POPULIST LESSONS OF POLAND’S SOLIDARNOŚĆ, PART 2

HISTORY OF A POPULIST UPRISING

As discussed in the last post, in this one, following the story as told by Lawrence Goodwyn¹, I want to recount the history of the events that led up to the formation of Solidarność, bringing down the managerial class regime of Soviet satellite Poland, with an eye to lessons that contemporary populists can take away from this history. Those even casually familiar with the history of the Soviet Bloc will associate the year 1956 with the much discussed, much more celebrated, Hungarian uprising. Only the above-averagely informed will be familiar with the fact that the same year there was a prior uprising against the Leninist regimes, within Poland. However, Goodwyn emphasizes that it is this, less acknowledged, Polish event that ultimately played the greater role in crashing the East European Soviet bloc regime.

By the 1950s the Polish communist government was experiencing economic failure of its command economy. Among the measures introduced to remedy the problem was an increased piece-rate, so that workers had to produce at a higher level to meet their quota. The only way they were able to meet these new rates was to work around safety measures. The result was not only stressful overworking, but a considerable escalation of workplace injury risk. All this was supposed to be provided by workers in a command economy that was seeing the workers’ standard of living decline.

In response to these conditions, workers at the railroad car production company, Cegielski, in the town of Poznan, began to organize themselves as a protest against these policy changes. After months of ineffectual internal complaints and negotiation, on June 28, 1956, their protest burst out onto the streets. They were joined in a major march and demonstration by other workers and students. The people of Poznan were out in mass: in a town with a population of 380,000, estimates put the protesters at over 100,000. However, it didn’t take long for the crowd to be agitated, particularly as false rumors spread that Cegielski’s organizing committee had been arrested. The headquarters of both the provincial and security police were overwhelmed by the crowd, which released prisoners and trashed the dossier files of police records. A bonfire fueled by such dossiers was created as the crowd chanted “freedom from police spies.”

Soon, general chaos broke out on the streets, including gun battles. Downtown streetcars and trucks were overturned to create barricades. Mass vandalism spread. By noon troops were moved into the area. The battle of Poznan staggered through into June 30. In the end, it’s estimated that somewhere between six and seven hundred were injured and killed. Eventually around 300 workers were arrested. There had been an international trade show in Poznan, resulting in many foreigners witnessing the outbreak of civil unrest. This event of 1956 was too dramatic and salient for the party to hush up or ignore.

Eventually, in an effort to return peace to party-worker relations, negotiations led to the proposal to create worker councils – a look that complemented the regime’s self-identity. The Russian word “Soviet” literally means council.² This appeared to be a way to address the workers’ demands for more control over their workplace while allowing the party of Poland’s Soviet satellite regime to save face. However, as time passed, it became evident that these new councils were still ultimately under the influence of the party. Worker efforts to introduce reforms wound up being frustrated by the councils, which had been ostensibly created to aid the workers in their efforts. In the guise of increasing workers’ control, the party had found a means to subtly undermine those aspirations and maintain its own control.

Meanwhile, many members of the workers’ leadership were subverted by various means. These included mass firings; widespread detention and beatings; transfer to jobs at distant locations; and in some cases, buying them off with privileges usually reserved to the party elite: e.g., access to party stores, cars, vodka, and comfortable apartments.   

From a certain perspective, then, the high cost of Poznan, 1956, might be seen as a failure. But Goodwyn’s argument is that to view the situation through that lens is to miss the point. In fact, 1956 was a major learning experience for Polish workers. One important lesson was understanding the risk that the Cegielski workers opened themselves up to by – after four months of sustained self-organizing activity – turning over their political destiny to people they did not know and who had not shared in their organizational experience, and thereby did not (and indeed had not been able to) internalize the knowledge gained in that self-organizing. These other protesters, who’d come out in support of the Cegielski workers, lacking the latter’s organized discipline, overreacted to rumors, and through their violence derailed the event with reckless, destructive behavior.

The failure point here had been the absence of an organizational communications network appropriately scaled to the expanse of the protest. This was a mistake they would not make again. Plus, the other benefit of such a network, which became increasingly evident, was that when lacking lines of lateral communication, Polish workers could only learn from their own, immediate, individual, and job-specific workplace action; with an effective organizational communication network, they could learn from each other’s experience.

