
Poland: Thoughts on consciousness 97 period. Relations with the Church were normalized on the basis of common national interest. Trade agreements with the USSR, based on unequal exchange during the 1950s, were renegotiated. 4 The works of the great Polish writers, banned by the censor during the previous period because of non-conformity with the official ideology, were once again published. The resistance activity of the internal army (AK) during the Second World War — decried after the war as reactionary — was rehabilitated and the judgements on its members revised. Even as far as the anti-capitalist emphasis of propaganda was concerned, this rested on a nationalist basis: the capitalist West and Nato were presented as seeking first of all to challenge the western and northern borders of Poland, while socialism was credited with having "recovered the ancestral lands" ' In short, the Gomulka team was trying to legitimize the party's rule not simply on the basis of its "socialist and workers" character, but also by placing it in the national tradition, as the direct continuation of the Piast dynasty which founded the Polish kingdom in the tenth century. On this basis the millenium of Poland was celebrated with great pomp in 1966.16
When social tensions reappeared as the model of extensive industrialization reached its limits in the mid-1960s and these tensions upset the balance within the bureaucracy created by Gomulka's accession to the top post in 1956, a section of the apparatus went onto the offensive, drawing on chauvinist and anti-Semitic arguments. This time it was not simply a struggle within the apparatus. On the contrary, the first attacks were made against the oppositional circles among intellectuals and students, seen as a danger in a situation where the stagnation — if not the drop — of the standard of living of the masses warned of a rupture of the mutual confidence contract established between the regime and the masses after October 1956.
Waging simultaneous campaigns of anti-Semitism and of bringing into line the liberal intelligentsia (denounced as "revisionist"), the Mieczyslaw Мосzar fraction met the emerging student movement in 1968 with repression and managed, by playing on certain chauvinist reflexes, to bring along certain sections of the working class in his wake. The student movement was wiped out in March 1968 and the political opposition circles in the universities broken by repression. At the same time, any independent thinkers still in the party were liquidated — forced to emigrate, marginalized or obliged to repudiate their positions. The PUWP thus broke its links with the intellectuals and brought Marxism into discredit in their eyes.
This clean-up operation only put off the social conflicts for a short while. On 14 December 1970, two days after the announcement of rises in food
98 International Marxist Review prices, the workers in the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk went on strike, soon followed by those of Szcecin and other workers on the Baltic coast. The regime responded by sending in the army. The Gomulka myth was wiped out in blood. The decade of the flight forward
After the bloody repression of the workers' demonstrations, which were this time clearly directed against the symbols of bureaucratic rule (the departmental committees of the party in Gdansk and Szczecin were ransacked), the Gomulka leadership had to give up. The new team around the PUWP first secretary Edward Gierek and the prime minister Piotr Jaroszewicz, did not manage to calm the situation. On 21 January 1971, there was a new strike in the "Adolf Warski" shipyard in Szcecin. On the afternoon of 24 January, a delegation from the state-party leadership, led by Gierek and Jaroszewicz, went to the dockyard, where they discussed with the workers for nine hours. The recording of this discussion is a very important source for the attitudes and opinions of the workers (and the bureaucrats) in this period. ' In a letter addressed to Gierek before he came, the strike committee wrote:
The shipyard workers have always been and still are for socialism and against its enemies.
We are also in favour of the renewal of social, political and economic life that comrade Gierek and comrade Jaroszewicz are carrying out in a consistent fashion. We assure them of our full support. But we are equally conscious that this renewal is encountering enormous resistance from all those who are worried about their past activity and who do not want or do not know how to undertake a direct and frank dialogue with the working class.
At the end of the meeting, the majority of workers' delegates decided to stop the strike. What is more, they repeated continuously: "we support comrade Gierek", "we salute the new central committee and the government" "we support the central committee and the party, but we demand that those who gave the order to fire on the workers be punished". Although the cancellation of the price rises of 12 December 1970 had been one of the central demands of the strikers, they accepted Gierek and Jaroszewicz's explanations as to why this was impossible.
During the discussion, the workers' delegates expressed the workers' attachment to equality, their aspiration to correct information, their rejection of bureaucratic functioning which led to a multiplication of inspectors of finished works and their demand for dignity. The identification of the party-state with the nation was very widely accepted. As a result, few voices directly confronted the new leadership and the majority wanted to believe that — although three-quarters of it was composed of former party officials — it was
Poland: Thoughts on consciousness 99 different from the preceding team.
