POPULIST LESSONS OF POLAND’S SOLIDARNOŚĆ, PART 3

AGAINT MANAGERIAL CLASS VENTRILOQUISM

Last post, I provided a condensed history of the organizational and strategic actions and lessons of Polish workers in their effort to redress the harms they suffered from the failed managerial class communist regime,¹ eventually leading to the creation of a free trade union and the ultimate downfall of the regime. This condensed history had been cribbed from Lawrence Goodwyn’s sweeping book on Solidarność.²

A parallel theme running throughout Goodwyn’s book is a challenge to the widespread conventional narrative that it was the studied intellectuals of Warsaw who provided the theoretical insights necessary to the “consciousness raising” which made Solidarność possible. Goodwyn dismisses this narrative as baseless nonsense, which is simply the usual self-flattery of what I call here the managerial class. As I’ve discussed at length elsewhere, the managerial class has a long history of coopting critique and protest movements by using their adept symbol manipulation capacity to put into the proverbial mouths of others the ideas which ultimately serve their own class interests (see here, here, and here, and especially my book, The Managerial Class on Trial.) Though he hasn’t access to this descriptive nomenclature, that’s precisely what Goodwyn is pointing at here.

Both the Polish intellectuals themselves, and those intellectuals from elsewhere who write about Solidarność, are convinced that such a social and political force would be impossible without the wise guidance of the (in Turchin’s phrase, surplus elite) managerial class sages.³ Goodwyn argues instead, far from being the product of managerial class vanity, Solidarność was the product of literally decades of organizational and strategic experience forged by the Polish working class within its long and frequent battles with the ruling faction of the managerial class, embodied in its formal regime as Polish communism. 

A couple of facts can be pointed to as illustrative of his point. First, the credit, among managerial class intellectual types, for the remarkable Polish August, of 1980, is usually given to the so-called Workers’ Defense Committee, with its Polish acronym KOR. This group of mostly Warsaw intellectuals though, as Goodwyn observes, was formed in 1976: not merely long after the primary organizational and strategic methods that drove and made possible the successes of the Polish August had been forged in the decades long struggle of working class protest, but in fact KOR itself was merely a product of that very history of worker revolt. KOR was not the cause, but a symptom of the history of the Polish workers’ struggle.

His second relevant observation was KOR’s insistence that the first of the famous Gdansk 21 points – calling for the creation of free trade unions, independent of the party – be removed from the list of demands as overly ambitious and likely to inadvertently sabotage any hope of success for the movement. Yet, as Goodwyn argues, and demonstrates, this demand did not come out of nowhere, but was the logical outcome of those decades-long struggles on the part of the workers. It was only because the intellectuals of KOR in fact were entirely unfamiliar with the nuance and internal details of those long decades of struggle, and the specific forms they took at particular times and places, that KOR was unable to recognize not only the value and necessity, but the practicality of such a demand. Again, it was the usual managerial class conceit that only abstract theoretical conception could inform effective practical action that allow KOR to be so confident about a claim that proved to be so entirely erroneous.

Central to Goodwyn’s analysis of Solidarność is the understanding that the social knowledge necessary to gradually build an effective workers’ movement (and I’d supplement: more generally, a populist movement) is experiential. It is only by living through a history of organizational and strategic failure, trial and error, experience – given a sufficient continuity, by oral tradition or other means – may people come to learn how to recalibrate their actions toward the means for greater success in the next iteration. As the KOR intellectuals had no access to such experience, access to such social knowledge was closed off to them. Marinated as so many were in their Hegelian Marxism, it was difficult for many of them to accept that, or even understand why, it was not a journalist or academic that emerged as the leader of the Polish August, but an electrician.

The key bits of the Polish workers’ struggle and its history – emphasized by Goodwyn, of which KOR was so ignorant, as demonstrated in the condensed history – was in the hard-earned lessons on the essential value of the occupation strike and the interfactory strike negotiating committee, as well as the long experience of subversion of workers’ efforts through the party controlled unions, and their various strawmen, such as the worker councils of the 1950s-60s. All of these organizational and strategic insights, essential to the success of the Polish August, of 1980, were invaluable lessons learned about how to successfully fight the communist regime and its party through the school of hard knocks.

In contrast to the standard Marxist nostrums about intellectuals raising the revolutionary consciousness of workers, though Goodwyn doesn’t seem to be familiar with the tradition, the approach of Jean-Claude Michéa provides a far more profound and relevant insight into what was actually happening in Poland. Michéa makes the distinction between, on the one hand, the historic left, which forged its initial expression of power in the French Revolution – the term “left” literally coming from where they sat in the national assembly – with their emphasis upon universalism, progressivism, individualism and rationalism, and on the other hand, the socialists who arose as a reaction against the privations imposed upon the peasants and workers by the industrial revolution. Indeed, the triumph of the industrial revolution was in large measure a product of the left’s progressivism, universalism, individualism, and rationalism: justifying the removing of peasants from their lands and ancient communities, crushing their producerist traditions and customs, forcing them into cities as cannon fodder for Blake’s Satanic Mills.