By the early 1960s, another important lesson learned from Poznan was that worker self-organization could no longer be treated as a temporary phenomenon – merely a way of getting the attention of the authorities. Rather, it had to be treated as a permanent feature of working-class efforts, consolidating their participation in Polish society. The imposition of the party-controlled councils had been a painful lesson in this failure of the workers’ protest to manifest a permanent organizational form. They needed free trade unions, which were independent of party control. This lesson of 1956 was to inform the aspirations and organization of Polish workers thereafter – right up to the world changing events of August 1980.

And, finally, a third lesson learned from 1956 was that while the workers were entirely capable of generating from within their ranks an effective leadership cadre, this leadership had to be protected from the party and the police. Otherwise, the leadership would be too susceptible to sanction, manipulation, or arrest by the authorities. A new tactical approach needed to be developed toward resolving this vulnerability. This new tactic would turn out to be the occupation strike.

Through the 1960s, even as the workers’ councils proved useless in addressing their needs, the Polish workers of the Baltic coast became increasingly radicalized. This was largely a product of the normal fact that port towns tend to be hotbeds of new ideas. Using the language of Michéa (whose analysis proves impressively relevant to this historical event, as will be discussed in the next post), the anti-left socialism of the Polish workers was regularly fed by exposure to foreign seamen who identified as socialist but had plenty of criticism of the authoritarian nature of the Polish communist regime. Additionally, Polish workers were acutely aware of how much better fed and dressed were these foreigners. These experiences only reaffirmed to them the importance of having trade unions that would act to benefit the interests and well-being of the workers, rather than just the party. As Goodwyn put it: these ideas percolated for years around the kitchen tables of Gdansk.

The next major event in the story came in 1970. After ten years of stable prices, on the brink of Christmas, the Polish government announced food price increases ranging from 12 to 36 percent. This announcement again set off protests across the country, with mass rioting, prolonged street battles, police firing live rounds into crowds, and eventual military occupation. However, to regard 1970 as a repeat of 56 was to miss the important differences which were occurring under the surface of the more sensational events. While these activities of 1970 became themselves part of the collective memory of the workers of the Baltic coast, a full appreciation of what was happening in 1970 requires reference back to the lessons learned from 1956.

The tactics, whose value had been recognized in ’56, were implemented in ’70: particularly the occupation strike and the interfactory strike committee.  The former successfully protected the workers from the 1956-style mass arrests – particularly of their leadership cadre. The latter allowed them to circumvent the party efforts, so effective in ’56, of isolating individual factories. The coordination of the Interfactory Strike Committee allowed for a larger scale, more united form of political action by the workers.

In Goodwyn’s estimation, the hothouse events of 1970 gave rise to a kind of workers’ tactical school in which the understanding and implementation of those tactics were consolidated. While street battles again played out in the city, inside, at the Gdansk based Lenin Shipyard, the workers elected an independent strike presidium – which included a young electrician named Lech Walesa. This presidium deliberately excluded party members, giving the workers’ discussion and planning mechanism insulation against the usual internal subversion by party agents – which the Polish workers had been familiar with, right back through ’56. The tactical school forged in this 1970 experience, correcting for the errors of ’56, was directly drawn upon by the young Gdansk leadership when a decade later they called for their decisive occupation strike of 1980.

Certainly though, not everything went perfectly in ‘70. A group of young workers, anxious to enter the fray upon the streets, feeling bottled up by the confinement associated with a strike that was premised upon occupying the shipyard, tried to breakout through Gate 2 and were met with a hail of fire from automatic weapons. Though, the more iconic moment of party violence occurred on December 16. That morning workers were slaughtered deboarding commuter trains, coming into the shipyard. The death toll remains in dispute. The government’s official claim was that there were several dozen fatalities, but others claim it was possibly in the hundreds, and injuries were well over a thousand. This event would become a decisively important symbolic moment in the decade ahead.

Despite these failures and tragedies, though, it was of vital value that the workers of the Baltic coast learned how to execute both their occupation strike and interfactory network tactics. Lines of communication and movement of goods had to be refined. Coordination of demands and actions, alongside learning how to ensure they were supplied, within the factories or yards, with the necessities to maintain themselves through a protracted conflict, was essential to the eventual success of that strike which the world later witnessed in August 1980.