The demands for workers' control and workers' democracy presented in the list of 11 demands which served as the basis of the discussion, were limited to the work place itself. Gierek's promise that members of the strike committee could be elected or co-opted into official bodies was enough to lighten the atmosphere. Many delegates proudly emphasized their party membership. All this took place as if — after the shock of the bloody repression of the December strike and the manipulation of information in the weeks which followed — the workers desired a return to normality and wanted to believe in the promises of the new leaders. No one protested when Gierek presented himself as a worker, also used to strikes and repression, while everyone knew that since his return to to Poland after the Second World War he had only set foot in a factory as an official guest. The identification of the workers with the regime required an identification with its political personnel. Criticisms only concerned local (and subaltern) leaders, and those who had been purged. The Polish working class, capable of a leap in defence of its own interests when they were threatened, was not yet able to believe in its capacity to lead and govern.
However, a mere 12 days later, faced with the strikes or the textile industry in Lodz, the regime was obliged to retreat. The worst-paid women workers in the country did not allow themselves to be manipulated by the promises of a better future, because they could not wait. They won the cancellation of the 12 December 1970 prices rises and a freeze on food prices. This price freeze, readopted every year until 1976, was the first unconditional victory for the workers. It occurred because the strikers refused to allow delegates to go and discuss with the regime, they insisted that the bureaucrats confront a mass meeting of the workers directly, and without anybody being authorized to speak in their name.
This victory made a deep mark on the consciousness of the workers in the 1970s. It bore witness to their collective strength and their ability to have an effect, even if only in the form of a veto, on the fate of the country. It was also a deeply-internalized limit on the bureaucracy's room for manoeuvre. When the same team finally decided in June 1976 to increase prices of meat products, one day's strike in two industrial centres was enough for the regime to go into reverse.
The 1970-71 strikes also marked the birth of the first, informal, nuclei of the workers' opposition. Most of the leaders of the 1970-71 strikes were in fact not integrated into the bureaucratic apparatus. Although they believed in Gierek, although they put their confidence in his desire to reform the system,
100 International Marxist Review they were not dupes of the immobility of the bureaucratic structure. Very quickly those among them who has been elected onto official bodies came into conflict with these bodies and finished by being expelled from them. Informal groups and friendships made during the strike continued. After the 1976 strikes and the formation of the Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) by the intellectual opposition, many of them followed the activity of the new opposition with interest. And in 1980 some of them re-emerged — particularly in Gdansk and Szczecin — at the head of workers' struggles.
The Gierek regime, conscious of its weakness, sought to ensure the passivity of the workers. From 1971 on it sought to reorient investments in order to satisfy the appetites for consumption ignored during the previous two decades. Homes were built, the manufacture of consumer durable goods (kitchen equipment, televisions, cars, clothing) increased significantly. The standard of living rose rapidly in the first five years, even though tensions reappeared rapidly, particularly in the food market. Gierek continued with the same course that had succeeded so well with the strikers: the propaganda gave great value to the workers, presenting them as the privileged destination of the petty-bourgeois model of consumption developed elsewhere. At the same time the country opened to the outside: travel (including to the West) became something possible, even if cost limited access (tourism in the West and particularly temporary work abroad contributed to the generalization of the idealized image of capitalism). On the other hand, nothing changed in relations at work — although the subject of material solicitude, the workers nevertheless remained a non-citizen to be shaped and worked at choice. What is more, the modification in the party's functioning, which abandoned any form of organization of its members and become a very formal grouping which guaranteed its members some slight privileges had slowed down the possibilities of social ascent for workers.!º The party preferred to recruit its apparatus among the educated. The workers who were members, unless they gave some particular service (to the political police for example), could only hope for a few facilities in access to rare consumer goods or travel abroad. The regime, while no longer demanding ideological adherence, had cut the bridges that made it possible to integrate the most active workers. With more than 1.5 million workers on paper, the PUWP had in fact become a phantom organization.
