Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics: Opposition and Reform in Poland since 1968 9780877226550

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50UDARrTV

and the Politics of Anti-Politics Opposition and Reform in Poland since 1968

Labor and Social Change, A series edited by Paula Rayman and Carmen Sirianni

and the Politics of Anti-Politics Opposition and Reform in Poland since 1968

DAVID OST

Temple University Press Philadelphia

Temple University Press, Philadelphia 19122 Copyright © 1990 by Temple University. All rights reserved Published 1990 Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 The author and publisher thank Institut Litteraire in Paris for permission to use three lines from Jacek Kaczmarski's poem "Arb Noego," from his book Wiersze i Piosenki (Poems and Songs), copyright © Instytut Literacki 1983; and Uncensored Poland News BuUetin for permission to use an excerpt from Jacek Kuron's article "Landscape After the Battle," from Uncensored Poland News BuUetin (London), No. 23, November 30, 1987. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Ost, David, 1955Solidarity and the politics of anti-politics: op,position and reform in Poland since 1968/ David Ost. p. cm. - (Labor and social change) Bibliography: p. 259 Includes index. ISBN 0-87722-655-5 (alk. paper) I. NSZZ "Solidarnosc" (Labor organization)-Political activity. 2. Trade-unions-Poland-Political activity. 3. Government. Resistance to-Poland. 4. PolandPolitics and govemment-1945- I. Title. II. Series. HD8537·N783088 1989 322'.2 '09438-dc20 89-4551 CIP

Contents

Preface / vii Abbreviations / xiv ONE: The Style of Solidarity /

1

Right and Left / 6 A Postmodern Politics / 14 TWO: Civil Society and the "Third Road" / 19 Capitalism and Civil Society / 21 State Socialism and Civil Society / 24 The "Third Road" / 30 THREE: The Genesis of Political Opposition in Poland: 1944-1970 / 33 Opposition in the Era of "People's Democracy" / 34 Stalinism and Post-Stalinism / 38 The Demise of Revisionism: 1968- 1970 / 49 FOUR: Opposition and Civil Society: 1970-1980 / 55 Late Post-Stalinism and the Thrn to Civil Society / 58 Politics and the Reconstruction of Social Ties / 64 Anticipatory Democracy / 67 Politics and the Problem of the State / 70 FIVE: Politics, Anti-Politics, and the Beginnings of Solidarity / 75 Independent Unions: Government Resistance / 79 Buying off strikers with wage increases / Offering a reorganization of the old unions instead of the creation of new ones / Trying to limit new unions to certain regions / Repackaging old unions as new ones

vi / Contents Signs of Hope / 97 The Structure of Solidarity /

100

The Significance of Solidarity's First Period /

109

SIX: Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism / 113

Neocorporatism and Democracy / 114 The Thrn to Politics / 121 The August Turning Point / 126 Last Attempts at a Political Solution / 134 A Neocorporatist Proposal / 138 The Final Weeks / 141 SEVEN: The Poverty of Martial Law: Limping Toward Reform / 149

Organizing an Underground / 149 Church and State / 156 Amnesty and Disarray / 160 The Right-Wing Critique of Solidarity / 165 Referendum and Reorganization / 169 The Party Moves Toward Reform / 172 Toward an Anti-Crisis Pact / 179 EIGHT: The Viability of an Accord / 187

The Basis of Soviet Acceptance / 192 Poland and the "Spanish Road" / 197 EPILOG: The New Solidarity / 205

Postscript / 217 Notes / 223 Bibliography / 259 Index / 271

Preface It was one of the most interesting places in the world in the late 1970s-that's how Poland seemed to me, anyway. The traditional state socialist system of the Soviet bloc was in desperate need of political reform, but only in Poland was there any real evidence of reform. Elsewhere change seemed precluded by the prevailing Brezhnev model of institutionalized boredom and stagnation. I had spent the fall of 1975 as an undergraduate exchange student studying in Moscow, and this was both an unforgettably enriching experience and enough to convince me that the USSR was not the place to return to if I was serious about studying political change in the Soviet bloc. I started learning Polish from a Russian textbook-a kind of "Polish Made Easy" for Russian speakers-and first visited Poland when my Moscow semester came to an end. A further visit in 1977 convinced me that this was precisely the place I wanted to understand up close. What I found so interesting about Poland was the appearance of a very new kind of political opposition. Emerging from student circles of the 1960s, this opposition sought to build a new type of society, yet was well aware of all the troubles created by those who had tried to build new types of societies in the past. This was a new kind of radicalism, whose main asset was its very wariness of radicalism. It held out the hope of a democratic transformation that would result in a more participatory system than is common in the West, yet avoid the usual authoritarian traps into which radical movements have typically fallen in the past. The fact that the government tolerated the opposition, or at least refrained from using its full repressive apparatus against it, only made the situation more interesting. Poland seemed to be both in the forefront of political reform efforts in the Soviet bloc and a kind of test case for the possibility of radical political reform in general. For these reasons, I decided to focus on Poland in my graduate studies. By the time I finished my courses and was ready to begin "field work," Poland of course had become more interesting than ever, as Solidarity was founded in August 1980.

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viii / Preface I developed many of the ideas for the book during a long stay in Poland in 1981-1982, as I kept notes for my dissertation and wrote articles for the weekly newspaper, In These Times. This book began as my doctoral dissertation, although it has been completely revised and substantially enlarged. The dissertation mostly concerned Solidarity in 1980-1981. When first working on these sections in the mid-1980s, there seemed to be nothing wrong in speaking about the union in the past tense. As late as 1987, that is how the union was referred to even by most of its activists. By the time I was preparing the manuscript for publication, however, everything started happening again. I wrote Chapter Seven in the fall of 1988. In retrospect, this proved to be the crucial period leading up to the relegalization of Solidarity in April 1989; at the time, it was unclear whether it would lead to anything. I submitted the first draft of the finished book in January 1989-on the very day the ruling Party voted to accept the return of Solidarity. When it came time to edit the manuscript, I had to decide whether to rewrite Chapters Seven and Eight so as to take account of later events. I decided against it, precisely so that the sense of transformation, simultaneously impending and uncertain, could be conveyed. Some people suggested that there was no need to add anything. In these heady days of perestroika, they said, anything written about the present rapidly becomes obsolete-"and a book must end somewhere, after all." I might have been convinced, except that with the signing of the Round Table Accord on April 5, 1989, the book suddenly had a natural ending. For I argue that the Solidarity leadership in 1980-81 was pushing precisely for the kind of resolution that the Round Table negotiations brought about. So I've added an Epilog (June 1989) to discuss the final months leading up to the signing of the accord, and then a Postscript (October 1989) to consider the election of a Solidarity prime minister. This new stage, however, when "anti-politics" finally gave way to a new era of politics, is properly the subject of a new book. As the book finally goes to press, it is November 1989 and the Berlin Wall has just come crashing down. Instead of adding to the Postscript, just a final note here. While I was writing the book, many experts rejected my argument that radical change in the Eastern bloc was both indispensable and inevitable. My scenario of the Party giving up its monopoly of power they considered "too optimistic" or, worse, "naive." Today everything has changed. With Berliners mingling at

Preface / ix Brandenburg Gate, it is no longer necessary to argue that East Europe is in the throes of historic transformation: everybody agrees. So it is not only the USSR and East Europe that can make a new beginning, but Soviet and East European studies, too. Perhaps we can finally take off our Cold War blinders and move forth to greet, and help shape, the new world in the making. My hope is that this book will playa small part in the process.

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Many thanks are necessary. I wrote the original dissertation at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I cannot think of a more intellectually exciting environment in which to do serious study. All of my dissertation committee members provided considerable assistance. Melvin Croan was a caring adviser and a tough critic, always forcing me to state my arguments more clearly. I thank him for his continued friendship and support. Edward Friedman and Ivan Szelenyi both taught me more about revolution and state socialism than I might ever understand. Friedman's probing questions have always been a great help to my work. Booth Fowler was a careful reader, a perceptive critic, and a friend and supporter during those worst days of self-doubt. Among those not on my committee, John Armstrong provided consistent support and encouragement. And Murray Edelman, in subtle ways, provoked some of my most exciting and fruitful ideas. His justly famous graduate seminar in social science theory opened up avenues of thought I had not known even existed. My research would have been impossible without generous outside support. I am particularly grateful to the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program, which offered me the chance to do research in Poland from September 1981 to December 1982. I also thank the Bronx High School of Science for making possible my original study of Russian and the State University of New York at Stony Brook for making possible my first study-visits to the USSR and Poland in the mid-1970s. The Graduate School and the Russian Area Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin provided generous support via Title VI fellowships, usually enough to reprieve me from frequent stints as a New York cab driver. The Blue Mountain Center in the Adirondacks offered me a wonderful place to work in the summer of 1987. The HewlettMellon and Atkinson Funds at Hobart and William Smith Colleges have

x / Preface provided very generous support for research trips abroad in 1987, 1988, and 1989, and for a sabbatical leave in fall 1988. I am grateful to the Russian Research Center at Harvard University for the opportunity to spend this sabbatical productively as a Fellow there. There is no way, unfortunately, to thank all the people in Poland who made this work possible. Many people with whom I spoke at Solidarity meetings, who generously gave me their time and their latest union bulletins-I never even learned their names. Others who were active in the underground I do not feel at liberty to speak about even now, even though they probably would no longer mind. In 1981-82 I was affiliated with the Department of Sociology at Warsaw University, and I thank the University and the Ministry of Higher Education for facilitating my stay, even during the exceptional period of martial law. The library staffs at Warsaw University and Krakow's Jagiellonian University were also quite helpful. Among the various scholars who provided assistance (and let me add hastily that I do not mean to make anyone here co-responsible for my interpretations), I would like to thank Jerzy Jedlicki, Krystyna Kersten, Tadeusz Kowalik, Franciszek Ryszka, Jadwiga Staniszkis, and the late Jan Strzelecki from Warsaw, and Janusz Mucha from Krakow. Krzysztof Wyszkowski, founder of the Free Trade Unions of Gdansk (precursor to Solidarity), has been particularly helpful. An extraordinary individual, remarkable for his perceptiveness, his irreverence, and his unselfishness, Wyszkowski has always helped me think about Polish politics in excitingly unpredictable ways. Special thanks also to Pawel B~owski, Grzegorz Ekiert, Andrzej Flis, Nina and Antoni Hoffman, Kazimierz Kloc, Ireneusz Krzeminski, Jan Kubik, Hanka Mezer, Krzysztof Okopien, Anna Popiel, Jerzy Prus, Tom Swick, Jerzy Strzelecki, Anka Walendzik, Jan Wisniewski, as well as to B.G. and O.G., B.K., M.P., andJ.S. and E.S. Above all, I'd like to thank two very dear friends who have helped me in every possible way, two people without whose friendship and encouragement this book could not have been written: Roman Stachyra and Nina Gladziuk. Back in the States, there are also many people to thank. Lucjan Dobroszycki of the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research helped me through difficult moments with his support and his confidence. I am very grateful to Alexander Rolich, Slavic Bibliographer at the University of Wisconsin, for his superb professional abilities and his unselfish assistance, both of which were essential to the book. I thank James Weinstein and

Preface / xi Sheryl Larson of In These Times for encouraging, and publishing, my articles. To my cousin Dan Stern, lowe more than I could possibly recount here. He has continually forced me to ask new questions, just when I start getting comfortable with a spurious answer. His support and encouragement have helped me through the most difficult moments. My brother Fred has helped me greatly with both finances, which he doesn't have, and with friendship, which he has in abundance. For advice and support of various kinds, I would like to thank Jane Cave, Edward Cook, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Ewa Hauser, Kimberley Kinast, Joanne Landy, Elibieta Matynia, Maureen Meegan, Craig Rimmerman, Adam Ringer, Mark Rosenzweig, Peter Rossman, Tom Rutkowski, Andrzej Tymowski, Krystyna Warchol, Lawrence and Joanna Weschler, and Kenneth Westphal. Valerie Vistocco, Dawn Feligno, and Sue Yates helped in printing out drafts of the manuscript. Also, a very special thanks to Shirley Nelson, for her company and support during the crucial last phase of the book.

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Finally, with gratitude and love, I thank my mother Ruth and my late father Milton. They taught me the important questions in the world, prodded me to search for answers, and made sacrifices to enable me to pursue the search. If my father's demeanor helped me write the book, his questions helped inspire it, and how sad that we won't be able to quarrel over my perhaps still somewhat reckless answers. But I've been lucky. My parents' lives have been an inspiration for me. It is to them that I dedicate this book.

50UDARfTY

and the Politics of Anti-Politics Opposition and Reform in Poland since 1968

Abbreviations CTUC ISTU

Central Trade Union Council (government-sponsored trade union leadership body, 1980) independent self-governing trade union

KIK

Kluby lnteligencji Katolickiej: Catholic Intellectuals Clubs

KOR

Komitet Obrony RobotnikOw: Workers Defense Committee

KKW MKS

Krajowa Komisja Wykonawcza: National Executive Commission (of Solidarity; October 1987-) Mi~dzyzakladowy

Komitet Strajkowy: Interfactory Strike

Committee MKZ

Mi~dzyzaldadowy

Komitet Zaloiycielski: Interfactory Organizing

Committee NSZZ

Niezalezny samorzgdny zwigzek zawodowy: independent self-governing trade union (usually referred to as ISTU)

NTO

Nauka, Technika, O.fwiata: Science, Technology, Education (Warsaw-based trade union of academic employees, fall 1980)

OPZZ

Ogolnopolskie Porozumienie ZwigzkOw Zawodowych: National Federation of Trade Unions (official unions, 1983- )

PPR

Polska Partia Robotnicza: Polish Workers Party (communist party, 1943-1948)

PPS

Polska Partia Socjalistyczna: Polish Socialist Party (1892-1948)

PSL

Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe: Polish Peasant Party (1945-1948)

PZPR

Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza: Polish United Workers Party (communist party, 1948- )

TKK

Tymczasowa Komisja Krajowa: Provisional Coordinating Committee (of Solidarity underground, April 1982--October 1987)

TRS

Tymczasowa Rada Solidarnosci: Provisional Council of Solidarity (September 1986--October 1987)

ZNP

Zwigzek Nauczycieli Polski: Polish Teachers Union

xiv

ONE

The Style of Solidarity

This book can best begin with an explanation of its title. That the Solidarity movement is the main focus of the work is obvious. But what about the "politics of anti-politics"? This takes a bit more explaining. Solidarity came into existence claiming to be a non-political movement. "We don't want to engage in politics," the strikers in Gdansk told the government negotiating committee in August 1980. "We'll have nothing to do with politics. Politics is your business, not ours." The KOR opposition that preceded Solidarity, and from which the union borrowed so heavily, ideas as well as personnel, had argued the same thing. KOR (Workers Defense Committee) "was not a political movement but a social movement," wrote its historian and founding member Jan J6zef Lipski, repeating what KOR itself liked to repeat on many occasions. In fact, almost the entire post-1968 democratic opposition, right up to Solidarity, argued strenuously that its main activities were social, not political. These protestations were sincere-the opposition really did mean something by its rejection of politics-and yet they were also quite false, for it was obvious that the opposition did not reject politics altogether. Mter all, KOR and Solidarity were founded by many of Poland's leading political oppositionists. These included student radicals from the 1960s who had spent months and sometimes years in jail for their political activities. They wrote for political journals, studied political history, worked for political change, and were denounced by the government as political oppositionists. In other words, it would be absurd simply to say that these people were anti-political. They were obviously political, to themselves and to everyone else. When KOR and Solidarity claimed that they were not "political" movements, what they meant was that they did not want to challenge the Party's control of the state. "Politics" here meant the business of 1

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The Style of Solidarity

government, and, for reasons discussed below, by the early 1970S the opposition had declared this realm out of bounds. But by rejecting the state, the common-sense site of "the political," it was not rejecting politics altogether. Rather, the opposition had developed a different understanding of politics, one that focused on civic activity within society rather than on policy outcomes within the state. The title "politics of anti-politics," therefore, is meant to draw attention to precisely what this alternative conception of politics entailed. But that's not all. There's another element here. For why did the opposition reject "politics"? On the one hand, the post-'68 Polish opposition eschewed state politics because it knew that it could not compete. The events of 1968 (student protests, harsh Party repression, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia) seemed to make it clear that neither the Party nor the Soviet Union would allow challenges on this level. And so, if the opposition did not want just to close shop and abandon politics altogether, it had to give up trying to change government policy per se and try instead to organize citizens, to bring people together in civic activities not directly oriented to changing the state. In this version, "anti-politics" is only feigned indifference to the state. Yet that's not the whole story. The opposition ignored the state not only because it had to, but also because it wanted to. That is, the post-'68 opposition was a new kind of opposition in Poland, one that owed as much to the events of 1968 worldwide as it did to specifically Polish circumstances. The opposition rejected the state not just because it could not win there, but also because it did not want to win there. It was inspired by the same radical views of politics that inspired the new left in the West. This opposition did not want to possess power so much as to abolish it. It was, before all else, anti-authoritarian. KOR and Solidarity were directly connected to this radical opposition of '68 through personal and intellectual linkages alike. So "anti-politics" is not just the necessary rejection of the state but also the deliberate rejection of the state, the belief that what is essential to a just order is not a benign government and good people in power, but rather a vital, active, aware, self-governing, and creative society. The opposition turned to civil society not just because there was no other public sphere in which it could immerse itself, but also because there was no other in which it wanted to immerse itself. There was an anarchist streak in all this, a general rejection of power, an ethos of openness, and a sense that the object of political

The Style of Solidarity / 3 struggle was not just to change the government but to change personal life as well. The personal was political, too-this password of the Western new left could easily have been used by the Polish opposition of the seventies. In terms of ideas and even language, the links with Western radicals of the sixties were widespread. Jacek Kuroii, for example, probably the most important figure of the opposition of the 1970s, began his "career" as an oppositionist in 1964, when, together with Karol Modzelewski, he wrote the "Open Letter to the Party." Kuroii and Modzelewski denounced the communist regime for betraying the working class and the revolutionary cause ("The only road to progress is through revolution"), using language heard quite often from sixties radicals.! In fact, their analysis of the socialist system resembles the critique ofDany Cohn-Bendit, the anarchist of May 1968 fame in France. 2 By 1968, the younger student supporters of Kuroii and Modzelewski were organizing strikes in defense of academic, cultural, and political freedom. These student radicals, led by such Kuroii disciples (and future Solidarity activists) as Adam Michnik, Seweryn Blumsztajn, and Jan Lityiiski, most definitely felt themselves to be a fundamental part of the radical student movement worldwide. The political systems of East and West were different in reality, but not always in appearance. The way Michnik, Cohn-Bendit, Rudi Dutschke, and Tom Hayden saw it, everyone was fighting for the same thing. The Poles were fighting for basic democratic rights, but then that demand is what sparked the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1962, which precipitated the whole U.S. student movement in the sixties. The Berkeley movement began when the school administration banned political protest literature from the college campus, a basic violation of principles of free speech, and of course the civil rights movement was entirely a matter of extending basic democratic rights to a class of citizens who had been denied them. There was a sense of international solidarity in 1968, as well as in the civic protest movements that emerged afterward. When Michnik traveled to the West in 1976, he met and hung about with many of the new left activists he had heard about in 1968-and even in 1988, in a remarkable interview with Dany Cohn-Bendit, Michnik said that he still felt "loyal to the whole anti-authoritarian project [of 1968]," and that in going from student protests to Solidarity and beyond, he felt that he was continuing to struggle for the things that he and Cohn-Bendit and the others had begun fighting for twenty years earlier. 3

4 / The Style of Solidarity Between the radicals of East and West there were similarities in style, in dress, in artistic tastes, in sexual mores. Polish oppositionists of the late sixties and the seventies wore jeans and didn't mind looking disheveled, liked the "classic rock" of the sixties (when I visited Jan Litynski one morning he was listening to an old tape of the Velvet Underground) and the theater of the avant-garde (such as their own Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor), loved late-night parties with lots of drinking, politics, and dancing, and, as anyone associated with them will tell you, practiced a sexual freedom that rivaled anything the Woodstock generation might claim.4 The "anti-politics" of the post '68 opposition was thus not merely a tactical maneuver to avoid the repression of the state. It was part of a new world-view that felt that the state was not all-important, that it was not the key to making a better and more livable world, which is why people got involved in the first place. "Autonomy's slow revolution," wrote the Hungarian George Konrad, "does not culminate in new people sitting down in the paneled offices of authority." 5 It is not enough to change governments; you have to change people, too. The point of this antipolitical politics was to empower citizens, to arouse in people a sense of their own value, their worth, their dignity as humans and as citizens. In 1980- I 98 I, the word that reappeared in all discussions of the world Solidarity wanted to create was podmiotowosc. Awkwardly translated as "subjectivity," the word refers to the creative, active process whereby people become the "subjects" of history rather than its passive "objects." People must no longer be cogs in some machine, ordered around by an omniscient party or by anyone else, but must take an active, creative role in shaping the world around them, thereby shaping themselves in the process. This was the essence of the alternative politics espoused by KOR and Solidarity. Politics is, and should be, an active and widely accessible process where people jointly shape the world they live in. It is about communication and representation, about empowering citizens and building up independent civil society, and not about state power and domination over others. When Hannah Arendt says, "The raison d' etre of politics is freedom," 6 and understands power not as a sphere of human domination but one of communicative understanding;7 when Bernard Crick writes of politics as "a great and civilizing human activity," completely different from the struggle for state power;8 when Jiirgen Habermas understands politics in terms of communication and

The Style of Solidarity / 5 says that radical politics today means revitalizing the notion of citizenship, and certainly not having another "vanguard" take power-they are speaking of politics in a way that was close to the views of the post-'68 Polish opposition.9 This alternative view, however, was often described as non-political or anti-political because in common language (in the West as in the East) "politics" invariably pertains to the state. And so "politics" has had two meanings for the Solidarity opposition. On the one hand, politics refers to the state, where it is about power and control. On the other hand, politics is anti-politics, or anti-state, and refers to a public area of communication and openness in which free citizens interact with each other. Here, the concept of "civil society" is central, as discussed in Chapter Two. Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics, therefore, refers first of all to Solidarity's alternative conception of politics. What were the origins of this view? What exactly did Solidarity mean when it assured the government that it was not interested in getting "involved in politics"? And what did this pledge entail for Solidarity's practice? As we will see in Chapters Five and Six, Solidarity did try, in its first few months, to abide by the pledge. It thought it could engage in its "anti-political politics" (that is, reconstruct civil society) without touching upon the sphere of "high-political politics" (that is, the sphere of the state). Yet there was a problem here. If anti-politics meant ignoring the state, this could be practiced by an opposition group that the state did not recognize, such as KOR in the 1970s, but it could not be maintained by Solidarity. As I discuss in the next chapter, the Leninist party state is special in that it seeks to monopolize not just the government, but civil society as well. When Solidarity became a legal organization with which the Party had to negotiate, that monopoly was suddenly broken. Since the very existence of Solidarity altered the character of the state, Solidarity could no longer ignore the state. It tried to for a while, but could not do so for long. In other words, although Solidarity came into existence with an understanding of politics that ignored the struggle for power-as Bernard Crick writes, "Why call a struggle for power 'politics' when it is simply a struggle for power?" lO-within a year's time it realized that it could not ignore the question of state power after all. This brings us to the second meaning of the book's title. That is, what kind of politics (governmental politics) did Solidarity adopt after its anti-political strategy became obsolete? What kind of politics (in the

6 / The Style of Solidarity original, rejected sense) did Solidarity's anti-politics inexorably lead to? What kind of institutional solutions did Solidarity propose? Or, simply, what did Solidarity want? This is the question I first asked myself when I began thinking about Solidarity. Only as I pondered it did I see that a serious answer meant going through the complex levels of "politics" and "anti-politics" that I have outlined here.

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Of all the radical movements that emerged from the international protests of 1968, only in Poland did the movement return to playa crucial political role in the 1980s. In France, the United States, and Czechoslovakia, the '68 opposition has been co-opted, marginalized, and destroyed. In Poland it has lived on to playa key part in contemporary domestic politics. Where else is a '68 radical like Michnik such a key player today? Only the West German Greens show a similar link to the radicalism of the sixties. But Solidarity'S influence in Polish politics has surpassed the Greens' influence in German politics. What makes the Polish experience so fascinating is that there the radicals were not just talking about politics from the safe haven of irrelevance, where most radicals can usually be found. Instead they were actually negotiating with the government about the political future of the country. The Polish experience has been almost entirely ignored in recent books and discussions concerning the legacy of 1968, but Poland is central to that legacy. For all those who dismiss the radicals of the sixties as anti-modern romantics, with nothing to say about political institutions in the real world, the Solidarity experience constitutes the closest thing we have to an empirical test. The results are often quite surprising-particularly as Solidarity began to give up much of its initial anti-political radicalism and propose a "neocorporatist" arrangement with the Party (Chapter Six). In any case, the unique Polish experience can teach us a great deal about radical politics and reform politics, in the West, and now in the Soviet Union, as well as in Eastern Europe.

Right and Left Is it really fair to present Solidarity as an organization of the left? It is certainly true that the categories "right" and "left" do not apply easily

The Style of Solidarity / 7 in Poland, nor do they mean what Western "rightists" and "leftists" want them to mean. As Timothy Garton Ash wrote when the right and left in the West both tried to claim Solidarity for themselves, each side was only "projecting its own fantasies on to that far-away country about which so little is known." Ash therefore rejects the left-right distinction altogether. 11 When talking to Westerners, most East Europeans tend to agree. They are particularly fond of quoting Soviet exile Vladimir Bukovsky's remark upon coming to the West: "I do not come from the rightist camp or the leftist camp, I come from the concentration camp." Should we therefore reject the left-right distinction, too? I think not - i f only because Polish oppositionists have certainly not done so themselves. What Ash's and Bukovsky's comments have in common is that they are directed to a Western audience (an audience, it might be added, presumed to be more naive than, in the late 1980s, it probably is). When oppositionists speak among themselves, they have always spoken of left and right, and this is true for the periods before Solidarity, during Solidarity, and after the imposition of martial law. And the consensus within Poland is that Solidarity was most definitely "on the left." Indeed, after 1981 it became quite common to hear charges that Solidarity was "too leftist" an organization, and that this was precisely its problem! 12 So "right" and "left" most certainly do mean something in Poland. KOR is usually considered to be "on the left," while organizations like the Young Poland Movement and particularly the KPN (Confederation for an Independent Poland) are said to be "on the right." The intense battles that took place within Solidarity, in places like Warsaw and LOdi, were often seen inside Poland as a struggle between left and right. 13 The "left" includes those who emphasize the "self-organization" of society, who appeal to democratic socialist slogans of self-government, worker self-management, participatory democracy, and broad social justice. While they see a need for market mechanisms, they are concerned that the market not rule everything and that special care be given to those who lose out in the market. They usually feel an allegiance to the traditions of the Polish Socialist Party of the first half of the twentieth century, which defended cooperativist principles of social and political organization even as it was fiercely anti-communist and anti-Soviet. The right of course supports "self-organization" as well, but it understands that concept in more of an individualist than a collectivist manner. It wants political and economic participation to be recognized

8 / The Style of Solidarity as a right that committed individuals can avail themselves of, and not as a general principle to be urged upon all. The right is far less sanguine than the left about the wisdom or desirability of popular participation in political or economic management. Although the right opposes the powerful state of the communists, it supports the notion of a strong state in general, for it supports strong authority in general and feels that the participatory ethos of the left tends too much toward anarchy. Instead of "participation," the password of the right is "independence." Only in the mid-1980s did the right put an emphasis on marketization per se, and this was a time when many in the traditional left began doing so as well. Before instilling a respect for the market, the right wanted to instill a respect for authority, although an authority based on "merit" rather than "the masses." Where, then, did Solidarity fit in? The fact is that every single account I know of the Solidarity period, and particularly of its first months, describes Poland as a place burstiJlg and bustling with the participatory spirit. One can read the accounts of the Englishmen Neil Ascherson or Timothy Garton Ash, of the Canadian Stan Persky or the American Lawrence Weschler, of the Frenchman Jean Yves-Potel or the European Daniel Singer, of John Darnton in the New York Times or Bernard Guetta in Le Monde, of the capitalist Wall Street Journal or the socialist Labour Focus on Eastern Europe-all without exception describe the Poland of 1980 as a country in revolution, a place where people had come alive, where they had begun to act as free individuals able to form a new community apart from the false one imposed from above. People attended meetings and read the newspapers with a sense that the public world of politics was no longer just passing them by. They built new trade unions that they felt were really going to count. As in any revolution, people had that rare sense that they mattered, that what they thought and did might really make a difference in the world at large. They were, in short, acting as the "subjects" of politics. It was a world marked by podmiotowosc, the kind of world that has always been close to the dreams of the left. Needless to say, Polish accounts make the case even clearer: August 1980 was an emancipatory celebration of citizen participation-and this party would not end soon. The renowned journalist Ryszard Kapuscmski, in one of the first and best pieces on the significance of the 1980 general strikes, wrote:

The Style of Solidarity / 9 The workers on the Coast have smashed the old stereotypes of the "dumb prole." ... The young face of a new generation of workers has emerged: thoughtful, intelligent, conscious of its place in society, and most importantly, committed to drawing all the consequences of the ideological foundations of this system, according to which it is their class that plays the leading role in society. 14 Kapuscinski describes Gdansk and Szczecin as cities in which a new morality took control. No one drank, no one caused trouble, no one woke up crushed by a stupefying hangover. Crime fell to zero, aggression disappeared. People became friendly, helpful and open with one another. Total strangers suddenly felt that they needed each other. IS People were motivated not by "wage demands," but by "the dignity of man." Kapuscinski saw the 1980 events as "an attempt to create new relations between people, in every location and at every level." And the "guiding theme" of these events was "the principle of mutual respect, embracing everyone without exception." 16 These passages recall another one, by a different writer: It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and draped [with flags and banners]. . . . Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized. . . . Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared .... Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the . . . machine. Or take another passage, by yet another writer: Never before had [people] been so actively involved in real political decisions; never before were their voices heard so clearly in the public forum.

10 /

The Style of Solidarity

These could be descriptions of Poland in 1980, but they're not. In fact, the first passage is about revolutionary Barcelona in 1936, and the man describing this anarchist stronghold is none other than George Orwell. 17 The other quotation is from a different revolutionary period, May '68 in France, and is by the radical student leader Dany CohnBendit. 18 And it's really not surprising that the descriptions of previous leftist social insurrections sound like descriptions of the early days of Solidarity, for all of these events were marked by a burst of popular participation in politics, by people taking seriously the concept of "citizenship"-and it is this activity, this participatory ethic, that is the hallmark of the left. Not always the "old left" of the 1930S and 1940S (Orwell's Barcelona, after all, was subdued by the Communists well before the Fascists took over), but the new left of the generation of '68. How did the left become so strong in Poland? How did it become so influential in Solidarity? No doubt part of the reason lies in the official leftist ideology of the regime, which Kapuscinski alluded to above. When their grievances become intolerable, the workers naturally try to seize the factories that are supposed to be theirs anyway. They have a readymade ideology that the Party cannot easily reject. 19 But this is certainly not the whole truth. For although workers in socialist countries sometimes oppose the Party by demanding "real" workers' power, they are much more likely simply to retreat from politics altogether, or to express opposition in more passive ways, such as by doing shoddy work. Moreover, this explanation tends to take the official ideology far more seriously than the general population does, and ignores the extent to which state socialist systems, particularly in Poland, have tried to legitimate themselves with nationalist and authoritarian appeals, without always speaking of Marxism. No, leftist social initiatives did not come naturally in Poland. People had to create them. Oppositionists had to lay the groundwork, to build a movement that seriously tried to organize independent social initiatives and the kernels of new trade unions. It took conscious preparation, and this is where the Polish radicals from the sixties were so important. KOR played the central role, providing a direct link from the radicals of the sixties to Solidarity in the eighties. Moreover, although the idea of forming independent trade unions was first raised by the striking workers of Gdansk and Szczecin in 1970, it was KOR that did the most to perpetuate the idea in that decade. Not only did it endlessly propagate

The Style of Solidarity /

II

the idea of independent civic initiatives in general, but it was KOR, as well as independent leftists collaborating with it, that organized the influential Committee for Free Trade Unions in Gdansk in 1978, the leaders of which became leaders of Gdansk Solidarity two years later. The political connections between the ideas of the '68 opposition and the ideas of Solidarity will be discussed in detail in the chapters below. This is a good place to go over some of the many personal links . First, there were well-known people like Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski. Both had once been communists not only with a capital C (Party members) but with a small c as well, believers in radical egalitarianism and the need for working people to run their own lives. When released from jail after serving three years for publishing their "Open Letter," Kuron and Modzelewski had repudiated their Trotskyist call for a new workers' party to lead an "authentic" workers' revolution, but they had not repudiated their essential radicalism. (Even in 1984, Kuron was referred to by one Polish writer, with some exaggeration, as "the most leftist person" in the country.) 20 The most influential of KOR's founders, Kuron has remained at the very center of the opposition stage. His famous injunction-"Oon't bum down committees, found your own" -became a rallying cry of the 1970S opposition. After 1980 he became a top adviser to Solidarity's National Commission, and his articles and speeches have been published in union journals nationwide. All in all, Kuron has been one ofthe single most influential figures within the Solidarity movement. Modzelewski stayed away from opposition politics for quite some time after prison, devoting his considerable intellectual talents to Polish medieval history. By 1980, however, he had returned to playa central role in Solidarity both in Wroclaw, where he was one of the founders of the union, and on a national level, where he was a member of the National Coordinating Commission (forerunner of the National Commission), and for several months the national union's chief spokesperson. Kuron and Modzelewski were an inspiration for many of the student activists of 1968, and it was this group in particular-so many of whom also considered themselves communists with a small c-that played such a prominent role in the opposition of the seventies and then in Solidarity. Adam Michnik, who has referred to Kuron as his model and mentor, was a key figure in KOR and a leading adviser to Solidarity. His articles were published in union bulletins throughout the country, and

12 / The Style of Solidarity his advice was always widely sought after. Jan Litynski, another radical from 1968, edited the underground journal Robotnik (The Worker) in the 1970s. He exercised an influence in national union politics through his journalism and served as an adviser to Solidarity in Warsaw and in the Silesian city of Walbrzych. (In 1989, Kuron, Modzelewski, Michnik, and Litynski were all elected to parliament from the Solidarity slate.) Two important links between the left of the sixties and the opposition of the seventies and eighties are less well known: Antoni Macierewicz and Krzysztof Wyszkowski. Macierewicz, more than anyone else, was responsible for the formation of KOR. Born in 1948 and a teenager in the mid-1960s, he was already a great admirer of CM Guevara and Mao Zedong before becoming involved in the student protests of 1968. Even his college course of study revealed his radical interests. Whereas most Polish oppositionists immerse themselves in Polish history alone, Macierewicz studied Latin American history and society, even learning an ancient Mayan language. When President Richard Nixon visited Warsaw in 1972, Macierewicz tried to organize an independent demonstration to protest against American involvement in Vietnam. Closely following events in Chile, he was a strong supporter of the Maoist MIR party, which called on the Allende government to arm the workers so that they could take power into their own hands. When instead it was Pinochet who took power, Macierewicz helped some of the MIR activists find asylum in Poland (although they were reportedly deported soon afterward when they tried to organize strikes in their new country). In 1975 Macierewicz was a leader of the campaign to protest against proposed changes in the Constitution, and in 1976, after the arrest and persecution of hundreds of workers who had taken part in strike activity against price increases, he took the leading role in forming an organization to defend the workers. His persistent visits to other activists finally resulted in the formation of KOR. By 1980 Macierewicz's politics were moving to the right, and consequently away from KOR, but he remained an important adviser to Solidarity. KrzysztofWyszkowski, meanwhile, a brilliant, eclectic, self-taught political thinker, is important for his part in initiating the Free Trade Unions committee in Gdansk. He drafted the original statement for the Free Trade Unions after having studied the French anarcho-syndicalist movement of the early twentieth century.21 He was also an important influence on Lech Wal~sa. In fact, when Wal~sa learned about the Free

The Style of Solidarity / 13 1.J:ade Union movement from a KOR newsletter and decided to get involved, he went first to Wyszkowski. 22 Wal~sa valued Wyszkowski's advice highly enough to take him along on his important official visit to France in October 1981. Once the Gdansk Free Trade Unions got going in 1978, Wyszkowski, in his usual self-effacing way, withdrew for a time from active involvement. In 1980 he returned to take part in the Gdansk general strike, and in 1981 became associate editor of the nationwide Tygodnik Solidarnosc (Solidarity Weekly). The eternal radical, with an ingrained distrust of mass organizations, Wyszkowski was the only one on the staff who refused to become a formal member of Solidarity! Finally, three other former student radicals are worth mentioning for the influence they had on Solidarity: Miroslaw Chojecki, Konrad Bielitlski, and Seweryn Blumsztajn. The left set the tone for Solidarity at large primarily through its preeminence in the union press, and these three were key figures in the independent press from its illegal beginnings in the 1970S to its quasi-legal heyday in 1980-1981. Chojecki, as head of the first underground publishing house, Nowa, was the man chiefly responsible for constructing an underground press in the first place. Despite continual police harassment, Chojecki, a founding member of KOR, built up the production and distribution network that was of enormous importance for Solidarity after 1980. Konrad Bielmski, whose first major activity was to organize protests against the unification (that is, liquidation) of student organizations in 1973, later brought the press directly to the workers. It was he who came to the Lenin Shipyard in August 1980 to produce a newsletter (which he and Wyszkowski fatefully decided to title Solidamosc) for the strikers, lending them his organizational, technical, and editorial skills along with his general political orientation. If Bielinski introduced the press to Solidarity, it might be said that it was Seweryn Blumsztajn who introduced Solidarity to the press. Blumsztajn, another founding member of KOR, who had spent many months in jail for his role in the 1968 student protests, played a fundamental role in developing a union press nationwide in 1980-1981. He was the leading figure behind the creation of the national Solidarity press agency Agencja Solidamosc and the chief editor of the twice-weekly AS bulletin that functioned as the union's central archival source. Blumsztajn wrote widely on the problems of developing a union press (occasionally

14 I The Style of Solidarity

criticizing the tendency to mimic the style of party propaganda), and he organized meetings with, and conferences for, the dozens of new and inexperienced writers and editors who were popping up in every city, town, and factory. Overall, his influence on the union press was considerable, a fact recognized after martial law was declared when Blumsztajn, in Paris, acted as official Solidarity representative in meetings with various Western governments. The post-'68 left also had an important influence on younger Solidarity activists like Zbigniew Bujak (born in 1954). As Bujak himself acknowledges, he was one of the best pupils of such KOR activists as Litytlski and Michnik, who took him under their wing as a promising young working-class oppositionist at the Ursus Tractor Plant outside Warsaw. Bujak served as head of the powerful Warsaw Solidarity branch and, as a member of the National Commission, was frequently mentioned as a possible national leader of Solidarity. He was the leader of the Solidarity underground from the time martial law was imposed until his arrest in 1986, and has returned to a prominent position in the relegalized Solidarity of 1989.