Eventually, the government revoked its price increases. While this revocation ended the immediate pitch of the conflict, it did not end the efforts of the workers. This time it was no longer merely a matter of winning piecemeal concessions from the government and party. An important way in which they maintained the spirit of 1970 was what Goodwyn refers to as monumental politics. This was the practice of holding regular ceremonies commemorating fellow workers killed during the street violence. This was a thinly veiled means of celebrating the workers’ battle against the control of the party in 1970 and perpetuating worker vigilance.

It wasn’t difficult to maintain this vigilance given that the rest of the 70s were characterized by massive mismanagement and bureaucratic self-dealing. All this governance failure ratcheted up the economic distress of Polish workers and their families. In a gesture of placating that distress, there was initially some softening of the party toward worker demands for more open organizational space. Movement in that direction, though, came to a crashing halt again in the mid-70s, when the government again attempted a range of price increases. This time the workers, with the lessons learned from ’70, moved more quickly and effectively. The measures were repealed by the government, more quickly, even though this time there was far less street violence.

However, the prior brief opening to workers was also fully reversed. Throughout the latter 70s any worker publicly criticizing the government or promoting workers rights and free trade unions was silenced or dismissed, and often blacklisted. In today’s argot, they were deplatformed or cancelled. In Goodwyn’s estimation, by the second half of the decade worker alienation from the communist regime was near universal. The time for “raising consciousness,” as the intellectuals of KOR would have called it, was well past. The challenge now was to find a way to publicly express opposition to the party without having one’s life ruined. The challenge, in Goodwyn’s words, was: “how to perform the acts necessary to encourage workers without undercutting oneself by getting fired and inadvertently proving once again the futility of all such activism.”

Though I’ll go into it in more detail in the next instalment of this series on Solidarność, it’s worth briefly mentioning that an important and effective tactic in this regard was the workers ability to ground their activism in deeply endearing Polish values and traditions. Very much in the spirit of Michéa’s distinction between socialism and the left (discussed here), the Polish workers who widely considered themselves to be socialist, fought the communist regime of the left on the terrain of Polish attachment to national and religious traditions and symbols.

A second dimension of interest in this deplatforming technique by the party though was that in a decisive way it wound up backfiring on the deplatformers. Walesa, throughout the 70s, rose as one of the Baltic coast workers’ most effective activists. His calming personality, that endeared him to his fellow workers, also allowed him to act in ways that undermined the kinds of repressive interventions that the party would have pursued if his responses had been more explicitly provocative. Additionally, he seemed to have an especially well-honed capacity for learning from prior experience with the manipulations of the party, and turning those lessons into more refined worker strategy.

In response, in 1978, the party followed the usual suppression technique of getting him fired from his job in the Lenin Shipyard and ensuring that he was blacklisted, and so unable to find any other job. As mentioned, this method, which usually worked in breaking the spirit and silencing the voice of worker activists, proved not merely ineffective, but counterproductive. Despite his lack of officially sanctioned income, to the party’s consternation, somehow Walesa proved able to continue feeding his family. Furthermore, now, without any employment, he had more time to engage in his worker activism. The constant arrests did nothing to dissuade him or reduce his influence among the workers of the Baltic coast. Eventually, the party recognized the folly of its usually tried-and-true strategy and intervened to ensure he would be rehired to a job.

Far from ending the party’s troubles with Walesa, though, the new job simply became an explosive new hotspot of conflict. Using his position at his new employer, Elektromontaz, he managed to win worker support at the plant for a major memorial event for the workers slaughtered on December 16, 1970. In mid-January, he was re-fired from the new job, along with several other activists at the plant. The body of one of them turned up dead and terribly mutilated. The funeral then became a major rallying scene for opposition activists and Polish workers.

Elektromontaz now became a major battleground in the struggle between the workers and the party. Thereafter controlling the workers required pervasive suppression by the security police at the shop. This experience became a reminder of the lessons of ’56 and ’70, of how much easier it was for the party and its security arm to isolate worker action if restricted to a single workplace. Anyone who’d lost sight of the importance of free trade unions received a poignant reminder.