Along with propagating a consumer model of individual success, the regime of Edward Gierek tried to break with the egalitarian ideology of the previous period. The press thus — particularly in the second half of the 1970s — emphasized the need to reward merit and try to establish a corre-
Poland: Thoughts on consciousness 101 spondence between the standard of living and social status on one hand and individual merits on the other. Bureaucratic privileges — which were previously shameful and hidden from the population - began to emerge into the open. Deprived of its Stalinist ideological cement, the bureaucracy openly demanded that its privileged place be recognized as its due.
The impact of this campaign was however more limited within the working class. In 1977, Polish sociologists conducted survey on how equality was perceived.?' This showed that while the "meritocratic" model had had an impact on managers and intellectuals, the workers remained attached to the egalitarian model and did not accept differences in income of more than the ratio 1:2. Both the workers and the higher layers were convinced that the differences in social status were generally unjust because they were linked to bureaucratic privileges.
After the workers' revolt of June 1976, there was a rapid development of an oppositional milieu which was to play the role of a de facto vanguard of the workers' struggle in the years to come. The intellectual opposition, which had been broken in 1968 and was two years later unable to mobilize when the working class took to the streets, had accumulated a feeling of great guilt. The pressure which followed the June 1976 strikes, made it possible for it to act and rid itself of this feeling. From July, oppositional intellectuals proclaimed their support for the repressed workers and organized practical solidarity. In September, the Workers Defence Committee, the first public grouping of the opposition, was born, and centralized this effort. The links between the oppositional intelligentsia and sections of the working class, which had been broken since 1956-57 were reforged. From an ideological point of view, this new opposition differed greatly from the currents which had shaped the anti-Stalinist revolt of the 1950s. The current which emerged from this historical opposition had broken its links with Marxism after 1968, had ceased to see society in terms of social classes and was influenced by the thinking the 1968 emigrant Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski." Another current, animated by Piotr Naimski and Antoni Macierewicz, had emerged from the groups, which in 1956 had attempted to revive independent scouting in 1956, and their thinking was shaped by national references. Finally, with Leszek Moczulski, one of the founders of the Movement for the Defence of Human and Citizen Rights (ROPCziO) and then of the Confederation for an Independent Poland, an opposition of nationalist persuasion, which for a time had flirted with the chauvinist Moczar current within the bureaucracy, made its appearance. Other groups of nationalist persuasion, such as the Young Poland Movement of Gdansk played a not unimportant
102 International Marxist Review role in the appearance of the first organized workers nuclei.
June 1976 also marked a reorientation of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. This latter, repressed during the 1950s and then enjoying a closely-watched freedom under Gomulka, had obtained an end to persecution from Gierek. The status of institution thus obtained did not however bring an increase in influence, quite the contrary. Among the young urban generations its influence noticeably declined. The regime's break with the working class after the repression and slander campaigns against the 1976 strikes offered the Church an opportunity to that it did not hesitate to take. The bishops spoke out publicly for the workers' right to strike and to form independent trade unions; the Church supported the opposition's effort to help the workers who were victims of repression. This turn, emphasized by the help given to the embryonic free trade unions which appeared in 1978 and reaffirmed a few years later by the Polish pope in the Encyclical "Laborem Exercens", allowed the church to occupy the ideological vacuum left by the decadence of the Gierek regime. From an institution on the road to marginalization because of the loss of social influence in its historical base — the peasantry —, the Catholic church became an ideological alternative to the regime. In 1980, for the first time in the post-war history of Poland, striking workers adopted as their own national and religious symbols. August 1980: the new workers' consciousness
The big strikes of August 1980 were a sign of this change in mass consciousness. The intellectual opposition groups had a particular influence here. The 21 demands of the inter-enterprise strike committee in Gdansk (MKS) reflected the role played by the workers' charter. 2 Oppositionists, particularly in Gdansk and Szcecin, played a leading role as animators and experts of the strike committees. National and Catholic symbols (white and red flags; masses, crosses, representations of the Virgin Mary) were adopted by the workers. The Solidarnosc trade union continued this tradition which appeared in the strike.
At the same time the movement was marked by a very strong egalitarian dynamic and a unanimous feeling of class solidarity. The workers from the big enterprises organized strikes to win satisfaction for the wage demands of weaker groups of the working class and the organization of the trade union on a geographical basis reflected this approach.