A Postmodern Politics In an essay on the new opposition politics in Eastern Europe with the wonderful title Antipolitics, which I have borrowed for my own, the Hungarian writer George Konrad wrote the following: I am neither a communist nor an anticommunist, neither a capitalist nor an anticapitalist; if one must absolutely be for and against something, I consider a permanently open democracy to be the greatest good. 23 Probably no other passage states as neatly or as crisply just how the Polish left opposition perceived its goal: a "permanently open democracy." The phrase stresses process and goal alike, suggesting a strong sense of freedom and community at the same time. 24 Konrad's words are just another way of saying that the goal of "anti-politics" is some radically new kind of society. And this is what makes the Solidarity experience so fascinating: its difficult, dramatic, painful, and yet exhilarating

The Style of Solidarity I 15 search for that elusive "third road." The goal was a political arrangement neither capitalist nor socialist, neither East nor West, but something new and original, something that borrows whatever seems worthwhile from existing models without adopting anyone model altogether. It is for this reason that the Polish opposition rejected being pigeonholed into Western categories of "right" and "left." This is why they scorned naive questioners asking if they favored "capitalism" or "socialism." Their goal was autonomy, an open democracy, podmiotowosc; and their enemy was a party monopoly that sought to crush it all. Their goal was a political system centered on neither the state nor the market, but on the public sphere of a strong, pluralist, and independent civil society. What they coveted was the social space for a free public life. To the extent that capitalism provided for that space, they were "for capitalism." To the extent that capitalism limited social space according to market constraints, they were "against capitalism." And the same goes for "socialism." To the extent that it undercut market constraints on freedom, great; to the extent that it undercut democratic freedoms themselves, down with it. They sought autonomy within a stable democratic polity, where what was most important was not the final goal of a perfect world, but the continually open search for a better world. They rejected the old left with its vision of a perfect society because they knew it led to Lenin's "Kto-kovo" ("Who will beat whom?") understanding of politics, where either the good guys with all the answers triumph absolutely, or they are wiped out by the philistines who will lead society astray. This new opposition admitted that it did not have all the answers, and said that that was OK. The vagueness of "permanently open democracy" is one o(the things that made it so attractive, and so apt a description. They didn't know exactly what it meant. They didn't know what "the answer" was. What they knew, from thirty-five years of experience, was that believing one does know "the answer" is the source of the problem. KOR and Solidarity were on the left in that they favored a participatory democracy, encouraged the growth of new social movements and civic initiatives, and believed that people were freest and felt freest when engaged in the process of creating their own world around them. These ideas have always passed for "left" in Poland, and they pass for "left" in the West, too. This Polish left is different from the old left in that it is not out to seize state power, but it is different from most of the Western

16 / The Style of Solidarity new left in having a "left" government as its enemy. Far from being an obstacle to the development of an authentically new left, this was a great advantage. For it prevented the Poles from succumbing to the two delusions that sometimes (though certainly not as much as neoconservative critics maintain) afflicted their radical counterparts in the West: (I) that since "bourgeois democracy" is not democratic enough, perhaps it is not democratic at all; and (2) since Soviet-type socialism is our enemy's enemy, perhaps it is not so bad after all. Radicals in Poland did not have these problems. They could neither disdain democratic liberties (which they knew they desperately needed) nor, obviously, have any illusions about Soviet "socialism." In Poland, everything was somehow much clearer. So it is not surprising that an original left theory and practice developed there much better than they did anywhere else. What made this left so original was that it had given up all the utopias radicals so often cling to. It might best be called a postmodern left. This is a left past the age of innocence, past the utopias and the simple solutions. It knows that left traditions have been hopelessly compromised, but seeks to salvage something anyway. It represents a continuation of tradition, but also its transcendence.25 Postmodernism is an attempt to recapture concepts and traditions that have lost their freshness and power, that have already been compromised but nonetheless have something important to say.26 This postmodern left thus rediscovered the concept of civil society long after the left had discarded it (for reasons discussed in Chapter Two). It embraces civil society and pluralism, and freely appropriates from different spheres: the right, the left, the Catholic Church. 27 It doesn't worry that the lines are being blurred, because it knows that the lines have already been blurred. The postmodern left rejects finality and accepts inconsistency. It revels in a "love of difference and flux and the exuberantly unfinished," 28 and wants these values to be welcomed in a new political pluralism. There is no modernist, constructivist faith in the future here. No technology, either mechanical or social, can guarantee a life worth living. Only people actually living a worthy life can guarantee its reproduction. And this takes us back to the title. Some have spoken of a postmodem "anti-aesthetic" that is not a rejection of aesthetics but a reconceptualization of its values. 29 Anti-politics, similarly, is not a negation of politics, but a relocation of the political public from state to society. It is this "anti-political" project that is crucial to understanding Solidarity's

The Style of Solidarity I 17 practice. And this book is devoted to Solidarity's practice-how Solidarity came to be, what it stood for, how it tried to achieve its goals, how the state tried to prevent this, how its goals changed, why its goals changed, what became of Solidarity after the declaration of martial law in December 1981, and what its intentions were in the watershed Round Table negotiations of 1989, which led to Solidarity's relegalization and its entry into parliament.

•

•

•

The plan of the book is as follows. Chapter Two discusses the history and significance of the concept of "civil society" that is so central to the new politics of Solidarity. Chapter Three follows the Polish opposition from 1944 to 1970, when it was still "political" in the sense of being aimed at democratizing the government rather than civil society (pushing for "state democratization" over "societal democratization," in other words). In Chapter Four, I discuss some of the "anti-political" texts of the opposition of the seventies, trying to pinpoint some of the weaknesses that Solidarity after 1980 would have to address. A detailed analysis of Solidarity's changing political practice from August 1980 to December 1981 constitutes the heart of the book. Chapter Five deals with the first four months of this period, providing an account of the institutional development of Solidarity and the original formulation of its goals. Chapter Six shows how Solidarity began to give up its anti-political rejection of the state and move toward seeking a "neocorporatist" arrangement with it, a search that lasted until the declaration of martial law in December 1981. Chapter Seven concerns political developments in Poland following martial law, showing how after five years of "war," government and opposition began moving toward each other, seeing that in essence they still really needed each other, and thus bringing the idea of a neocorporatist arrangement back onto the agenda in 1988. Chapter Eight explores the international and theoretical ramifications of the Solidarity movement and suggests why the Soviet Union is likely to accept a new arrangement in Poland. Finally, an Epilog looks at the rapid series of events that led to the relegalization of Solidarity in April 1989 and considers what Solidarity's open entry into the world of politics might mean for the future.

TWO

Civil Society and the "Third Road"

What is "civil society?" For some years now, this rather oddsounding category has been creeping into discussions of contemporary politics.! In Western Europe, it has been a key concept of the new social movements of the last twenty years. In Poland, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, it became the central category of democratic oppositionist thought in the 1970s. The term grew so pervasive under Solidarity that when one Party official in 1988 wanted to mock Solidarity's program, he did so by making derisive reference to "His Excellency, Civil Society." 2 What-this chapter asks-is all the fuss about? The concept of civil society is an old one. It had its greatest currency in political theory of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, and reached simultaneously a zenith and nadir in the works of Marx. Significantly, the original German term, burglische GesellschaJt, can be translated either as "civil society" or "bourgeois society." When Marx, in a process discussed below, essentially reduced the problems of the state to problems of the economy, he unmistakably gave the term a "bourgeois" bent; not surprisingly, Marx's use of the term has almost always been translated as "bourgeois society." Marx's usage stuck, and subsequently the analysis of civil society was usually reduced to an analysis of the market system. The concept thereby disappeared from political discourse for well over a century, until social upheavals in the 1960s and 1970S precipitated a revival. Its revival today in Europe is connected with important contemporary developments; most important, it is connected with the problem of statism. The twentieth century has witnessed the rise of strong, activist states throughout the world. In Europe, statist development took off particularly after World War II, in response to popular demands for orderly economic development and for increased social welfare programs. The growth of the state was defended as a "democratic" development: the 19

20 / Civil Society and the "Third Road" state would extend to all citizens the opportunities and benefits previously accessible only to the few. 3 In Western Europe, statist tendencies were sanctioned by electoral ballots; in Eastern Europe, they were imposed from without and were incomparably more extensive, but there, too, the justification was that the strong state would take care of those basic needs of the population that had previously been ignored. These claims were initially quite convincing. Mter all, who else but the state was big enough to reconstruct whole countries destroyed by war? By the 1960s, however, the claims had worn thin. Higher standards of living and more extensive education had contributed to a widespread feeling that the state no longer needed to dominate public life, that citizens could and should take a greater role in planning their own lives.4 And so the original, non-economic understanding of civil society began to re-emerge. If the cause of democracy once could be advanced by a strong state counteracting the inefficient and inegalitarian trends of a free market, the cause of democracy now seemed to require a fight against an overly large state itself. New democratic theorists and activists sought to oppose the state not in the name of the prewar free market, but in the name of a free, mature community of independent citizens. This brought them back to an appreciation of a model of political life dating to the old Greek polis, a political community of cultured citizens freely discussing politics and coming to an informed judgment. It seems that by the 1960s, many people in both East and West thought that such a community could really exist-if only the twin obstacles of state and market could be overcome. The 1960s saw a huge expansion of citizen movements everywhere, causing state leaders everywhere to speak of impending "anarchy" and "chaos." The charges were similar whether they issued from Warsaw or Paris, Belgrade or Rome, Mexico City or Chicago. Although the new citizen movements were defeated in the 1960s, their theorists sought a way to defend the movements' democratic claims. They wanted to refute the charges that these movements were trying to sow anarchy or reject modernity. And it was in this context that the concept of civil society found its way back to the center of political discourse. Theorists began recalling that civil society referred to the public space for citizens to interact as equals on a variety of levels, not just the level of the marketplace. It referred, perhaps above all, to what Jiirgen Habermas called the "public sphere," public space where citizens discuss politics and form public opinion, which acts as a control upon the "ruling struc-

Civil Society and the "Third Road" /

21

ture organized in the form of the state." 5 The idea of civil society, in other words, was that private citizens, individuals not in government, had a legitimate public role to play in the political life of their country. Things "public" or "political" were not just the property of the state; they belonged to citizens (sometimes absurdly called "private citizens") as well. Reviving the concept of civil society was a way to recapture the idea of a public realm away from the modern distinction between public and private, where what is "public" is considered to be open to government intervention and only what is "private" is considered outside government's reach. Civil society is a public sphere of social interaction that has nothing to do with government. According to the theorists of the post- '68 generation of East European activists, the role of citizens could not be reduced to providing support for the omniscient rulers of the Party, as Soviet theory would have it. Nor did it mean, as Joseph Schumpeter argued in his very influential prescriptive theory of Western democracy, that the citizens just elect their leaders every few years and then retreat from politics altogether, under the premises that "once they have elected an individual, political action is his business, not theirs," and that "acceptance of leadership is the true function of the electorate."6 Theorists of the "new politics" 7 argued that there were other models of a democratic polity, models in which independent citizens play a key political role outside government. These democratic political functions of an independent and self-conscious citizenry were said to be part of civil society, a sphere of political life that was being beaten down by statist systems in both East and West. The concept of civil society is intended, therefore, to highlight the public role of citizens outside the government. As citizens demanded to be heard in new ways, they argued that the system had to allow new forms of expression. Democracy could no longer mean the continual expansion of the state; citizens were too wise for that now. Democracy now meant expansion of the political rights of citizens. A revitalized democracy meant a revitalized civil society.

Capitalism and Civil Society If there were similarities in the demands of radicals in both East and West, there were also many differences stemming from the fact that

22 /

Civil Society and the "Third Road"

civil society is organized differently in capitalist and in state socialist societies. To understand Solidarity, its underlying political theory and its goals, we need to understand the Marxist and Leninist approach to civil society. But this can best be understood by contrasting it with the relationship of capitalism to civil society. Insofar as "civil society" refers to the public space where citizens communicate and interact on the basis of their various particular interests, the concept assumes that citizens have legitimate particular interests. Citizens have interests as businesspeople or industrialists, as laborers or students, as intellectuals or farmers, as journalists or steelworkers. Does each system allow these interests to be represented publicly and independently? Because capitalism must at least provide for independent business interests, capitalist systems must to some degree be open to an independent civil society. Capitalist social systems must permit a fairly large share of social space independent of the state in order to allow for private economic transactions. Social space open to some, however, is potentially accessible to all. This can hold true even under a dictatorship. In other words, it is often possible to utilize the social space open to business in order to pursue activities that would not otherwise be tolerated. A consulting firm legally formed, in a dictatorship, to offer advice on small business ventures may simultaneously be committed to researching the ill effects of economic policy on the poor. A small company legally allowed to import rugs may be chiefly designed to offer financial and employment support to political oppositionists, who would be less likely to survive if the state were the sole employer.8 Privately owned communications media can play an especially significant role. They may employ writers critical of the dictatorship and may gradually shift public opinion away from it (as happened, for example, in Somoza's Nicaragua and Marcos's Philippines). These are possibilities in a capitalist economy. They are not, however, essential to a capitalist economy. Indeed, pursuing such activities in a capitalist dictatorship requires the utmost courage, as there is a considerable chance that using one's legal rights in this way will bring down the full repressive power of the state. Pre-Sandinista Nicaragua, or contemporary E1 Salvador or Guatemala, gives us a frightful number of examples of murderous repression unleashed against those who use the legal capitalist public sphere for humanitarian or oppositionist pursuits. These are telling reminders of the limitations of the market's

Civil Society and the "Third Road" / 23 public sphere, too often forgotten by capitalism's defenders. Nevertheless, it is often possible to utilize the social space kept open and legal by capitalism to organize pressure for political democratization. The critical role played by such societal actors as business associations, cultural associations, student unions, and trade unions in providing the conditions for the transition to electoral democracy in Spain, Greece, and Portugal has been noted by many writers. 9 If capitalism accepts the right of independent social representation, although imperfectly, what is its relation to the public sphere? Habermas, who dates the origins of the public sphere to eighteenth-century Europe, writes: By "the public sphere" we mean first of all a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens . . . . Citizens behave as a public body when they confer in an unrestricted fashion-that is, with the guarantee of freedom of assembly and association and the freedom to express and publish this opinion-about matters of general interest. 1O The principles of the public sphere are the principles of publicity and openness (as in Konrad's "permanently open democracy"). For public opinion to be formed freely, political information must be publicly accessible. Political institutions must not enshrine themselves in secrecy (a principle Solidarity took particularly to heart, leading it to publish unauthorized stenographic reports of the meetings of its top leaders). An open public sphere requires that information about the activity of governmental bodies be accessible to the public, as should procedures like trials and court hearings, something Hegel also considered an essential aspect of civil society. 11 For Habermas, the public sphere includes newspapers and magazines, radio and television, as well as schools, meeting halls, cafes, and other public spaces where citizens meet to exchange ideas. Most people in any political system participate in politics primarily through participation in the public sphere. The state guarantees-or should guarantee-the existence of the public sphere, but is not directly apart ofitY Just as for Hannah Arendt politics is possible only with freedom, so for Habermas a public sphere entails full civic freedom. The idea of the

24 / Civil Society and the "Third Road" public sphere carries with it an ideal of perfect, undistorted communication between citizens. Does Western capitalist society meet this ideal? Habermas saw a number of obstacles. One of these, ironically, came from democratization itself, and particularly from the entry into the public sphere of workers and other previously excluded social groups. This development changed the way political decisions were made. As Habermas puts it, "Laws which obviously have come about under the 'pressure of the streets' can scarcely be understood as arising from the consensus of private individuals engaged in public discussions." 13 His point is not that before the "entry of the masses" political decisions did arise from such a consensus, but only that mass participation does not necessarily imply an ideal public sphere. The communicatory ideal is also threatened by demands for efficiency, which lead to efforts to ignore the public. "Large organizations," writes Habermas, "strive for political compromises with the state and with each other, excluding the public sphere whenever possible." 14 More than anything, however, it is pressures from the marketplace that damage the possibilities of a free public sphere. Capitalist democracy does permit freedom of the press and of assembly. Anyone may start a newspaper or magazine, or, in the United States, buy a radio or television station. The limitations are posed mainly by the marketplace. Yet it is precisely this limitation that robs the public sphere of its open and accessible character. To put it simply, although anyone "may" start a newspaper, in reality only those with lots of money, or with backers with lots of money, can do so effectively. More than the power of ideas, therefore, it is the power of money that secures influence in the public sphere. The public sphere survives in a society dominated by the market -indeed, it does better than in the classic state socialist system-but it survives in an incomplete and unsatisfactory condition. IS

State Socialism and Civil Society To understand the Polish situation, we must explore the relationship between state socialism and civil society. Here, one must begin by looking at orthodox Marxism's critique of civil society, and that means looking at Marx and Lenin. Marx's concept of civil society comes directly from Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Hegel's political architectonic

Civil Society and the "Third Road" / 25 distinguishes among three different levels of social life: family, civil society, and the state. Civil society denotes the sphere of social activity that mediates between individuals, with their private and familial affairs, and the state, with its universal concerns. 16 Hegel's civil society is made up of three "moments": the capitalist marketplace (what Hegel calls "the system of needs"), political democratic principles based on legality and publicity (Hegel's "administration of justice"), and diverse societal interest groups (Hegel's "corporations"). The central element for Hegel is the "system of needs," or the bourgeois free market economy. Hegel's concept of the marketplace as the social space for the exchange of goods and services among individuals relies heavily on the work of Adam Smith. The logic of the marketplace is said to require that individuals refrain from any consideration outside their own private interests. The intensely private and particularistic orientation of the system of needs reaches out to the universal through the "administration of justice," or law. Although it is grounded in the right of private property, law goes beyond the particular insofar as it is universally valid. Law presupposes universality, according to Hegel. It is "concerned with freedom." 17 As for the actual social mechanism to mediate between the individualism of the marketplace and the universal interests of the state, Hegel proposes "the corporation." Society's diversity is recognized through the existence of different societal interest groups, but in Hegel's theory these are not and ought not be granted full independence from the state. The political public sphere would be part of Hegel's "moment" of legality, or the "administration of justice," but there is no explicit discussion of the uniqueness or the significance of the public sphere as such. The separation of civil society from the state is, for both Hegel and Marx, a necessary, although simultaneously unhappy, feature of modernity. In accord with the period in which they lived, both thinkers had the greatest admiration for what was perceived as the "naive" unity of state and society in the age of antiquity, particularly in ancient Greece .18 Although the emergence of a formally autonomous civil society was seen as a necessary and desirable historical fact, allowing for the free and full development of the self-determining human being, something that had been stifled by feudalism, it had serious negative effects as well. For although the individual became free, community life seemed to disintegrate, leaving only, as one writer has paraphrased Marx's and

26 / Civil Society and the "Third Road" Hegel's view, "an impersonalized system of atomized, privatized individuals confronting one another in the egoistic pursuit of their own self-interests." 19 Neither thinker, naturally, believed this a satisfactory culmination of human history. Marx's attitude to bourgeois civil society fully reflected this ambivalent appreciation of its value. On the one hand, he was a great defender of its democratic accomplishments and sought the extension of democratic rights to greater numbers of people and more areas of social life. On the other hand, the implication of one of Marx's crucial theoretical categories, the "universal class," was to negate the importance of democratic civil society, to see all of existing civil society as merely the paraphernalia of the capitalist "system of needs," which must be superseded by the higher social system of the proletariat. Jean Cohen, in her book Class and Civil Society, has provided the best account of Marx's changing approach to the notion of "civil society." Marx's earliest writings, she shows, particularly from around 1840-1843, consistently manifest the first of these tendencies. Here, Marx sees features such as universalistic norms of citizenship, principles of legality, and a formally democratic and constitutional state as fully positive developments. The problem is only that they are poorly and inadequately realized in the modern, class-ridden reality. Thus, Marx's original strategy is one of "immanent critique," the contrasting of norm and reality. He denounces civil society for not realizing its own universal claims. Marx is the radical democrat, demanding that civil society be truly universal, and that its classic liberal program be implemented in political life and not only in economic life. Thus, he demands the abolition of censorship and the consistent realization of the representative principle in government. This is perhaps best represented by his essay On the Jewish Question. By the time of his 1844 Manuscripts, however, Marx had discovered political economy, and he was swept away by it. "Immanent critique" gave way to the search for the one, true, underlying principle behind the entire unjust totality. He discovered this, of course, in the economy. As Cohen writes, "The fundamental difference between the concept of civil society here and previously lies in the reconstitution of its definitive representations . . . as the surface expressions of a deeper reality: the labor/property relation." 20 Civil society now becomes a hoax. It cannot be criticized for not being fully democratic, for Marx now sees that it

Civil Society and the "Third Road" / 27 is simply not capable of being fully democratic. "Civil society" is thus nothing more than "bourgeois society," as the "system of needs" is no longer one "moment" but the "truth" of civil society. The political dimension of Hegel's original schema, the "administration of justice," disappears here entirely, soon to be relegated to the lesser status of "superstructure. " These theoretical conclusions presented Marx with a problem. If civil society is nothing but the capitalist market, how can democracy be achieved? If civil society, contrary to what Marx asserts in On the Jewish Question, is incapable of realizing universal democratic principles, then the question is, what can? Hegel's institutional solution to the problems of modernity was the corporate organization of society. Corporate bodies are the social institutions that mediate between the interests of society ("particular") and the interests of the state ("universal"), and that chiefly serve the interests of the latter. Marx, of course, rejects this solution because it leaves fully intact the class divisions of civil society that he has identified as the root of the problem. The fateful step, however, is Marx's rejection of any institutional solution whatsoever. Civil society as such becomes absolutely irredeemable. Universality can be salvaged, but not through any readjustment within civil society. It is salvaged through a Hegelian deus ex machina, a new universal class. Thus, in late 1843, Marx speaks of a class in civil society that is not of civil society, a class that is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society having a universal character because of its universal suffering and claiming no particular right because no particular wrong but unqualified wrong is perpetrated on it; a sphere that can invoke no traditional title but only a human title, ... a sphere, finally, that cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all the other spheres of society, thereby emancipating them; a sphere, in short, that is the complete loss of humanity and can only redeem itself through the total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat.21 Here Marx steps outside the bounds of the political economy in which he had just immersed himself. Political economy showed him the problem

28 / Civil Society and the "Third Road" with civil society. Marx, however, did not want to give up the struggle for "unity" (in this case the unity of state and society), which was the indispensable category of French democracy and post-Kantian German philosophy. Marx turned to British political economy because he could not find the answer to the actual problems of civil society in German philosophy. In his study of political economy he tries to identify what it is in the capitalist economy that produces, and necessarily reproduces, so much substantive inequality. He points to the intrinsically unequal relationship between capital and labor, both of which are nominally free, but only one of which systematically comes out on top. Moreover, he documents the political measures undertaken by the authorities, such as the "enclosures" in Britain, which contribute to the domination of one class over others. Such analysis suggests that other political measures might be taken to undercut this domination. It suggests, in other words, that some institutional solution to the problems of bourgeois civil society might be possible. Marx disliked Hegel's anti-democratic "corporatist" solution, which would only institutionalize the class domination of the bourgeoisie. But he apparently convinced himself, at least theoretically, that this was the only possible institutional solution. Rather than search for a different arrangement, one that might democratize civil society by allowing for the articulation "of all interests and the participation of all pluralities in sociopolitical life," Marx rejected the search for an institutional solution and chose to follow Hegel (against Hegel) with a search for the "real" universal class. 22 In the end, Marx reconceptualized British political economy in a quintessentially Hegelian manner. David Ricardo provided the link. His theory of value, identifying labor as the source of all wealth, provided Marx with the empirical justification for his "discovery" of the new universal class. Marx's theoretical rejection of problematic civil society in favor of a simplistically sublime new universal class had fateful practical consequences. This new direction prevented Marx from salvaging the democratic values that he had championed and that he clearly still valued. For when he rejected civil society altogether, he rejected not just the "negative" aspects, but the crucial "positive" ones as well, such as the formally democratic polity, the principles of legality, and the universality of citizenship, all of which Marx had recognized as universally

Civil Society and the "Third Road" / 29 valid ideals. And he would continue to champion these ideals in the future, in all his political writingS. 23 But his theoretical discovery of the new universal class, which would provide the theoretical foundations of Leninism, was at odds with his radically democratic predilections. Marx's "real" universal, of course, turns out to be neither the "bureaucracy" of Hegel's political philosophy nor the "philosopher" of Hegel's speculative philosophy, but the proletariat. That class "surpasses" the tensions between the particular and the universal, the public and private, the personal and political, all inherent in civil society, by "abolishing" civil society. "Unity" is recovered. State and society are "de-differentiated." 24 It is a premodern goal, the attempted realization of which in the modern world can only result in the state's subsuming both society and economy. Moreover, since mediating social institutions are considered "irrelevant," this "solution" secures neither a noncapitalist basis for individual autonomy nor the possibility of authentic popular participation in the political life of the new state. Finally, the program implies totalitarian aspirations. 25 For, as Lenin understood, it can only be realized by a party (particular) that dubs itself "universal" (since it is "of the working class") and seizes state power. Its particular interests are then proclaimed universal interests against the "particular" interests of the citizens themselves. Principles of universality are no longer recognized in civil society, for they are now said to be embodied in the state. The principle of plurality hereby becomes only an intolerable smokescreen for the revival of particular interests. Thus, Lenin was being a perfectly legitimate Marxist by demanding a Constituent Assembly when in opposition, and by dispersing it after his party came to power. The positive aspects of civil society become negative when the universal class runs the state. The rejection of any institutional solution to the dilemmas of civil society was the fateful turn that provided the basis for Bolshevism's drive in Russia and Eastern Europe to stamp out any social sphere independent of the state. Here we get to the crucial point: that the relationship between state socialism and independent civil society is necessarily hostile. If civil society is only a breeding ground for noxious particular interests, it needs to be suppressed, in order that universal interests can be achieved. Thus, there is room for neither the organizational representation of particular societal interests, nor an independent political public sphere. Leninist state socialism therefore aims to prevent the development of any

30 / Civil Society and the "Third Road" independent civil society. It blocks such a development in the economy by nationalizing industry. This allows for the possibility of a planned economy that can reduce capitalism's most intolerable substantive inequalities (and it is this, of course, that provides for Leninism's continued appeal in the Third World), but it also prevents the consolidation of societal groups with particular interests based on property ownership. Laborers, of course, still exist, but their right to independent representation is undercut by the myth that the proletariat, through the party, runs the state that employs them. As for the political public sphere, this is also nationalized by the state in order that it may serve "universal" interests only, and not the now-obsolete "particular" ones. Such are the theoretical implications of Leninism for civil society. The practice I examine in following chapters. In the post-Stalinist period, the USSR and the East European countries began to reach out to some particular interests-to technical experts, for example. 26 But before the rise of Solidarity, societal groups were not permitted to represent themselves irulependently. Civil society suffocated, and its revival did not appear imminent. The demand for the reconstruction of civil society invariably becomes a radical one.

The "Third Road" A capitalist system gives us a civil society centered on the market. Market factors mean that citizens can obtain political influence by buying their way into the public sphere. The public sphere in capitalist society is thus limited by the market because not all citizens have an equal opportunity to participate, regardless of the force of their ideas. A state socialist system gives us a civil society centered on the state. Instead of the market's selecting which voices are heard in the public sphere, the Party decides. With social groups forbidden (until recently) to articulate their own particular interests, the state monopolizes civil society and smothers the right of free discussion. For those who seek extensive citizen participation in politics, for the advocates of "permanently open democracy," neither system is the answer. Statist and market principles both appear as a constraint on public freedom. And so, the idea of a "third road"-a civil society based

Civil Society and the "Third Road" / 31 neither in the state nor in the marketplace, but in a vibrant political public sphere itself. This seems to be the theory underlying the post-'68 social movements of Eastern and Western Europe. Indeed, Solidarity's practice in its first months of existence makes a great deal of sense if we understand it as being based on this theory. Discussion clubs, political forums, independent social organizations, diverse newspapers, numerous ad hoc organizations: these constitutive elements of a democratic public sphere are not mere means to an end (that is, "power") as they were for many previous social movements, but are ends in themselves. This approach, this "anti-political third road," seems to link groups as diverse as Solidarity, the Greens, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, the human rights movement and Christian base communities in Latin America, and the ecological and women's movements in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. 27 If these movements fetishize anything, it is the value of free and undistorted communication, a belief that links them with the Enlightenment's view of a world based on Reason as well as with Habermas's cautious utopia of communicative competence. This is the "anti-politics" of modern social movements. 28 The theory has entered political discourse in different ways. For example, despite the fact that the Marxist tradition devastated civil society in Eastern Europe, it is the Marxist tradition that is largely responsible for reintroducing the concept of civil society in Western Europe. I have already discussed Jiirgen Habermas, from the "Western Marxist" tradition of the Frankfurt School, but of course Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist of the "old left," also played a key role. 29 Gramsci's recognition of the importance of non-state activities and of autonomous social organizations has been crucial to recapturing a notion of politics that is not centered on the state (even if Gramsci himself continued to see state power as the ultimate goal). In Eastern Europe, however, the conservative tradition has been most important: particularly the traditions of Tocqueville and of Hannah Arendt. All four of these theorists understand the primacy of politics-politics as communication among free citizens, societal politics as opposed to state politics-in a way that transcends the "left-right" distinction that might divide them. Gramsci's "civil society" and Habermas's "public sphere" are quite similar to what Tocqueville calls "political society." 30 And in all these theories there is a vision of a third road-whether it is Tocqueville's project for

32 / Civil Society and the "Third Road" strengthening "political society" against threats from the state and market, Arendt's quest for the revival of the polis, or Habermas's emphasis on the revitalization of the public sphere. What makes Solidarity so interesting is that it inherited this tradition and then actually tried to do something about it-tried, that is, to take that mysterious "third road."

THREE

The Genesis of Political Opposition in Poland: 1944-1970

Anti-politics, with its effort to democratize civil society rather than the state, emerged in Poland only in the 1970s. Before then, the political opposition set its goals on the transformation of the state. Without providing a detailed history, this chapter outlines developments in these years and tries to show that the Polish opposition-from the origins of "People's Poland" in 1944 through the "revisionist" challenge of the mid-1950S up to the ouster of Wladyslaw Gomulka in 1970-persistently understood politics as being about state power. Why this focus on the state? In the first place, it seemed obvious, particularly just after the war. With the defeat of the Nazis, the numberone question was, quite simply, who would control the postwar Polish state? Socialist, communist, and bourgeois parties all agreed that the desired political system could only be realized when their own party held state power. Before civil society could be organized, the question of state power had to be resolved. Yet even after this question was answered decisively in favor of the Communists, the political opposition that emerged after the Stalinist period maintained this orientation. And so the other reason for the perseverence of the state strategy was that it seemed to have a chance of succeeding. As this chapter argues, in the period from 1944 to 1968, with the exception of the Stalinist years between 1948 and 1954, the Polish opposition always had reason to believe that its political strategies might succeed in transforming the state or changing its policies. And as long as success seemed possible, there was neither reason nor motive to reject the strategy and search for another. It was only when the system appeared to be incapable of reform that the state orientation was seen as hopeless. This juncture came in 1968, with the twin developments of the 33

34 / Genesis of Political Opposition in Poland "March events" in Poland and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. At that point, the opposition needed to find a different orientation in order to avoid sinking into passivity and despair.

