POPULIST LESSONS OF POLAND’S SOLIDARNOŚĆ, PART 1

A BRIEF INTRODUCTION

For easy access to the other parts of this series on the history of Poland’s populist uprising, see:

Part 2: History of a populist uprising

Part 3: Against managerial class ventriloquism

Part 4: Trucking, again

The managerial class regime would have us all buy into their self-serving binary that one either does politics through elections (which just happens to be rigged in their favour) or you are a violent extremist, terrorist and all the rest of it. But of course, that’s just the usual reality-curating, self-serving nonsense of the managerial class’s culture industry. Of course, there are other historical precedents, models, and strategies. And the next few posts will dissect one of them, as a potential learning case.¹  

In my review of Neema Parvini’s somewhat self-delusional little book, The Populist Delusion, among the blind spots I demonstrated that it exhibited regarding the populist tradition, and its literature, was his failure to address (probably even to be aware of) arguments made by those who directly challenged his central thesis: that all political and social change had to be carried out by an elite: i.e., strictly along a top-down vector. In fairness, I’ve offered comparable assessments myself. But I’ve couched my assessments in terms of probability; I certainly didn’t dismiss populism as a delusion because of some supposed iron law that its axioms violated – like vectors of political change are only and can ever be top-down, rather than bottom-up. And the reason I’ve been more cautious in such statements is that – apparently unlike Parvini – I was aware of the work in the populist scholarship that challenged those assumptions. Specifically, in that review of Parvini’s book, I mentioned the scholarship of Lawrence Goodwyn. I had read his classic work on the U.S. agrarian populists, but he makes his case in this direction even more forcefully in his study of Poland’s Solidarność movement.

Just parenthetically, in hindsight, 1991 was a remarkable year, viewed through the lens of populism. As I mentioned in my last post, there was a major populist uprising in America in the 1990s. And this was foreshadowed(?) by the publication that year of two landmark works on the nature and prospects of a renewed populism. The two books were Christopher Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, and Lawrence Goodwyn’s Breaking the Barrier: The Rise of Solidarity in Poland. (And this too was about the time that Telos really dug into its multi-year exploration of populism.) Something was clearly in the air. But one could do a heck of a lot worse in striving to understand populism – its axioms and prospects – than with a deep dive into these two, admittedly tome-like, books.

So, right now, I’m regarding this as a four-part serial, but we’ll see. As the current plan looks: after this introduction, the next instalment will provide a condensed history of the Polish workers’ movement, which finally resulted in the formation of Solidarność. The following instalment will look at the relationship between populism and the managerial class ventriloquists through the lens of Solidarność. Specifically, we will see how the Polish workers are best understood through the lens of Jean-Claude Michéa’s distinction between the left and a proto-populist, early socialism. The final post will reflect upon what we can learn from all of this toward a better understanding of the means and prospects for the new populism of today.

Given how interconnected the ideas are across the next three instalments, they all had to be pretty much completed together. I’m intending to post them at intervals of a few days. They’ll be published as instalments because it would be a bit much to publish as a single post. That I expect would be asking too much of a single sitting investment of time for even my always impressively erudite readers. At the same time, though, I want to post them close enough to each other so that folks aren’t overly taxed (given life’s flow of other obligations and activities) in trying to keep in mind the ideas and arguments from the prior posts. Hopefully all this will work out, because I do believe there’s a lot of value here for those interested in the topics regularly explored on this substack.

So, watch out for the next instalment in a few days. And, if you haven’t yet…

1. That’s not to say that the history I’ll tell in the next post doesn’t include a lot of violence, but as will be seen, not only was that violence in no way essential to, or even consistent with, the lessons of the Polish workers that eventually led to the achievement of Solidarność, but to some considerable extent the organizational and strategic lessons the Polish workers developed were a response to, and way of avoiding, such violence in their subsequent efforts.