Meanwhile, Walesa’s many trials, after all his frequent detentions and interrogations, became themselves major political events. The government tried holding his trials on Holy days, Saturdays, and even tried filling the courtrooms with security agents, so there’d be no seating for workers. They also engaged in last minute venue changes – including to out-of-town locations. The party had been reduced to a knee jerk, reactive position, constantly on the defensive against the continual flow of new events and occasions through which workers promoted their goals and recruited more supporters.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the dramatic events of August 1980, which would be watched around the world, and arguably change the historical direction and fate of the Soviet bloc East European countries, arose in response to yet another government effort in July to impose a steep price hike in essential goods. Through the 70s the standard of living of Polish workers had been continually deteriorating as the communist command economy continued to fail. Upon word of the price hikes, strikes began breaking out around the country. Unlike past occasions, the institutional, organizational, and strategic memory of the Polish workers – particularly on the Baltic coast – building upon 35 longs years of trial-and-error experiential insight and memory, almost immediately went to work, implementing the strategies and tactics that had been revealed as so necessary and successful across that long period of learning. Occupation strikes were struck, an Interfactory Strike Committee was formed, and the demand for party-free, self-governing trade unions was front of mind.

Within the Lenin Shipyard, which proved so pivotal to the events of August 1980, another important lesson from the past – particularly in ’56, when the protests had been subverted by the destructive influence of rumor – was also addressed almost immediately by the workers’ leadership. Whether such rumors grew naturally, out of fear that the leadership could sell out the membership, or indeed might be spread maliciously by the party’s security agents, their potential for undermining worker solidarity and discipline was acknowledged and addressed.

Upon meeting with the party and shipyard management representatives, Walesa – who’d been smuggled into the shipyard to join the Strike Committee, after the occupation began – insisted that all negotiation between the two sides had to take place over the yard loudspeaker, broadcast out to the entirety of the throng of workers assembled in the Lenin Shipyard. (This same throng of workers, also, of course, protected the workers’ leadership cadre, insulating them from being picked off through selective arrest, as per the hard-learned lessons of the value of occupation strikes.) While the party and management representatives initially balked at the idea that negotiation could take place under such conditions, the strike committee was uncompromising, eventually winning concession to this demand. As a result, workers listened in on the negotiation in real-time; any prospect of whisper campaigns by security agents to undermine worker solidarity were then rendered moot.

Goodwyn emphasizes the extent to which the workers’ demands put forward on this day were tailored to highlight the hypocrisy and failures of the so-called workers’ party – emphasizing its habitual abuse and betrayal of actual Polish workers. A few days into the strike, the Interfactory Strike Committee wrote the famous 21 demands. Given the long history of the party-controlled unions subverting the workers’ movement, it was inevitable that demand #1 was for free trade unions, independent of the party or management.

Another matter, that will be returned to in the next post, bears foreshadowing here: it was of some significance that the intellectuals of Warsaw, and KOR particularly (who fancied themselves the intellectual progenitors of the Polish August), urged the workers to abandon this demand for free trade unions as too radical and extreme. As Goodwyn would note, it was precisely because they were not the progenitors of the events, and indeed lacked any of the experience and history that gave rise to those events, that KOR failed to understand either the importance or practical prospects of the demand for free trade unions.

Knowing that Monday morning, August 18 – when workers across the country were due to report to their jobs – would be the decisive moment, strikers went to work Sunday night, engaging in mass leafletting, spreading the 21 demands far and wide. (Again, relying upon a decade of experience in leafletting the worker districts and commuter trains, while eluding the control and surveillance of security forces and police.) As this post is already getting long, I’ll cut a long story short. Effectively, that Monday morning the Lenin Shipyard worker activists won. The workers of Gdansk, and indeed those across the Baltic coast, came out on the side of the strikers.

That day workers’ leadership, supported by activists steeped in the lessons of earlier strike action, throughout the 70s and before, led shops across the tri-cities region (Gdansk, Sopot, Gdynia) to their own strikes along the same method of organization. All of these were executed with impressive precision, order, and speed. Gdansk itself came to a complete standstill, as the transportation workers joined in. The red and white Polish flags started unfurling in support from office windows across the city. Factory delegates began arriving at the Lenin Shipyard literally by the truck load to take their place on the Interfactory Strike Committee. By nightfall of Monday, 156 affiliated factories were represented. At that point, the Interfactory Strike Committee was speaking for over 200,000 Polish workers.

In the weeks to come, a courier war took place. The government shut down telephone and telex, cutting off the Baltic coast from the rest of the country, and even isolating individual towns. In response, the strikers mobilized a network of vehicles to move couriers across the region and the country, maintaining the vital interfactory dimension of the strike action. The party responded with widespread nets of courier arrests. The Committee though made release of couriers its pre-condition for continued negotiation of its 21-point set of demands. The official Polish government position that Poland had no political prisoners made resolving this problem difficult. However, the Committee refused to budge on this point, and provided specifically named couriers who’d been arrested. This detail of response and demand made the party’s stonewalling absurd, and eventually forced the party to expose its own propaganda.