Opposition in the Era of "People's Democracy" It is easy to say with hindsight that the East European "People's Democracies" were frauds from beginning to end, and that the noncommunist oppositions never had a chance. But even if it was already clear in 1944 that the communist parties were laying a very privileged claim to power, that did not necessarily mean that they would prevail absolutely. Politics is always a risky and treacherous endeavor. l Political outcomes are the product of human choice and popular activity, even if not exclusively so. The case against historical determinism is too well known to warrant treatment here. 2 It is interesting to note, however, that deterministic reasoning tends to dominate the non-communists' explanation for their defeat in Eastern Europe far more than it does the communists' explanation for their victory. Polish Communists announced the formation of a new government already in July 1944,3 a full six months before the end of the Nazi occupation of Warsaw. They held power on their own until international pressure forced them to admit several leading representatives of the London government-in-exile. In June 1945 the premier of the exile government, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, returned to Poland to become vice-premier in a government dominated by the Communists and their left-wing socialist supporters. The ultimate goal of Mikolajczyk's Polish Peasant Party (PSL) was to establish a parliamentary polity with a strong market economy. The short-term goal was simply to prevent the Communists from monopolizing power. Mikolajczyk hoped to win the free elections that the Yalta accord had mandated. This did not happen, of course, but the outcome was not so obvious at the time. In fact, in late 1945 Hungary's very similar Peasant Party did win the elections held there. Whether the communist authorities would accept the results was uncertain, but the Hungarian experience, combined with the fact that the PSL was a legal party-with offices throughout the country, its own national and local press, and the right to hold public forums-seemed to indicate

Genesis of Political Opposition in Poland / 35 that political struggle aimed at democratizing the state was not doomed to fail. The PSL faced extraordinary difficulties. Harassment and repression were often intense: PSL newspapers were subjected to harsh censorship, and its meetings were frequently broken up. Members were arrested on false charges and blackmailed by the police. 4 Sometimes they were just assaulted in the streets, and when these attacks were reported to the police, the latter often suggested that the assaults were the work of the armed right-wing underground, which had declared war against all "collaborators" with the government, in which Mikolajczyk was still vice-premier. Usually, however, police authorities made the opposite charge: that the PSL was working with the armed underground. In May 1946, for example, all PSL activity in two regions of the country was shut down on precisely these grounds.s Yet despite all the repression, it was still possible to conduct a quasiparliamentary opposition based on legal, independent political parties. And as long as this was possible, it made no sense to give it up. The political situation was unsettled throughout Eastern Europe; its utter hopelessness was obvious only in retrospect. The struggle did not yet seem senseless. Of course, many believed that it was. But that position led to despair or passivity, not to political opposition. The London exile government provided the best example of this. Its leaders angrily denounced Mikolajczyk as a traitor for his decision to conduct parliamentary opposition inside Poland. Yet their only alternative was to agitate for a new war between the Western allies and the Soviet Union, after which, they believed, they would return to introduce a capitalist polyarchy in Poland.6 They believed this war to be quite likely. But counting on war meant that the task of organizing opposition inside Poland was of minor importance. If one did not want to depend on a new war, and was determined to carryon some kind of opposition politics inside Poland, the primary way to pursue this, during the 1944-1948 period, was through legal party politics. For example, when Zygmunt Zulawski, the influential socialist leader of the prewar years, quit the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) in 1946, he devoted his energies to building another party, the Polish Social-Democratic Party. When this project failed to get government approval, Zulawski withdrew from oppositional activity

36 / Genesis of Political Opposition in Poland altogether. He saw no other way, at that time, to carry on a political struggle. This period of legal opposition did not last very long. The parliamentary elections that finally took place in January 1947 were rigged to ensure the defeat of the PSL and the triumph of the Polish Workers Party (PPR).7 (The PPR was the Polish communist party; it ran as part of the "Democratic Bloc," which formally included the PPS and two minor parties, the Democratic Party and the Peasant Party, that were closely tied to the communists.) In the months following the elections, conditions for political opposition rapidly became intolerable. Although the party itself formally remained legal, PSL activists were regularly arrested and jailed, its papers frequently confiscated, its headquarters and meeting places repeatedly raided. The only other non-communist party to field an independent slate of candidates, the Church-affiliated Party of Labor (Stronnictwo Pracy), decided to disband rather than face the repression. 8 In October 1947 Mikolajczyk fled the country to avoid arrest. Within a matter of months his party was forcibly merged into the Peasant Party to form the United Peasant Party. Only a handful of Mikolajczyk's people remained in the "united" party. A few months later the Polish Socialist Party was merged into the Polish Workers Party to form the ruling Polish United Workers Party (PZPR). The period of party opposition had come to an end. Finally, a word needs to be said about the Polish Socialist Party. The PPS was one of the strongest parties in the interwar period, with a commitment to parliamentary government, state intervention to help the poorest, and support for cooperative efforts. The postwar PPS, however, was controlled by those who had been the left opposition of the prewar PPS. The left's success was partly due to the party leadership's decision in 1939, only days after the German invasion, to dissolve the party. As might be expected, this led to the rise of many socialist movements during the war, each claiming to be the real heir to the PPS tradition. The confusion ultimately enabled the left wing to seize the initiative in 1944 and announce the "rebirth" of the PPS. 9 In contrast to the prewar PPS, whose hostility to capitalism was always tempered by a far greater fear of communism and an overriding commitment to parliamentary democracy, the "reborn" PPS was every bit as hostile to capitalism as the PPR was. Like the PPR, the new PPS considered the prewar Polish governments to have been fascist dictator-

Genesis of Political Opposition in Poland / 37 ships that kept the masses utterly impoverished and prepared the way for the cataclysmic war and occupation. Its members were as committed as the Communists to ending the reign of capitalist exploitation, and they felt that now, after the cataclysm, the great opportunity had arrived. They themselves were not communists. They were opposed to state control of the entire economy. Against "nationalization" they posed the slogan "socialization." Their economic emphasis was on the creation of cooperatives. But this notion had a political corollary as well; it implied people organizing society for themselves, running their own lives. Seeking full autonomy for society, they were, in a sense, the precursors of the I970S social movements, of the program of societal democratization. But in the I940S the question of the state was still at the forefront. There was a fierce struggle going on, and in this real world the PPS had to choose-not between capitalism and communism, they felt, but between socialism and barbarism. And so they took their stand with the Communists in the PPR, whom they believed to be committed to a socialism at least somewhat compatible with their own.10 They did not fully trust the Soviet Union, which so clearly stood behind the PPR, but they felt that there was a better chance of curtailing Soviet influence in Poland if they stood with the Communists rather than against them. Moreover, they thought that after a successful anti-capitalist alliance with the PPR, their own vision of socialism would ultimately prevail, insofar as it was more compatible with Polish tradition. The PPS therefore never acted as an opposition party in the way the PSL did. Publicly, it stood with the PPR. Privately, it tried to use its influence to press the PPR for democratization along the lines of reduced state control, greater freedom for cooperative economic associations, and more autonomous participation in public lifeY Rather than appealing to the people to undertake such societal initiatives themselves, however, the PPS, committed to its alliance, appealed only to the PPR. Even though its goal was societal democratization, the PPS concentrated its efforts on transforming the state. In the end, it was this overriding commitment to collaboration with the PPR that brought about its own strangulation. The PPS's program was directed toward a "third road," but the party stuck to the position that the struggle, "for now," was focused on the state, and that it was between two sides only. This premise ultimately left it defenseless against the Communists' argument that the PPS had to be merged with (into) the PPR precisely in

38 / Genesis of Political Opposition in Poland order to strengthen the "progressive forces" against the "reactionary" ones. "Unification" occurred in late 1948, and socialist ideology was silenced. It would emerge again, however-first around 1956, and then in the 1970s.

Stalinism and Post-Stalinism By 1949 the orthodox Marxist-Leninists of the PPR had destroyed both the PSL and the PPS, de-legalized all independent interest associations, and liquidated all independent organs of the political public sphere. The Stalinist years had begun. No opposition political parties existed, legally or illegally, on Polish territory. Many thousands of political opponents were in jail or in Siberian exile. The Church remained the only important social institution not taken over by the state. Social advancement was possible for young people willing to play by the rules, for this was the period of mass industrialization, opening up many opportunities to those for whom political liberties were unimportant. For opponents, however, the system offered no opportunities at all. The Stalinist period was the attempt to eliminate independent civil society completely, or to realize the Marxist-Leninist assumption that state and society become reunited when the party of the "universal class" takes power. Civil society was, of course, thought to mean bourgeois society, the site of capitalist social relations and thus an obstacle to the beneficial social policies the Party wanted to introduce. But civil society, as we have seen, is also a non-governmental sphere of politics, and its elimination means that the Party is left with total power: over state and society, public and private, everything. Does this mean that every Leninist must become a Stalinist? Lenin himself implemented the New Economic Policy rather than follow through on his own theoretical conclusions. But these conclusions, by eliminating civil society, do entail "the end of politics," as A. J. Polan has argued so lucidly. Lenin's theory of the state did not call for terror or totalitarian control, but by equating public and private, state and society, governor and governed, it "rigorously outlawed all and any version of those political institutions and relationships that can make the triumph of the Gulag less likely." 12 So the effort to "unify" state and society (or "de-differentiate" them, overcome their self-alienation, and restore them to what they

Genesis of Political Opposition in Poland / 39 "should" be) can only mean the destruction of all civil society, including independent associations and the public sphere, and the replacement of civil society by the state. This means that totalitarianism is inherent in part of Leninist theory, and in the Stalinist period, it is this part that prevails. With civil society silenced by terror, there is no political opposition at all. But the Stalinist period cannot last forever, for a number of reasons. The terror becomes harmful to the elite and dysfunctional to the economy, and the Party always comes up against the fact that although social divisions can be declared obsolete, they cannot be made obsolete. Difference, in other words, persists. Or, as Polan puts it, Stalinism must "founder on the complications introduced by the continued existence of political wills." 13 This argument about Stalinism I cannot develop here. The point, however, is that although totalitarianism is a necessary tendency of a Leninist party state, it cannot be achieved. And so the Party continually swings between a totalitarian tendency and a reform tendency, which recognizes that the state must interact with civil society rather than try to extinguish it.14 Throughout Eastern Europe the reform tendency first appeared as civil society began to re-emerge after Stalin's death. In Poland, by early 1955 the press had become increasingly open, increasingly critical of official policies. And the kernels of a new, independent political public sphere were emerging with the rise of political discussion clubs throughout the country. IS This might perhaps have developed into the kind of opposition that emerged in the 197os, one that focused on rebuilding civil society and ignored the state sphere. But it did not, and the reason is that the PZPR itself seemed to be undergoing a major change. All the old totalitarian legitimations of the Party's absolute right to rule-its monopoly of knowledge and its claim to be the sole authority in the land -began to give way to a new kind of legitimation. It was still "Marxist," of course, but instead of appealing to orthodox Marxist-Leninist theory, it appealed to the European socialist tradition of Marxism. The new legitimation, in other words, was essentially social democratic. And it was this that kept the post-Stalinist opposition from rejecting party-state politics altogether. Why write off the Party when it suddenly seems open to great democratic change? (Whether it was really open we shall consider below.) This transformation of Party ideology first became visible in early 1955 as members of the Polish press began to criticize the recent past

40 / Genesis of Political Opposition in Poland and to praise the socialist traditions that had been unsparingly denounced in the Stalinist period. The former socialists of the PPS, who had gone along unenthusiastically with the "unification" of their party only to see all their ideals betrayed, were permitted to publicize those ideals once again, and to defend them against the perversions of Stalinism. Intellectuals who had joined the Party out of a general commitment to social justice were permitted to state their ideals pUblicly. And these ideals-full democracy, a society of equals, real political participation -were now presented as reforms that needed to be enacted, not as ones the Party had already enacted, or would certainly enact in some vague, distant, communist future. "Revisionism," based on the ideals of Marxist social democracy, had entered the political public sphere. This was not a quick or easy process. Most Party journals maintained an old-style orthodoxy in 1955 and even into 1956. The bloody suppression of the Poznan workers' demonstrations in June 1956, with Premier J6zef Cyrankiewicz's infamous threat to "cut off the treacherous arm of counterrevolution," recalled the worst of the Stalinist dayS.16 But there were many signs of change. Each new issue of the newspapers Nowa Kultura (New Culture) or Po Prostu (Simply Speaking) contained more appeals for "democratization," or for greater participation in public life. Even the national Party daily, Trybuna Ludu (The People's Tribune), published occasional bold pieces, such as one article arguing that the Poznan events would not have occurred if "democratization" at the economic and political levels had proceeded apace.17 As hackneyed as such formulations appear today, they seemed both fresh and promising at the time. Julian Hochfeld, a former leader of the PPS, denounced the impotence of the parliament (Sejm) and called for a revitalized and more independent Sejm, freely elected and subject to recall. IS Oskar Lange, the internationally known economist and a member of the PZPR Central Committee, publicly re-embraced his social democratic past with a call for greater democratization and a drastic reduction of the prerogatives of the central planners. And instead of being challenged, his article received extensive publicity in the summer of 1956.19 The ideals of social democracy were sneaking into public discourse. This was less the Marxism of Bolshevism than the Marxism of Menshevism, less the Marxism of the PPR than the Marxism of the PPS. And in fact it was these traditions of the PPS-social democratic Marxism

Genesis of Political Opposition in Poland / 41 and national independence-that became key, but unstable, ingredients of the new principle of legitimation in Poland. Does this mean that the Party became social democratic? Did the PZPR turn to the program of the PPS and reject that of the PPR? Not at all. Social democracy was only its "coquettish" ideology, not its real one. It was meant to seduce a renascent civil society, to help the Party through the difficult de-Stalinization process, whereby the Party had to give up some of its control but was afraid of being forced to give up all of it. But only with hindsight can we say that the Party's moderation was "coquettish." That was not fully clear at the time, which explains why so many oppositionists stayed with the Party through it all. The Party's new strategy proved very successful. The old socialist ideals that the Party now appropriated, far from destabilizing the system, in fact contributed to the rejuvenation of Party rule. And the man most responsible for this was Wladyslaw Gomulka, who made his spectacular return to power in October 1956. Gomulka himself seemed to symbolize national aspirations. He was one of the few communist leaders who had spent the war as part of the underground in Poland, and not next to Stalin in Moscow. But in 1949 he was purged from the Party for "right-wing nationalist deviations" and placed under house arrest. Gomulka was charged with "overemphasizing" Polish traditions and the role of the PPS while minimizing the communists' own past. (He had severely criticized the early communist movement, and specifically Rosa Luxemburg's Social Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania [SDKPiL], for belittling Polish national aspirations.) Gomulka's persecution during the Stalinist years and his record in defense of Polish traditions gave him the magnificent aura of the Polish patriot persecuted by the Russians. That aura was enhanced by his earlier work in connection with the newly acquired Western territories. He had headed the ministry for these territories for its entire existence (November 1945 to January 1949), a position connecting him with the tradition of Polish national expansion. Even anti-communist leaders gave Gomulka credit for "standing up to the Russians" in the Western lands. One of them tells how Gomulka supposedly instructed Polish soldiers to open fire on any Soviet soldiers caught looting in these areas, and then boldly informed Soviet authorities of his order.20 The political crisis intensified rapidly in 1956, with the bloody

42 / Genesis of Political Opposition in Poland insurrection by Poznan workers in June, increasing demands by intellectuals for greater freedom, and the organization by workers of selfmanagement councils in the factories. Anxious to avoid the Hungarian scenario, which was leading to revolution and a Soviet invasion, the PZPR decided to meet the crisis head-on. In a dramatic plenary session on October 19, interrupted by an unannounced visit by a suspicious Nikita Khrushchev, the PZPR Central Committee voted Gomulka the Party's new First Secretary. Mter seven long years of harassment and persecution, Gomulka was back on top. The opposition forces that had been actively mobilizing within society now turned their sights back onto the state. It seemed that tremendous reforms could now be won from above. Gomulka was a man whom everybody could support, because everyone could see in him what they wished. For the right, he was a genuine patriot 21-or, as Margaret Thatcher would say of Mikhail Gorbachev, a man with whom you could do business. For the left, he was a socialist. His years under Stalinist arrest seemed proof enough for everyone that he was not a communist -or at least not one of the Stalinist type, which was all anyone had yet experienced. Everyone had high hopes for Gomulka, and the hopes seemed to be confirmed by his acceptance speech. What was remarkable about this speech were the social democratic ideas spotted throughout. Gomulka began by locating the "evil" of the Stalinist years safely away in the "irrevocable past." 22 He praised the economic advances of those years, but with social democratic caution (as opposed to Leninist bravado), he noted that these gains were often paid for by an inexcusable exploitation of labor, citing as an example the 92 million hours of overtime miners were forced to work in 1955 alone. Gomulka then denounced agricultural collectivization, the institution that is arguably the quintessential feature of state socialism,23 and promised to allow farmers to de-collectivize, which they did at once. He said that he favored genuine and voluntary producer cooperatives, the promulgation of which had always been one of the main economic planks of the Polish socialist movement. 24 He added that there ought to be a healthy "rivalry" between the PZPR and the United Peasant Party, and also with the "progressive Catholic movement," in building authentic cooperatives. Gomulka encouraged the development of such cooperatives, but, as a way of demonstrating his social democratic impulses and his aversion to the central planning of the past, he said he

Genesis of Political Opposition in Poland / 43 could give no figures on their prospective growth. One passage in particular is noteworthy, for its social democratic credentials ooze from every clause: "The quantitative development [of authentic collective farms] cannot be planned because, if the entry into cooperatives is voluntary, it would amount to the planning of human consciousness, and that is impossible." 25 For Leninists, quantitative development of collectives not only can but must be planned: only in this way is a "rational" economy possible. Similarly, the principle of voluntary entry into cooperatives, while desirable, cannot for Leninists be an absolute rule, for it might sometimes be necessary to break people loose from the grip of bourgeois consciousness. And, finally, what Leninist would consign the realm of "human consciousness" entirely to the private sphere, where Gomulka seems to place it? Gomulka's definition of the essence of socialism as "the abolition of the exploitation of man by man," and not as the strengthening of Party rule or the state ownership of the means of production (to cite two Stalinist definitions), was also dear to democratic socialists. His description of proper relations between parties and states within the socialist bloc sounded very much like what socialists had been saying in the mid-I940s: these should be "based on mutual confidence and equality of rights, ... on mutual friendly criticism, if such becomes necessary," with each country maintaining "complete independence and freedom" and having "the right to rule itself in a sovereign manner." 26 As for government bodies, Gomulka repeated the social democratic call for a more powerful Sejm. The main orientation of his speech can be summed up in a remarkable sentence that echoed what Polish socialists had been saying in vain for years: "It is a poor idea that socialism can be built only by Communists." 27 In this new context, the revisionist wager on the Party seemed to make a good deal of sense. If the regime was independent but left-wing and socialist, as Gomulka now claimed, then convinced socialist intellectuals could legitimately try to pressure the regime to make reforms, to change the system into one more in harmony with "real" socialist ideals. The coquettish appeal to democratic socialist Marxist principles provided an opportunity for parts of the public-the elite and the intelligentsia-to repeat these same principles and use them against the system itself. The immanent critique of state socialist society now became possible. When the system's legitimation was based, as in the

44 / Genesis of Political Opposition in Poland Stalinist period, mainly on the belief in a glorious future, no part of the present reality could be held against it. In that view, the problems of the present were due only to capitalist underdevelopment, the World War, and the Cold War. The Party was held responsible only for the future. But with a social democratic legitimation and a regime claiming to be committed to procedural norms in the present, the reality of the present could be used to criticize the political system responsible for the present. The entire revisionist strategy, based on the belief that the Party and state could be reformed in a democratic direction, seemed to be an appropriate one. This new belief in the state was not due solely to its latest ideological pronouncements. There were deeds, too, as Gomulka took a number of steps with far-reaching implications for a revitalized public sphere. Perhaps the most important was the reopening to the Catholic Church. Curiously, it was only the late Stalinist period that saw the harshest measures taken against the Church. The Party had tolerated the independent Catholic weekly, TygodnikPowszechny (Universal Weekly), up to March 1953. Then, when the editors refused to print a laudatory obituary of Stalin, the state seized the paper and handed editorial control over to its lay Catholic collaborators in the PAX organization.28 The Catholic monthly Znak (Sign) was closed at the same time. A few months later, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, the Primate of Poland, was placed under house arrest in distant seclusion. One of Gomulka's first acts as new Party leader was to release Wyszynski. He asked the cardinal to visit him in Warsaw, where he announced that editorial control of Tygodnik Powszechny would be restored to its original editors. When the Church asked for legalization of a group of discussion clubs under its guidance, Gomulka conceded this as well. Gomulka even offered another concession: he set aside a certain number of seats in the Sejm for Catholic representatives, to be selected by the Church hierarchy. But the Church was not the only beneficiary. The public sphere appeared to be opening up to non-elites throughout society. The retreat from collectivization had suddenly produced millions of private farmers. They became autonomous decision-makers with whom the state, it seemed, would have to negotiate. De-collectivization thus seemed to imply a revitalized public sphere as a necessary corollary. Gomulka continued to express an interest in genuinely autonomous cooperatives, too. Almost a full year after his return to power, he spoke of the possible

Genesis of Political Opposition in Poland / 45 relevance for Poland of the social democratic, Scandinavian experience with cooperatives .29 The workers' council movement was giving increasing numbers of workers valuable experience in public life. The press was publishing penetrating critiques of Polish society, replete with public opinion surveys, which were beginning to be recognized as a legitimate method of learning the public's views. 30 This seemed to legitimize the principle that people could make their views known to the government without using the "transmission belts" of the Party-controlled mass organizations, andl as such constituted a tacit retreat from the totalitarian state-society identification of the Stalinist period. Finally, the elections to the Sejm in January 1957, although not free in the sense of permitting a choice among candidates at the polls, nonetheless hinted at a more democratic public sphere with the corporatist cooptation of Church representatives. This could be interpreted as a prelude to the coopting of other social groups, and thus as the beginning of political pluralism. Taken together, all these developments seemed to point in the direction of greater democracy. It was possible to believe that citizenship rights would be expanded for all. But Gomulka was no social democrat. Soon after coming to power, he moved to limit the gains civil society had made, and to reconsolidate the hegemony of the Party. This does not mean that Gomulka was a Stalinist. Gomulka did reform the system; Stalinism did not return. But what emerged in its place was a new arrangement in which non-elites were excluded from participation, just as before, while intellectuals and other elites obtained a small but genuine social space in which they could speak out and criticize more freely than before, and believe that they were making an impact on the political system at large. For non-elites, the end came quickly. The self-management councils that had arisen spontaneously in 1956 were brought under Party control by a law of 1958. Peasants, meanwhile, were allowed to own their own farms, but the state remained the sole buyer and supplier and imposed numerous restrictions preventing farmers from buying additional land or adequately developing the bit of land they did own. The intelligentsia had a different experience, which in part followed necessarily from the end of the terror. Socioeconomically, little changed in the state socialist countries after the death of Stalin. The planners decided to produce some more consumer goods, but everything was still dependent on the whim of the planners. But because these systems

46 / Genesis of Political Opposition in Poland were political monopolies, those who produced political or ideological outputs-that is, the Party elite and intelligentsia-now had greater freedom in which to perform these jobs. This led inevitably to a certain diversity and revitalization of elite public life. Within legal, established channels it now became possible to defend policy positions at odds with the one finally chosen by the Party, and to do so without running the risk of arrest, imprisonment, or expUlsion from the elite. The risk of demotion for taking the wrong side on a controversial issue remained, but demotion could be reversed. The situation changed most dramatically for the literary and academic intelligentsia because of their unique social role. When workers' councils were suppressed, workers could only go back to their tedious jobs. They no longer had any outlet for political participation, except within the rigid PZPR framework. The intellectuals' "job," however, is to think and write about society. They are the creators of the public sphere. If they were to pursue their jobs, political differences with the Party were inevitable, because the Party's post-Stalinist principle of legitimation embraced social democratic principles that had nothing to do with the reality of the system. The writers could not be denounced for defending an official principle of legitimation, but since the principle clashed with reality, their output would unavoidably contain an oppositional content. Writers write. During the Stalinist period, they had to write paeans to socialist industrialization, to the Party, to Stalin. After around 1955, they no longer had to. Many of these writers had first come to communism out of socialist, humanist ideals, and they now had an opportunity to return to those convictions. They were able to recapture the ideals of the halcyon days when the left had no power. Writers write, and those who no longer pen odes to factories must write something else. Censorship prevented them from writing "pro-capitalist" works, but not from reclaiming the democratic socialist ideals that the Party was coquettishly claiming as its own. I am not saying that coquettish social democratic ideology lasted throughout the entire Gomulka period. Obviously it did not. Gomulka was attacking the revisionists as early as the spring of 1957. In October 1957 the Party liquidated the popular student weekly Po Prostu, the most radical of all the revisionist publications, and censorship tightened everywhere else. The climate steadily deteriorated, and by 1959 all

Genesis of Political Opposition in Poland I 47 revisionist "suspects" had been removed from Gomulka's ruling circle. Yet even then it was still possible to believe both in the system's ability to change and in the willingness of at least some members of the Party to undertake a democratic reform. And it was this belief that was the premise of all opposition activity until 1968, which is why it can all be labeled "revisionist." How was it possible to believe this even after 1959, the date often given for the demise of revisionism? There were several reasons. The fact that there was no attempt to return to Stalinist terror was itself a positive sign. Moreover, some small democratic advances still remained in place. Space in the public sphere was left open for the intelligentsia long after it was closed to non-elites. The Club of the Crooked Circle, for example, one of the most prominent and influential of all the revisionist discussion groups, survived until 1962. Historians, poets, journalists, novelists, artists, essayists, philosophers, sociologists, economists-the major figures in all these fields regularly attended CCC meetings. The club made no appeals to society at large and produced no samizdat (selfpublished) literature, but it took a critical stance toward the increasingly repressive post-October status quo. The fact that it was tolerated for as long as it was seemed to many members to suggest that the government might still be capable of reform. It also indicated that the Party was indeed concerned with the views of the intelligentsia, and that it might still be persuaded, through the enlightened pressure of the intellectuals, to move society in a more democratic direction.3' In cultural life, too, the coquettish social democratic rules seemed to persist. At the Third Party Congress in 1959, Gomulka declared that the literature of "despair and hopelessness" that had been published between 1956 and 1958 (for example, the works of Polish "beat" author Marek Blasko) would be published no longer, because such writings were "not works of art but instruments of the political propaganda of anti-socialist forces." 32 But he did not follow up on his own threat. Three years later, in 1962, it was possible for Roman Polanski to produce Knife in the Water, one of the grimmest existentialist films of modern cinema, and the experimental theater of Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor, and others played throughout the Gomulka period. One major episode in 1964 demonstrated how even in the gloomy mid-1960s, when official Party statements contained not a trace of revisionism,33 the revisionist strategy of appealing to the state to undertake

48 / Genesis of Political Opposition in Poland democratic reforms was still the natural, if unsatisfactory, method of opposition. In March, thirty-four prominent Polish writers and intellectuals signed a short letter to Premier Cyrankiewicz drawing attention to the potentially tragic consequences of "severe press censorship" and other official policies. The letter continued with an appeal for "a change in the Polish cultural policies in the spirit of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. . . and in harmony with the welfare of the nation." 34 This terse letter met with both repression and recognition. The writer Jan J6zef Lipski, who had collected signatures for the letter, was briefly arrested. Authors Jan Kott and Pawel Jasienica suddenly found themselves unable to publish. Yet the premier invited fourteen of the signatories to meet with him in an attempt at conciliation. One of Gomulka's closest associates, Zenon Kliszko, denounced the "Letter of the 34," as it had quickly become known, at a writers' convention in Poznan. But Warsaw writers then attacked Kliszko's speech at their own convention. Kliszko asked to reply, and a special session was arranged in which the two sides met. The discussion was acrimonious, and the power relationship clearly unequal: the political authorities alone would make the final decisions. Yet there was still a feeling on both sides that a discussion was both possible and desirable. Neither side challenged the right of the other to speak. Antagonists on both sides were largely drawn from the same social milieu, and they seemed to maintain a certain grudging respect for one another. The writers were not attacked for defending the social democratic principle of freedom of speech per se. In fact, Premier Cyrankiewicz told the fourteen writers he called to his office that the government was not opposed to the letter as such, but was only indignant that it was sent abroad before the government could answer.35 And Kliszko complained to the Warsaw writers' conference mainly about the "intervention" of Radio Free Europe in the affair, not about the revisionist content of the letter. Of course the government was hardly telling the truth. It has always used attention from Radio Free Europe as a way to smear oppositionists, to suggest that they are somehow anti-Polish. The point, however, is that amid all the acrimony, there was still a kind of discussion going on. Oppositionists still had some access to the elite. The Party was not ready to give up its coquettish social democratic principle of legitimation. And this meant that the opposition still saw some sense in focusing its reform efforts on the state. There was no need to turn to "society" if

Genesis of Political Opposition in Poland / 49 reform was possible through the state, and the opposition was not yet convinced that this effort was doomed. It would not be convinced until 1968. Until then, the revisionist form of opposition could limp on.

The Demise of Revisionism: 1968-1970 Two developments in 1968 destroyed the opposition's orientation to state-sponsored democratic reform: the anti-Semitic "March events" in Poland, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. By eradicating the Prague Spring, the crowning achievement of the revisionists, the invasion wiped out the belief in the ability of an East European socialist state to undergo genuine democratic reform (at least so long as the Soviet Union did not undergo such reform itself). The "March events," meanwhile, had earlier destroyed the belief in the willingness of any section of the Polish Party to carry out such a reform. When the national-chauvinist" Partisan" faction took control of the PZPR in 1967-1968, the opposition lost its last hope that an immanent, left-wing critique of state socialist society could have any influence at all. For when the "Partisans" came to power, the Party dropped the coquettish socialism that had always been the revisionists' starting point. The new Party leadership, essentially jettisoning Marxism and staking a claim to legitimacy on a nationalist principle alone, broke down the minimal consensus between Party and opposition that was intrinsic to revisionist opposition. The intellectuals could talk to Cyrankiewicz in 1964, but they could not talk to Mieczyslaw Moczar in 1968.36 If the intelligentsia and the Party leadership had nothing at all in common, then it was hopeless for the former to try to persuade the latter to undertake a democratizing reform. The Partisans emerged from a social milieu-mainly the military and police-that was radically different from the milieu of the intellectuals. 37 Anti-Semitism in the ruling elite was in itself nothing new; it had even been an element in the 1956 power struggle. Now, however, it became a major ingredient of official Party ideology, achieving prominence in 1967, at the time of the Six Day War in the Middle East. Moscow ordered all East European countries to break with Israel. The Partisans, already a majority in the Politburo, used this opportunity to denounce the Jewish presence in public life in Poland. Increasingly

50 / Genesis of Political Opposition in Poland speaking on behalf of the Partisans, Gomulka warned Polish Jews that if they had any sympathy with Israel in its "imperialist" war against the Arabs, they ought to think about leaving the country immediately. Those who stayed, he suggested, might constitute a nefarious "Fifth Column" in the socialist fatherland. The question of why the Partisans openly pursued anti-Semitism is a difficult one to answer. It was a way to take control of the Party, a means of purging liberal intellectuals (since they would resist the drive and could thus be discredited as "pro-Zionist" and "therefore anti-Soviet"), and an expression of a pathological aversion to Jews. But the fact that anti-Semitism was combined with an assault on the intelligentsia suggests that the Jews were never the sole target. The pretext for the 1968 events came from student protests over the government's decision in January to close down a production of the classic Polish drama Forefathers' Eve by Adam Mickiewicz, the nineteenth-century playwright and national bard. The production was said to be stirring anti-Soviet feelings, but students saw the move as just another Party assault on intellectual freedom. They held a series of meetings at Warsaw University to protest. When two students, Adam Michnik and Henryk Szlajfer, were expelled from Warsaw University for their part in the protests, students called for a mass demonstration at the university on March 8, 1968. The government's response symbolized the new policies of this Partisan-dominated leadership. Police entered the traditionally inviolate campus grounds, beating and clubbing the retreating students. Protests followed at universities throughout the country; hundreds of students were expelled. Intellectuals who came to the students' defense were punished severely. Professors were fired on direct orders from the Ministry of Education. At Warsaw University the departments of economics, philosophy, sociology, and psychology were administratively dissolved. There was no longer even a show of discussion and debate, as there had been in 1964. In 1968 Polish students fought against the socialist state by demanding "real socialism" instead of the bureaucratic dictatorship of the Party. The leading activists, many of them the children of radical communists from prewar days, were followers and admirers of Kuron and Modzelewski's "Open Letter to the Party" of 1964, which called for a new revolution to overthrow the Party and create a genuine socialist system, run by the workers themselves. The students of '68 very self-

Genesis of Political Opposition in Poland / 51 consciously saw themselves as part of a new, international left-and as if to prove it, the students leading the protests, including Michnik, Lityiiski, and many others who would play important roles in Solidarity, gave themselves a name reminiscent of militant Third World guerrillas: "The Commandos." When Polish students went on strike in 1968, they felt, like the revisionists, that the government had at least some connection with the left. They did not expect much from the Party, but few thought it capable of an almost fascistic persecution of Jews. And yet in the aftermath of the March protests, students of Jewish origin were singled out for persecution and prominently denounced in the press. Pretrial investigations searched through the ancestry of non-Jewish student defendants in the hope of discovering a Jewish lineage. An anonymous government leaflet distributed at Warsaw University included such lines as "Seize the Jew by his payis, and hurl him into the sea!" 38 The anti-Semitic purge extended into all levels of public life in 1968-1969. If student activists were the children of Jewish PZPR officials, and they often were, the Partisans used this to purge the parents from public life. Jews were accused not just of having incited recent student protests, but also of having caused Stalinism! The Partisans, playing the role of the anti-Stalinist "real Poles," defined the Stalinist period as the time when the bad Jewish Stalinists had persecuted the good Polish patriots. Jews were attacked on all fronts. Jewish employees were forced to make degrading public statements before the entire workforce, denouncing a "Zionism" none of them had ever supported. Those who refused usually lost their jobs; those who spoke often lost them too. Thousands of Jews were hounded into exile. The new Party leadership used the occasion to purge public life of all social democratic influence. Non-Jewish liberal intellectuals were expelled from UIlliversities, government ministries, publishing houses, or wherever else they worked. The viciousness of the campaign, the persecution of thousands of law-abiding citizens, the attempt to stir up nationalist hatreds-all of this dramatically changed the political situation in Poland. It also changed the nature ofthe Party. Thousands of socialists for whom such policies were the antithesis of socialism either left the Party or were expelled. The hopes that many had held for so long, that somehow something good could still come out of this Party -all of that was dashed. 39 It was not easy to recover from this blow.

52 / Genesis of Political Opposition in Poland Not surprisingly, the intellectual community in Poland was quiescent in 1969 and 1970. In December 1970, another blow fell. Having shown that it felt no need to be "social democratic" toward the intelligentsia, the Party now repeated the lesson for the workers, on an incomparably bloodier scale. When workers went on strike in cities along the Baltic coast to protest against price increases and demand greater political freedoms, the regime responded with unprecedented force. The first day of the strikes brought pitched battles in Gdansk and Szczecin, where police fired on workers who had left their factories and marched downtown, and workers responded by burning down Party headquarters. But this was nothing compared with December 17. The mayor of Gdynia, Stanislaw Kociolek, had broadcast an appeal for workers to return to the shipyards that day, saying that the strikes were over. And workers did come to work. But when they arrived for the 6 A.M. shift, they found the gates locked. Immediately afterward, in one of the most gruesome massacres in postwar Europe, still unexplained to this day, police opened fire on the unarmed crowd, killing dozens of workers trying to report to their jobs.40 Although these events led to the ouster of Gomulka and the rise of Edward Gierek, who visited workers in Gdansk and Szczecin the next month and allowed them (temporarily) to elect their own union officials, irreparable damage had been done. Just as its intellectual support had evaporated in 1968, the Party now squandered whatever trust it had retained among workers. Intellectuals seemed too shell-shocked to respond. Their lack of response to the December events was itself eloquent testimony to the demise of revisionism.41 Few intellectuals thought protest could serve any purpose. They chose silence instead .

•

•

•

Adam Michnik has written that 1968 marked the "death of revisionism," a time when "the bond tying the revisionist intelligentsia to the Party was definitively severed." 42 Michnik wrote this in 1976, but the break was already visible in 1968. "Against Fascist Provocation" was the title of one protest leaflet of 1968, written by Jacek Kuron.43 Fascist provocation? Yes-for many oppositionists, the events of 1968 demonstrated that the Polish "communist" party had become little more than a typical fascist party, without a hint of its original socialist program.

Genesis of Political Opposition in Poland / 53 (Thus, the opposition's passive response to the events of 1970: it was not surprising that a fascist government would shoot workers.) The opposition now felt that it had absolutely nothing in common with such a party, and there seemed little point addressing democratic demands to it. This was the turning point. The revisionist strategy broke down. If the opposition was unwilling to succumb to pessimism and despair, it had to find a new strategy. It had to embrace a new theory of politics, and a new theory of democratization.

fOUR.