The constitution of a trade-union movement independent from the party-
Poland: Thoughts on consciousness 103 state and managed by the workers themselves, on the model of council democracy, was the sign of a new break in the class consciousness of the Polish workers. Unlike 1956 or 1970-71, there was no longer any question of having confidence in the capacities of the bureaucratic apparatus to carry out democratic reforms, the workers no longer identified with the party-state. The symbolic expression of this was the Accords signed at Gdansk on 31 August 1980 between the two parties: the delegation from the government and the Central Committee of the PUWP on the one hand and the striking workers supported by the majority of Polish workers on the others. They demanded that their own institution, Solidarnosc, control the implementation of the Accords.
The workers' aspirations (their "spontaneous ideology") remained marked by socialist values, as was seen in the programme adopted by the first Solidarnosc congress in 1981, two months before the coup by General Jaruzelski. This aimed at building a "self-managed republic" which associated planning with the market and self-management. The dynamic of the self-management movement which appeared in summer 1981 is evidence of the strength of these aspirations.
The self-management councils which developed in the autumn of 1981 spontaneously chose the path of cooperation and solidarity between collectives of freely-associated workers rather than the more or less worked-out projects which aimed to submit the Polish economy to the laws of the market, freed from any administrative constraints. 4 However, in reaction to everything which reminded them of the regime, references to socialism as such, to any vocabulary which could evoke Stalinist "newspeak" are very rare. Lech Walesa could thus say "the majority of Poles are socialist but don't know it"
While in 1956 the workers expressed their aspirations by using the vocabulary of the "October left" which, in order to criticize Stalinism, returned to the sources of Marxism, in 1980 it was the vocabulary of the Catholic Church and the intellectual opposition — which was strongly marked as we have seen by conservative ideological references — which was the only nondiscredited language available to the workers. As long as the movement was on the rise, as long as it was expressing its own dynamic, this language seemed to be enough to express workers' aspiration. It was quite different after the banning of Solidarnosc. Once the words were not an expression of the social dynamic, they had a different impact on the consciousness of the workers. This occurred in the reference to the "economic reform". Seen by the majority of the Solidarnos leadership as implementing a self-management
104 International Marxist Review project, seen by the workers as a value in itself, in 1981 this term took on a unilaterally positive connotation. When in January 1982 the regime started to use it to describe its attempts to redistribute national income to the detriment of the working class — particularly by introducing very substantial price rises — and to prepare the way for price liberalization, the workers rejected this attack while demanding "a real economic reform". The intellectual opposition which, in the underground, had played a more and more dominant role within the leadership of Solidarosc, took the significant step in 1984-85.25 In the report then prepared by Lech Walesa and entitled "Solidarnose five years after August" ', it is clear that what is intended by "economic reform" is a return to the market economy, presented as the only "natural economy". What is more, the references to self-management become purely formal in this context. In September 1985, the underground leadership of Solidarnosc (TKK) followed their lead in he document "Economic demands of TKK Solidarnosc" which put forward the introduction of a capital market, privatization of enterprises and guarantees for foreign investors in Poland. These positions had a considerable influence on the small layer of workers that were still active politically and in trade unions. They were taken up at more of a mass level when in 1988-89 the mounting wave of discontent enable Solidarnose to reinforce its positions through the strike movements. Disarray and "privatization" of social life
Although the evolution of the level of consciousness of the layers which played the role of the organized vanguard during the 1982-89 period is marked by increasing support for a capitalist perspective, this is not true for the mass of the workers. Many sociological surveys carried out during this period — both on the initiative of the bureaucratic regime which had learnt the lesson from the Gierek regime that they had no interest in allowing themselves to be brainwashed by their own propaganda, and on that of independent researchers linked to the opposition - show up an increasing discrepancy between the aspirations of the (silent) majority and the projects of the Solidarnosc leadership supported by the majority of active workers militants. These surveys suffer it is true from the lack of information on the social situation of those questioned, because the Polish sociologists who carried out these surveys were in their majority of the opinion that the class structure, which was not reflected in the differing opinions of those questioned, was an out-of-date dogma. Nevertheless, they make it possible to give
an account of what were the phenomena marking working-class conscious-
Egalitarian aspirations continued to play a big role in the consciousness of the majority of workers, even if there were opinions held that accepted social differentiation when this seemed justified: in the cases of different levels of qualification or of productivity. But as a general rule, the external signs of social differentiation were interpreted in a negative fashion. For the majority in fact, they were associated with illegitimate enrichment, the result of opportunism towards the regime or manipulation on the black market. In the same way, there is an obvious dual vision of society, divided between the "honest"