Again, as I’ve made the key points which I want to emphasize for purposes of drawing lessons for populism from the Polish experience, we can start to wrap up this discussion. Most of you either know how things unfolded thereafter, or can easily find out. But, briefly: As the attention of the world turned upon the Gdansk shipyard and the veil of both legitimacy and authority was yanked away from the Soviet world, clearly Solidarność had won, regardless of what came next. The Gdansk Agreement did finally establish the free trade union, Solidarność, but this brief thaw in communist oppression was brutally concluded on December 13, 1981, when martial law and a military junta were imposed. The regime though couldn’t win with guns what it needed: the Polish people’s ignorance and/or resignation. The Poles had already seen over the other side of the hill. As Goodwyn observes, despite the imposition of martial law, “Solidarność continued – in a thousand underground publications, in nationwide networks of cooperating activists, and in new civic habits tested in struggle.”

Through the rest of the 80s, the Polish regime lurched from failure to failure. In a quixotic effort to recover its shattered legitimacy following the imposition of martial law, the government pursued a period of reform between 1986 and 1988. In 1988, two more strikes in the Lenin Shipyard led to the re-legalization of Solidarność. Finally, in 1989, in a desperate effort to salvage the regime, through a spectacle of legitimization, the party invited the newly re-legalized Solidarność to join in government. In June and July, the once trade union, now political party, won major electoral victories. The Soviet dominated Eastern bloc was back on its heels. A few months later, in November of that year, the Berlin Wall came down. The rest, as they say, is history.

None of this of course refutes the claims that political change always ultimately involves a circulation of elites. This was to a significant extent the story of Polish governance through the 90s, into the new century. The point here was not to create some fairy tale about the redemption of the people. The point of the post, and the lesson of Goodwyn’s book, is that political momentum – in organizational and strategic experience – can be, and in this case was, a bottom-up vector: a manifestation of the populist driven political change that Parvini dismisses so cavalierly.

Of course, there are those who claim that these events were not ultimately driven by the Polish working class, drawing upon its own experience, lessons, and traditions, but rather that the workers were merely the puppets of the wily dissident intellectual ventriloquists in Warsaw – informed of the history and theory necessary to mold insurgent class consciousness. As hinted at in this post, a major parallel theme in Goodwyn’s book was the refutation of this narrative. Indeed, though Goodwyn was unfamiliar with the analysis of Jean-Claude Michéa, upon close inspection, it becomes clear that his analysis provides a far better explanation for what happened in Poland, and its ramifications for contemporary populism, than does Parvini’s uninformed, dogmatic dismissal of the supposed “delusion” of populism.

And that topic will be the subject of the next post in this series. So, if you haven’t yet…

1. Lawrence Goodwyn, Breaking the Barrier: The Rise of Solidarity in Poland, 1st edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Goodwyn tells this story over many hundreds of pages, and to be sure hardly in anything that might be considered resembling a rigorously linear timeline. As he has specific theoretical and historiographic points he’s making along the way, his emphasis is often more concerned with highlighting those points than following a precise chronology. Still, I believe I have distilled out of his treatment an accurate condensation of the story. However, I will apologize in advance if in fact this distilling has led me to misconstrue any specific details. I’m confident though that no such errors would either misrepresent the overall story arc he is providing, nor would they in any way invalidate the lessons which I’ll argue that this story provides for today’s populism.

2. The term was adopted by the Soviet Union as a nod to the early workers’ council which had been the instrument of Russian worker self-organization going back to 1905. However, in practice, the adopting of this nomenclature wound up being a ventriloquist ploy by the managerial class under the guise of its communist strategy. For more on this, see my (must read!) book, The Managerial Class on Trial. And for my much older treatment of the history of the worker council movement: Mike McConkey, “On Arendt’s Vision of the European Council Phenomenon: Critique from an Historical Perspective,” Dialectical Anthropology 16, no. 1 (1991): 15–31. (Brief warning: this latter article was published in the final issue of the journal edited by the great Stanley Diamond, and perhaps as a result the copy isn’t quite up to expected standards.)