Opposition and Civil Society: 1970-1980

"A great leap nowhere" sums up Polish life in the 1970s. For it was a decade of dramatic change and yet ultimate stagnation, economically and politically. Edward Gierek threw Gomulka's renowned caution to the winds in an attempt to revitalize Poland's economy on the cheap, hoping to attract support for the PZPR not as the party of Marxian socialism, but as the party of economic prosperity. His initial strategy called for domestic reforms to be combined with the import of new Western technology to produce a booming modem economy that could become a major world actor. But once detente and then petrodollars had made Western credits forthcoming, Gierek essentially abandoned the domestic reforms and staked everything on the Western connection. While the massive importation of Western consumer goods created a dangerous illusion of prosperity, the lack of internal reform, combined with the collapse of the Western market in the aftermath of the oil crisis of 1973, meant that Poland in fact had only a few profligate years, enjoyed at the price of a skyrocketing foreign debt that has hampered economic recovery ever since. By 1976 the economy was plummeting downward while the government sat and watched. The ensuing crisis was a key reason for the wide support attained four years later by the strikes that resulted in the legalization of Solidarity.! In the realm of state politics, the cycle of change and stagnation was played out as one of concession and repression. In January 1971, when strikes again broke out in Gdaiisk and Szczecin only weeks after Gomulka had been ousted, Gierek tried to resolve them by conciliation. He met with workers in both cities, asking for their support in a joint effort to build a new and better Poland. 2 At the Warski Shipyard in Szczecin, workers gave him their conditional support, but only after

55

56 / Opposition and Civil Society obtaining approval for new, free elections to the official trade union. This was a considerable concession, and for a while it looked as if the government would respect it. The strike committee at Warski, permitted to become a "Workers Commission," was authorized to oversee the forthcoming election, which resulted in militant strike leader Edmund Baruka's being elected head of the local union. Having won this apparently stunning victory, the commission disbanded. An exhausted workforce was unable to stop the rapid deterioration that followed. Within months, one young strike militant was found dead in his apartment, suffocated by gas. Another strike leader was beaten in his own apartment by two men who left him unconscious and turned on the gas. The victim recovered in time and managed to open a window, only to be arrested soon afterward on a trumped-up rape charge, and fired. 3 Many of the newly elected union leaders lost their posts on one pretext or another. By mid- 1972 Warski had been pacified. Baluka, the last to survive, was "bumped upstairs" and made head of the Regional Steelworkers Union in order to get him out of the shipyard. Less than two months later he was dismissed from his new post and denied his old one. Finally finding work as a sailor, he jumped ship in the West. There he became involved in Trotskyist politics, returning to Poland only in 1981. The same combination of concession and repression was repeated five years later, in 1976, when newly announced price increases sparked another wave of strikes in a new set of cities. The government rescinded the price hikes within twenty-four hours, and then unleashed a massive campaign against the "rioters and instigators" who had allegedly tried to "sow discord among the working class." 4 In Radom and Ursus, where workers had staged militant protests outside plant grounds, strike leaders got prison sentences of five to ten years. Elsewhere strikers were fired and blacklisted, while those remaining were required to attend public rallies denouncing the "hooligans" and proclaiming support for the Party.s For the next four years, the Party seemed to be afraid of the situation it had created but unwilling to do anything about it. In this condition of official stagnation, a new opposition emerged that began to offer an alternative. Not knowing what to do, the Party not only let the economy decline, but also let the new opposition expand. With the social fabric crumbling and the government unable to take action, the new opposition

Opposition and Civil Society I 57 suggested that people turn to their own resources. The only way for things to change would be for people to start rebuilding the independent social bonds that the system tried to destroy. Forget about the state, the opposition now counseled. Forget about "politics." Let's start at the bottom and rebuild civil society instead. This chapter concerns the genesis of the new political theory of the opposition and the development of its program of "societal democratization." It aims to uncover the inconsistencies within this program that would have a critical impact on the practice of the future Solidarity movement. The argument can be stated briefly. The opposition strategy articulated in the 1970S proved to be extraordinarily successful, as it led directly to the rise of Solidarity. Yet this very success created enormous problems for Solidarity. For as soon as this program reached its fruition, it became obsolete. The essence of the program was that opposition practice had to focus only on rebuilding civil society. The goal was to transform society in a democratic direction, and not the state, which appeared to be incapable of reform. Although, as will be shown below, the main theorists of the opposition knew that the state would eventually have to be challenged, they emphasized only that it could be ignored. The ideology of the 1970S opposition, as reflected in the Solidarity movement this opposition spawned, was thus based on an "ingenious error":6 the belief that society could be democratized without affecting the state. It was "ingenious" in that it successfully mobilized civil society, before the creation of Solidarity and even more so afterward, when millions suddenly began acting as citizens of a newly revitalized public sphere. But it was also an error, because the monopolistic state could not be ignored. For if the socialist state necessarily tries to monopolize public life, which is what the societal democrats asserted, then the reappropriation of the public sphere that would occur with the legalization of independent societal organizations (like Solidarity) would be an encroachment upon that state. At that point it would no longer be possible to ignore the state. In practice, this meant that once Solidarity existed, the question of the state had to be confronted. But at that point Solidarity was unprepared, because its ideological origins had counseled bypassing the state. The program that was "ingenious" in one epoch became irrelevant the moment it succeeded. The program of societal democratization had its origins in the attempt by democratic oppositionists to resurrect a social movement of

58 / Opposition and Civil Society political opposition in a period of gloom and despair. The "cultural pogrom" of 1968,7 the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and then the astonishing brutality of 1970 had created a deep layer of hopelessness and resignation, a conviction that since nothing could change in Poland, or in any state socialist country, it was pointless even to try. Obviously, there are no statistics measuring such feelings, or at least none in the public domain. But several oppositionist texts of the early 1970S refer explicitly to the deep pessimism that the authors detected among their friends and colleagues.8 At the time it was not easy to combat these views, for the chances of reform did not look bright. The experience of the 1940S showed that the Party would not tolerate a parliamentary opposition, and the Hungarian experience of 1956 demonstrated that the Soviets would not allow one of its "allies" to leave the fold. The revisionist strategy of gradual, moderate reform from above had seemed plausible until the experiences of 1968. Mter 1968, a belief in the hopelessness of democratic reform efforts in the Soviet bloc seemed to be the only honest position a reasonable person could take.

Late Post-Stalinism and the Thrn to Civil Society The seminal work that introduced the postrevisionist strategy of political opposition was Leszek Kolakowski's "Theses on Hope and Hopelessness."9 The article was published in 1971, before the era of samizdat, in the emigre journal Kultura, and had a tremendous impact inside Poland. Other writings along similar lines also had considerable influence, such as the works of the economist Wlodzimierz Brus and the sociologists Zygmunt Bauman and Maria Hirszowicz, all of whom, like Kolakowski, left Poland after the 1968 events. Yet no single piece captured the essence of the "new politics" as well as Kolakowski's. It would be no exaggeration to call it the fundamental theoretical text of the Polish democratic opposition of the 1970s. For this reason alone, it warrants detailed examination. Kolakowski's aim was to demonstrate why the revisionist strategy of reform from above was dead, yet why this need not mean that hope had had it as well. He begins with a discussion of why the state socialist system appears to be unreformable, presenting the strongest possible

Opposition and Civil Society / 59 case for this increasingly widespread view in order to make his subsequent refutation that much more persuasive. Let's look closely at his seven "theses of hopelessness": I. The state socialist system is marked by the political and economic monopoly of the ruling party, which runs the state as well as the entire economy. Therefore, any genuine democratization is impossible, since it would involve the "partial expropriation" of the ruling class and thereby threaten the party's dual monopoly. Workers may be allowed to discuss working conditions in their own factories, and the Sejm, "a 'parliament' by the grace of the Party apparatus," may talk a bit about economic policy, but the decisions are made by the Party authorities at the top. Moreover, any dissent from these decisions "will have no significance, since as a result of the detailed control of information it will not be able to take the form of social pressure." 10 2. The system necessarily degrades the role of experts and tends to replace them with those who are politically servile. Allowing experts any real role in decision making would reduce the scope of the ruling elite's power. Therefore, inefficiency and the rule of incompetents are intrinsic to the system. 11 3. Misinformation is a necessary part of the state socialist system. Officials are rewarded for good results and therefore have a vested interest in concealing information not likely to be favorably received by the center. Correct information, if it conveys discontent, is punished; false information, if it confirms the wishes of the planners, is rewarded. Freedom of information is therefore impossible. 4. The strict hierarchical system rewards servility, cowardice, lack of initiative, and indifference to the public interest. Since concern for the public good without regard for the interests of the apparatus adversely affects an individual's chances of political survival, let alone promotion, it is unlikely that broad sections of the elite will ever show such concern. 5. The despotic form of government requires the presence of enemies to justify its own despotism. In the absence of war, enemies must be internal. Enemies are therefore invented (for example, "kulaks," "wreckers," "anti-socialists"). Repression follows, producing more real enemies. "The system of repression is thus self-propelled." 12 The partystate must wage constant war against its own people. 6. Since the "main function of this system is to uphold the monopo-

60 / Opposition and Civil Society listic and uncontrolled power of the ruling apparatus," it has a necessary tendency to destroy all independent forms of social life. 13 The problem, however, is that real social interests cannot be abolished; they can only be driven to seek other forms of expression. But this means that the party must fear everything, for from its point of view, "even the most innocent forms of social organization, if not subject to proper police control, can indeed transform themselves into centers of opposition." 14 Therefore, no independent social life is possible under this system. 7. The regime is unable to grant more rights. It knows that the dissatisfaction is so great that any concession will only provoke a landslide threatening the whole system. Therefore, it resists all attempts at reform. What we have, therefore, is a party-state that must continue its monopoly, ignore genuine experts, lie, encourage servility and contempt for the public, engage in a constant war with its citizens, and, most important, destroy all social bonds that it does not control. And since it must do all this in order to survive, it cannot give an inch to popular demands, out of fear that it will then be forced to give more. For all these reasons, therefore, the system seems hopelessly unreformable. Yet here Kolakowski breaks ranks. The theses of hopelessness are all true, he says: They "can be personally confirmed by all who live [in that system]." 15 Yet even so, it would be wrong to draw the apparently logical conclusion. He gives four reasons why: One can never tell in advance what the limits of a social system really are. 2. The inflexibility of a social system is partially dependent on the degree to which the population is convinced of its inflexibility. 3. The "all or nothing" mentality of the unreformability theorists may be characteristic of people raised on Marxism, but it is not supported by historical experience. 4. State socialism is "entangled in contradictory internal tendencies," which it is unable to resolve and which consequently weaken the system's cohesion. 16 I.

What is known of the system's inflexibility comes from the past, not from the future, and for Kolakowski the future is always, so to speak,

Opposition and Civil Society I 61 up for grabs. In this sense, he says, state socialism is not dissimilar to capitalism. Capitalism, writes Kolakowski, did not reform itself on its own. Marx's analysis had a great deal of merit. There were good reasons to believe with Marx that the capitalist system was unreformable and would only lead to increasing immiseration and economic anarchy. The failure of these predictions was not due to the "philanthropic attitude of the bourgeoisie or ... its moral transformation. It was the result of long years of struggle to recognize certain principles of social organization as its permanent features." 17 Social structures, in other words, no matter how hopeless they seem, are transformable through human praxis. IS Kolakowski's argument here is actually quite similar to one often raised by the new left in the West. His belief in the potential of human effort to transform an unreformable polity echoes Herbert Marcuse's position in One-Dimensional Man. Marcuse had argued that advanced capitalism in the West constituted a "totally administered society" in which no alternatives were possible; even the possibility of imagining alternatives had been destroyed in the society at large. (Kolakowski, similarly, remarks about the stagnation of opposition thought in Poland.) And yet, Marcuse argued, it was still necessary to act as if there were alternatives. For through that very activity, possibilities may be created. That which seems impossible today may become possible tomorrow, provided that we act as if it were possible today. For both Marcuse and Kolakowski there was one crucial question: What does one do when it seems nothing can be done? And their answer: One does something anyway. 19 Kolakowski introduces the program of societal democratization in a carefully worded passage immediately following his discussion of hopelessness: What follows [from the seven theses] is that if the mechanism of the bureaucratic rule functions without any resistance on the part qf society, it will inevitably keep producing, in ever more intensive forms, all the phenomena we have described, leading ultimately to a society organized on strictly Orwellian lines. It does not, however, follow from these observations that these tendencies cannot be countervailed by a movement qf resistance capable qf limiting and weakening their operation, which will not lead to any perfect society, but which will create viable forms of socialist

62 / Opposition and Civil Society organization capable of offering its members a reasonable life. The reformist position would be absurd if it were dependent on the goodwill of the exploiting class .... [It] is not, however, absurd if it is understood as an idea of active resistance exploiting inherent contradictions of the system.20 An obvious question is raised: How is this "active resistance" possible in a system that necessarily strives to destroy all social bonds? If the seven theses are correct, as Kolakowski says they are, then just where does the possibility for resistance and reform lie? If the system will not reform, how can people resist? The answer hinges on a separation of realms, one of the key concepts of this new theory of societal democratization. "Reform" is something the state does; "resist" is what individuals and groups in civil society can do. The system may quash attempts at reform, but it may not be able to destroy the human tendency to resist. Reform requires the system's acceptance of reform, but resistance only requires people's willingness to resist. If the will is not present, the system will never have to accept any reform. If it is present, however, and if some forms of resistance can flourish, then the system may ultimately have to reform. But what is resistance? Since the tendency of the state socialist system is to monopolize public life, to destroy all independent forms of social life (Thesis 6), then any form of independently organized social activity constitutes resistance to the system. Any sustained resistance counteracts a fundamental principle of the state socialist system and thus constitutes a de facto reform of the system. Thus, reform is possible through independent social activity-that is, through an independently organized civil society. The question, then, is whether independent activity is at all possible. Yes, answers Kolakowski, if people are willing to take the risks necessary to engage in it. But should people be willing to take the risks? Can the system be compelled to accept some forms of independent activity? Again yes, Kolakowski replies, because of the nature of the ruling power in its late post-Stalinist phase. According to Kolakowski, the state socialist system is racked by two internal contradictions. The first is between the need within the Party for both unity and security. The second is based on the crisis of ideology.

Opposition and Civil Society / 63 Unity and Security. The ruling apparatus is stymied by the impossibility of reconciling these two crucial values. True diversity, even within the Party, cannot be permitted without jeopardizing the monopoly of power that is the basis of Party rule. As Kolakowski writes: The conflict for power within the system cannot be institutionalized without threatening the ruin of the whole system, for institutionalization would mean the legalization of fractional activity within the Party, which would only differ in an insignificant way from the establishment of a multi-party system.21 In order to repress the irrepressible differentiation of civil society, the systemic ideal is "absolute tyranny." 22 Only such "unity of state and society," it would seem, can guarantee against an avalanche of interest representation that would undermine the system's foundations. Yet this absolute tyranny, good for the ruling elite vis-a-vis society, is risky for the ruling elite itself, which must fear, as under Stalinism, that the tyranny could at any moment be used against it. The need for security therefore conflicts with the need for unity, and the terror is dismantled in the security interests of the Party elite. This results in a certain decentralization through the extension of the rights of the local apparatus. Factionalism becomes unavoidable. This raises the possibility of playing off one faction against another. Thus, the rejection of unity in the interest of security is one of the contradictions that makes resistance possible. The Crisis of Ideology. The second contradiction is between the need for a radical change in ideology and the impossibility of jettisoning the official ideology. The official ideology, according to which the Party, as the agent of the "universal class," embodies the interests of the entire nation, is the system's sole official legitimation. The problem, according to Kolakowski, is that there is no one left who believes in it. These systems do have unofficial legitimating ideologies: in the Soviet Union it is the idea of national pride in superpower status; in Eastern Europe it is the fear of Soviet invasion and the hope for economic improvement within Soviet constraints. But these unofficial ideologies only indicate the bankruptcy of the official one. The demise of ideology is important

64 / Opposition and Civil Society in that it allows the articulation of new kinds of social protest. If the demise of terror made the revisionist strategy possible, the demise of ideology makes the reconquest of civil society possible. In his seminal 1971 article, Kolakowski does not fully develop this theory of societal democratization. Yet his rejection of the overthrow (or even the radical transformation) of the state as the sole focus of opposition activity is a crucial step in this direction. The present aim, Kolakowski writes, should be to secure "a reasonable life," 23 to "loosen the bondage" and bring about a "form [of state-society relations] more in accordance with the needs of society." 24 What he presents, in other words, is an imperative of resistance.

Politics and The Reconstruction of Social Ties A similar line of thought was being pursued by Jacek Kuron. Kuron began his political career as an activist in the communist youth movement in the early 1950S. A pedagogue by training, he became the leader of a left-communist scout organization, the "Walterites," active in Warsaw in the mid-1950s. 2s Many of Kuron's young disciples, including Adam Michnik, grew up to be activists in the student movement of 1968, as well as in the 1970S opposition and in Solidarity. In 1964 Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, a colleague at Warsaw University, published the "Open Letter to the Party," in which they subjected state socialist society to a Trotskyist critique and called for a new proletarian revolution. As a result of the "Open Letter," Kuron began serving a series of prison sentences that ended only in 1972. By this time, his views had changed considerably. His new line of thought, expressed in a series of articles throughout the 1970s, showed an evolution very similar to Kolakowski's. Kuron's 1974 article, "Political Opposition in Poland," was an important step toward the recognition of the potential for mass oppositional activity oriented around society rather than the state.26 Kolakowski had written of the necessity to preserve independent Polish culture. For Kuron, however, the movement for independent culture is not a prelude to political opposition; it is itself political opposition. This article constituted a key theoretical turning point, as it introduced a new notion of politics into the opposition. If activity that takes place within civil

Opposition and Civil Society I 65 society alone-between individuals drawn together neither by business contract nor political necessity nor religious bond, but only by a desire to freely engage in social activities of their own choosing-can properly be called "political activity," even though such activity ignores the state sphere that is normally considered the locus of politics, then it should be possible to bypass the state altogether and still effect political change. The desired democratization might not require state transformation after all-good news for the dejected ex-reformists and others who had given up hope that the state could change. Democratization, for Kuron, becomes a goal that can be realized within society as opposed to the state. Kuron was presenting here an important reconceptualization of the meaning of "democracy." Democracy becomes the continual expansion of the scope for autonomous, non-coerced social activity. It is the expansion of citizenship rights to include the whole of society. This is an idea rooted in the Marxist humanist concept of the human as "a being of praxis," a creative being who feels fully free when engaging in some activity that he himself chooses to engage in, one that she herself finds fulfilling.27 This may sound more like "freedom" (particularly "positive freedom") than "democracy," a distinction Isaiah Berlin so correctly insists one make. But all democratic theory presupposes a certain minimum freedom to engage in autonomous activity. It presupposes at least the rights of citizenship. But since the state socialist system so sharply restricts citizenship rights, the fight to regain them was at the forefront of the democratization effort. For Kuron and the other opposition theorists of the 1970s, democracy includes but is not identical to parliamentary democracy.28 For democracy requires an active citizenry: a people interested in politics and able to communicate their views in the public sphere, able to represent themselves in all spheres of life, not just in the state. Kuron was well aware that he was using the notion of "politics" in a new way here. In the very beginning of the piece, he announced that he was about to make a "declaration that many people will find shocking." The declaration is this: There are people in Poland today who are intentionally counteracting the fundamental principles of the system, a system that has been imposed on society by state power. These people are

66 / Opposition and Civil Society so numerous, and occupy such a significant place in society, that we can speak of the movement of political opposition as being a permanent element of life in Poland. 29 What is "shocking" about this movement, however, is that few of its members are even aware that it exists: I fear that very few participants of this movement realize the significance of their activities, or understand the dimensions, the influence, or the possibilities of the movement of which they are a part.30 How can there be a meaningful political opposition if the members do not even know that they are political oppositionists? This is possible, according to Kuron, because the very concept of the "political" takes on an unusual meaning in state socialist society. This system, says Kuron following Kolakowski, is not exactly totalitarian, but it necessarily strives to be: "It is a system in which the decision-making center, subject to no social control, strives to control the life of every citizen." 31 This goal, Kuron immediately adds, cannot be fully realized, but the system continually tends in that direction. Therefore, any action that resists that tendency resists the political system. Since the state socialist system strives to dominate every life, every resistance to this domination constitutes political opposition sui generis. Because state socialism rejects the state-society distinction, and society is therefore thoroughly politicized by the state, rejecting state domination over society becomes a profound political act. And so all of those people who engage in any form of social activity that the party-state does not control-a sports team, for example, or a political discussion club-are necessarily a part of a political opposition insofar as they are counteracting the totalitarian tendency of the system. The political opposition of the present, Kuron is saying, is made up of all those who are acting to rebuild civil society. The strategy of the opposition, therefore, should be to reconstruct social ties. The social is the political!

Opposition and Civil Society / 67 Anticipatory Democracy It was Adam Michnik who developed the ideas of Kolakowski and Kuron into a coherent strategy for political opposition. Born in 1946, Michnik first became politically active as a member of Kuron's Walterites. As a fifteen-year-old high school student he helped form the radical study group known as the "Club of the Seekers of Contradiction," but it was after helping to organize the Warsaw University protests of March 1968 that he emerged as a major political theorist on his own. His synthesis of Kolakowski's and Kuron's ideas was presented in his enormously influential 1976 article, "A New Evolutionism." 32 That the system was post-Stalinist, or post-terror, had been obvious since 1955. Michnik, however, still needed to argue the point that it was post-ideological. It was this new element, he felt, that demanded a new strategy for opposition. Democratic reformi§ts (revisionists) of the earlier period had utilized Marxist categories either because they believed them or because they felt that the ruling Party was most likely to be susceptible to arguments based on them. But Gierek and the Partisans' Moczar had changed all that. The strategy of revisionism was obsolete, Michnik wrote in 1976, because "in today's Poland the Marxist-Leninist doctrine is nothing but an empty shell, its gestures nothing but an official rite. " 33 Kolakowski had explained that the system was post-ideological. Michnik sought to draw conclusions for the opposition based on this new reality. To do so, he built on Kuron's insight that independent social activity per se constituted a political opposition. In "A New Evolutionism," Michnik begins by identifying the fundamental flaw of the revisionists' strategy: their wager on the elite. This had two consequences. First, it "ruled out all appeals to public opinion." 34 Second, it meant that in a conflict between elite and society, revisionism had ultimately to defend the elite. When the cards are down, revisionism must stand with the regime, because if it breaks with the regime, it breaks with its only source of hope. 35 In the period from 1956 to 1968, when there were no major headon collisions between state and society, these consequences were not considered particularly compromising to the opposition. After 1968 and 1970 they were. Michnik felt that the opposition was foundering on the absence of a movement. The revisionists had behaved like a hermetic

68 / Opposition and Civil Society pressure group, the self-appointed conscience of the Party, and refused even to consider increasing the chances of reform by means of organized social pressure.36 But in the post-ideological state socialist system, when the government was actively and violently repressing workers and intellectuals alike, Michnik felt that some organized resistance was essential. This resistance must not, however, explicitly challenge state power. Geopolitical realities ruled this out. "It is unrealistic in Poland today," wrote Michnik, "to think of a change in the government while the political structure of the USSR remains what it is, and it is dangerous to organize conspiratorial activities." 37 This is a reaffirmation of Kolakowski's theses of hopelessness. But Michnik accepts the theses of hope as well. He follows Kuron's emphasis on independent social networks as the source of a renewed opposition movement and reconceptualizes the strategy of political opposition as the turn from state to society. He calls for an "unceasing struggle for reforms, in favor of evolution which will extend civil liberties and guarantee a respect for human rights." 38 But he insists that the way to win such reforms is not by petitioning the state as such, not by pleading the case to the authorities, but by acting today as if these basic civil liberties and human rights were already guaranteed. This is anticipatory democracy, behaving in the present the way one would like to be able to behave in the future; acting today as if the desired tomorrow were already a reality.39 As Michnik puts it, concisely capturing the essence of the anticipatory project, the task of the opposition is "to create political facts through collective action." 40 Political life becomes more democratic (in the sense of expanding citizenship opportunities) when people act as if it were already more democratic, when they act as members of the revitalized civil society they hope will be legalized in the future. This is in line with Kolakowski's (and Marcuse's) position that the system is only as unreformable as people believe it is. Michnik calls on society to reject the state's ascribed monopoly on public life by simply engaging in independent social life, by creating an independent public sphere and accepting the risks incurred. This is a call for the reconstitution of civil society. The new theory of opposition thus asserts that democratization is the reconstruction of independent civil society. The state, therefore, does not need to be overthrown in order for significant democratic change to occur. People can accomplish this on

Opposition and Civil Society / 69 their own. Kuron makes the same point in his influential "Reflections on a Program of Action," written in late 1976, soon after Michnik's "New Evolutionism." He concludes with a call for the creation of a national network of interlocking social movements: Every issue of public concern can be the basis for the rise of a social movement. It is essential, however, that society organize itself into social movements interacting with each other, expressing as fully as possible the aspirations of all. This is a program for creating through these social movements ... a Poland of civic concern and independent social activity.41 In his "Notes on Self-Government," published in 1977, Kuron reemphasizes the significance of such activity: "Every independent social initiative challenges the monopoly of the state and thereby challenges the basis on which it exercises power." 42 He recalls here that in the 1960s he thought that the political system had to be changed before independent activity would be possible. Now he is convinced that activity must come first, and that activity itself constitutes a political transformation of the system. In a 1979 article, "The Situation of the Country and the Program of the Opposition," Kuron makes the argument once again: "The program of the self-organization of Polish society into independent social movements and institutions . . . is today the only road to the realization of the goals of the opposition and the aspirations of society." 43 The goal is not to overthrow the government, he says. The opposition must "aim for the improvement of the system, not for its transformation." 44 Such quotations can be multiplied endlessly. For the entire political opposition of the late 1970S in Poland revolved around this basic proposition: organize independent social initiative. But what did this mean concretely? For the most part, it meant recreating the classic institutions of the modem public sphere: meeting places, an uncensored press, organizations to represent various interests. Newsletters, journals, pamphlets, and even entire books were printed by independent publishing houses. Some publications focused on specific regions, others were nationwide; some expressed the views of one political tendency, others presented diverse tendencies. Then there was educational activity. Lecture series

70 / Opposition and Civil Society were organized in private apartments: this was the "Flying University," at which prominent professors and relative unknowns gave "public" addresses not subject to censorship. Organized groups began coordinating all this activity. The most prominent of these, of course, was KOR, the Workers Defense Committee, which was formed by intellectuals in late 1976 to provide legal and moral support for workers persecuted for their role in the strikes of June. When the workers were amnestied a year later, KOR remained in place in order to pursue what had been its main goal all along, as its founders Macierewicz and Kuron had envisioned it: to support and sponsor social initiative throughout the country, to oversee the reconstruction of civil society. Although the strikers of 1970 may have first proposed the creation of new unions, it was KOR and its supporters that sponsored the first "Free Trade Union" committee in 1978. It was just a hope at the time, and Lech Wal~sa joined the KOR mavericks without much conviction that they would succeed.4s Indeed, the founders were not very optimistic either; no one believed that the state could really allow independent unions, but the important thing was the initiative itself. The Free Trade Union group was a way of getting people involved in independent activity, and it was the process that was central to the opposition.46 In short, the goal of the opposition in the 1970S was to get people to do things-anything-just as long as they did it on their own, with no official mediation. Organizing, publicizing, or even attending a lecture series or discussion group, a theatrical work, or an art exhibit presented in a private apartment, basement, or some other space not under state control; distributing samizdat materials; independently assisting people persecuted for political reasons-these were among the main forms of oppositional activity. For all these were felt to produce an ethos of self-determination, a belief in one's ability to act publicly. New social institutions, if they were to come at all, would only come later; and in order for them to come later, new beliefs would have to be inspired today.

Politics and the Problem of the State Because this opposition was non-institutional and non-legal, it would usually speak of itself as "non-political." KOR was not a politi-

Opposition and Civil Society I 71 cal but a social movement, writes its historian (and member) Jan J6zef Lipski.47 But this was only true according to the traditional identification of politics as the realm of state power. The post-'68 opposition remained very much interested in this realm, but it realized that if it ever hoped to change it, it had to stay away from it. This was the irony of KOR's position. The main reason it rejected "politics" was because it was interested in politics. But rather than bang away on a door that was "hopelessly" locked shut, the opposition chose to force open another door that had a different name on it. This enabled the opposition to engage in public activity that could coyly deny its own status as "political." 48 But the fight to resurrect civil society was most emphatically a political struggle, for it was a fight to recapture the political components of civil society-the right of independent association and the realm of free communication-that had been obliterated by Leninism. But what if the fight was successful? What if social groups were allowed to organize independently and have their own press? The next stage would call for negotiations with the government. This would mean treading upon the supposedly off-limits realm of the state, and the groups would have to take form as legal institutions rather than as budding, inchoate movements. For the time this was unnecessary. Lacking legal status in the 1970s, the opposition could not conduct any kind of political dialog with the government. Its activists could only operate illegally, like revolutionaries, and call people to action. Unlike revolutionaries, however, their goal was not to seize state power, but to secure the conditions in which they could interact politically with the government. They had to act illegally, but their goal was to have independent societal institutions exist legally. Thus, the "non-political" struggle was aimed at securing the possibility of a "political" struggle. The long-term goal, therefore, implied a confrontation with the state. The ideology of the opposition always stressed that the state could and should be ignored, that people could act as citizens even without the state's permission. But if this opposition strategy was successful, independent civic institutions would become part of a legal public sphere. At that point, the new institutions would certainly have to deal with the state. This was the future, this was the goal, but it was also a stage for which the opposition never prepared. Therefore, when the government signed the GdaIlsk Accord, legalizing independent societal institutions, the opposition was at an absolute loss concerning what to do next. As will be shown in the next two

72 / Opposition and Civil Society chapters, Solidarity, many of whose major leaders and advisers had emerged from the opposition movement of the 1970s, could not break easily from the suddenly obsolete ideology of societal democratization. Only after several months did it realize that an explicitly political program was essential. It was the ideology of the 1970s, however, that was responsible for Solidarity's programmatic crisis in the first place. As the texts make quite clear, opposition theorists were aware that the state could not be ignored forever. In "Reflections on a Program of Action," KuroD. writes that the aims of the opposition movement could only be "fully realized ... in a parliamentary democracy." 49 Only because this was presently unattainable did KuroD. argue for the construction of social movements. In a later essay, "Toward Democracy," KuroD. states that although the creation of independent social groups constitutes "a certain modification of the system," a limitation on totalitarianism, and as such must be the opposition's immediate goal, it could not be the final goal. The conflict between state and society was ultimately a question of "kto-kovo?" according to KuroD.. Therefore, a "totalitarianism limited by the interest representation of various social groups is possible only as a moment in the process of democracy's triumph over totalitarianism, or vice versa." 50 Yet the oppositionists, aware that the state could not be ignored, nonetheless kept emphasizing that it should be ignored. Thus, near the end of "A New Evolutionism," Michnik says that the desired democratic socialism "should be not only-and perhaps even not mainlya legal and institutional structure, but above all a real community of free individuals, created anew each day."51 Here Michnik presents a model of the "third road," where the formal state is not very important at all. Elsewhere in the same piece, however, Michnik does not treat the state so cavalierly. Indeed, elsewhere he seems to indicate that society should organize precisely in order to force the state to democratize, after which the social mobilization will no longer be necessary. Thus he says that the Polish opposition must embrace "the Spanish rather than the Portuguese road," between which he sees only a tactical divergence. The "Spanish road" is said to mean "progressive and partial changes," while the "Portuguese road" entails "the violent overthrow of the existing system." 52 Both, however, entail a complete transformation of the state, and not of society alone. Similarly, in trying to dissuade the Polish opposition from focusing

Opposition and Civil Society / 73 on the state, Michnik nonetheless reinforces a belief in the state's longterm primacy: "The Polish democratic opposition should admit that transformations in Poland have to be made, at least in their first stage, in line with the Brezhnev Doctrine." 53 The crucial caveat, which I have emphasized, demonstrates that Michnik did not believe that the state could be ignored forever. Yet he felt that, at present, the opposition should turn its attention from state to society, so that, later, it would be able to deal with the state from a stronger position. When the state could be faced with the fait accompli of an independently organized society, then, perhaps, the next stage could begin. Opposition theorists apparently felt that this next stage was so far away that it was pointless to try to plan for it. It is hard to avoid the impression that they never imagined that their program could be realized. Indeed, this would explain why virtually all of them were so surprised when the government finally accepted independent trade unions in 1980. The call for the building of an independent civil society seems to have been for them what Trotsky called a "transitional demand" 54_a demand which can only be realized by the overthrow of the state, but which purports to be realizable without a revolution in order to attract support that might not otherwise be forthcoming. They were wrong. In August 1980 strikes in Gdansk and Szczecin resulted in the de facto legalization of the independent trade union Solidarity. Literally overnight, the party-state's juridical monopoly on public life and on the representation of social interests was destroyed. An independent, legal civil society had suddenly been created. The opposition's main goal had been accomplished. The period for which the program of societal democratization was appropriate came to an end. A new historical period had begun. No one was ready for it.

•

•

Herbert Marcuse, in defending the strategy of the Great Refusal as a way to break down a totalitarian present and hold out the hope for a more democratic future, admitted that he lacked a positive program for the future: "The critical theory of society possesses no concepts which could bridge the gap between the present and its future; holding no promise and showing no success, it remains negative." 55 The Great Refusal meant that people should organize independently of the state, resist state domination by avoiding it, and construct pockets of freedom

74 / Opposition and Civil Society wherever possible. Aimed at democratizing society, the Great Refusal was "positive" only in that it was directed to the expansion of "positive freedom." It was decidedly "negative" as far as constructing a political, institutional future was concerned. It lacked a program for the state. The Polish opposition was in a similar situation. Its strategy in the 1970S was precisely the strategy of the Great Refusal. Just as Marcuse held out the hope that the Great Refusal, despite the power of the "totally administered" society, might just succeed in changing the unchangeable, so Kolakowski and Kuron and Michnik argued that independent societal activity, despite the "totalitarian" nature of real socialism, just might succeed in reforming the unreformable. Although the programmatic deficiency of the Great Refusal was not a real problem for the new left in the West, which never managed to alter the system in a fundamental way, it became a crucial problem for the Polish opposition. For in August 1980 the Polish Great Refusal succeeded in attaining the presumably unattainable. The negative program had dramatically changed the system. Suddenly a positive program was needed to reconstruct it.