ger". Wealth was therefore quite broadly seen as the fruit of transgression of social norms. More than 69% of the people questioned in 1987 considered that those who were in power had unwarranted privileges. Thus what deprived the bureaucratic regime of all legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of the population was more the individualism of the bureaucrats — seen as pursuing their own personal goals rather than the needs of the society — than their economic incapacity. Finally, 70% of those responding considered that
It is interesting to note that at the very moment when the opposition started to accept more and more openly the possibility and then the need for unemployment, the majority of the population, whatever its attitude to this, considered that work was a "natural" attribute of human beings and it was impossible that one would not find a job. Work was nevertheless not identified with social promotion nor with the possibilities of self-fulfilment, these being seen as linked to the place occupied within the social hierarchy, without any relationship to qualifications, skills or aptitudes. In such a situation, the perspective of unemployment for the workers seemed very abstract or concerning others and not oneself. This vision of work as meaningless — which is directly linked to the personal experience of workers under bureaucratic rule — leads to thinking that working for oneself is more natural than working for an enterprise. "The general interests of society, which cannot be translated in terms of the tasks and goals of the enterprise, are replaced by a
The most popular values in Polish society remain those generally associated with socialism. They are "equal opportunity and possibilities, freedom of expression, democracy seen as the influence of the citizens as a whole on the government of the country, justice, truth, respect for human dignity and the well-being of the whole of society (indeed economic efficiency as a condiness just before the fall of the bureaucratic regime.
and the "dishonest"
"state employees don't care about people like me"
series of individual interests. Society is "privatized' '27
Poland: Thoughts on consciousness 105
', between the "workers" and "those who don't lift a fin-
106 International Marxist Review tion of this well-being) "28 That these values should be in contradiction with Polish reality of the 1980s is not surprising. But it should be emphasized that although they are in perfect agreement with the Solidarnos programme of 1981, they are just as contradictory with the orientation of the Solidarnosc leadership after 1984-85.
The perception of politics also seems to be deeply shaped by the experience of bureaucratic rule. Politics appear first of all as being a domain reserved for a particular caste, as a world not only separate from the world of ordinary human beings but but indeed foreign to them. Politics are very important because they determine the framework of social existence but are outside this framework. Such a vision contributes to creating a feeling of powerlessness."
The research carried out in 1981 made it possible to see that mass uprisings — which are a de facto transgression of the view of politics as a domain reserved for the caste in power — are not considered as being in the domain of politics. People think that they are the only effective manner to demand what is due to them. They see them as being in the domain of morality rather than politics. 3° It is characteristic that this same type of perception of politics appeared in 1988 among the grass-roots activists of the opposition. They see their own activity as a particular style of living rather than as an activity which is aimed at achieving defined political goals and say that they became oppositionists because they refused to submit passively to the rules of social life, and not with the goals of changing the established political system." This weak politicization of the grass-roots activists of the opposition makes possible all the manoeuvres of the Solidarnosc leadership. 1989: the great leap into the unknown
The 1988 strikes (in May in Cracow and Gdansk, in August in the Upper Silesian mines, Stalowa Wola and Gdansk), which marked the entry onto the social and political scene of a new generation of workers, sounded the passing bell for the Jaruzelski regime. But the Solidarnosc leadership managed to pacify the movement and ensure a transition negotiated with the existing regime, which culminated in the round-table agreement of the April 1989 and the partially free parliamentary election in June of the same year. It was thus freed from the pressure of the dynamic of the mass movement which had imposed the political line on it in 1981. When capitalist restoration was on the agenda for the Solidarnosc leaders, such a movement could only be an
The orientation of the governments established under the Solidarnose banner following the electoral defeat of the bureaucratic bloc in June 1989, very rapidly led to a retreat in the social activity of the workers. Although in 1989
Solidarnosc was still a symbol of popular aspirations (wrongly, because its programme no longer had anything in common with them), the results of the
Moreover, recent sociological surveys show that the same phenomena still exist among the workers as in the preceding decade: strong egalitarian and democratic instincts, negative identification of the regime with politics, disarray and lack of confidence in its own strength. Unlike the 1970s, and particularly the 1980s, no hope in a future improvement of their fate can be seen.