The early socialists appealed to those obfuscated traditions and customs, in a manner consistent with the lessons of the Scottish Enlightenment, and in stark contrast to the rationalism and individualism – which would ultimately usher in the managerial class’s social engineering and administrative state – of the left’s French Enlightenment. Though, again, he doesn’t seem familiar with this socialism vs left distinction, it is the more telling lens through which to view Goodwyn’s treatment of the Polish workers’ movement – in contrast to the left’s progressive managerialism manifest in the assumptions of the Warsaw intellectuals.

As a going concern, communism everywhere has fancied itself as the party of the future, moving ever into a brighter tomorrow, driven by the dialectic of history, that allows the people to leave the regressive and reactionary ills of the past where they belong, in an abandoned antiquated yesterday. However, while many in the West imagined the Polish workers as proto-libertarian free marketers, Goodwyn’s book makes clear that there was a widespread sentiment among the Polish workers that they were socialists. Their problem with Polish communism wasn’t that it wasn’t sufficiently free market, but that it was a deep perversion of an ostensible aspiration to create a country in which the rights and dignity of workers was honored. However, Goodwyn’s description of the Polish workers as socialist is one very much rooted in Michéa’s understanding of the original socialist tradition.

For, among the antiquated, regressive, and reactionary traditions that communism, as party of the future, presumed to leave behind were those of religion and nationalism. Yet, as Goodwyn repeatedly illustrates, a great deal of the success of the Polish workers’ movement, particularly through the 70s, was precisely its appeal to its people’s own religious and national traditions. Goodwyn emphasizes this point with a tellingly poignant quotation from the Polish social critic, Ryszard Kapuściński. Observing how totalitarianism so thoroughly destroys life that thousands, even millions of Poles considered leaving, he goes on to say:

But a whole nation cannot emigrate, so it undertakes a migration in time rather than in space. In the face of the encircling afflictions and threat of reality, it goes back to a past that seems a lost paradise. It regains its security in customs so old, and therefore so sacred, that authority fears to combat them.

In the previous condensed history post, I’d emphasized the important role of monumental politics, during the decade of the 70s, when the workers’ movement commemorated their fallen comrades, butchered during the strikes of 1970. However, in addition to obviously holding such commemoration events on the actual date of the massacre, December 16, they also started holding such commemorations on May 3: the anniversary date of Poland’s 1791 constitution. Also, Lech Walesa, an electrician by trade, resuscitated an ancient Warszawa automobile – symbol of an earlier post-WWII Polish industrial optimism – which he then plastered with copies of the 1791 constitution. In effect, he created a mobile reminder of both Poland’s democratic history and contemporary Polish workers’ ingenuity and political self-activity. While displaying the 1791 constitution was not de jure illegal, its flaunting was understood to be a subtle mocking of the presiding regime. Likewise was the effect of Poles singing their pre-communist national anthem and unfurling their flag in protest.    

Likewise, the workers integrated their religious traditions into their protests. Catholic rites, ceremonies, and symbols were used by the Polish workers: pray services and masses were made occasions for recruitment. Prayer was also invoked in intense crowd situations to calm the protesters when they were being goaded into self-defeating violent overreaction by the police or security forces. (The national anthem also was sometimes used for such occasions.) Perhaps though the most famous, and arguably most important, occasion of the workers drawing upon their Catholic traditions was on the first Sunday of the decisive 1980 strike when the Interfactory Strike Committee convinced bishop of Gdansk Lech Kaczmarek to support holding Sunday mass in the Lenin Shipyard. During the mass a cross built to commemorate the victims of 1970 was formally blessed, giving the workers’ protest the aura of sanctification.

The takeaway here seems to me to be not merely, as Goodwyn would put it (though in my nomenclature), that the managerial class predictably both tried to take credit for the achievements of the Polish workers, and in the process effectively coopt them through that class’s trademark ventriloquism. But rather that, the anti-left socialism of the Polish workers was existentially incommensurable with the agenda of the managerial class, however locally expressed as the communist strategy of that class. It was precisely the administrative state’s social engineering dimension of communism’s command economy with which the Polish workers were inherently at odds.

In this sense, as I noted in my discussion of Michéa, the anti-left socialists are probably best understood as proto-populists, insofar as populism today, confronted with the social engineering and bureaucratic paternalism of managerial liberalism, finds itself caught in a Schmittian friend-enemy conflict with the managerial class (see here and here). In a battle over the world, the conflict over either preserving or eroding organic community is today a zero-sum game between populism and the managerial class (see here). Where each gains ground, the other must lose it. The early anti-left socialists were but the initial faint realization of what has become ultimately at stake for populism. This insight, though, is only scratching the surface of the lessons that the new populism can learn from the Polish workers and the history of Solidarność. I’ll dig a little deeper into those lessons in the next, and final, instalment of this series of post.

So, if you haven’t yet...

1. For insight into my use of the phrase “managerial class,” see here, or my book The Managerial Class on Trial. See the latter for a detailed explanation of how communism was only one case of managerial class strategy. (And for my mea culpa for having underappreciated populism in that book, see here.)

2. Lawrence Goodwyn, Breaking the Barrier: The Rise of Solidarity in Poland, 1st edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

3. This argument runs through the book. A more condensed version of it is available in a contribution Goodwyn made to a Telos conference on the topic of populism: Lawrence Goodwyn, “Rethinking ‘Populism’: Paradoxes of Historiography and Democracy,” Telos 1991, no. 88 (June 20, 1991).