FIVE

Politics, Anti-Politics, and the Beginnings of Solidarity

In August 1980, provoked by rising prices, a deteriorating economy, and a long-simmering anger, shipworkers in Gdansk and Szczecin walked out on strike. Within days the strikes became general, guided in each city by an Interfactory Strike Committee that demanded that the government recognize the workers' right to form independent trade unions. Initially intransigent, the government finally began negotiating when the workers could not be broken and the strikes began to spread. An agreement was signed in Szczecin on August 30 and in Gdansk one day later, marking the first time a Leninist party state had recognized the right of groups within civil society to organize in defense of their own particular interests. The victory of August 1980 was the crowning triumph of the antipolitical strategy of democratizing society rather than the state. Suddenly it became permissible, even if not yet strictly legal, to engage in the various kinds of social activities the 1970S opposition had made the focus of its agitation, including, most importantly, the construction of independent trade unions recognized by enterprise management. The next few months became a kind of emancipatory celebration of civic life, as millions of people began discussing politics, attending meetings, reading and printing samizdat leaflets, and establishing unions, and doing so with an enthusiasm that gave Poland the flavor and feel of the great radical insurrections of the past. Poland's "revolutionaries," however, did not seek to overthrow the state. They carefully refrained from demanding changes in the party or state structure, for that was "politics," and the new union movement stated clearly from the beginning that it did not want to be a political movement. This was part of the price of the Gdansk Accord, but it 75

76 I Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity was paid willingly. Reared in the ideology of the KOR opposition, and remarkably loyal to it, the new union leaders were quite comfortable in disavowing "political" ambitions. Of course, not everybody shared these views. In Gdansk, many workers vehemently protested against the decision of WaI~sa and the other strike leaders to append onto the Gdansk Accord, at the insistence of the government, a "preamble" stating that the new unions accepted the constitutional guarantee of the Party's "leading role in the state." From the point of view of the new opposition, however, the preamble was no problem whatsoever: the party and state were supposed to be left to "them"; only society was "ours." By accepting the preamble, Solidarity leaders were only showing how much the KOR ideology had become their own. I And they continued to show it afterward, too. They had no comment when Gierek was ousted and replaced by Stanislaw Kania; that was "their" business, not "ours." For many months, Solidarity refused even to present its views publicly on solutions to the economic crisis. In a remarkable October 1980 interview with the influential weekly Polityka, Lech WaI~sa, Andrzej Gwiazda, and other Gdansk Solidarity leaders kept squirming away from the editors' questions, obviously feeling that they represented some kind of a trap. We can't say exactly what the government should do on this or that issue, they pleaded. That's "politics," they said, the government's business, and Solidarity is just a trade union that cannot and will not interfere in the affairs of the government. 2 Similarly, Solidarity for a long time refused to get involved with proposals for workers' self-management councils: running the state-owned enterprises was the "political" business of the government. 3 Yet, as soon became clear, the anti-political approach was completely inadequate to the new period. If the goal prior to August was to reconstruct civil society, the goal after August was to institutionalize it. If the goal before August was for independent trade unions to exist, the goal afterward was for independent unions to continue to exist. Yet for Solidarity to become a normal part of the system, there quite obviously had to be political changes, for the state socialist system does not naturally allow independent social institutions to exist. The government had accepted the principle of independent trade unions, but it still needed to alter the system in a way that could allow the unions to function. A new arrangement for the mediation of conflicting interests had to be worked out. New rules had to be devised, for example, for problems such as how autonomous unions can negotiate with heteronomous management;

Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity I 77 how the outcomes of open-ended negotiations could be reconciled with the prescriptions of the state's economic plan; how to reconcile free public opinion with rules of censorship; how to guarantee the union's right to affect public policy while preserving the Party's formal right to carry it out. In other words, the social goals of the post-August period required political adaptation on the part of the state. So at the moment when "anti-politics" reached its greatest success, it suddenly became obsolete. State politics was now back on the agenda. As its activities of the first months demonstrate, however, Solidarity was not fully aware of this. Nor did it know what to do next. In this, however, the fault lies with the opposition theorists of the 1970s, who had worked for this moment but never really prepared for it, for they never believed it could actually arrive. Adam Michnik has expressed this best, in a fascinating account of KOR discussions in the summer of 1980. In July, when Jacek Kuron thought that a major social explosion was at hand, Michnik was doubtful and went off to spend a month writing essays in the mountains. He returned to Warsaw to find that Kuron was right. As he would soon learn, however, neither he nor Kuron fully understood what was happening, nor were they prepared for what was to come: Jacek, like me, was very uneasy about the situation in Gdansk, where they seemed to have some pretty wild ideas .... The "wildest" idea was the one that independent and self-governing trade unions could be formed. Jacek knew this was impossible in a communist system. I also knew it was impossible and that's why I was supposed to go to GdaDsk, to explain to them that it was senseless to insist on such a demand. Since I was known and rather liked there, perhaps I might have convinced them. Fortunately, I was arrested. I couldn't go to Gdansk and convince them and so Solidarity was created. [It was good] they arrested Jacek and me ... because we probably could have shown them that Solidarity simply "had no right" to exist. We knew that independent, self-governing trade unions were impossible in a communist system, but the workers didn't know. That's how Solidarity arose, without us and against us, although we always considered it to be our [KOR's] child. An illegitimate one, you might say.4 Having done so much to make this moment possible, the old oppositionists still did not believe that it was possible. By mid-November

78 / Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity 1980 Michnik could still offer no new idea on how to deal with the state. 5 And so Solidarity tried its best to keep ignoring "politics" and to concentrate on building its new union, staying faithful to the old opposition ideology until finally overcoming it by the end of the year. If it was still easy for Solidarity, in these early months, to focus on "civil society" alone, that was because the government was still not conceding the terrain. For the authorities continued to pose enormous obstacles to the activities of the new unions, as will be documented below. It was possible to act as a citizen in a revitalized public sphere, but only if one was willing to take risks to do so. And this made the immediate post-August period seem somewhat similar to the pre-August period, for in the campaign to build the new unions that had grudgingly been allowed to arise, it was still social activism rather than "political" (or state-oriented) activism that was most urgently needed. The government had signed the Gdansk Accord permitting independent trade unions, but the workers still had to build these unions themselves. The long-term goal would require a political solution, but the short-term exigencies allowed the obsolete societal focus to continue. The Solidarity experience of 1980-1981 can be divided into three periods: August-December 1980. Solidarity attempts to stay out of politics and concentrates its efforts on establishing its own union. It tries to find a structure for the union that would be appropriate for pursuing the struggle for societal democratization within the existing political environment. 2. December 1980-August 1981. Increasingly aware of the inadequacy of the "societal" model, Solidarity begins to press for a political solution requiring a transformation of the state. Its first efforts reveal an inclination toward working out a neocorporatist arrangement between state and society. 3. August-December 1981. In this final period, Solidarity abandons its resistance to "politics." It realizes that the anti-political model of societal democratization is inadequate if not incoherent, and presses openly for a new political accord requiring a fundamental change in the existing system of government. The union is divided between those seeking a pluralist solution, and those, including the top leadership, working toward a neocorporatist solution. I.

Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity / 79 Each of these stages revealed different problems for the effort to democratize a state socialist country, and each merits close examination. This chapter will concern the first period only, documenting the events that led Solidarity to break away from the ideology of societal democratization. The next chapter will encompass the following two periods.

Independent Unions: Government Resistance Immediately after the signing of the Gdansk Accord, political oppositionists and labor activists set about trying to establish new, independent trade unions. But they continued to run into obstacles. Official attempts to thwart the rise of an independent civil society based on independent trade unions began during the first strikes in July 1980 and lasted until the resolution of the registration crisis in November of that year. These attempts took four forms: Buying off strikers with wage increases Proposing the reorganization of old unions instead of the creation of new ones 3. Trying to limit new unions to certain regions 4. Repackaging old unions as new ones I.

2.

In order to understand why Solidarity emerged from this struggle as the kind of organization it was, each of these experiences needs to be analyzed in some detail. For each left its imprint on the social consciousness. Buying Off Strikers with Wage Increases

Beginning in July 1980 in Lublin, the government exhibited a willingness to resolve strikes favorably for the workers so long as the latter did not press for independent trade unions. Workers in the large automotive repair works in Lublin (Lubelskie Zaldady Naprawy Samochodow), where a strike began on July 10, demanded the liquidation of the existing factory union and the election of a new one that would be independent from management. It was unclear whether this entailed a

80 / Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity new union structure or just the election of a new local within the old structure. As it turned out, it would remain unclear, since the strike was settled on July 15. Management offered wage increases and promised to redress other grievances pertaining chiefly to working conditions, while the workers agreed not to press the union issue. 6 Such settlements were the rule elsewhere in Lublin. Everywhere there were complaints against the official trade unions, which usually sat on management's side during negotiations with the strike committees? But local directors were empowered to offer only wage increases, and they often did so quickly in order to avoid the introduction of demands concerning representation. On July 14, for example, the first Monday after the onset of the strikes and immediately after the automotive repair works had introduced the demand for new trade unions, workers in the major local dairy and poultry processing plant (Zaldady JajczarskoDrobiarskie) as well as in the "Herbapol" tea-packaging plant went out on strike. But even before a full-fledged strike committee could be formed and a list of demands drawn up, management offered wage increases of 800 and 500 zloties per month, respectively, if the workers would return to their jobs right away. They did. s In Gdansk, the story began in the same way. The Lenin Shipyard went out on strike on August 14, demanding the reinstatement of Anna Walentynowicz, fired for political activities, and a I ,ooo-zioty pay increase. The demands threatened to escalate very quickly. When Lech Walpsa climbed over the shipyard gate to join the strike, the workers demanded that he be given his job back, too. There were calls now for a 2,000-zloty pay raise, the erection of a monument to the victims of 1970, family supplements equal to those of the militia, publication of the demands in the media, and the creation of free trade unions. As the authorities hesitated-management, for instance, explained that it did not have the authority to grant permission for the construction of a public monument-other enterprises in the area went on strike and sent representatives to the shipyard. In an effort to ward off further escalation of demands and a widening of the strike, the shipyard authorities finally agreed to reinstate Walentynowicz and Walpsa, increase wages by 1,500 zloties per month, and permit the erection of a monument. This attempt to buy off the strikers and head off nascent political demands nearly succeeded. On August 16 the striking shipyard workers accepted the agreement and voted to end the strike. The entire strike

Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity / 81 movement might well have subsided at this point had it not been for the intervention of shipyard nurse and free trade union activist Alina Pienkowska, who hun-ied around the plant urging workers not to go home. We have won our demands, she said, but there are others who have not. We must stay on strike for them as well. In this way, only hours after the strike was declared over, a solidarity strike began. The: director canceled the accord with the shipworkers. An Interfactory Strike Committee (MKS) was established at the Lenin Shipyard, with two representatives each from that plant and the twenty other striking units. Its task was to coordinate strike activity throughout the tri-city area (Gdansk, Gdynia, Sopot). In the list of demands drawn up by the MKS on the night of August 16, the call for free trade unions was listed as number one. Subsequent MKS statements emphasized that this was the one demand it would not give up. The Party responded by intensifying its efforts to settle the strikes through wage increases. On Sunday, August 17, Deputy Prime Minister and Politburo member Tadeusz Pyka was appointed head of a government commission to examine the situation in Gdansk. When he arrived there two days later, he refused to meet with a three-man delegation from the MKS and sought to negotiate only with individual enterprises. In return for breaking with the MKS and returning to work, Pyka frequently offered the strikers more money than they were demanding! 9 This strategy, singularly unsuccessful, continued even after Pyka was replaced by Deputy Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Jagielski on August 21. But by August 22, almost four hundred enterprises in the Gdansk region had gone on strike and affiliated with the MKS. Only then did Jagielski finally receive an MKS delegation and agree to begin negotiations the following day. The attempt to prevent the rise of independent trade unions by buying off the strikers had proven to be a spectacular failure. It did, however, succeed in conveying the impression that the government was implacably opposed to the idea. Offering a Reorganization of Old Unions Instead of the Creation of New Ones

Agreeing to talks with the MKS did not yet mean that the government was accepting the demand for new trade unions. When Jagielski

82 / Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity presented his position to the MKS for the first time on August 23, he repeatedly stated that trade unions should represent the interests of employees and effectively defend their rights. But he argued that this could and should be done within the existing unions. If the public feels that the unions do not fulfil their function satisfactorily, and that this overgrown structure has become outmoded, then it must be changed. Another must be sought, or alternatively, we can use what already exists by replenishing it with new people without delay.lO In fact, the government had demonstrated already in July its intention of insisting on the reorganization of the existing trade unions if it could not squelch the trade union question altogether. In the Lublin railyards (Lokomotywownia), the strikers could not be bought off with money. They not only demanded new union representation but went ahead and elected new representatives on the fourth day of the strike. When the government was presented with the fait accompli of an "Independent Factory Council," it consented to the change and immediately moved to limit the damage. On the very next day, July 19, the strike was settled. The government recognized the right of the railworkers to elect new union councils within the framework of the existing union structure, and also consented to changes in union election rules. But the workers did not win the right to form new trade unions. 11 The settlement echoed the 1970-1971 solution: then, the government had consented to the demands of the Szczecin shipworkers for free union elections, only to devote the year afterward to returning the situation to normal by removing the ones who had been freely elected. 12 The Lublin railyard workers in July 1980 won nothing more than Szczecin had won in 1971. 13 Jagielski's decision to negotiate with the MKS seems to have entailed the same kind of recognition that the Lublin authorities had given the railyard workers. The government commission was accepting the fact that it could not keep the question of trade unions off the agenda. Its task now was to try to persuade the workers to accept a reorganization of the old unions. Wal~sa opened the second round of negotiations on August 26 by reiterating that "the most important [demand] is the one concerning

Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity / 83 trade unions." Substantiating the claim that the strikers had no "political" pretensions, Wal~sa argued that free trade unions were necessary to help improve the economy. The economic crisis, he said, "came about because working people did not have their own, authentic union representation." 14 When Jagielski spoke, he expressed the same concern about the dire state of the economy and agreed on the need for changes in the union movement.. But his proposal was somewhat different: It is essential that steps be taken which open the way to a radical improvement of the situation and allow the trade union movement to strengthen its class character and regain its position among the masses. It is planned to hold trade union leadership elections without delay, in every factory where the workforce wishes them. I propose that such elections be conducted throughout the Gdansk region within the next few days or weeks, as you prefer. Such elections must be democratic, by secret ballot. [Emphasis added] 15

This was a plea for Gdansk to settle for what Szczecin had settled for in 1971. The PZPR had decided upon the tactic two days earlier, at its IV Plenum. In his widely publicized speech to the Plenum, Party leader Gierek had announced new procedures for trade union elections. The Party would renounce its right to name up to 85 percent of the candidates for trade union posts and would allow new, democratic, and fully competitive union elections .16 The phrase "where the workforce wishes them," however, was a reminder that even these concessions would not necessarily apply everywhere. So in this sl~cond round of negotiations, on August 26, Jagielski offered not new unions, but the chance to become leaders in "rejuvenated" old ones. The MKS unanimously rejected this, and the session ended without an explicit agreement on Point I. In a sense, however, the strikers' determination had essentially settled the matter. Following the second negotiating session, a special "working group" was created, where representatives of both sides could meet to discuss the specific demands at length and in private in order to work out details of an eventual agreement, to be voted upon by the MKS as a whole. From the Solidarity side, the "working group" included several prominent scholars and academics, known for their largely social

84 I Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity democratic oppositionist views, who had been invited to the shipyard to provide advice to the MKS. This "Commission of Experts," formed on August 24, one day after the first round of negotiations, played a key role in the subsequent negotiations and in drafting the language of the accord. At the first meeting of the "working group," on August 26, the government spokesmen initially repeated the official position that there should be new elections instead of new unions. According to one MKS participant, however, they did not argue very strenuously, for they already knew that this was unacceptable to the workers. 17 Indeed, as the session went on, the government side began talking about independent unions, although for now only as "hypothetical" entities. ls The next day, when the working group met instead of the larger plenary session, the government asked for an explicit limitation of the new unions to the "coastal region" and introduced the question of the new unions' "political orientation." 19 This seemed to indicate that the government side had essentially conceded the key trade union demand in Gdansk, and was now working to contain the damage. The MKS experts (with the exception of Jadwiga Staniszkis, who resigned over this question) proposed to resolve the political issue according to the principle of the anti-political opposition: the workers would recognize the Party's "leading role in the state," but only in the state. As Tadeusz Kowalik, one of the authors of this compromise, has explained, the experts insisted on the phrase "leading role in the state" so as to grant less than the Polish Constitution, where the Party "leads" all of society as well.20 It was this wording that was finally drafted into the preamble of the Accord, although there has long been considerable controversy around i1. 21 In any case, raising the "political issue" on August 27 was a sign that the general question of the existence of independent unions had been conceded. There was little discussion of Point I at the next day's meeting of the working group, and by its fourth session, on August 29, the final agreement on Point I was almost fully worked out. 22 The proceedings of the general plenary negotiations support the view that the matter was largely settled by the workers' steadfastness at the second open negotiating session. When the two sides next met publicly, on August 28, the trade union issue was not even discussed. The MKS Presidium instead used the time to vent built-up frustrations: they wanted to force a high government official to listen to descriptions

Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity / 85 of inequities and injustices as perceived from below. As MKS leader Andrzej Gwiazda put it, Jagielski had to hear about "life as experienced by an ordinary person." 23 As it turned out, Point I was not discussed publicly again. At the next negotiating session, on August 30, the final draft of the agreement on Point I was made public and signed. Permission to form "independent, self-governing trade unions" had been granted. 24 / The state's second strategy for blocking the rise of independent trade unions had, therefore, failed. For all its effort, and despite its final capitulation, all the government earned was the increased suspicion of Polish society. What people perceived was not so much the government's final concession, which was the lead story in the Western media, but its dogged opposition to new unions and its repeated efforts to block them. There was never any indication that the state willingly accepted the new unions; it allowed them only to end the strikes. Thus, the acceptance had to be understood as provisional. After Gdansk, the government made one last attempt to preclude new unions by drawing the new leaders into the old structures. Wal~sa revealed that officials of the old unions had contacted him in early September and offered to let him take over the leadership of the Central Trade Union Council (CTUC) at its September 7 plenum.25 WaI~sa refused. The government now had to find other methods of blunting the consequences of what it accepted in Gdansk.

Trying to Limit New Unions to Certain Regions The Gdansk Accord clearly spelled out the right of workers in the tri-city area to form "new trade unions outside the Central Trade Union Council register." 26 According to the agreement, the existing factory strike committees "are free to become bodies representing factory employees, such as: workers' or employees' commi~ees, workers' councils, or founding committees of the new, self-governing trade unions." The Gdatlsk MKS was explicitly recognized as "the Founding Committee of these new unions" and was given the right to form a "single union or association of the Coast." 27 This last point is significantly ambiguous. There was nothing in the GdaDsk Accord that explicitly recognized the right of workers throughout Poland to form new, independent trade unions. From the transcript of the negotiations, it is obvious that it was

86 / Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity the intention of the workers' demands to establish this right. It is also obvious that Jagielski did not want to concede this. For example, during the second negotiating session on August 28, Jagielski had called for new trade union elections "throughout the GdaIlsk region," 28 as if purposely omitting the rest of the country. Lenin Shipyard delegate Lech Sobieszek immediately protested, expressing his" anxiety over the Prime Minister's statement to the effect that the new trade unions apply only in the GdaIlsk region .... Statements like these," he warned, eliciting strong applause from the strikers, "can bring the whole country on strike." 29 Jagielski sometimes created the impression that the government wanted, or perhaps just needed, to be forced from below on this issue, and in the end, of course, it was. The final version of the Gdansk Accord, then, suggested applicability to the entire country (especially Point I, section I), but never explicitly proclaimed it. In fact, it seems certain that, in August, the government did indeed plan to limit independent trade unions to GdaIlsk. The most compelling evidence for this lies in the text of the oftenneglected Szczecin Accord. This accord, signed by Kazimierz Barcikowski for the government commission and Marian Jurczyk for the Szczecin MKS, was actually concluded on August 30, one day before the Gdansk Accord. A careful examination of key parts of this text may explain why the government rushed to finish negotiations and sign the Szczecin Accord first, and not allow Gdansk to be the precedent.30 It may also explain why the government later sought to play up the Szczecin Accord over the GdaIlsk Accord. In the summer of 1982, for example, Professor Adam Lopatka, a high state official and member of the government negotiating team in Szczecin, complained: "For a long time, even to this day, there has been one-sided publicity for the GdaIlsk negotiations and agreement, while those in Szczecin are overshadowed. This is wrong. We should stop this in order to give proper value to Szczecin." 31 The attractive thing about the Szczecin Accord, from the state's perspective, is that the status of the new unions that were to emerge from the strike committees was left extremely unclear. Indeed, there are good grounds for interpreting the Szczecin Accord as guaranteeing the subordination of the emerging unions to the old union structure. Where the GdaIlsk Accord was an explicit, clear-cut agreement, the Szczecin Accord was a model of vagueness. It may well have suffered from the

Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity I 87 absence of a committee of experts on the workers' side, which might have seen through the ambiguity of official language and insisted on a more solid commitment to trade union independence. But the Szczecin MKS generally took a more wary stance toward outside assistance than did Gdafisk. It accepted only a few intellectuals into the Warski Shipyard, where the MKS was based, and it excluded foreign reporters and even most domestic ones, which accounts for the fact that we know relatively little about the August strike in Szczecin even today. Demand number one of the Szczecin MKS was for the "formation of trade unions which would be free and independent of the government and Party." 32 But the wording of the final accord reads as follows: It is agreed that, based on the opinion of the experts, self-governing trade unions, having a socialist character in accordance with the Polish Constitution, will be able to arise .... After the strike, the strike committees will become workers commissions, which will hold, where necessary [w miar~ potrzeb] , general, direct, and secret elections for trade union leaderships.33 What is suspicious here is the lack of a statement that the new trade unions were to be independent. The adjective "self-governing" (samorzr;dne) in itself did not signify any concession, since the term had been used for over twenty years to refer to official factory institutions that were legally subordinate to the Party.34 Moreover, the Szczecin text stipulated that the strike committees would only become "workers commissions," not the "founding committees" of new unions that the Gdansk Accord allowed. In addition, those commissions were to sponsor elections only "where necessary," and only to elect "trade union leaderships" (Wladze Zwie-zk6w Zawodowych). Nowhere does it specify that this concerns elections to new trade unions, rather than to the ones already existing. The language on the "socialist character" of the emerging trade unions, which are to operate "in accordance with the Polish Constitution," also offered grounds for suspicion. Surprisingly, some Solidarity supporters have argued that the absence of any reference to the "leading role of the Party" shows the superiority of the Szczecin Accord. 35 In fact, it would seem that the Szczecin appeal to the Constitution, which guarantees a "leading role" for the Party in all realms of public life, was

88 / Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity far more compromising than GdaOsk's reference to the "leading role of the Party in the state." But the Szczecin language was suspect in another way, too. Since the Constitution guarantees the Party a "leading role" in state and society, and since the workplace is the constitutional focal point of the Party's socialization activity, it could easily be argued that genuine trade union independence was itself in conflict with the Polish Constitution. Of course, the Constitution also speaks of trade union independence, just as it speaks of freedom of the press. But in official interpretations, the principle of Party domination has always prevailed over the contrary principle of societal independence. Citing the Constitution as the sole basis for the new unions' legality, therefore, only placed union independence in jeopardy. In contrast to the Gdansk Accord, the Szczecin Accord was mired in secrecy. Only one document was made public-the one widely known as "the" Szczecin Accord. Two supplementary documents, however, were signed but never released. A reporter for the Polish monthly Literatura, Malgorzata Szejnert, who was at Szczecin's Warski Shipyard during the signing of the accord, tried immediately afterward to find a copy of the key supplementary document, the one containing the mysterious "opinion of the experts" that was cited by the public document as the basis for the new unions. But she was told it was secret, and already under lock and key in the office of the shipyard director. 36 One of the lawyers who drafted this secret document was Adam Llpatka, the man who argued, nearly a year after the imposition of martial law, that the GdaOsk Accord should be downplayed and the Szczecin Accord brought to the fore. Parts of the two supplementary documents were made public for the first time in 1982 by Szczecin Party leader Janusz Brych, one of the three government signatories to the public accord. Significantly, he revealed that both of these secret documents, although not the primary one, stated that the emerging unions would be registered with the existing Central Trade Union Council! 37 In contrast, Point I, section 4, of the GdaOsk Accord stated that the new unions would be registered "outside the CTUC register." This would seem to be clear evidence of the government's intention to withhold from Szczecin what it had granted to Gdansk. It is this intention that may explain why the government so carefully avoided the apparently more logical sequence of first signing an

Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity I 89 accord in GdaDsk and then using that accord as a basis for settling strikes elsewhere, and instead rushed to sign the Szczecin Accord before the GdaDsk precedent was established. For the government wanted to demonstrate that it could reach an accord with workers without granting them independent trade unions. By August 28, the government had all but agreed to the demand for independent unions in GdaDsk. It was at this point that the government prolonged negotiations there and turned its attention to Szczecin. Jagielski, for example, concluded negotiations with the Gdansk MKS in the early afternoon on August 28 and promised to return for more talks at 5 :00 P.M. He did not return that day, however, nor did he come for talks the next day. Instead, the next round of negotiations took place on August 30, the very day the Szczecin Accord was signed. The GdaDsk MKS was angry with the government for delaying negotiations when an agreement was at hand; meanwhile the Barcikowski commission in Szczecin was fast pressing for a settlement. (It should be kept in mind that telephone and telex communication between Gdansk and Szczecin was highly erratic at this time, often breaking down completely. This prevented the two MKSs from coordinating their activities. ) It is likely that the government pursued this policy in order to make sure that Szczecin would not demand the same explicit guarantees of trade union independence that GdaDsk had obtained. It was part of the general strategy of warding off the specter of independent trade unions. Recognizing defeat in GdaDsk, th~ government set out to restrict the defeat to that region. Its view of the Szczecin Accord was forthrightly stated in early September 1980 by a "high official of the Polish Communist Party" visiting New York City. Unwilling to be named for the record, he readily agreed to speak for it. According to the New York

Times: Only time will tell, the official said, whether newly independent unions will form their own federation or affiliate with the existing Central Council of Trade Unions. "In Gdansk they are organizing their own unions," the official said. "In Szczecin they will elect their own union and affiliate with the official union." 38 As it turned out, the government was not able at the time to insist on its own interpretation of the accords. After the Gdansk and Szcze-

90 I Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity

cin strikes were settled, a wave of strikes exploded in Silesia, which demanded that the accords be applicable there as well. The JastrzS?bie Accord of September 3, ending the wave of coal strikes in Silesia, was an unsatisfying compromise document. The first point about the trade unions stated only that there would be "new trade union leaderships" (nowe Wladze Zwi(pk6w Zawodowych), in the ambiguous language of Szczecin. Then comes a bizarre formulation: "It was informed that the striking coal mines and enterprises fully support the twenty-one demands of the striking enterprises of the Coast, and in particular the point concerning trade unions." 39 As to who informed whom (the MKS to the government's negotiators? the negotiators to the Central Committee?), or what all this "informing" meant for the workers, the document is silent. Further on, the accord explicitly refers to "new trade unions," thus suggesting greater similarity to Gdansk than to Szczecin, although the relationship to the CTUC remained unclear. This ambiguity soon proved intolerable. Further strikes in Silesia, particularly at the massive Katowice Steelmill, forced the government to sign one more accord. The Katowice Accord of September I I, signed by Iron and Steel Minister Franciszek Haim for the government, and Andrzej Rozplochowski for the Interfactory Workers Committee, finally explicitly extended the agreements of Gdansk to the whole country.40 Only then did the massive strike wave come to a halt. The explicit guarantees of the Katowice Accord perhaps explain why it was never given the same official publicity as the others. The government's "trio" was always GclaDsk, Szczecin, and JastrzS?bie. Only Solidarity would cite Katowice in the same breath. More important than how the government sought on paper to restrict the right to form new unions was how it tried to do so in practice. It was these experiences of harassment that impressed themselyes indelibly on the consciousness of a new generation of activists. The government's strategy, in short, was to obstruct the formation of independent unions wherever workers had not gone on strike to ensure it. This was done in the first place through official inaction. Managers of enterprises received no new instructions stating that independent unions were now to be permitted wherever the workers wanted them. Moreover, managers could see that even if the government had allowed a new trade union organization to arise in GclaDsk, it had certainly not done so willingly. Managers had no reason to think that they

Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity / 91 should be forthcoming where the central authorities were not. Most managerial personnel, moreover, would not know how to proceed even if they were disposed favorably to the workers' demands, because independent unions just did not fit into any arrangement the system had known. Lacking instructions from the center, and resenting unplanned and unregulated social activism that could only lead to a diminution of their own authority, most managers responded harshly to any attempt to create new unions on their own terrain. From their point of view, obstruction was the safest bet. A research team led by Dr. Ireneusz Krzeminski of Warsaw University's Sociology Department conducted a series of studies in November and December 1980 on the origins of the independent union movement in Warsaw. These studies uncovered a consistent pattern of resistance by enterprise authorities to the formation of independent trade unions. Frequently, activists were threatened with dismissal from their jobs.41 This threat was rarely executed, for fear of provoking precisely the kind of strike the director sought to avoid, but often the threat itself was sufficient to deter an activist. In some enterprises management issued orders banning gatherings of three or more people on plant grounds. A passageway betw~en two enterprises, or between two sections of a sprawling plant, might be blocked if a new union organizing committee arose in one of the two but not in the other. Where organizing committees did emerge, their telephones and mimeograph machines would suffer a rash of inexplicable "breakdowns." Phone service in an entire plant might be mysteriously "disrupted." When the phones of organizing committees did work, wiretaps were common. Foremen were ordered to tear down notices and leaflets about the new unions, and to collect lists of workers who had signed up for them. And when activists sought space for their meetings, they frequently discovered a sudden lack of available halls. Nevertheless, workers were so mobilized in this early period, so intoxicated by the prospect of building new unions, that they usually withstood the initial harassment and created organizing committees in their plants. The government answered with new forms of harassment. Management might claim the right to censor all communications. Activists might be demoted or transferred, provoking a clash with the new trade union. Other activists might be called in for "discussions" with enterprise officials or even with the police. Police interrogations, of

92 I Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity

course, can be compromising, for cynicism is pervasive and a suspicion may arise, often spread from above, that the activist has agreed to cooperate with the authorities. Even summoning some and not others can sow suspicion, since a question arises as to why X was overlooked, or why Y was detained longer than Z. The pervasive police apparatus of a Leninist state leads people to worry that anyone, except one's closest friends, just might be a fink. Such mutual suspicion could be devastating to a small union local. Indeed, it played a destructive role throughout Solidarity's harrowed history. Finally, there were attempts at old-fashioned bribery. An activist struggling to get by (and who wasn't?) might suddenly be offered a bonus, a promotion, a car-purchase coupon, or even a low number on the housing list-"only who needs this union stuff, right?" 42 The authorities tried other ways to scare the rank and file. Both management and the official unions often spread the false and frightening rumor that joining the new unions would mean losing the benefits normally provided through the old ones, such as paid holidays, subsidized vacations, and child health care.43 At the first national gathering of independent union representatives, held in Gdansk on September I7, many delegates reported harassment. The situation was particularly grim in the smaller regions, where activists lacked the politically sophisticated support that was available in the larger cities. The most desperate report came from the small southeastern city of Krosno: "The local authorities do not recognize the national character of the Gdansk Accord," said delegate Krzysztof Gruski. "They keep emphasizing its local character, restricting it to Gdansk, Szczecin, and Jas~bie, the places where government commissions were sent." 44 He added that the organizing committees were systematically denied office space or any possibility of access to the public. "If you don't support us," he exhorted the gathering, "they'll wipe us out." 45 In the official press, there was very little coverage of incidents of harassment. What there was, however, spoke quite eloquently. In the Fast textile plant in Bialystok, the workers, mostly women, went out on strike on September 4. Conditions at the plant were extremely poor. The factory was very hot in summer and freezing in winter, and the women worked long hours at dilapidated machines. They went on strike in order to win the right to form new unions. Technically, this was already legal,

Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity / 93 but no one told them that. The local paper had not printed the text of the Gdansk Accord, and the national papers that had were not available there. The director of the plant told the workers that they had no right to form new unions and ejected from the plant a reporter who had given the secret away. When the strike committee stood fast, the director told them that if they insisted on new unions they would lose their vacations and the summer camps for their children, and would not be able to get a loan again.46 In the city of L6di, meanwhile, one factory manager tried appealing to the workers' consciences. Demanding new trade unions, he told them, was a very dangerous thing. Better not to press the issue, he coun~eled, for one thing always leads to another: Demanding new trade unions today could lead to World War III tomorrow! 47 Such episodes of fraud and intimidation were repeated throughout the country. They could not be easily forgotten. Repackaging Old Unions as New Ones

During the strike wave in the summer of 1980, the official trade unions were usually the workers' most strident opponents. In Lublin in July, union representatives frequently sat alongside management, and opposite strike delegates, during negotiations to end the conflict.48 In August, when the general strikes in Gdansk and Szczecin revealed the depth of the national crisis, the official CTUC leadership entered the fray as the most vituperative opponent of the strikers. Jan Szydlak, a Politburo member and the CTUC chairman, expressed the prevailing attitude simply and colorfully when, at a Gdansk meeting of official unions on August 19, he vowed that "we shall not give up power and shall not share it."49 "We fought too hard for power to divide it now with somebody else," bellowed Szydlak,50 echoing a famous quotation of Gomulka's from the early postwar period. Yet it was not in the state's interest for the official unions to be discredited completely, particularly if the strikes could not be suppressed. On the same day Szydlak was megalomaniacally denouncing the strikers in Gdansk,. members of the CTUC presidium were admitting to local leaders in Warsaw that the official unions had failed to represent workers' interests in the past. It vowed to reform itself and to initiate legislation so that it could better defend the workers in the future. 51

94 / Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity This statement signaled what would soon become the official line: that the workers' protests were justified, and that a "renewed," revitalized Party would carry out the requisite reforms. A few days later, at the IV Plenum on August 24, this tendency got the go-ahead from the top. Szydlak was expelled from the Politburo, along with Tadeusz Pyka, who was scapegoated for the original policy of refusing to negotiate with the MKS.52 The victorious Party faction inaugurated its new union policy the next month. In mid-September, the unions of teachers, metal workers, healthcare workers, transport workers, and textile workers all convened special sessions to "discuss the new situation." Each of them issued essentially the same remarkable resolution: a purported declaration of independence. Each announced that it was breaking from the official CTUC, and that henceforth it would be an "independent" representative of the interests of workers. The Polish Teachers Union (ZNP), for example, declared itself "an independent and self-governing union operating outside the congress of unions." 53 The choice of adjectives was revealing: they were the very words used by the supporters of the new Gdansk union. It must be remembered that at this time there was no such thing as a national union called "Solidarity"; until September I7, as discussed below, that was the name for the Gdansk group alone. Instead, there were only hundreds of organizing committees of mostly nameless "independent self-governing trade unions," or ISTUs (NSZZ). By its declaration of September 12, the ZNP was claiming that it was only one more of these, an heir of the Gdansk Accord as legitimate as any other ISTU. Although other official unions were making the same proclamations, it was surely no accident that the greatest public exposure was given to the "transformation" of the ZNP. For the ZNP was the only union that already had a genuinely autonomous competitor. On September 10, the ISTU of Scientific, Technical, and Educational Employees (NSZZ Pracownikow Nauki, Techniki i Oswiaty, known generally as NTO) was founded in Warsaw as an independent union for teachers and other intellectual employees. 54 In contrast to other ISTUs, where only organizing committees yet existed, NTO was the product of organizing committees created earlier. The September 10 meeting approved a union charter and elected union officials. Its founders and leaders were people known for their oppositionist, democratic socialist beliefs, as well as for their early support of the Gdansk strike.

Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity / 95 NTO was a particularly well organized union. Lacking only legal status, it was rapidly gaining members and could be expected to severely erode the base of the ZNP. It had its own small samizdat press, but received no publicity or news coverage in the mass media. The meeting of the ZNP, by contrast, was widely publicized in print and on radio and television. Its transformation into an "independent self-governing trade union" was heralded as a major event, a realization of the Gdansk Accord. It appears, however, that this transformation was only intended to stop the NTO. The object was to maintain the strength of the official unions by dubbing them ISTUs, thus attaching the symbolic lure of Gdansk to the decrepit unions of officialdom. This new state strategy was aimed at stifling the growth of independent civil society not by preventing the rise of new unions, but by "repackaging" the old ones. On September 16, the official union of seamen and longshoremen, based in the new union stronghold of Gdansk, announced that it, too, was quitting the CTUC and would henceforth be "independent and self-governing." Three days later, leaders of the construction, trade and cooperative, mass media and book publishing, and local administration unions followed suit. Unions of printers and of communications workers announced their withdrawal from the CTUC on September 23. Such gestures only persuaded Solidarity activists that the Party's long-term strategy was to appropriate the mantle of independence in order to defuse the opposition and maintain Party control over society. The parallels with the Polish Socialist Party in the late 1940S and the independent workers' councils in 1956-1957 were inescapable. In both cases the Party had created new institutions that claimed to embody the goals of these opposition organizations, but that in fact only swallowed them up and destroyed them. Thus, the Polish United Workers Party "inherited the mantle" of the PPS ill 1948, and official Conferences on Workers' Self-Management took over the authentic self-management committees in 1958. Trying to prevent a repeat of this cynical history, Solidarity denounced the old unions' hypocritical declarations of independence. On September 25, one day after the genuinely independent unions jointly applied for registration as "Solidarity," the Warsaw branch of Solidarity issued a statement charging that the official unions had become "independent" in the same unacceptable way they had always made decisions in the past: under orders from above. The official unions, however, played up their new status. At a September 27

96 / Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity meeting between government ministers and officials of the "new" old unions, the latter publicly demanded that the government hurry up and implement the "just" demands of the workers. 55 In mid-October, as the Warsaw District Court was expressing serious reservations about Solidarity's statutes, or charter, and delaying its registration, the official unions were easily being re-registered as "independent" ones. The press presented this as the.fulfilIment of the Gdansk Accord. It reported, for example, that as of October 8, the applications of twenty-seven new trade unions had been submitted, without noting that virtually all of these were simply old unions with new charters.56 Newspaper coverage of "New Unions in Action" chiefly concerned the activities of the old unions; information on Solidarity locals was marginal. 57 On October 27, the CTUC formally dissolved-only for the Party to launch a new central body in its place: the Coordinating Commission of Branch Trade Unions. This body, chaired by Albin Szyszka, head of the communication workers union, billed itself as a voluntary national association of fully independent and self-governing trade unions. But the meager support these unions enjoyed was underlined by the Commission's first official act, which was to defend its Szczecin locals against decertification in the many plants where they represented less than 10 percent of the workforce! 58 The very next day the media again gave broad coverage to more "national congresses" of official unions. 59 Where Solidarity locals were discuss~d, they were frequently shown as cooperating with the old unions, strengthening the desired impression that all the unions were essentially alike. 60 Solidarity feared that the government's attempt to appropriate the mantle of independence for the unions under its control was part of a plan to bypass the new unions when it came to policymaking. It got a hint that this was the case in early September, when the Council of Ministers issued the timetable for implementing the wage increases won by the August Accords. This resolution began with the words: "The Council of Ministers, after consultation with the Central Trade Union Council, has decided. . ." Lech Wal~sa protested on behalf of Gdansk Solidarity.61 Yet soon afterward representatives of the old unions were given equal standing with representatives of Solidarity on the legislative commission set up to draft a new trade union law, despite the vastly disproportionate membership bases of the official and grass-roots unions.

Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity / 97 For the most part, Solidarity chose to concentrate on building its own union. It devoted most of its energies in October and November to the dispute over registration. Some locals, however, more actively resisted the official unions' attempts to "declare independence" and maintain influence. In Silesia, for example, dozens of miners went on hunger strikes to try to prevent the old miners union from even holding its national conference. The conference, nevertheless, took place as planned. 62 Discredited and isolated, none of the official unions won over many workers during the Solidarity period. Despite (and, no doubt, because ot) all the official support and media coverage that they received, they could not shake their image as defenders of the old way at a time when everyone was pressing for something new. In November 1980, when Solidarity was at last officially registered as a national union, the government dropped its campaign to present the old unions as a viable alternative. Seen as proof of the state's bad faith, the campaign left one main legacy: to heighten suspicion regarding the government's willingness to accept the August Accords.

Signs of Hope If Solidarity was to abide by the August agreements and avoid becoming a "political" organization or intruding upon the prerogatives of the state, the state would have to make changes on its own. It would have to learn to accept and negotiate with independent unions, to stop insisting on running the organizations of civil society. It would have to recognize that particular interests really do exist, even in state socialism, and that the Party does not and cannot represent "universal" interests, since there is no such thing as a "universal" class or ideology. The Party would have to accept that particular groups within society can legitimately create their own organizations, and select their own leaders, to advance their own particular interests. But would the party-state make the necessary changes? The legacy of tricks, harassment, and repression suggested that it would not. And yet there were signs of hope. For besides the repression and harassment, there were important conciliatory gestures as well, suggesting that perhaps the government might yet be willing to undertake-or might yet be persuaded to undergo-the institutional changes necessary

98 / Po.litics and the Beginnings of Solidarity for the system to function peacefully with independent societal institutions. What were the encouraging signs? First, there was the simple but still astonishing fact that the government had signed the accords. As we have seen, few oppositionists believed that this was possible. ("We knew it was impossible," says Michnik.) It ran counter to everything they knew of the state socialist system, everything they had argued in the 1970s. Beginning with Kolakowski, the oppositionist critique had identified the monopolization of public life as the essence of the system. At most, the Party might tolerate some degree of independence for intellectuals. But not for workers! For the ruling Party is the "party of the working class," and the workplace is the basic unit of socialism. Surely they couldn't give up that social space! The factory is just too crucial. It is the primary location of two of the system's most important socializing institutions: the Party cell and the official trade unions. Official unions maintain discipline, coordinate the provision of social benefits, and provide the formal equivalent of an interest association. Independent trade unions would deprive the Party of its crucial non-productive function in the factory: to socialize workers into the statist system and prevent the formation of associational ties rivaling those of the Party.63 It was simply inconceivable, therefore, for most oppositionists, that the Party could allow free trade unions to exist. Michnik, as noted, thinks it "fortunate" that he was arrested before he could get to Gdansk. One oppositionist, Jan Strzelecki, who was "less fortunate" and made it to Gdansk, actually resigned from the MKS committee of experts because he felt that honesty obliged him to advise against demanding independent trade unions, and yet he did not particularly want to counsel "hopelessness" against "hope." 64 Nevertheless, Deputy Prime Minister Jagielski did sign the Gdansk Accord, and the Central Committee and Politburo approved. The government may have signed under pressure, and may have done so only because it was too weak and divided to forcibly suppress the strikes. Yet sign it did, and this was something absolutely unprecedented in the history of state socialism. The Gdansk Accord was not the only sign that the state might be responsive to society's demands. On September 13 the Council of State issued a decree allowing organizing committees to obtain legal registration for the new unions prior to the passage of appropriate legislation. One part of the decree did, in the words of Gdansk Solidarity, "arouse

Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity / 99 objections." This was the section giving the courts the right to annul the legal status of a union that had already been approved, if they subsequently decided that the new union's "activities or structure are in conflict with the law." On the whole, however, the decree was an important and auspicious first step toward institutionally establishing the right to form independent trade unions, and Gdansk Solidarity expressed general "satisfaction" with its content.65 In September and October, the new Party leadership frequently stated its commitment to the accords. Kazimierz Barcikowski, the government signator in Szczecin who was rapidly emerging as a leading Party figure, delivered a widely publicized speech in late September reiterating the state's commitment to the accords. He spoke of the general feeling that "something great" had happened in Gdansk and Szczecin. "Something new and invigorating has arisen in our social life, in our national existence." 66 The entire situation cannot be changed overnight, he stated, but the work of reform had begun. No doubt there were still "certain problems" connected with the rise of new unions, but these, he said, were the kinds of problems "common to all new phenomena that seek to alter old habits and structures." The situation might not be good everywhere, but everywhere it could and would become good: "I want to stress again, with all possible force, that the government stands on the basis of these accords, and will implement them with conviction and determination." 67 The VI Plenum of the Party convened a few days later, on October 4, one day after the successful one-hour general strike staged by Solidarity to protest against delays in granting wage increases. Despite the tensions, First Secretary Kania was equally effusive about the Party's commitment to reform. He spoke of "historical, epochal" changes that had taken place in the past few months, and stated that the Party was fully determined to implement the accords. 68 Although criticizing "certain organizers of the new unions" for the previous day's strike, the tone of the speech was conciliatory. In fact, this plenum turned out to be more conciliatory toward Solidarity than any other before martial law. On the one hand, conciliatory words were still "only words." Harassment, after all, continued, and many unpublicized meetings between central and local officials were conveying an impression that was anything but conciliatory.69 On the other hand, the conciliatory words conveyed a message to lower-level and middle-level functionaries and

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to the rank and file. The message was that the August Accords were binding documents, affirmed and confirmed by the highest Party authorities. Public statements from the Party center were vital symbolic communications for would-be activists as well. In many smaller towns, for example, workers were still too afraid to initiate new unions. Positive Party statements, however, unmistakably conveyed the impression that union activism alone would not invite the wrath of the state. As a result, many Solidarity locals arose only in the late fall of 1980, when it finally appeared safe to do SO.70 The last sign of hope was that, despite the legal obstacles, the harassment, the lack of information and the disinformation in the media, Solidarity was legally registered as an autonomous, self-governing trade union, fully independent of Party and state. The union's application for registration was submitted on September 24, accepted with imposed statutory revisions on October 24, and finally, under threat of a general strike by Solidarity, accepted in its original form by the Supreme Court on November 10, 1980. Independent trade unions, the cornerstone of an independent civil society, had been legally permitted within the state socialist structure. An enormous amount still needed to be done to allow these unions to function in the system. And yet it was impossible to argue, in midNovember, that nothing at all had been won. So firm an oppositionist as Karol Modzelewski, the Solidarity press spokesperson who had already spent years in Polish prisons for his political activities, stated, when pressed by an interviewer soon after the union's registration, that "generally speaking, the evolution is positive." 71 These few bright signs meant that there were grounds for feeling that a satisfactory resolution was possible, and that the government might yet make the political changes that would permit Solidarity to continue to focus on "civil society" alone.

The Structure of Solidarity Not wanting to overthrow the system, Solidarity had to be built in order to fit into it. And yet no one could be certain what kind of independent union could fit into a system that had never tolerated one before. If the Solidarity experiment was to succeed, workers had to be

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IOI

guaranteed the right to organize independently and to participate in an open political public sphere, while the Party had to be guaranteed its "right" to continue to govern. The first priority for the workers was to firmly establish the new unions' right to exist-not on paper but in the real world, and not just in Gdansk but throughout the country. From the beginning it was clear that this required two things: (I) a network of unions around the country, strong and militant enough to demand their rights from local authorities, and (2) some kind of national body able to come to terms with the state. What was not clear was how these two should coexist. Did this mean there would be one national union, or a multitude of smaller unions bonded loosely at the top? Would decisions at the top be binding or advisory? Would the unions be organized according to profession, like NTO, or according to geographic region, like the Gdansk and Szczecin MKSs? And if they were regional, what would be the relation between factory locals and the regional center? Or between regional centers and the national center? These were crucial questions in the heady days after August, because, contrary to widespread opinion, the strikes in the Lenin Shipyard did not end with the creation of a single national union called "Solidarity." In fact, the Gdansk strikers never envisaged the creation of a giant national union, but only of numerous small ones throughout the country. The Gdansk Accord permitted the hundreds of individual strike committees that made up the MKS to transform themselves into founding committees of "new, self-governing trade unions." This implied that there might be as many new unions as there were strike committees. The workers had decided during the strike that the new unions would stick together afterward, but there was no decision as to what form this "sticking together" should take. The accord stipulated that the Gdansk MKS, as the organizer of the "new unions" (note the plural), could choose to create "either one union or an association [of local unions] on the Baltic Coast." 72 At the first poststrike meeting the day after the accord, the workers decided that they should retain "unity" and agreed, by acclamation, to form a single union for the Gdansk region. The catchword "unity," so seductive to the social movement the August strikes had created, often resulted in decisions whose implications were far from clear. The decision to form a regional union, for example, ignored the question of the precise relationship between the factory local and the regional center. For if there is one union there are not many

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unions, and it was not clearly spelled out what powers remained to each. The ambiguity was built into the very name Gdansk chose for its union: "Solidarity." So potent from a psychological and propagandistic point of view, appealing to the inherent collectivism of the workers' radicalism while alluding coquettishly to the lexicon of official Marxism, the name was hopelessly ambiguous from an organizational point of view, as it held out the promise that everyone would support everybody else and did not even entertain the concept of conflict. If the Gdansk decision resolved, albeit ambiguously, the status of the union in the tri-city area, the national union structure was still far from clear. Immediately after August, two definite tendencies began to emerge, a centralist position and a decentralist position.73 Decentralization was the natural tendency in early September. The Gdansk Accord, after all, had only guaranteed independent unions for the Gdansk area. The MKS had refused to insist that the accord be made applicable to the whole country.74 Other cities would have to organize to win this right for themselves. Less than two weeks later, NTO was created as a fully autonomous union, with no intention of becoming part of anyone else's national structure. In early September, regional organizing committees were created in Warsaw and L6di, while in Silesia three different organizing committees, based in three different industrial enterprises, arose independently, each aspiring to lead a regional union. This general tendency toward a decentralized union movement was not surprising: centralization, after all, was the traditional model of union organization in Poland, and this movement was about autonomy, about podmiotowosc. The debate between the Centralists and the Decentralists was a fascinating one, with a relevance to unions and social movements far beyond Polish borders. Unfortunately, it is also a debate that is exceedingly hard to reconstruct, because it ended almost before it had a chance to begin. At the first national meeting of ISTU representatives on September 17, the decentralist position suffered a sudden, jolting defeat. From that time on, "unity" became the password, and the Decentralists, not wanting to break ranks, refrained from carrying on the debate in public. Within weeks, all the regional locals became part of national Solidarity, and even NTO decided to dissolve into the new national union. A full account of this debate can be provided only by its participants. Nevertheless, in order to understand the nature of the union that emerged, it is worthwhile to try to reconstruct the decentralist position.75 Its proponents offered three main arguments for a decentralist ap-

Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity / 103 proach: it was more efficient for dealing with the state, more democratic for the unionists, and more in line with the overriding goal of reconstructing a diverse civil society. The question of efficiency centered on the problems that might arise if small ISTUs could succeed only with outside support from a strong central union. The Decentralists argued that for any ISTU local to be strong and secure, it had to go through the process of unionization on its own. There would certainly be obstacles, as in Gdansk and Szczecin, but what made these two regions strong, in the view of the Decentralists, was the shared experience of building a new union, of overcoming the obstacles on their own and learning in the process how to negotiate with power. Many Decentralists favored a national union in the long term, but felt that establishing one immediately would weaken the movement as a whole. Without hardwon experience, the new locals would not know how to negotiate with local authorities. Such inexperience might make them either too radical or too timid, and in either case not very effective. If individual unions won the right to exist by their own efforts, they felt, a national union resulting from an eventual federation would be unstoppable. The Decentralists defended their position by appealing to the ideal of participatory democracy as well. The experience of autonomous public activity, they felt, was in and of itself a major goal of the movement. Independent trade unions, after all, were not just unions; they were a way for society to recapture public life from the monopoly control of the Party. The goal of the movement was for people to learn to become autonomous public actors-that is, to become citizens. Establishing one big union would mean handing people something they ought to earn and learn themselves. A vibrant new political system, based on an active and open democratic civil society, required people to develop institutions for themselves. Without this, what was the point of the whole movement? The Centralists were not indifferent to these concerns, but they felt that the situation was simply too urgent. Thrning the efficiency argument on its head, they contended that at a time when the state was already trying to reverse the gains of August, the most efficient way for Polish workers to defend themselves was to unite in a single national union. Similarly, they argued that any future democratization depended on the ability of the movement to survive in the present, and that, they claimed, required a single, unified organization to counter the unified resistance of the state. This argument obviously had a great deal of common-sense appeal.

104 / Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity But more important than any single argument they presented was the Centralists' belief that the struggle was now at a new stage. By calling for a single national union that could pose a political counterweight to the arm of the state, they were saying that the conflict had already passed the stage where societal democratization alone was the goal. The current problem, they felt, was to institutionalize the changes that Solidarity's appearance had made a fait accompli. And such political change could not be made without the kind of intense pressure only a unified union movement could mount. The Decentralists conceded that a single national union might be a better weapon to wield in a political contest against a centralized state. But they rejected the view that this was all that was necessary. The Decentralists remained loyal to the anti-political focus on the reconstitution of independent civil society. This was a struggle people had to wage on their own, without a central leadership. A political struggle might soon be necessary, they felt, but only when a base had been established in a strong, independent society. Although the Centralists began to move in a political direction, they still did so very tentatively. For one thing, the new union movement still had to respect the "non-political" conditions of the August Accords. Not until 1981 did the self-restraint on political activity begin to loosen up. But the other problem was that even the Centralists lacked a political program at this stage. They perceived that it was necessary to find a new political solution, to advance beyond the "societal" stage, but they still had no idea exactly what this entailed. On September 17 activists of some thirty-five budding ISTUs nationwide met in Gdansk to discuss problems of union organization. Only the Centralists came prepared for battle; the Decentralists didn't even know there'd be one. Many of the delegates came from provinces where resistance from above combined with fear and inexperience from below to hinder the formation of new unions. And they wanted Gdansk to help. The first hours of the meeting were taken up by local reports, often opening with stories of obstructive activities on the part of the state and ending with appeals for "unity." According to one participant, the Centralists had people placed in different parts of the hall, all breaking into applause any time the word "unity" was mentioned, hoping thereby to prepare the ground for the resolution they were about to offer. 76 Like "solidarity" itself, "unity" was a slogan of official Marxism that the

Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity / 105 opposition sought to use to its advantage. The Decentralists of course also favored working-class "unity," but not in the fonn of a single institution that might smother social diversification. But the Centralists were in control here. Late in the meeting, the chair recognized Jan Olszewski, a lawyer from Warsaw, and permitted him to make a motion, technically out of order, proposing that all ISTUs seek to register as one national union. 77 Olszewski was followed by Karol Modzelewski from Wroclaw, who argued that without such unity the state would slowly but inexorably liquidate all the unions, up to and including Gdansk.78 Lech WaI~sa opposed the centralist program, but only half-heartedly. The position of WaI~sa and of Gdansk Solidarity was that each ISTU should register independently, while maintaining "unity" through a coordinating committee without binding authority. But Wal~sa did not fight hard for this position, probably because he was th~, one person who had nothing to lose either way: he would remain the de facto leader of the movement in the decentralist scenario, or become the official leader of the union in the centralist scenario. The fonner would spare him the obligation to consult other regions when negotiating with the authorities; the latter would enhance his fonnal prestige but technically make him only first among equals, which is one reason other activists supported it.79 Soon after Modzelewski's speech, the delegates went off into a separate room to conclude debate without the presence of guests, spectators, and journalists. When they reconvened in the main hall, WaI~sa announced: "We're going together! All the heads of the local union organizing committees-we'll go together to Warsaw and we'll register together." 80 They had decided to form one national union, borrowing from Gdansk its statutes as well as its name: "Solidarity." But although this appeared to be a victory for centralization, the result was actually a compromise, and an extremely effective one. The workers were too committed to their own new unions to hand much power over to a central body. They wanted the show of unity to guarantee legalization, but insisted on the full autonomy of the regions, too, something that Modzelewski had argued strenuously against. 81 Logically, the resulting hybrid did not always make sense. Yet for a social movement fighting for legality without any guarantee of success, it was a brilliant and indispensable strategy. Soon after announcing "unity," Wal~sa said: "We will adopt one set of statutes together. A joint statute.

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But the regional unions will stay as they are." 82 This, of course, is impossible. If the local unions adopt the same charter and register as one union with a central Coordinating Commission at the top, then the regional unions do not "stay as they are." Because the way they are is fully autonomous, and they lose that full autonomy if they join together in a national union. Solidarity even tried to retain this contradiction in its proposed charter, which presented Solidarity as a single national union, yet also stated, in the original Paragraph 37, that its regional components would retain a separate legal identity. When the Warsaw District Court insisted that this paragraph did not make sense, Solidarity quietly withdrew it, in one of the less heralded incidents of the "registration crisis." 83 Yet Solidarity never publicized this concession. It continued to function as if it were simultaneously centralist and decentralist, a single union and many unions, depending on the needs of the situation. In fact, it was this very ambiguity that was at the heart of Solidarity's mass appeal. Lech WaI~sa summed up the nature of the union best in his closing remarks to the gathering of September 17: "Let everybody know that Gdansk has become the headquarters for everybody-no wait, that's wrong-that ... a central authority has emerged in GdaDsk, though it's not really a central authority, something like it, but not that exactly." 84 Solidarity's structure allowed precisely as many zigzags as appear in this apparently confusing comment, which was in fact an accurate characterization of Solidarity's internal structure. The ambiguity about whether Solidarity was one national union or a loose federation of autonomous ones was inherent in the new union's activity, and was a source of its strength. On the one hand, the Coordinating Commission (whose name was soon changed to National Coordinating Commission and later just to National Commission, suggesting an increasing role for the center) would issue authoritative statements of policy, saying that the union stood for this or for that, and had such and such a demand to present. On the other hand, regional union authorities were responsible for activities carried on in their own areas and frequently took decisions in conflict with those of central union leaders. The central union body alternately called the recalcitrant local to heel or allowed it to do as it pleased, whichever seerr:ed best at the time. One might argue that this arrangement was not so much ambiguous as federalist, with a clear distinction between power at the local level

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and power at the national level. But the point is that the boundaries between centralization and decentralization were not at all clear, and were purposely made unclear. The reason had to do with its opponent. In the first part of this chapter, it was shown how the government responded in a contradictory way to the demand for free trade unions and to the first steps of the new unions. It erected a steady stream of obstacles, intended first to prevent the rise of independent trade unions, then to limit their scope, and then to deceive would-be members by promoting state-sponsored "independent" unions. Yet it also signed accords allowing independent unions, generally refrained from arresting activists, issued a decree permitting the registration of the new unions, and substantially relaxed censorship. The ambiguous structure of Solidarity was a direct response to this mixed set of signals. As a centralized union, Solidarity could reply to obstruction with unified strike action and to conciliation with unified assent. It could show the government that it was strong enough to insist on long-term reforms, and disciplined enough to guarantee social peace. As a decentralized union, it could demonstrate that civil society was still mobilized on its own. This would tell the government two things: (I) that repression against the center could not destroy the movement; and (2) that if the government did not work with the authorized officials of Solidarity, with whom accord was possible, then it might have an uncontrollable strike movement on its hands and be unable to secure social peace at all. Solidarity had to playa treacherous balancing act. It had to be both a centralized institution and a decentralized movement, showing the government that it always could control the workers while demonstrating that it did not in fact always do so. The union's institutionalized ambiguity allowed for both kinds of responses, each of them essential in this tricky struggle to compel the socialist state to institutionally guarantee the permanence of an independent civil society. Did such an arrangement allow Solidarity to fit into the system? It was the union's only chance. Its ability to forcefully articulate the diverse interests of its members while also compelling their allegiance enabled Solidarity to offer the government the assurance it needed that reform without revolution was possible. Only this could counteract Kolakowski's final thesis of hopelessness: that the government would not give up anything for fear of having to give up everything. It enabled the union to offer the government the possibility of a peaceful political

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solution, a corporatist solution, and in 1981 this is what Solidarity began to do. There was another way in which Solidarity was built to fit into the system, and that was its adherence to the branch, or ministerial, tradition of union organization. Solidarity was organized into regional unions, but within regions the union locals still organized workers according to branch, not profession. This was how the old (and "new") official unions were organized. According to Paragraph 8, section 2, of Solidarity's statutes: "The basic union organization is the factory local, organizing workers of every trade employed in a given factory." The Solidarity local in a steelmill, a coal mine, a school or a hospital would represent all the employees there, regardless of the job performed. The coal mine local, for example, would represent miners, mine safety technicians, on-site medics, clerical workers, and janitors alike. The hospital local would represent secretaries and bookkeepers as well as nurses and doctors. This type of representation helped the union fit in because it directly corresponded to the structural organization of the state socialist economy. In this economy, investment decisions are made on a branch or ministerial level. The central planning board allocates funds according to industry, and the wages for all workers in a given industry are paid out of the monies allocated to it. This results in extreme inequalities. For example, since the coal industry has top economic priority in Poland, the wage fund allocated to this branch has always been substantially higher than the fund allocated to, say, health and education. Thus, there will be a great disparity in wages between a nurse at a coal mine and a nurse at an elementary school, or between a secretary at a coal mine and a secretary at a hospital. And if the unions reflect this arrangement, they cannot alter its consequences; they cannot bargain collectively for workers of one trade if that trade is performed in enterprises under the jurisdiction of several ministries. By adopting branch representation within its regional structures, and rejecting organization by profession as advocated by NTO, Solidarity was choosing a structure that would allow it to plan and negotiate with individual ministries and so function within the given socioeconomic system. Sticking to the branch tradition gave Solidarity political clout but forced it to sacrifice some of its egalitarian aspirations. Although this elicited some criticism,85 there was no debate over whether

Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity / I09 to adopt an alternative structure that could better meet the needs of marginal workers. In the end, the union was structured in a way that made a long-term reformist solution possible.

The Significance of Solidarity's First Period At the September 17 meeting, Karol Modzelewski had suggested that a national union was needed in order to pursue political goals. Yet although his organizational proposal was adopted, his call for a political orientation was not. For in this first period, Solidarity left the political sphere to the government. Solidarity was structured in such a way that it could become a political actor. But the ideology of societal democratization was still hegemonic in the movement, so it did not yet try. By the end of the year, however, Solidarity had finally begun to abandon its anti-politics and to tum directly to the problem of the state. Three key factors led to this change: the harassment, the gains won despite it, and the structure of the union that emerged. The harassment was probably most important. This was an experience that imprinted itself indelibly on the minds of the new union activists, who saw the government continually try to undermine the idea of independent trade unions, even after it had signed the August Accords. Clearly something more than the signing of a social compact was needed. There had to be changes in the state as well. Despite the obstacles, however, the movement had achieved enormous, unprecedented successes. This suggested to union activists that perhaps the socialist state could peacefully coexist with an independent civil society. Political transformation might not be as hopeless as the opposition had once thought. Moreover, Solidarity'S structure now made it possible for it to conduct state politics. By the end of November, Solidarity was a legal trade union with millions of members and thousands of full-time functionaries (most of whom were still on factory payrolls, as was normal for the state-run unions of the past). Up to that point, Solidarity would not have been able to tum to high politics even if it had wanted to, because it lacked an institutional base. Now that base was established. By combining the centralization and discipline of a national union institution with the decentralization and spontaneity of a power-

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ful social movement, Solidarity could now wage a multi-level battle to bring about a political settlement with the state. What kind of settlement? These same three factors pointed to a new kind of arrangement, a neocorporatist arrangement. The experience of harassment had created a deep and dangerous layer of societal distrust. If the government kept saying that it honored the Gdansk Accord, and yet all the time tried to sabotage it, then it was difficult to believe the government at all. If the government said that there was no quick way to rescue the economy from its continuing decline, this claim also had to be treated with disbelief. It would not deter workers from strike action, since they could not be sure the claim was true; more likely, they might reason, it was fabricated in order to discredit Solidarity. This crisis of confidence, crippling for any government, could only be overcome if an independent societal organization could vouch for the credibility of the government. Solidarity alone could rescue an isolated and delegitimated state. The experience of societal distrust thus made the state open to a possible corporatist resolution of the deepening crisis: Solidarity would guarantee social and political stability if the state would recognize the permanence of societal independence. Democratic representatives of society could coordinate and cooperate with the party-state if the latter would accept the institutionalized influence of Solidarity'S leaders. The signs of hope, culminating in the legalization of Solidarity, led in a similar direction. By late 1980, the Party and Solidarity were coexisting in an ongoing political arrangement. It was not very stable, but each passing day suggested that there was a willingness to make it more stable. Since Polish society demanded societal independence, and the Soviet Union and the PZPR demanded the maintenance of Party rule, a corporatist solution that guaranteed the existence of both seemed more and more like a genuine possibility. Finally, the very structure of Solidarity was conducive to a corporatist solution. It was a national union with a central leadership that did not challenge the leadership role of the Party in state affairs. It had millions of followers and was capable of disciplining them, as demonstrated by its coordinated nationwide strikes and the peacefulness of all its protests. Solidarity, therefore, had something the government desperately needed: the key to legitimacy and social peace. Moreover, the union's branch-based organizational principle matched the state socialist econ-

Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity /

III

omy. The state, it seemed, could coordinate plans with Solidarity. If both sides worked together, there did not need to be a state of permanent crisis.

•

•

•

On December 16, 1980, before the watchful eyes of the nation, Lech Wal~sa stepped out onto a platform in front of the Lenin Shipyard, together with the head of state, Henryk Jablonski; the Party leader of Gdansk, Tadeusz Fiszbach; and a leader from the Roman Catholic hierarchy, Cardinal Franciszek Macharski. The representatives of church, state, and independent civil society together unveiled the long-awaited monument to the slain workers of 1970. With this moment, the first period of the Solidarity era came symbolically to an end. Not only had independent unions been established, but their leader was being accorded all the dignity of a major national figure. There was a sense of a new beginning in Gdansk that night. Less than two weeks earlier, ominous signs of a possible Soviet invasion had alarmed Solidarity and the world, but this grandiose display of unity seemed to put those fears to rest. In a crucial but ineffable way, the monument itself provided a new sense of security. Somehow people knew that the old lies could not ride any more. No longer would it be possible to speak of an "inseparable bond" between Party and working class. The monument represented a historic triumph of memory over forgetting, and without this, as Milan Kundera has reminded us, no politics, or aesthetics, is possible at all.

SIX

Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism

We have to save what's most dear Of the plenty already here. Build an ark before the flood! -Jacek Kaczmarski, "Noah's Ark," March 1981

By the end of 1980, Solidarity had begun to look for a political solution to the crisis. Any solution had to preserve the right of Solidarity to exist as a legal, autonomous trade union, while guaranteeing the Party the ability (and legitimacy) to continue to exercise the "leading role" in the state. The first was necessary because a mobilized society demanded it; the second was necessary because the Party and the Soviet Union required it. The argument of this chapter is that Solidarity, in its attempt to find a political solution, inexorably gravitated toward a neocorporatist arrangement with the state. Neocorporatism was, and perhaps still is, a viable democratic alternative within state socialist society. Yet even if Solidarity always pushed in this direction, it never fully committed itself to a corporatist solution. For one thing, it was unwilling to break completely with the program of societal democratization, and it was wary of involvement in the political realm, which had always been the Party's turf. And partially because of this reluctance, Solidarity itself did not fully understand what it was striving toward. Even when its lingering anti-political orientation dissipated rapidly after August 1981, Solidarity still did not have a language or model to explain where it was headed. It only knew that parliamentary democracy was unattainable and that societal independence was indispensable. That this combination can lead only to neocorporatism was demonstrated by Solidarity's own

113

114 / Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism practice. But "neocorporatism" is my concept, not theirs; and they developed a similar model too late to gain wide appeal. The solution revealed itself in practice, but was barely acknowledged in theory. The most explicit corporatist proposal to appear in print was published on the very day martial law was imposed.' This theoretical gap contributed to a polarization of views in Solidarity's last months. For since the only widely known political alternative was state pluralism, or electoral democracy, many regional activists after August 1981 began demanding that Solidarity give up its original mission and work to overthrow the Party. Wal~sa and others tried to fight this trend, but lacking a model of their own, they were not very successful. This led to WaI~sa's loss of control over the union in the final weeks before martial law. The theoretical model is therefore quite crucial. If Solidarity had better understood the inexorable direction of its practice, it might have been better able to influence the ultimate outcome. As we will see in the next chapter, the opposition of the late 1980s seemed to understand it much better.2

Neocorporatism and Democracy Corporatism refers to a political arrangement whereby diverse interests of civil society come to be represented in the polity without obtaining power through electoral contest. Philippe Schmitter describes it as an "institutional arrangement for linking the associationally organized interests of civil society with the decisional structures of the state." 3 It entails a special relationship between one or more societal organizations and the state, wherein the government gives each organization, as the officially recognized representative of certain social interests, special influence in the determination and implementation of public policy in a given sphere. Schmitter has proposed the following generic definition of corporatism:

a system of interest representation in which the constituent units are organized into a limited number of singular, compulsory, noncompetitive, hierarchically ordered and functionally differentiated categories, recognized or licensed (if not created) by the state and

Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism / 115 granted a deliberate representational monopoly within their respective categories in exchange for observing certain controls on their selection of leaders and articulation of demands and supports.4

In other words, a few societal interest groups are given special influence by the state in return for agreeing to defend the state. Schmitter distinguishes between two very different kinds of corporatism: state and societal. Societal corporatism (or neocorporatism) obtains where the privileged status of certain key interest groups is forced on the state from below, by independent societal institutions, and is established de jure (i.e., legally and institutionally). If corporate status is granted from above, with the organizations themselves "created" rather than "recognized" by the state, and dependent solely on the will of the state, Schmitter calls the result state corporatism. 5 The former alone allows social groups to retain considerable independence and to have a guaranteed influence on government policy. Most of the literature on corporatism has concerned societal corporatism rather than state corporatism. That is because it has concentrated on corporatist arrangements in Western democracies that permit the existence of independent interest associations. Indeed, the focus on Western Europe has been so pervasive that state corporatism is often treated merely as a relic of the past, as "old corporatism," relevant to the "medieval or interwar" periods only.6 Schmitter in fact quickly dropped the discussion of state corporatism altogether, focusing instead on societal corporatism, which he renamed "neocorporatism" to make more wieldy.7 Where the right of free association is not guaranteed, however, state corporatism would not necessarily be obsolete. And some recent studies have argued that post-Stalinist state socialism does indeed fit very well into a model of state corporatism. To Daniel Chirot, Romania looks like a quintessential corporatist state.8 The postwar communist authorities, he says, created several interest groups entirely dependent on the state. In agriculture this entailed the development of a "co-operativist union," but the state also organized groups of writers, artists, professors, industrial managers, scientists, and the like, each with its own social institutions such as restaurants, spas, recreational facilities, medical services, and schools.9 Such an arrangement allows room for social diversity, while the fact that the

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corporatist groups are created by the state means that if they have any influence on the government, it is only because the government chooses to listen to them in some particular case. In Schmitter's terminology, Romanian corporatism is only a form of state corporatism. As for pre-Solidarity Poland, Jadwiga Staniszkis has written about the extensive contacts between the Gierek regime and representatives of the largest Polish factories, as well as with industrial managers, intellectuals, and even some representatives of the Church. Such contacts, she writes, "met all the criteria of a corporatist type of ... interest articulation." 10 But this, too, was only state corporatism, not neocorporatism. As Staniszkis writes: This corporatist structure of interest representation was authoritatively recognized but not legalized as part of the political process. Corporatist groups, owing to their semi-legal participation in politics, did not have any specialized political apparatus, and their impact on politics was more a result of the style of the particular ruling team than of lasting institutional arrangements. . . . They served as advisers or consultants but did not actually participate in decision-making. The initiative for contacts was usually taken by the ruling group, which also chose the topics of consultation. II The Polish opposition found the Gierek state corporatist arrangement unacceptable because such an arrangement continued to deny the principle of societal autonomy, or the right to free association. Yet the situation changed dramatically when the Gdansk Accord was signed. When Solidarity became a legal, independent national trade union, state corporatism was no longer just unacceptable; it also became obsolete. The legalization of Solidarity as an independent union, and the inability of the government either to take it over or to liquidate it in the first months, meant that state corporatism could no longer be a possible solution to the problem of how to mediate between the interests of the state and the interests of society. A new way had to be found. Western writings focus on the choice between neocorporatism and pluralism. "Which one is more democratic?" scholars and activists have asked.12 In Poland, the choice was rather different. The pluralist option, after all, was still impossible. The opposition had turned away from the state and toward society in the 1970S because it realized that the

Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism / 117 state could not be forced to accept a pluralist solution, if only because the Soviet Union would not tolerate it. The Leninist party state could not permit pluralism's "spontaneous formation, numerical proliferation, [and] horizontal extension" of societal interest groups, whose "competitive interaction" would influence public policy.13 And even though Solidarity had been legalized, the geopolitical parameters had not been altered at all. Solidarity understood this from the very beginning, which was one important reason for its original "anti-political" demands. But even after the weakening of the ideology of societal democratization in light of the negative experiences of the first period, most of Solidarity'S leadership still recognized the impossibility of achieving a pluralist solution. As Wrodaw Solidarity official Karol Modzelewski would tell his comrades during a critical National Commission meeting in August 1981, adopting the pluralist program meant "declaring war on the Party as well as on the USSR," and thus was impermissible. 14 This left the neocorporatist option. IS Schmitter has argued that the neocorporatist arrangement entails the subordination of one procedural norm of democracy, meaningful elections, to another procedural norm, freedom of association. Further, the principle of majoritarianism is subordinated to the principle of agreement between representative elites: decisions result not from counting votes, but from weighing interests. 16 After the legalization of Solidarity, the Party still refused to accept the principle of electoral democracy. But when the Party recognized Solidarity, it did accept the principle of freedom of association. Since this is the premise of a societal corporatist arrangement, as opposed to a state corporatist one, the possibility of a legitimating, democratic transition emerged. The Party could not accept a pluralist solution, but the legalization of Solidarity suggested that it might be able to accept a neocorporatist solution. Therefore, discussion of democratic possibilities in Poland during the Solidarity period needs to focus not on a choice between pluralism and societal corporatism, but between state corporatism and societal corporatism. It is the latter choice that first faces a state socialist society in the process of reform. But can neocorporatism be a democratic alternative in a state socialist country? Can it be a democratic alternative at all? It seems that it can. Let's look at the relationship between neocorporatism and democracy in liberal democratic societies. Schmitter argues that if democratization implies "the progressive extension of the citizenship principle" to "a

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wider range of eligible participants," and it seems quite clear that it does, then neocorporatism mainly implies a shift in democratic emphasis.!7 If citizenship is equated only with electoral rights, with the ability to elect a sovereign parliament, then neocorporatism, with its emphasis on interests over votes, would seem to restrict democracy by narrowing the citizenship principle. But if citizenship implies equal political opportunity, then the correlation is reversed. In that case, neocorporatism may in fact expand democracy by empowering those societal interests that are consistently underrepresented in polyarchical systems. Neocorporatism can thus be as democratic as electoral pluralism. It is true that where the electoral principle prevails, any group whatsoever may theoretically obtain political power. But political underrepresentation is a symptom of inequality, not its cause. With political clout so dependent on access to market resources, Western capitalist polities cannot help but generate what Schmitter refers to as "the paradox of liberal associability," the fact that where the freedom to associate is equally accorded but the capacity to exercise this freedom is unequally distributed, those that most need to act collectively in defense of their interests are the least likely to be able to do SO.!8 It is this inherently anti-democratic "paradox" that neocorporatism can resolve. It can do so by institutionalizing the political influence of specific collectivities, granting recognition to those social groups that the "liberal paradox" inexorably excludes. By guaranteeing that certain social interests will be considered by political decision-makers, neocorporatism can be more democratic than what might be called "actually existing pluralism," if by democratization we understand the equalization of political opportunity and not the practice of free elections alone. By the same token, it can be far more democratic than "actually existing socialism." Neither the opposition of the 1970S nor Solidarity ever identified democratization with the electoral principle alone. Theyopposed the system insofar as it monopolized public and political life. The democratization they sought consisted, above all, in expanding opportunities for public participation and in securing recognition of the right of association. Neocorporatism satisfies both these demands. In Western societies it is the "liberal paradox" that restricts the

Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism / 119 political opportunities of various social groups. Historically this has meant a disadvantage for labor as opposed to capital, and most modem neocorporatist arrangements, beginning with that introduced by Sweden's Social Democratic Party in 1932, have been oriented to mitigating precisely this inequality.19 In state socialist society, however, it is not by paradox but by fiat of the ruling Party that social groups are excluded from public and political opportunities. Thus it was not neocorporatism that allowed workers to form independent trade unions and become accepted participants in the public sphere. All it took to accomplish this was the decision of the Party to sign an accord and to refrain from arresting activists. But the problem now was how to institutionalize the new situation. This required a new political arrangement in which the Party agreed to permanently guarantee Solidarity's existence as an independent trade union. The only way it could do this, without moving toward a pluralism that neither the Party nor the Soviet Union would allow, was to establish a neocorporatist arrangement. Of course, insofar as electoral democracy would still be lacking and a single political party would maintain a monopoJy on foreign affairs, the resulting polity would not be identical to neocorporatist polities in the West. As Andrew Arato has written, this alternative would be "societal corporatism with elements of state corporatism." 20 But in the critical area of mediation between state and society, societal corporatism would prevail, since Solidarity would maintain its independent status. As an opposition committed to respecting Party authority in the state, Solidarity could come up with few alternatives to neocorporatism. This would be a retreat from "permanently open democracy," but a vast democratic improvement over the post-Stalinist system that was the norm. The neocorporatist option would entail Solidarity's entrance into a position of co-authorship of, and co-responsibility for, certain areas of governmental policy. The leadership of Solidarity, as the single, unified representative of the interests of workers, would work with the government in drafting all measures related to work rules, labor conditions, economic reform, and other areas that the union and the government would agree to collaborate on. It would be able to shape and to veto certain policies within its established domain. In return, Solidarity would agree to put limits on its demands and to help discipline the workforce. It would eschew demands such as free elections or a change in foreign policy orientation, and would restrain those who sought to use Solidarity

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as a vehicle for such demands. As the "voice of the people" within the state, Solidarity could help ease social unrest. It could dispel the widespread distrust in the government by vouching for its credibility, particularly in economic matters. The precise sphere of competence, of course, could only be determined by ongoing negotiations between the two sides. One key obstacle to such an arrangement was that Solidarity had become, inevitably, not just a trade union of workers, but a mass organization of "all of society." Specific political choices, however, cannot be made in the interests of "society," but only in the interests of parts of society. Entrance into a neocorporatist arrangement, however, would itself have effected the necessary rupture within Solidarity. For if, as the union in 1981 kept demanding, Solidarity became co-responsible for planning and implementing an economic reform, which would necessarily cause serious short-term economic dislocations, it would be unable simultaneously to defend the interests of those who lost out by the reform. This alone would lead to a healthy, partial breakup of Solidarity and allow it to be a responsible neocorporatist partner. Neocorporatism always excludes a certain number of societal interests, as does every political arrangement. But as will be shown below, Solidarity, and in particular Lech Wal~sa, was quite ready to make the move from being the impossible representative of all to being the institutionalized representative of some. Yet even if Solidarity favored a neocorporatist solution, it had to persuade the Party to go along. To do so, it had to prove that it could (I) discipline its ranks, (2) maintain its near-monopoly status as the representative of the bulk of civil society, and (3) maintain a moderate political leadership that would refuse to demand political pluralism. Solidarity had to be able to deliver social peace and guarantee the Party continued political control, particularly over foreign affairs. Yet if the union was too restrained, the Party might not accept any reforms at all. So, in order to have a bargaining chip, Solidarity also had to behave radically, threatening the government with general strikes and the loss of control. It needed to prove that the situation could be much worse, that the Party might have to deal with unreasonable people with whom no accord would be possible, and that in light of this it would be wiser to offer a neocorporatist, power-sharing arrangement to the known quantity of the Solidarity leadership. In other words, Solidarity

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had to be both a movement and an institution, even though the two aspects conflict. A movement requires mass participation, often spontaneous, whereas an institution establishes regular bureaucratic channels for participation. The former shuns official, formal political responsibilities, while the latter strives to obtain them. An institution can broker a corporatist arrangement, while a movement cannot. By late 1981, as will be shown below, the Solidarity leadership was moving consistently in the direction of greater institutionalization, without, however, for all the reasons outlined above, being able to go all the way.

The Tum to Politics Solidarity could not initiate a neocorporatist settlement on its own. The initiative would have to come from the Party, which retained its monopoly on political power. Solidarity could only hint to the Party that it was amenable to such a solution. It began doing this in late 1980, when it gave up its anti-political focus on societal democratization and showed signs of interest in participating in a broad political solution as well. Two conflicts at this time revealed Solidarity's new approach to dealing with the government. The nature and the resolution of these conflicts directly raised the issue of who had decision-making power in the country. They signal the moment of Solidarity's open engagement with the problem of the state. With these conflicts, the Solidarity period entered its second stage. The first conflict began two days after the unveiling of the monument in Gdansk. On the morning of December 18, in and around the city of Piotrk6w Trybunalski, workers in some 135 workplaces began a sit-in strike. They were protesting against the small meat rations city residents had been allocated-less than half the national average-the result, according to the local authorities, of extraordinary supply problems. In itself the strike was nothing unusual. What was significant, however, was the outcome four days later. On December 22, an agreement was reached that provided not only for improved rations, but for Solidarity to supervise the meat distribution process. This was the first time Solidarity was brought in by local officials to help administer normal governmental functions. It thereby provided the first hint of a neocorporatist arrangement.

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The other conflict was the dispute over free Saturdays. Despite numerous promises by numerous Party and state officials, Poland remained, with Albania, the only European country without a five-day work week. The twenty-first and final demand of the Gdansk strikers called for the introduction of free Saturdays for all workers. The government, however, would agree only to the "principle" of reducing the work week, through free Saturdays or "some other way." Gdansk did not press the issue, but Silesia did. By the late 1970s, the coal ministry had been forcing miners to work, on average, more than sixty hours a week as part of a frantic effort to generate increased export earnings. So when coal miners went on strike soon after Gdansk, the government was forced to promise much more. The Jastrz~bie Accord of September 3 categorically stated that as of January I, 1981, all weekends would be considered free, with any work to be voluntary and counted as overtime. Since the Gdansk, Szczecin, and Jastrz~bie Accords were all declared to be binding throughout the country by the Katowice Accord of September 9, Solidarity interpreted the specific provisions of Jastrz~bie as applicable everywhere. 21 The government initially accepted this interpretation, but it quickly retreated. Its first counterproposal was to offer free Saturdays only in return for a longer work day. When Solidarity was unwilling to concede this, the government decided to move on its own. On December 19 the government decreed that workers would get two free SatUrdays a month in 1981; a five-day work week would be possible only in 1985. The union protested vigorously. Wal~sa issued a statement saying that the decree was contrary to the original accords, constituting "another shocking example" of the government's disinclination to implement them. 22 Solidarity, however, did oot demand that the government respect the original agreement for a five-day week as of January I. It only insisted that there be negotiations to resolve the dispute. Solidarity emphasized that it was well aware of the country's economic difficulties, and that it was not only willing but anxious to do its part in resolving the crisis. For it to do so, however, the government had to treat the union as a partner. It could no longer simply present for ratification plans that it had drawn up alone. It had to work with Solidarity. This signified a radical departure from Solidarity's original approach. In August 1980 strikers made demands upon the government, which it was the latter's responsibility to meet. Solidarity called its first

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national strike on October 3 because the government had not fulfilled the agreement on wage increases. To the government's argument that it had not had time to do so, since the problem of raising wages fairly throughout the country was more complex than had originally been thought, Solidarity's answer was that the government should have said all this before it signed the accord. Solidarity's purpose, Wal~sa and other leaders argued strenuously, was not to figure out with the government what was possible and what was not. That was the government's business. Interfering in that would be "interfering in politics," which the union was forbidden to do. Solidarity's sole purpose was to defend workers' interests-just as the Gdansk Accord had stipulated. If the employer (in this case, the government) did not fulfill its obligation (in this case, to raise wages by October I), then the union had no choice but to go on strike. That would be the only way to defend workers' interests without interfering in politics. 23 Although the union's logic was impeccable, the Party was not satisfied. The impasse only underlined the incoherence of the August Accords as the basis for a long-term settlement. During the first months of Solidarity's existence, the government reserved its harshest reactions for strikes. At the V Party Plenum in October 1980, Party Secretary Kania singled out the October 3 general strike as the most disquieting action of the new union movement to date. The Party did not want strikes; it wanted order. Yet only Solidarity could deliver order. And with the dispute over free Saturdays, Solidarity began to play the role of the potential restorer of order. If the government could not meet its obligations, Solidarity would not just go on strike to defend its members' interests, as it had in October. It was ready to negotiate to reach a compromise settlement. But it would not accept government fiat. If the government wanted social order and economic restraint, it could have them. But it would have to pay a price: accepting Solidarity as a permanent partner. The union"s tactics in the negotiations over free Saturdays showed a clear evolution in a neocorporatist direction. Solidarity did not demand that the government honor the earlier agreement, but only that it negotiate in good faith. At the first two negotiating sessions, on December 29 and January 5, the government side just kept "explaining" its position, which was that the deteriorating economic situation precluded the possibility of a five-day work week. Solidarity, in a sign of its new

124 I Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism

commitment to formalities, responded that it wanted to see the official documentation. If the economic situation was really that bad, Solidarity would gladly reconsider its position, but first it needed to see the information substantiating the government's position.24 No longer was Solidarity saying that implementing economic policy was the government's business alone. When the government balked at either rescinding its decree or presenting documentation, Solidarity called for a boycott of work on those Saturdays that the government had decreed to be working days. At the end of the next negotiating session, on January 19, Solidarity finally received the materials it had requested. And immediately afterward it offered a compromise, agreeing to work one Saturday in four. This formula was ultimately accepted by the government on January 30, but not before Solidarity made one more important concession: it agreed that those who had heeded the union's call and boycotted work on January 10 and 24 would have to work two extra Saturdays in February. This was an extraordinary concession. For Solidarity had pressed hard to make the boycott a success. Those who complied often did so at great personal risk, as local enterprise officials threatened various consequences for failure to report to work. But in order to reach a settlement, Solidarity agreed to sacrifice the interests of the very people who had made the settlement possible. The decision was extremely unpopular within the union.25 But in this way Solidarity demonstrated that if the government would work with the union in drafting and implementing national economic policy, it was ready and able to negotiate away some of its members' benefits, and discipline them as well. This was an essential condition for a neocorporatist solution. For as Schmitter has noted, neocorporatist associations "do not just inform policymakers" about their members' preferences and "expect officials to react accordingly; they also agree-for a price-to deliver member compliance." 26 The union's behavior in this conflict, as well as in all subsequent conflicts, revealed two diverse tendencies: (1) determination to win its demands, even if that meant calling a nationwide general strike, and (2) a willingness to retreat, and to compel its members to accept unpopular decisions. Both tendencies followed inexorably from Solidarity's basic premise: to compel respect for societal independence without trying to overthrow the government. But the two parts of this premise were often contradictory. For Solidarity'S commitment not to

Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism / 125 try to overthrow the government meant that there were limits on the determination it could show. It meant that Solidarity always had to pull back from the brink. It could not threaten the state to the point where the Party might legitimately fear losing control, because the danger of military intervention always hovered not far in the background. If it did not want to jeopardize the government, Solidarity had to retreat. Thus, its strength was based ultimately on a bluff. For the same reasons, however, Solidarity could offer no political solution except a neocorporatist one. It could not demand state pluralism, for that would mean overthrowing the Party. It could not try to take state power, for that might bring in the Soviets. It could not accept a return to statism or state corporatism, because that would mean the destruction of Solidarity as an independent union. If Solidarity's behavior is perceived as oriented toward a neocorporatist solution, however, then the dual strategy makes sense. Militance and determination were necessary to pressure the government to accept Solidarity as a partner; discipline, moderation, and a willingness to retreat were needed to convince the government that Solidarity could be a reliable partner. This meant that Solidarity could never force the government to do anything. But if the union could maintain its mass base, it would be difficult for the government to do anything without Solidarity. Although Solidarity had nothing to offer except a neocorporatist solution, it was not fully aware of this itself. This was first demonstrated by the general strike threat of March 1981, and the union's divided response to its cancellation. The immediate cause of the strike threat was a police assault on union leaders in Bydgoszcz. Local Solidarity activists had been petitioning the city council (rada narodowa) on behalf of farmers demanding registration of an independent farmers' union. The council adjourned without hearing the petitioners, but when the petitioners would not disperse, the police entered the council chamber and ejected them, beating several. The union responded by scheduling a general strike to begin March 31 and to last until a settlement was reached. In this way the largest mass mobilization of 1980-1981 got under way, as millions of workers stocked supplies, studied strike instructions, and prepared for a long-term occupation of the factories. Solidarity presented three main demands: punishment of those responsible for the assault, recognition of an independent farmers' union, and regular access to the mass media. The union was prepared as never

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before-and as never again. But at the last moment, after tough negotiations with the government, WaI~sa called the strike off, much to the chagrin of union militants who thought that this was the great opportunity to settle things once and for all. WaI~sa justified his action by hinting that Deputy Premier Mieczyslaw Rakowski had suggested that a Soviet invasion was likely in the event of a strike. Yet it is doubtful that an invasion would have been necessary. For even if a strike had taken place, the demands were such that it would have been settled quickly, without changing anything. None of the demands addressed the crucial issue of long-term coordination between the government and Solidarity. The union's error was not that it called off the strike: that in itself was only a display of its moderation. Its error was that it did not demand any kind of permanent institutional arrangement with the government that would solidify Solidarity's place in the public sphere. Without this demand, it really didn't matter whether the strike took place or not. For since Solidarity was not going to try to overthrow the government, it would have had to agree to a settlement; and since the demands did not entail institutional changes, a settlement could not have resolved the impasse. Solidarity was still not aware that it had no long-term settlement to offer except a neocorporatist one. It began to be aware of this only in August.

The August 'fuming Point Tensions temporarily relaxed following the abortive general strike of March. Solidarity concentrated on organizing internal elections to local union branches, while the Party largely occupied itself with preparations for the Extraordinary Ninth Party Congress in July. Unfortunately, the Party was also responsible for governing the country and managing the economy, tasks it seemed increasingly to neglect. The result was a plummeting economy, which provoked a new wave of protests. Isolated acts of repression against individual union activists caused more tension. A joint commission had finally drafted an acceptable trade union bill, but the Party stalled on having it passed into law. Aside from a liberalized censorship law passed in July, little long-term progress had been made. Each side blamed the other for the continuing impasse, and so the two sides agreed to meet for general negotiations in early August 1981. These discussions signaled a new, and worsening, stage in the

Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism I 127 political crisis. They also marked the moment of Solidarity's decisive turn to politics. The third and final stage of the Solidarity period was underway. Rakowski opened the negotiations by saying that he was not there to talk about details, but only about whether Solidarity wanted "to cooperate, or to follow the road to nowhere"-the road, he added maliciously, the union had been following so far. 27 He cited the recent rash of marches against food shortages as an example of the dangerous escalation of the conflict by Solidarity. He would not accept the leadership's wellfounded explanation that it went along with these demonstrations only because society was demanding action and Solidarity wanted to avoid strikes. Rakowski accused Solidarity of sponsoring "anti-Soviet, antigovernment, and anti-Party" activities, opening the way to a "violent confrontation." He stated categorically that Solidarity's "final goal" was the "liquidation" of the government.28 Surely this was an inauspicious setting in which to articulate a neocorporatist solution. Yet this was precisely what Solidarity proceeded to do. First there was an outburst by Wal~sa, mirroring Rakowski's. It was the government, he said, that bore responsibility for the rotten situation. Solidarity was to blame only for not being tough enough, for not demanding things like the release of all political prisoners, which he promised to push for now. 29 Not very conciliatory, this, but it must have calmed things down. For afterward the Solidarity delegation focused all its comments on a single neocorporatist demand: that the union be allowed to supervise food supply and distribution. Solidarity said that it was just as upset as the government by the recent rash of protests. It was trying to discipline its members, and the fact that protest marches had taken place instead of strikes was already the result of Solidarity's moderating influence. But patience was running out, and Solidarity hinted that soon even it might be unable to control the tide. Yet there was still time-if the authorities would allow Solidarity to take part in certain governmental functions, such as regulating food distribution. National Solidarity was essentially adopting the strategy first proposed by tiny Piotrkow 'Irybunalski eight months earlier. If it was accepted, Solidarity would then be able to vouch for the credibility of government assertions that the food crisis was real. Distrust would diminish, legitimacy could be rebuilt, and the government would be able to govern more effectively. The problem with Solidarity's proposal was not that it was corporatist, but that it was not corporatist enough. 1rade Minister Andrzej

128 / Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism Kacala cogently pointed out the disingenuousness of Solidarity's claim that it wanted to check on food supply alone. 30 For if Solidarity's premise was correct and societal distrust was so deep that the government could not govern effectively without a trustworthy authority to vouch for it, then Solidarity would also have to vouch for a disruptive economic reform, for new price rises, and ultimately for the credibility of the entire government, its laws, its decrees, its elections. Solidarity would have to become a partner of the government. Yet the union still did not say this openly. It still did not grasp the full implications of its own policy, and it feared the reactions of both government and rank and file to an undisguised admission that the union needed to be part of the state power. Indeed, Rakowski almost immediately followed Kacala with an attack on Solidarity's proposal, saying that whoever controlled food production essentially controlled political powerY The negotiations came to an abrupt end on August 6, in a sea of innuendo and mutual accusation. The problem began when Solidarity balked at signing a "joint communique," whereupon Rakowski stormed out of the room, claiming that Solidarity had broken off negotiations. The union refused to sign on the grounds that the communique was no longer "joint," having been unilaterally altered at the last moment. The changes were minor, but enough to alter the sense of the document and minimize the obligations of the government. For example, instead of the agreed-upon statement that the government "intends" (zamierza) to increase the meat ration for tough physical labor, the government substituted the phrase "will consider" (rozwaZy) an increase. In addition, the union was presented with a preamble, written by government negotiators, in which only Solidarity was criticized.32 Once again, a crisis was precipitated by the government's refusal to treat Solidarity as a serious partner. The stormy end of these talks inaugurated the most serious crisis of the Solidarity epoch, a crisis that would be settled only with the imposition of martial law on December 13. There was no longer much pretense on either side that something other than a "political struggle" was going on. Rakowski had hinted during the talks that the government was considering outlawing the "anti-communist" Independent Student Association. Solidarity took this and other comments to mean that the government had similar intentions vis-a-vis Solidarity, as many in the union had thought all along. As Rakowski put it at the outset, the two sides were now entering the "sharply conftictual" phase. 33

Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism / 129 In a three-day National Commission meeting beginning August 10, Solidarity considered its response. For the first time in its history, it spoke openly of various long-term political solutions. There was a general conviction, obviously shared by the government, that the existing situation could not last much longer. Because this meeting was a key turning point, it is worthwhile to focus on it in some detail. As usual, the veteran oppositionist Karol Modzelewski offered the most perceptive and penetrating remarks on the situation. (Modzelewski spoke here as a union official from Wroclaw; he was no longer the union spokesman, having resigned the post in protest against Wal~sa's handling of the Bydgoszcz crisis.) There were only two possibilities now, he said: a radical democratic transformation or a state of emergency.34 In a few brilliant passages, Modzelewski captured the essence of the crisis since 1980: Mter the state monopoly on power was broken in August 1980, it was inevitable that society would put all its hopes in Solidarity. For that reason, however, Solidarity could not be a normal trade union; it had to be a vast social movement. For geopolitical reasons Solidarity did not want to assume co-responsibility for the prevailing system. But it forgot that it had no choice but to do so. For [the appearance of Solidarity meant that] the command system of government stopped functioning, both in politics and in economics. Yet it was not replaced by anything else. Economic reform, therefore, is not a sufficient solution. There also needs to be a reform of state institutions.3s At this National Commission meeting no one questioned the need for a reform of the state. There were no more illusions that societal democracy could leave the state unaffected. Union radicals, or "fundamentalists," had abandoned reservations against politics long ago; now the moderate leadership around Wal~sa was doing so as well. It was Modzelevrski again who argued that Solidarity could not survive without the democratization of the state, and that if Solidarity did not move in this direction, the present situation could only end with the union's destruction. Again, he traced the events of the past year. In the Gdansk Accord we chose to limit ourselves to securing certain democratic freedoms. Concerned with the safety of the

130 / Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism country, we did not introduce demands for the democratic reconstruction of government. But is it safe to live in a system that leads to a steadily deepening economic crisis and to ... the breakdown of all public structures? The question arises: Why is it like this? And it is Deputy Premier Rakowski who has unwittingly supplied the answer: "First you tie our hands," he told us, "and then you accuse us of riot doing anything." Rakowski is right-except that for him this "tying of hands" is the result of the diabolical machinations of Solidarity, whereas in reality it is just the result of the democratic rights we have won. For the state is capable of governing only in conditions where those rights are lacking.36 Modzelewski's statement is a gem of political insight. The union could not avoid a political solution, he argued, because its very existence threw the state into a deep political crisis. If there was to be any social peace at all, a political solution had to be found. Modzelewski had argued something similar at the union's very first national meeting on September 17, 1980, when the decision to form Solidarity was made. It was only in August 1981, however, that the rest of the union leadership, having abandoned the old societal ideology, was ready to go along. The only question was in what direction the state needed to be reformed. Stefan Kurowski, an adviser to Solidarity and an economist involved with the opposition since 1956, proposed that the union demand free elections to local councils and the Sejm, as well as the abolition of central planning.37 In the extremely tense atmosphere, where a state of emergency increasingly seemed to be the government's treatment of choice, this open declaration for a pluralist solution began attracting a growing number of supporters. For Modzelewski, as we have seen, to adopt the pluralist program was to declare war on the government and the USSR. Instead, he suggested that the union adopt a program that would show it to be genuinely committed to resolving the economic crisis, but would also demonstrate' that it could help the country on its own, without the government. We must offer society the prospect of reconstructed state institutions as well as of an economic reform under our control. . . . We must explain that the government is not in a position to undertake this effort that is so necessary today. Thus, our actions would not

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constitute a "seizure of power." It is just that the government has conceded large areas of its jurisdiction to society.38 Modzelewski outlined a possible solution that included elements of neocorporatism while retaining a large space for independent societal initiatives. We must fight for authentic local government councils as well as for workers' self-management .... But even with independent enterprises and local councils, there would still be an enormous sphere for "macro-decisions." There must therefore be an institutional solution, too. Self-management councils and Solidarity must form a national body that will be given guaranteed influence on these "macro-decisions." 39 Jacek Kuron proposed a similar program. A condition for solving the crisis, he argued, was a government people trusted. Therefore, along with the rise of self-management councils in enterprises and local selfgovernment bodies in communities, there must be a new body in the Sejm-a "House of Labor" or "House of Self-Governance"-to ensure society's influence in the government.40 Kuron thereby introduced an entirely new element into the neocorporatist discussion, one that has since been picked up elsewhere in Eastern Europe. For if the goal is to provide some formal, institutional representation for societal interests, this can perhaps be done through a second house of parliament whose members consist entirely of the representatives of various interest groups. In other words, neocorporatist arrangements need not be separate from parliamentary ones. Indeed, the most stable neocorporatist arrangements in Western Europe are closely bound up with parliamentary systems. Kuron also proposed that a new government would emerge from this new configuration-what he called a Government of National Salvation. This he saw as a long-term solution.41 For the time being, he proposed something else: as a way out of the crisis, the union should ask all workers to work harder and produce more today. This additional effort, however, should be entirely organized by the self-management bodies and by new union control commissions, which would also administer the additional output. For example, since the country needed more coal, society should direct more food to the miners in Silesia.

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"Such a solution would mean taking partial control over production and distribution." 42 What Solidarity finally chose, and what it presented to the public in a remarkable document on August 12, was a combination of radicalism from below and enforced discipline from above. The document, significantly, was not a "Resolution" but an "Appeal" (Apel), directed not to union members but "to society." The title indicated that Solidarity sought to take the initiative. But part of its initiative was a new self-discipline. Asserting that no one could avoid taking responsibility for solving the economic crisis, Solidarity called on workers to end all strikes over supply issues, and to contribute to increased production by giving up eight of the free Saturdays remaining till the end of the year. This was unprecedented-a call for workers to give back one of their most important "bread-and-butter" gains. Moreover, in response to Rakowski's charge that the union was raising tensions with provocative protest marches, Solidarity also appealed to the organizers of a planned nationwide march in defense of political prisoners to call off the action. The union then noted that the government's own anti-crisis measures "have not been able to halt the breakdown of the economy." 43 Therefore, Solidarity announced that it would itself introduce a "selfmanaging reform." First, it would work with Rural Solidarity to check on meat purchase centers and distribution points. Simultaneously, it urged people to "take economic matters ... into your own hands." This was intended as support for spontaneous economic initiatives, such as the burgeoning cooperativist movement among farmers.44 But apparently it was also intended as an admonition to the government that if it did not work directly with the Solidarity leadership (which had just called off several strikes and protests), the union could mobilize society in a potentially uncontrollable way. For Solidarity then presented a more drastic proposal. On the eight free Saturdays Solidarity was proposing to work, the workers themselves were to control what they produced, taking care to distribute the product in ways that would most effectively alleviate the crisis. This was a tactic that Kuron had proposed and that LOdi activist Zbigniew Kowalewski and others had championed as the "active strike." 45 It was Solidarity'S first and only real flirtation with a syndicalist approach. But it was only flirtation. The Appeal showed that Solidarity did not

Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism / 133 really want to take this syndicalist road. The union said that it was compelled to layout its "self-managing reform" by the continuing political crisis. The nation's primary need, however, was said to be not the selfmanaging reform, but the creation of "institutions that will guarantee working people influence in the socioeconomic policy of the state." This might be a second house of parliament, with members chosen by societal interest organizations; or a new supervisory control commission to give independent groups some influence in the government; or a new social compact between Church, state and Solidarity. That the syndicalist program was only a ploy is borne out by subsequent developments. For although the active strike was embraced in theory, it was never put into practice. Nor did Solidarity, on a national level, ever try to control Saturday production the way it said it would. Except for a few areas, most notably LOdZ, Solidarity took no decisive steps whatsoever toward implementing its self-managing reform. All in all, the August appeal was the most outstanding example of Solidarity's dual strategy: Its combination of discipline and militance, of carrot and stick, was intended to persuade the government to introduce far-reaching political changes. The appeals for working Saturdays and cancellation of the protest march displayed Solidarity's Willingness to discipline society. The appeals for broad new social initiatives and for a partial "takeover of production" were intended to demonstrate its continued power as a social movement. Taken together, they constituted a plea for a political settlement with the government. The August turning point, then, was marked by two critical developments: the government's walkout on negotiations and Solidarity's response. Or, we might say, by Solidarity's political turn and the government's anti-political tum. For, as soon became clear, Rakowski's walkout had introduced a new official strategy that might be called a "governmental strike." From that point on, the government showed less and less interest in resolving strikes or revitalizing the economy. The period came to be marked by an absence of power, and not, as some have argued, by dual power, for Solidarity never tried to step into the vacuum. The government became increasingly interested in creating a sense of chaos and impending doom, leaving an "anarchic" country that the military would then be able to "rescue." Solidarity became increasingly interested in a political solution, and after August it pressed even harder.

134 / Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism Last Attempts at a Political Solution In August WaI~sa and his closest advisers finally came up with a political program that they felt was viable, and they pursued it till the very end. Aware that the government would have to initiate the desired pact, WaI~sa set about trying to prove that Solidarity could be an acceptable participant. Immediately after issuing the Appeal, Wal~sa traveled with Bronislaw Geremek to Silesia, where they tried to persuade the miners to give up some of their free Saturdays. They had a hard time doing so, for the miners felt that the government would squander the fruits of their effort and were not convinced that the active strike was a realistic option. In the end Geremek and WaI~sa left with the miners' grudging support, well aware, however, that it could easily be lost if Solidarity did not produce some major political breakthrough. In the four months after the August appeal, WaI~sa, with the support of his mostly hand-picked Presidium 46 and of advisers like Geremek, waged an almost non-stop battle to bring the union together behind his program. This entailed an increasingly sharp campaign against his increasingly militant opponents in the National Commission, who, mistaking the government's inactivity for weakness, seemed to feel that there were no longer any obstacles to political transformation and that Solidarity ought finally to fight for power. WaI~sa's new approach became clear at Solidarity's First National Congress in September-October 1981, and particularly during the elections for union president. Whereas Szczecin union leader Marian Jurczyk demanded free elections to the Sejm, Andrzej Gwiazda of Gdansk exhorted workers to take greater control in the workplace, and Bydgoszcz leader Jan Rulewski mocked and challenged the Warsaw Pact itself, WaI~sa began his election speech by urging respect for the state authorities. Solidarity was beginning to "seriously underestimate" the government, he said, and to become "far too self-confident." WaI~sa was the only one of the four candidates who did not speak as if he were a political rival to the government. He attacked those who sought to "overthrow Sejms and governments and have us take their places" and, in a stunning reminder of the dangers of power, taking a page from the postmodern left from which he emerged, added that if ever Solidarity did take power, that would lead only to the "construction of a totalitarian system even worse than the present one." The three pillars of

Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism / 135 the existing political establishment, he said, were all necessary "for the good of democracy: workers' councils, Solidarity, and the party-state administration." And, he stressed, "the replacement or dislocation of anyone of these elements would weaken democracy." 47 Obviously such remarks were directed to the state authorities at least as much as to the union. They constituted an implicit offer of an alliance. The election results were something of a surprise. WaJ:~sa won, but with an unexpectedly low 55 percent of the vote. Part of the reason was his delivery. WaJ:~sa never talks from notes, and he used none here. This time, however, the delegates wanted a prepared speech, worthy of the parliamentary dignity with which they had endowed the congress. Moreover, in contrast to his usual energetic, awe-inspiring style of speech, he had rambled somewhat aimlessly, assuming that there was no way he could lose. This was precisely the wrong attitude toward a congress where so much symbolic value was being placed on the electoral game. But if his delivery irked some, no doubt his message bothered many others. For with the crisis intensifying and the government taking an increasingly obstructionist line, many delegates were ready to go much further than Wat~sa in abandoning political reservations. Jurczyk, who gave a particularly well-polished speech, declared himself for "a hardline course-decisive and uncompromising," and won 24 percent of the votes. Gwiazda and Rulewski, also promising a harder-line position, shared 15 percent between them, while an additional 6 percent abstained. Wal~sa understood that his victory was not the mandate he had hoped for. He took it as a sign that he had to produce an acceptable political deal soon or risk losing control of the union. Just after the union election, WaJ:~sa reiterated his plea for cooperation in an interview with the influential weekly Polityka. The August appeal to work eight free Saturdays was not going over very well in the mines, partly because the government had issued a special decree on the Saturday pay schedule with which the miners disagreed. They were, in fact, to be paid a good deal extra for Saturday work. The miners protested against this because they did not want to appear to be profiting from the economic crisis. Again, they said the main problem was the decree itself: the government had to talk with them, not just issue decreeS.48 WaJ:~sa complained that the government's one-sided action was squandering a good chance of making progress on the economic front. Since the miners did not trust the government, they were not obey-

136 / Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism ing it. But, said Wal~sa, "they would have obeyed us. We could have implemented this together." 49 Wal~sa knew that any economic reform would have serious short-term costs, and that restraining social unrest during the implementation phase would be of critical importance. He also knew, as he had noted in the aborted August negotiations as well as in this interview, that social unrest could not be controlled except by Solidarity. Being an ardent proponent of reform, Wal~sa therefore beckoned the government to bring him in. This was the intention behind Solidarity's proposal in the fall of 1981 for the creation of a Social Council on the National Economy (Spoleczna Rada Gospodarki Narodowej). It was a plea to be a cosponsor of economic reform. Did this mean that Solidarity was ready to "join the system"? Such language came to the fore at this time. "Solidarity can 'join the system,' " wrote Waldemar Kuczynski, associate editor of the national Solidarity newspaper, if the Party agreed to political changes "aimed at de-monopolizing the exercise of power." 50 And one way to bring about this "de-monopolization," according to Kuczynski, was precisely the Social Council on the National Economy. While self-management councils would playa major role in the factories, the Social Council would initiate necessary reforms in the national economy. The council would consist of some twenty economists and other individuals "enjoying social confidence." The main point of such a body was to provide for independent societal representation within the government. The council's authority would be limited to economic affairs. It could propose measures to improve the economy and veto measures decreed by the government. Most important, it would lend credibility to the government's untrustworthy authority. Kuczynski argued that this would actually help preserve the system by reducing tension and allowing Solidarity to evolve into a less expansive organization. In the factories, Solidarity could restrict itself to protecting workers' rights on the shop floor and negotiating with management and self-management bodies, while at the national level it could become a partner of the government in overseeing the new arrangement and ensuring social peace. Limiting the Social Council's field of interest to economic matters meant that there was still a need to provide political representation, and here is where the proposal for a second house of parliament came in. As proposed by Kuron 51 and others, this second house would be made up

Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism / 137 of representatives of interest groups within civil society. Trade unions, self-management councils, and professional organizations might all get seats in this body, whose relationship with the Sejm would still have to be worked out. This would not entail free parliamentary elections in general, which the Party would not permit, but it would give independent social groups some representation within the political sphere. The proposal was not without its problems, but it demonstrated again the creativity that marked the late Solidarity period .