Finally, unlike 1980-81, the feeling of workers' solidarity no longer exists. 33
The disarray of the working class is largely explained by a mass feeling of rejection of all the organization identifying with its fight. Solidarnosc is identified with the new regime and the effects of its policies; the OPZZ trade union (formed under the guardianship of the Jaruzelski regime in 1983-84)
continues to be held responsible for the harmful effects of the old regime.
Thus, like the traditional working class at the beginning of the 1950s, the
Polish workers feel both duped and abandoned, deprived of the results of their struggle by a mechanism which escapes their control.
Although, unlike the 1950s, the organizations independent of the new regime continue to identify with the working-class struggle — this is particularly the case of the Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland (SDRP — from the old PUWP) and the OPZZ trade-union movement — they are seen at best as not very certain allies and in no way an alternative to the governments formed by the Solidarnose movement. Their electoral results bear witness to this. During the 1990 presidential elections, the SDRP candidate got
1.5 million votes, in the 1992 general elections the slate prepsented by the
SDRP and the OPZZ got only 1.3 million 34 As for the left wing of Solidarnosc, all the different currents taken together barely scraped together 270,000 votes in the recent legislative elections so for the moment it does not really
1991 seems to mark the end of a period in the development of the Polish workers' consciousness. The hopes they put in Solidarnose and its governments have worn out,3s No potential alternative has yet appeared on the horizon. The level of organization of the working class is at its lowest since 1984-
85 (which were the black years of the underground struggle!). The •new embarrassment to them.
last elections clearly show that this is no longer the case. 32 exist.
regime is still seen in the optic of "them and us"
Poland: Thoughts on consciousness 107
', as was the bureaucracy after
1971. The aspirations of the workers have not changed significantly. As was.
the case in 1980s, the majority of unskilled workers hope for a "protective socialist state" while the skilled workers are divided between the support of ences to self-management — which was discredited during the 1980s. And opinions which could be characterized as "religious nationalism" seem to be in retreat to the benefit of a "secular Europeanism" 36 The strike movements, which were increasingly numerous in 1991, do not seem for the moment to have an effect on workers' opinions nor to change their aspirations.
A change in this situation will only be possible if the is the appearance of a pole of reference which is able to present a credible alternative to the pro- capitalist orientation of the new regime. The Polish left — whether coming from the PUWP or from Solidarnose — has not yet been able to constitute such a pole. The ability to explain the history of repeated defeats of the working class struggle for liberation — both that which led to the establishing of the Stalinist regime and that which allowed the Solidarnose leadership to misappropriate the victory of "late Stalinism" and to learn the lessons in terms of programme seems a precondition for the appearance of such a pole, particularly if it is to be a product of currently existing forces.
1. We do not have figures for sacking for social activity, however the increase in sackings in the state sector of industry was spectacular in 1982: 1,049,527 workers lost their jobs that year, that is 172,068 more than in 1981 — an increase of 20%! Most of them could not get another job in the state sector because the number of hirings in 1982 was the same as in the previous years. Moreover, and although this figure must be an underestimate because the forces of repression very often pressurized the workers to resign, in
1982 there was an increase of 43% in relation to the previous year and ot 12 % in relation to 1980 of sackings on request of the enterprise. We can assume that the majority of these further sackings — from December 1981 — were directly linked to trade-union
2. During the war, Polish Socialist Party (PPS) in the underground took the name WRN (Freedom-Equality-Independence) and played a leading role in the mass armed resistance
(AK — internal army) linked to the government in exile in London. After the was, disorganized by the defeat of the August 1944 insurrection in Warsaw and subject to violent repression from the Stalinists, it could not be reorganized. It was more marginal socialist groups — the most favourable to Moscow — who managed to take over the name PPS
3. The Polish Workers' Party (PPR) was founded during the war by two groups of experienced militants of the former Polish CP dissolved by Stalin in 1938. One was parachuted in (in the literal sense of the term) from the USSR, the other was formed the Polish-Soviet friendship societies (TPPR) which after the dissolution of the CP were the only form of
108 International Marxist Review
"liberal capitalism" and those of "protective socialism"
Notes activity.
". There are no referand rebuild a party which more and more lined up with the Stalinists.
organized Stalinist activity blessed by Moscow. 'It formed a small armed force, the People's Guard (GL) and during the war managed to influence the maquis, mainly peasants, formed by the radical wing of the pre-war agrarian movement, known as the People's
Left (AL). It remained however marginal at the time of the Soviet military victory. It was only thanks to control over essential posts in the new state apparatus — particularly the army formed in the USSR and the militia (police) that it was able to grow rapidly.
4. See Z. Zaremba, La Commune de Varsovie, Paris, 1982 and also International Viewpoint No
5. See "Robotnicy 1950" (Workers 1950), in Tygodnik Solidarnose No 3, 16 June 1989.
7. Since April 1950 a law on the "protection of socialist discipline at work", which was only repealed in 1956, introduced sentences of up to three years in prison for lateness or abandoning one's post. As for attempts to call strikes, this fell under Article 3 of the Penal
Code (economic sabotage) which carried sentences of between five years in prison and
8. Edward Gierek, future first secretary of the PUWP, who settled this strike and for that won
The Dabrowa mines had a long-standing personnel, still dating from before the war, within which there were strong PPS organizations whose members had considered the formation of the PUWP as a liquidation of their party. Thus when the authorities attacked a conquest won with such difficulty by the workers — a working day of seven and a half hours — they considered the increase in working hours of one hour per day as a challenge to the main conquest of the miners. (...) I told them 'You think you were the only ones to organize strikes, I have also organized strikes and I was kicked in the behind for that, but I organized them against the enemy, against the capitalists, and for your strike we'll all have to pay'. I told them that the government was determined and that it would not give up, it needed this coal.
If they did not want to work, then others would work in their place. Finally, I convinced them with the argument that everybody would lose if the strike continued, would lose more than the others. (Edward Gierek interviewed by J. Rolicki, Przerwana
9. Ryszard Turski, who was later one of the collaborators of the anti-Stalinist weekly Po Pros-
I was arrested by the political police when I left cinema before the end of the film Harry
Smith discovers America. It was awful, I came out, and they held me for thirty hours for
He was an activist of the official youth organization. Cited in B. Lopienska, E. Szymanska,
10. In Poland it was the flight abroad in 1954 of one of the leaders of the political police, Colonel Swiatlo, and the transmission of his confessions by American radio which led to a challenge to the practices of the police apparatus and and then its coming under party
11. Official leadership organ of the Union of Polish Youth (ZMP), Po Prostu (Quite Simply) in entember 1955 declared itself to be 'the weekly of students and the young inteligent ia" and launched an appeal for forming clubs of the young intelligentsia. In spring 195 there were already more than 100 clubs throughout the country. Other journals played a
66, 1984.
6. Ibid.
the death sentence.
Dekada, Warsaw, 1990)
tu, often remembers:
control in December 1954.
promotion in the party apparatus, wrote:
attempting to organize a mass exist from the film.
Stare numery, London 1986 and Warsaw 1990.
, but that they
----- pull-quotes on this page -----
Poland: Thoughts on consciousness 109
110 International Marxist Review similar critical role to that of Po Prostu, for example: Trybuna Wolnosci, Nowa Kultura,
Sztandar Mlodych and, when the liberalization was at its height, Trybuna Ludu, daily of the PUWP. However, it was the Po Prostu team which became a sort of de facto political leadership of the October left. 12. J. Kossak, R. Turski, W. Wirpsza, "Workers' self-management", Po Prostu, 30 September
1956. 13. While Po Prostu launched an appeal for the formation of a new youth organization, on the remains of the ZMP, but still linked to the party... 14. After the war, the USSR won an agreement that Poland should give it (and the GDR) a certain quantity of coal free each year, as compensation for Soviet support for the moving of the Polish border to, the West (Oder-Neisse line) and to the NorthEastern and Western Pomerania). The USSR thus gained de facto participation in the products of the
Polish mines on former German territory. This secret agreement was abandoned in 1956. 15. And in this context the political and social weight of the the organizations German refugees in the FRG was greatly exaggerated for the needs of the cause. 16. In 966, Prince Mieszko I, reigning in Gniezno, married a Czech princess and at the same time converted his kingdom to Roman Catholicism. 17. Under the slogan, "Zionists to Zion" which included all Jews or those said to be Jews under the term "Zionists" 18. Cf. Rewolta szczecinska i jej znaczenie, Paris, 1971. A French translation exists: Gierek face aux grévistes de Szczecin, Paris, 1971. 19. In the 1950s, to become a party member one had to pass a real exam in official "Marxism-
Leninism", a custom which continued under Gomulka, although in a less strict form. 20. In the 1950s, special shops selling rare goods were hidden by yellow curtains which became the symbol of unwarranted privileges. 21. Survey on the perception of inequalities by H. Malewska et Z. Gostkowski. Cf. H. Malews-
"Les modes de pensée égalitaire (réflexions autour d'une enquête menée en Pologne)", Revue d'Etudes Comparatives Est-Ouest, Vol.9, No 2, 1978. 22. Oppositionists like Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron were the main leaders of this current.
Cf. L. Kolakowski, Glowne nurty marksizmu, (Main currents in Marxism), Paris, 1976-1978, an erudite work from the point of view of assimilation of Marxism to Stalinism. In France a similar vision was propounded by the groups known as the "new philosophers", but with less erudition. 23. Published in the underground bulletin Robotnik in September 1979, of which tens of thousands of copies were distributed, this charter was a real action programme for the workers. The demands culminated in the demand for the right form independent unions. 24. See in particular Z. Kowalewski, Rendez nous nos usines! - Solidarnose dans le combat
• pour l'autogestion ouvrière, Paris, 1985. 25. Years where, for the first time, public opinion seemed to be dominated by resignation and where the number of those who said they supported the regime (28%) outstripped the number of its declared opponents (16%). Cf. Aneks, No 48, London 1987). 26. A. Giza Poleszczuk, "Stosunki miedzyludzkie i zycie zbiorowe", in. M. Marody (ed.), Co
Poland: Thoughts on consciousness 111 nam zostalo z tych lat — Spoleczenstwo polskie u progu zmiany systemowej, London
1991. 27. A. Giza Poleszczuk, "Praca w systemie gospodarki planowej", in M. Marody (ed.), op cit. 28. M. Marody, "Polityka", in M. Marody (ed.), op. cit. 29. Ibid. 30. M. Marody, J. Kolbowski, C. Labanowska, K. Nowak, A. Tyszkiewicz, Polacy '80,
Warsaw 1981. 31. P. Szwajcer, Zyc normalnie... Szkic do portretu opozycji lat osiemdziesiatych, unpublished(1988), cited by M. Marody, "Polityka", op. cit. 32. The detailed results of the Polish presidential elections of November-December 1990 were published in Le Journal des élections; No 16, January-February 1991. Those of the
October 1991 legislative elections in International Viewpoint, No 217, 1991. It is the increase in abstention (39.37% 25 October 1990, 46,6% 9 December 1990, 56.8% 27
October 1991) which is the most striking feature of these results. 33. The symbol of this is the lack of reaction after the police invaded the bus depots occupied by the strikers at Bialystok in September 1991. 34. Because of the significant increase in abstentions, the SDRP won a significantly greater percentage of votes cast and, above all because of the fragmentation of votes, it took second place, which was interpreted as the beginning of a turn in the situation. This interpretation does not seem very well founded to me because it ignores the feature which I think the most important in the Polish politico-social scene; the lack of an alternative policy to that which has been in operation over the last two years, which is credible in the eyes of significant layer of workers. In addition, according to various surveys, the
SDRP electoral base is less "working class" than that of the right-wing parties or of Lech 35. The Solidarnose trade union presented its own slates in the October 1991 elections and received 560,000 votes, that is the support of 2.05% of registered voters or 5.05% of those who voted. 36. See P. Boski, "Jak wartosci spoleczno-polityczne podzielily elektoraty pretendentow do
Belwederu w wyborach prezydenckich 1990?", in W. Daab, K. Korzeniowski, P. Boski,
K. Gembura-Chmielewski, K. Skarzynska, M. Zakrzewski, Polski wyborca '90 - psychospoleczne studia nad wyborami prezydenckimi, Volume 1, Warsaw 1991.
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