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•

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Was there any basis for hope? Was there any reason to think that the government would go along? Were there any signs that the partystate was willing to work with Solidarity and enter into a neocorporatist arrangement? Some. In fact, in a few cities, such as Poznan, Gdansk, and Krakow, a virtual neocorporatist arrangement was already in effect during the late Solidarity period. In Gdansk, for example, Solidarity published a weekly column in the daily Party newspaper, while in Poznan and Krakow Solidarity even obtained access to local television. And all this at a time when access to the media was causing great tension at the national level. The "governmental strike," in other words, was mostly at the national level, and even here it was clearest only in retrospect. The Party took the offensive after August, and yet there were still occasional signs of conciliation. The closest the Party ever came to offering a corporatist solution was General Wojciech Jaruzelski's call on October 30, 1981, soon after becoming First Secretary of the Party, for the formation of a Front of National Accord. The terms of the Front were left exceedingly vague, and there is reason to believe that the Party was divided on the issue. Although Jaruzelski said that Solidarity, "as a trade union, has a lasting place in the social life of our country," Central Committee Secretary Stefan Olszowski said on November II that the basis of any Front would be the Party's alliance with its two satellite parties, thus reducing Solidarity's role to little more than that of an irrelevant observer. Government spokesman Jerzy Urban suggested the same thing during the brief negotiations held with Solidarity on the issue. The exact nature of the Front would be worked out at a meeting of "various" interested parties, he said, of which Solidarity would be only one of seven.52 Yet Solidarity had nearly 10 million members, almost four times as many

138 / Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism as the depleted ruling Party and about ten times as many as the official trade unions. The government had offered a similar "one-seventh" arrangement for discussions on the supply situation, but Solidarity refused, saying, "We are interested only in two-sided negotiations."s3 The National Commission rejected this new proposal, too. Its decision was probably foreordained by the context in which the Front was first proposed, for Jaruzelski used the very same speech to announce that the government was considering seeking new legislative powers to impose a state of emergency. This declaration solidified a rejectionist front within the Solidarity National Commission. Wal~sa, however, felt that an accord needed to be reached at all costs, and he was increasingly ready to break with his own National Commission in order to pursue one. On October 30, the day of Jaruzelski's speech, Wal~sa had his Presidium issue a fierce denunciation of the recent wave of strikes. If the "wildcats," as he called them,54 did not cease, Wal~sa threatened to seek a special resolution of the entire National Commission sharply restricting the right of locals to go on strike and specifying disciplinary measures for insubordination. Armed with this proof of good faith, and not unduly deterred by the context of Jaruzelski's Front speech, Wal~sa either sought or consented to a hastily arranged summit meeting with General Jaruzelski and Primate J6zef Glemp. On the evening of November 4, the celebrated summit took place in Warsaw. Exactly what transpired at this meeting is still not known. But the meeting became the basis for the only explicit neocorporatist proposal put forth during the entire Solidarity period. It would be helpful, I think, to stop here and consider this proposal.

A Neocorporatist Proposal Given that a neocorporatist solution required expanding the decision-making political sphere to include independent representatives of society, it was only the state that could initiate the process. As the authorities proved consistently unwilling to do so, Ryszard Reiff finally broke ranks. Reiff was the chairman of the historically pro-regime PAX organization and a member of the Council of State, the highest governmental body.sS He was the only public official to set forth explicitly,

Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism / 139 publicly, and in print a view of what a neocorporatist solution might look like. In so doing, Reiff made a valuable, long-term contribution to the discussion of the reform of state socialist systems. Using his seat in the Sejm as a forum from which to expound his views, Reiff began publicly advocating a corporatist settlement in the summer of 1981. Encouraged by a favorable response from both oppositionists and other officials,56 he refined his proposals in a steady stream of speeches and articles over the rest of 1981. Most of the speeches were presented at PAX meetings and published only in the PAX press, accounting for the limited response they elicited. For despite the changes it was undergoing, PAX was still largely treated as the collaborationist organization it had been. Ironically, and perhaps tragically, Reiff's best article, presenting the clearest picture of the corporatist solution he envisioned, appeared in an issue of the PAX weekly dated December 13, 1981-the very day martial law was imposed. (The text had been delivered as a speech on November 24.) Applauding the "historic" summit meeting of November 4, Reiff proposed the formation of a "Grand Coalition" between Solidarity, the political authorities, and the Church. 57 For Reiff, the crux of the ongoing political crisis was the unprecedented crisis of confidence. Society at large neither trusted the party-state authorities nor believed they had a program for solving the crisis. Rakowski had complained of the lack of confidence during the tempestuous negotiations of August 1981. But whereas Rakowski attributed it to Solidarity's contrivance, Reiff thought it was due to the lack of political reform. And whereas Rakowski saw the problem of confidence merely as something that obstructed government':"Solidarity relations ,58 Reiff, like Modzelewski, saw it as a calamity that had made the country ungovernable. Reiff was in full agreement with Solidarity: the political crisis was at the root of the economic crisis. Echoing Kuczynski and many other Solidarity people, he stated clearly that the old method of governing simply could not work any more. A way had to be found in which society could select its own representatives and see them in a position of authority alongside the Party. R.~iff therefore proposed the formation of a committee in which society would be represented "alongside representatives of the state." 59 Governing without Solidarity had become impossible, and governing without the Party remained impermissible. The two sides had to be

140 I Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism

brought together. But because of their enmity and mutual distrust, a conciliator was required. Reiff therefore proposed that the Party, Solidarity, and the Church, building on the initiative of their November 4 summit meeting, jointly announce the creation of a "Committee of National Reconciliation. " The twenty- to thirty-member committee proposed by Reiff would be distinguished by four features: self-selection, equality, exclusivity, and executive authority. The first three were the least problematic. "Self-selection" meant that each of the three parties to the Grand Coalition would be free to name its own representatives to the committee, thus securing the principle of independence. "Equality" meant that the committee would be composed of an equal number of representatives from each side. "Exclusivity" meant that only these sides would be represented, thus preventing the Party from trying to drown Solidarity by demanding equal participation by the official unions. The Party had of course been doing exactly that, arguing, on "democratic" grounds, that if Solidarity could participate, other trade unions must also be allowed to participate. One reason Reiff did not fall into this trap was that, unlike either Solidarity or the Party, he did not assert that he was interested in "democracy." His proposal was based solely on the neocorporatist principle of "weighing interests": the Party, of course, had a claim to power; Solidarity had a claim because of the social interests it represented; and the Church was needed to help ensure social peace. By "executive authority," Reiff meant that the committee had to have not only an advisory role, but certain executive powers as well. Although he was not precise, Reiff implied that the committee would be charged with two main tasks: (I) purging the government apparatus of corrupt officials and appointing or confirming their successors; and (2) controlling the mass media so that "the points of view (racje) of all three sides are presented, and not just that of one of them." 60 The resulting committee would be "a kind of 'moral-political directorate.' " It would oversee the difficult economic reform, organize the upcoming elections to local councils, and in general "take political responsibility for ensuring social peace." 61 Was such a drastic political reform possible within the constitutional constraints guaranteeing the "leading role of the Party"? Reiff thought that it was: the proposal, he said, did not "question the 'leading role of the Party' but only the monopoly of power, about which the Constitu-

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tion says not a word." 62 For Reiff, not only was reform possible; it was absolutely essential. Keenly aware of the divisions within Solidarity, Reiff realized that the crisis must either find a corporatist resolution or be transformed into a struggle to oust the Party. He presented his solution as "the last chance to prevent the crisis from being transformed from one based on strikes and protests into one based on a multi-sided political struggle." 63 This second kind of struggle, however, "would mean civil war"; that is, it would be suicidal. The neocorporatist Grand Coalition, however, could provide a way out of the crisis, or at least would allow state and society to work together to develop a way out of the crisis. It would eliminate the need for the kind of political strikes that had become so prevalent. They would no longer be necessary, because the corporatist option would provide for "the participation of society in the structures of power, ... access to the mass media, guaranteed influence on government personnel decisions, an expanded self-management network, and increased powers for local government."64 The strikes that would occur would be "normal" ones, caused by a conflict between workers and management or by poor communication between local government and society. Strikes, in other words, would be de-politicized and so would no longer endanger national security. The system as a whole would then be able to work out its political problems in a "normal" way. This was Reiff's hope: that a new "normality" could be forged.

The Final Weeks The November 4 meeting ended with a single communique, noting only that the talks were "useful" and that "further consultations" were expected.65 In his memoirs WaI~sa reveals nothing, except to say that the meeting was a "dead end." 66 With hindsight this is obvious. Wal~sa emerged from the talks, however, determined to impose union discipline and restore social peace. Perhaps he perceived a hint from laruzelski that a permanent accord was possible if he could tightly control his union. Bronislaw Geremek, WaI~sa's key adviser at this time, was frequently told by government spokesmen that a solution could be found if only the "unruly" elements within Solidarity could be isolated.67 In any case, this now became WaI~sa's main occupation. He quelled two

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very costly strikes in southern Poland-a miners' strike in Sosnowiec, and a general strike in Zielona G6ra-after having just helped conclude others in Zyrard6w and Sandomierz. He was personally responsible for quieting a frighteningly tense situation, putting his enormous prestige on the line in the process. Yet, curiously, after all the major strikes had ended, the government continued to speak of an "extremely tense" and even incendiary situation across the country.68 It opened the November 17 negotiations with the union-the last negotiations, as it turned out-with the statement that although it was doing everything possible to ease social tension, the other side was doing nothing. Not a word was said of the conflicts WaI~sa had ended, while the minor ones that continued (such as a student strike in Radom) were blown far out of proportion. As for the government's "anti-crisis" measures, even the official press admitted that they were virtually non-existent. The government showed a marked lack of interest in ending strikes or easing shortages. It sent powerless negotiators to meet with strike committees (for example, in Zyrard6w) and refused independent help aimed at boosting production.69 Obviously the authorities had already decided to impose martial law, and therefore had an interest in presenting a picture of a society on the brink of anarchy. And since they alone had the power, they alone could create the anarchy. And they did so quite successfully, as is shown by the gnawing sense of hopelessness and despair that racked Polish society in the last weeks before martial law. As regional activists became more radical, the rank and file grew withdrawn. I observed this withdrawal myself at Solidarity meetings in Warsaw. When the union, in October and November, organized regional strategy sessions on self-management issues, expecting a crowd of fifty, sometimes only two or three people would show up. For the first time since Solidarity began, people were losing confidence in their own ability to change things. With the government "on strike" and Solidarity not ready to replace it, people quite naturally began to long for someone to do something. When the government announced, in the midst of this manufactured power vacuum, that "military operation teams" were being sent to the countryside to "check up on production," even many union supporters applauded. Here at last was the someone, beginning to do something .... After November 4, there were no more summit meetings. Mter November 17, there were no more negotiations at all. Wal~sa, alone,

Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism / 143 kept pushing until the very end. As he later recalled, "Only one thing was important now: to see if we could create in Poland a tripartite system involving government, Church, and Solidarity." 70 To do so he had to fight hard against opponents both external and internal, and he knew it. He had agreed to the November 4 meeting without the knowledge of the National Commission. In fact, he informed the National Commission only hours before the meeting was to begin, thereby eliciting unprecedented outrage on the part of some of its members. Questioning the purpose of this particular meeting as well as Wal~sa's unilateral decision to participate, some opponents even said that it might be time to start thinking about a new union president. When Wal~sa flew off to meet with Jaruzelski, his opponents on the National Commission took advantage of his absence to push through a resolution toughening Solidarity's bargaining position. For the first time there was ~ danger of dual power within Solidarity itself, with WaI~sa, his advisers, and the Presidium on one side, and a National Commission majority on the other. WaI~sa responded to the resolution with a statement, issued in the name of the Presidium (which first saw and signed it three days later), that Solidarity did not claim to be the sole representative of Polish society and that it eagerly sought a compromise. Any union resolutions suggesting otherwise, WaI~sa's statement continued, would be contrary to the August Accords as well as to the union's own set of statutes.?) Up until late November 1981, WaI~sa was usually able to win the votes of a majority on the National Commission-if he put his considerable prestige on the line. Although many did not like his style of leadership, few could imagine a Solidarity without WaI~sa as its leader, and Wal~sa, like Lenin, would sometimes threaten to quit the union if he did not get his way on what he considered a key issue. In other words, WaI~sa could probably still have prevailed on the union to unite behind a neocorporatist plan, if one had been forthcoming from the state. But everything changed at the end of November. What changed things, above all, was the VI Plenum of the PZPR, held on November 27-28. Declaring that the tensions caused by Solidarity were threatening the very coherence of the Polish state, General Jaruzelski announced that he would now ask the Sejm to grant him the special emergency powers he had first mentioned a month ago. For the first time since August 1980, the use of large-scale force seemed more than a vague threat. Two days later, the government announced its economic plan for 1982. Having

144 / Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism long promised consultations with Solidarity and a reduction of the command economy, this plan was decreed without consultations and kept the command economy intact. In politics and in economics, the state, it seemed, was declaring war. After this moment it was impossible for Wal~sa to regain the initiative within Solidarity. On December 2 the government settled a strike in the Warsaw Firefighters Academy in a way it had never done before: by force, using the army and helicopters to storm the building. At the next day's National Committee meeting in Radom, which the government illegally wiretapped, publishing some of the proceedings, the mood was more radical than ever. Jan Rulewski said that Solidarity had to think seriously about taking power and that Solidarity itself should be ready to give the necessary military guarantees to the USSR. Zbigniew Bujak said that the union should itself appoint a Social Council on the Economy, which would then create a provisional government, mobilize worker guards to take over the factories, and take control of radio and television. Seweryn Jaworski said that Solidarity had nothing to fear from a confrontation, since the army and police would "join us." Even Karol Modzelewski, paraphrasing the last line of the "Internationale," which as an old Marxist radical he knew so well, said that if it came to a confrontation, ""lWill be their final conflict." And, finally, even WaI~sa talked tough (although he later insisted that he did so only to maintain his standing within the National Commission). "A confrontation is inevitable," WaI~sa now proclaimed. This was the line that government propagandists replayed endlessly in their scandalous montage from the wiretapped proceedings. (One can imagine the gems a wiretapped Politburo meeting would produce.) But WaI~sa said more than that. Even here he defended the possibility of a new accord, "which we'd already have if it could just be the three of us [Party, Church, and Solidarity]. But no one-seventh!" 72 Against WaI~sa's advice, the National Commission at Radom passed a resolution presenting a set of "minimal conditions" that the government had to meet in order for negotiations to continue. As Jerzy Holzer notes, this was a very inconsistent packet of demands. 73 Some demands, such as legislative approval of the new trade union bill, were clearly negotiable, while others, such as free elections to local city councils and complete local self-government, would require the Party to renounce power at the local level, hardly a "minimum" demand.

Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism I 145 The National Commission convened for its final meetings on December 11-12, this time back in Gdansk, at the Lenin Shipyard where it all began. The neocorporatist option had few supporters left at this too-late stage, but one of them made an impassioned plea soon after the meeting began. Jerzy Kropiwnicki of LSdi not only repeated the call for a tripartite alliance of Solidarity, the Party, and the Church, but tried to spell out what the three of them could do: "These three forces would conclude a new social compact, which other organizations, other unions and social forces, would be free to join. But these three main forces must make the decisions about Polish matters. The rest could only give their opinions." 74 Janusz Onyszkiewicz, an influential Warsaw leader, supported Kropiwnicki's proposal, as did advisers like Geremek, but there were few other takers. Instead, speaker after speaker took the floor with more immediate demands, such as free elections to the Sejm, creation of a provisional government, a seizure of the factories, "socialization" of the mass media, and a national referendum on the future of communist rule in Poland. Sitting silent through it all ("like some maharadji up there," taunted one opponent) was Lech Wal~sa. He spoke briefly for the "Triple Accord," and then withdrew completely when he saw where the discussion was headed. He exuded a sense of resignation but not utter hopelessness. Scolded for his silence and challenged to admit that negotiations were pointless, Wal~sa was defiant: "I'm just sitting here trying to figure out what it is you guys ate today that makes you talk like you do."7s In the hallway during a break, Wal~sa could again be heard defending the "Triple Accord" and saying that he was going to try to implement it no matter what the National Commission decided. 76 Back at the meeting, however, Wal~sa again fell silent and waited for the end many already felt was imminent. Solidarity had received reports of troop movements, and one Warsaw union daily reported on December II that martial law had "supposedly" already been invoked. 77 But Solidarity was too committed to the principles of democracy and openness to organize any kind of military defense. That could only be done by a non-democratic organization, one quite unlike Solidarity. The final resolution passed by the National Commission was less radical than many had proposed. It essentially reaffirmed the Radom demands and announced Solidarity'S intention of conducting some kind of referendum within the next two months, without specifying what

146 / Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism questions would be asked. Although some delegates said that the referendum ought to ask whether the Party should continue to run the state or whether Solidarity should offer military guarantees to the Soviet Union, the National Commission, contrary to widespread view, did not endorse this position. Instead, it empowered the Presidium to come up with the questions, and the Presidium, under WaI~sa's control, would certainly not have proposed such questions. The meeting therefore ended on a note of indecision, and even though the delegates passed a resolution calling for a general strike in case they were all arrested, most of them expected to see each other at the next meeting the following week. The meeting adjourned just before midnight. Two hours later most of its participants were arrested. Martial law had begun .

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WaI~sa's actions in these last months of 1981 have been frequently criticized by Solidarity supporters in Poland. He has been accused of being too trusting of the government, too willing to come to an accord, too ready to sacrifice ultimate goals. But what were these ultimate goals? For some, such as the increasingly influential conservative KPN (Confederation for an Independent Poland), the ultimate as well as minimum goal was an independent Poland, regardless of whether it took a democratic political form or not. For the main tendency of Solidarity, the one that inherited the ideas or emerged from the milieu of the KOR opposition of the 1970s, the goal was a new kind of participatory democracy, a polity centered on a fully open public sphere, encouraging independent association and broad social communication. It was to facilitate these goals that Solidarity kept demanding fully guaranteed rights of association and broad social access to the media. Indeed, Solidarity insisted on no less from itself: how else but by its belief in a participatory democracy can we explain Solidarity'S almost obsessive commitment to internal openness?78 Was WaI~sa now working against these goals? On the contrary, it seems that he was working hard to protect their longterm viability by trying to secure their fundamental precondition: the institutionalization of an independent civil society. WaI~sa never suffered from illusions of omnipotence. He knew that the state's repressive apparatus had not disappeared, even if it was temporarily under wraps. By pursuing the "Triple Accord" and eschewing a radicalism that could

Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism / 147 only lead to repression, Wal~sa sought to guarantee Solidarity's permanence. As he put it later, "The question was if and how we could reach a compromise with the government that would make it possible to fit Solidarity into the Polish political scene as an independent popular force. "79 Any further democratization depended on this central precondition. Wal~sa was aware of the concessions that would have to be made, the discipline that would have to be imposed. People would not get all they had hoped for, that much was certain. But the goal now, as the poet Jacek Kaczmarski had sung, was to "save what's most dear / Of the plenty already here." Would the proposed solution save enough? It would salvage all that was possible. Neocorporatism would certainly be a retreat from the original goal of a "permanently open democracy." And yet it would only be a retreat. It would not sabotage that goal; it would preserve it as a vision. And as many people realized from the experience of 1981, the goal itself-Michnik's "authentic community of free individuals, created anew each day"-had to be transformed into a vision, for it could not itself be institutionalized. Laws could make it possible for people to become free, active, and creative citizens, but they could not make people into free, active, and creative citizens. Nothing can make people free citizens, because if they are "made," they are no longer free. The goal can only be implemented by people actively committed to implementing it. The problem, however, as Jacek Kuron began to see, is that many people may not be so committed.so The original goal, a permanently open democracy, can only come about at times of revolutionary upheaval. In other words, it was possible after August 1980, which produced millions of passionately involved citizens, people who understood that citizenship was an active and creative concept requiring their active participation. But if this was exciting, it was also incredibly exhausting. Revolution is tiring and draining and prevents you from making plans for the future. It cannot last forever. In Poland it lasted about a year. By late 1981, as noted before, enthusiasm and participation had declined rapidly. No longer did Poland resemble Orwell's Barcelona or Paris in May '68. By late 1981 people increasingly wanted order in their lives, and WaI~sa was pursuing the only program that could produce order without entailing the destruction of everything that had been won since August. Not all of the gains would last, but not all of the gains could last, not in any sys-

148 / Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism tern, because the gains of August included a passionately involved civil society that could not help but disrupt any institutional arrangement. WaI~sa understood that institutional arrangements are not just limitations but also conditions of possibility. And as the revolutionary passion died down, Poland desperately needed some arrangement that would allow people to participate in public life in the absence of revolutionary ferment. The tripartite neocorporatist option was a way to preserve that most important gain which alone was the condition of all future gains: the principle of societal independence .

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In the end, of course, the government did not go for the neocorporatist solution. It chose to implement martial law instead. In his fascinating speech that appeared in print the very day martial law was imposed, Reiff posed the question of whether the corporatist solution he was proposing had any real chance of success. After all, this was a period of growing polarization and extremism. Each side seemed to want power only for itself. So why should either accept this compromise? Reiff's answer was: "There is no other way . ... Only the Grand Coalition can halt the process [of radicalization] that now threatens the nation and the state with a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. But it cannot wait much longer." 81 Indeed, it did not wait much longer. The declaration of martial law did not bring about a real civil war, for only one side had guns. But neither did it eliminate the deep-rooted problems that were at the source of the crisis. The problem of how to mediate the interests of state and society remained even after martial law was imposed. The factors that had made state pluralism an unviable solution also remained. Nothing in the Solidarity experience, however, pointed to the unviability of the neocorporatist solution, for that solution was never attempted. What Reiff said before martial law might still be applicable afterward: that there is, quite simply, "no other way."

SEVEN

The Poverty of Martial Law: Limping Toward Reform

On August 31, 1988, Lech Wal~sa met with Interior Minister General Czeslaw Kiszczak for high-level negotiations aimed at ending a new wave of strikes in Gdansk and elsewhere. Eight years to the day after the signing of the Gdansk Accord, and more than six and a half years since the imposition of martial law, government and opposition were talking again. By the fall of 1988, a neocorporatist option was once again at the center of the political agenda. What happened in the interim to bring this about? Trying to make sense out of Polish developments in the years since martial law is a rather daunting challenge. It is also more than a bit foolhardy, since things are changing so fast that today's wisdom may read like tomorrow's curiosities. And yet it is a challenge worth taking. For insofar as martial law did not resolve the crisis of which Solidarity was only a symptom, the period since then has revolved around many of the same basic questions. The post-Solidarity period can be divided into two distinct stages, with the crucial caesura occurring in September 1986, when the government declared a general amnesty, launched a series of meaningful reforms, and began to recognize the political opposition as a fundamental part of any stable political system. It was the first period, however, that led to this realization, and it is there that we must begin.

Organizing an Underground Many of the: union's foreign supporters were surprised by the relative ease with which Solidarity was broken up on December 13, 1981, 149

150 / The Poverty of Martial Law but it really is not much of a mystery. Solidarity was an organization committed to openness and legality, committed to seeking a compromise with the state. If it had prepared for an illegal struggle, it would have been something other than Solidarity. The union rank and file responded to the declaration of martial law with strikes throughout the country, but the strikes were appropriate only to a period that had just ended. lWo factors predetermined the outcome: the workers' time-honored practice of sit-in strikes, and the government's decision to shut off all telephone and telex communication. Strikers in Poland do not set up picket lines; they occupy their worksites. In 1970 the workers left the plant during a strike, and the catastrophic results brought them back for good. And so, when martial law was declared, workers in plants throughout the country dropped their tools and sat down on the premises. The problem, however, was that they had no idea what to do next. Earlier they had gotten instructions from Solidarity leaders. Now most of those leaders were in jail, and those who were not had no way of contacting those on strike. Workers struck in splendid isolation, their only contact with the outside world being radio and television, which reported from day one that most people were accepting the new situation and that things were quickly becoming "normal." There were some clashes, chiefly in Silesia, where miners, often feeling guilty for not having led the way in previous years, now offered resistance to the police, resulting in seven killed at one Katowice coal mine.) Other plants were simply surrounded. The police waited outside while the strikers waited inside-until after a week of sitting around, the strikers left to be with their families on Sunday. Returning a day or two later, they would find the plant under military control, key strike leaders arrested, and no one ready to organize anything. So committed was Solidarity to the principle of free and open communication that when that communication was blocked, the union could offer no reply. But did martial law really solve anything? Could it solve anything? The government could de-legalize and cripple Solidarity, but the same old problems remained. There still needed to be some new political arrangement to mediate the interests of state and society. Martial law meant that the totalitarian tendency was being re-emphasized, but the government was never foolish enough to think that this would solve the problems that had brought about the crisis in the first place. There was

The Poverty of Martial Law / 151 never, for example, any attempt to resurrect the idea of the infallibility of the Party. In fact, the Party was hardly mentioned at all in the first days of "the war." (The Polish term for martial law literally means "war state.") General Jaruzelski appeared and signed proclamations as Minister of Defense, head of the new Military Council for National Salvation, and Premier, but his role as head of the Party was omitted. In this sense, martial law further weakened the already fragile theoretical underpinnings of the system. When the Party began to reappear publicly in 1982, there was never any question that it could run things by itself. That notion had been discredited forever. Martial law did not, therefore, solve the crisis, but only brought it to a new stage. What stage? No one knew. The government's "program" at the time revolved exclusively around breaking up Solidarity, and "breaking" Wa1t!sa. The union president was the focus of extraordinary government attention. Now the government wanted the deal he had been proposing, but with Wa1t!sa as the only "societal" signatory. The union president was not immediately "interned;" he was flown to Warsaw to meet with government officials, who tried desperately to persuade him to make a public appeal to the nation for calm. Wa1t!sa refused to do this until the government freed other Solidarity leaders and sat down for talks with the National Commission. At that point Wa1t!sa was interned, though under special conditions. The government kept him isolated from everyone else, holding him under house arrest in a luxurious villa near the Soviet border in a continuing vain effort to get him to break ranks. Just as opposition leaders were not prepared for success in August 1980, they were not prepared for defeat sixteen months later. Those who were lucky enough to escape arrest formed an underground Solidarity only because they felt they had to. They certainly did not want to be an underground., and Solidarity made no sense as an underground organization: its whole purpose was to work with the established political authorities. As it was, the few leaders still at large waited four months before banding together in a formal way. Only when it became clear that Solidarity was not going to regain its legal status any time soon did these leaders form the Provisional Coordinating Commission of Solidarity, or TKK, on April 22, 1982. By virtue of being the best-known leader to escape capture, Zbigniew Bujak automatically came to head the underground that had to be created from scratch. Bujak had been one of the

152 / The Poverty of Martial Law most thoughtful leaders of legal Solidarity. He was acutely aware of the contingency of politics, never believed that he alone had the right answer, and was not a man to impose his views on others. And Bujak's temperament, together with the disorganization resulting naturally from a blow as devastating as martial law, invariably left its mark. From the very beginning, the Solidarity underground was organized as a loose bonding of disparate groups pursuing their own oppositional activities any way they could and any way they wanted. The opposition did not have much of a program at the time-the time did not lend itself to a program. "Free all political prisoners!" (of whom there were quite a few thousand) substituted for a program. It was not a year for political thought; 1982 was a year to survive. The opposition's most prominent public discussion was the exchange of open letters between Jacek Kuron, in prison, and Bujak and Wiktor Kulerski, heading the Solidarity underground. Kuron's position was surprising, and it was not one he maintained for long: "Prepare for the overthrow of the government!" Kuron said that he still favored a compromise, but that there unfortunately seemed to be no takers on the other side. In these conditions, the choice was between an uncontrollable mass insurrection from below, in which the regime would "probably be overthrown," and an organized campaign led by a centralized Solidarity underground to achieve the same goal. Only the second possibility, he felt, could avert a Soviet intervention. As Bujak summarized it, Kuron's position was: "If you don't want war, prepare for war." Being on the outside, Bujak knew that Kuron had painted an erroneous picture of the mood of society. He and Kulerski responded by harking back to Kuron's program of the 1970s. The struggle, they said, was to create a "parallel society," not to overthrow the government. Against Kuron's call for centralization, they said that only a thoroughly decentralized movement, "imprecise and diverse," could survive the police state conditions of martial law. As Bujak put it, with reference to another great struggle for survival, Solidarity had to adopt the tactic of "the long march." 2 The outcome of this dispute was never much in doubt. Kuron's position had little support. A diverse and loosely organized underground was the only way to proceed in 1982. There was simply no way to organize anything else. Telephone lines were cut for four weeks and openly wiretapped for nearly a year after that. ("Openly wiretapped" means

The Poverty of Martial Law / 153 that one heard the repeated message "Conversation being monitored" just before connection.} Publication of newspapers and magazines was suspended; letters and telegrams were censored; and one needed special police permission to leave one's home city. A union movement like Solidarity, with its commitment to public communication and legal activity, did not have a chance of survival in such conditions. And so, after December 13, 1981, Solidarity as such ceased to exist. If it could not be a legal trade union, it could not be a trade union at all. Instead, it became a symbol, a myth, and Bujak's decentralization only hastened the transition. With no central leadership, anyone who drew up a banner with the distinctive SOUD~ logo automatically became part of the club. If there was any "official" Solidarity, it was the TKK, thanks to the presence of Bujak. But since Bujak called on people to create their own "Solidarity" cells, it soon turned out that there were many "Solidarities,"meaning, in practice, no Solidarity at all. The TKK saw its main goal as providing some continuity with the pre-martial law period. It put most of its resources into propaganda, such as the underground press and various other measures designed simply to say "we exist." Its most spectacular project of 1982, as well as its most expensive and time-consuming, was the installation of underground radio and television transmitters for a series of sensational penetrations of state-run airwaves. 3 The TKK issued statements calling for the authorities to end martial law and for supporters to stage brief strikes on the thirteenth of each month, but it did little to back up either of the calls. Its organizational weaknesses were dramatically revealed in October 1982, when workers at the Lenin Shipyard went on strike to protest against the new trade union law that formally de-legalized Solidarity (until then it had only been "suspended"). When the strike began on October 8, the underground was caught completely off guard. Earlier that same day, the TKK had called on workers to refrain from striking, and to prepare instead for a coordinated one-day national strike on November 10. Two days later the TKK reversed its call, appealing now for nationwide strikes in support of Gdansk. But once again the underground was hopelessly out of sync, as the Gdansk strike ended the day the new appeal went out. It is hardly surprising, under these circumstances, that the November 10 strike was pretty much of a failure. 4 With the underground appearing weak, the authorities made their first conciliatory move. The day after the abortive November strike,

154 / The Poverty of Martial Law and only hours after the news of the death of Leonid Brezhnev, they announced that Lech WaI~sa was "no longer a threat to public order" and would be released unconditionally. (A Warsaw joke: Jaruzelski says to Brezhnev: "We must at least release WaI~sa already." Brezhnev: "Over my dead body!") Yet this gesture was not followed by many others. Although the government announced the formal "suspension" of martial law one month later, for most Solidarity leaders it did not make much difference. In the first year of martial law, there were two categories of political imprisonment: internment and arrest. Most leading Solidarity figures, detained during the first hours of martial law, had been "interned": accused of no crime, they were held because the state said they were "likely" to commit crimes (that is, violate martial law) if they remained at large. "Arrest," on the other hand, applied to those picked up for violating martial law after the decree went into effect. Those arrested, including such leaders who had escaped initial internment as Wladyslaw Frasyniuk of Wroclaw and Andrzej Slowik of LOdi, received regular prison sentences. Internees, on the other hand, could be held only so long as martial law was in effect. As the government prepared to suspend martial law, it sought new legal ways to keep some internees in jail. The prosecutor's office thereupon announced two sets of legal proceedings against a dozen key activists. In September 1982, five leading interned members of KOR-Jacek Kuron, Adam Michnik, Jan Litynski, Jan J6zefLipski, and Henryk Wujec-were formally "arrested" on charges of trying to overthrow the state by force. 5 Three months later, as the last of the internees were being released, the government announced the "arrest" of seven more interned activists on similar charges of treason. This group consisted of WaI~sa's three rivals for union president: Andrzej Gwiazda, Marian Jurczyk, and Jan Rulewski, along with Karol Modzelewski of Wroclaw, Seweryn Jaworski of Warsaw, Grzegorz Palka from LOdi, and Katowice Solidarity leader Andrzej Rozplochowski. Despite the lifting of martial law, therefore, most Solidarity leaders, with the exception of Wal~sa, remained either underground or in jail. The twelve would stay in jail until an amnesty in 1984; most were rearrested soon afterward. The government was certainly maintaining a hard-line to the opposition. But this doesn't mean that the government did not reach out at all. Although many people expected that martial law would mean the

The Poverty of Martial Law / 155 death of all reform efforts, the government knew it could not return to the pre-August days. It thought it could do without Solidarity, but it knew it had to find some social support. The civil society that became conscious of itself after August 1980 could not just be bottled up to die. And so the period from 1982 to 1986 was marked by an effort to win some support from some sections of civil society. Not from the political opposition, and not from the workers, but from the Church first of all, the intelligentsia second, and a fledgling class-in-creation of entrepreneurs third. The first was more receptive than the second, while the third was not cultivated seriously until 1986. In the end it did not really matter. By ignoring the claims of the workers and persecuting the political opposition, the government could not possibly legitimate itself. The overtures were not, however, insignificant. The authorities were initially quite harsh in their treatment of existing organizations of intellectuals. They dissolved various professional associations, such as the Writers Union, the Journalists Association, and the Filmmakers Union, and permitted the Polish section of the International PEN Club to resume activity only in 1988. At the same time, the official cultural realm remained far more open than it was prior to 1980. As newspapers and magazines resumed publication, writers found that they could still publish on a wide range of critical issues. Many journalists had quit their positions for fear that they would have to turn into pro-regime hacks, but that fear turned out to be unfounded. Books and articles by oppositionist authors continued to be published legally. The liberal press law of 1981 was indeed changed for the worse, but even with the revisions it was a vast improvement over previous rules. Newspapers were allowed to note in the text where the censor had demanded something removed, and negotiations between editor and censor often resulted in the text's being restored. Overall, cultural policy continued to be the most open in all of Eastern Europe. Cultural life was not very lively in 1982, but in large part this was due to performers and audiences who joined in a widespread boycott of theater, cinema, clubs, and even radio and television in solidarity with the thousands still in prison. There was a general refusal to be happy that first year, as if a smile would legitimate the repression by proving it could even momentarily be forgotten. The government, trying to break the boycott, argued that the cultural realm was open to a wide range of views. By mid-1983, some intellectuals began to feel that this was the

156 I The Poverty of Martial Law case. One important turning point was a polemical exchange of views published in Tygodnik Powszechny. The paper had been running critical and often bitingly sardonic tidbits of information in its "View of the Week" column since resuming publication in the spring of 1982, b\lt it had never run the kind of article it did on July 31, 1983. The government had just announced, to great official fanfare, the formal lifting of martial law. But editor Jerzy Turowicz was not impressed, and in a front-page editorial he said why. He denounced the new set of laws that were to replace martial law. Insofar as they restricted the basic civic rights that the population fought for in 1980-1981, Turowicz wrote, the new laws could not bring about the social peace the authorities said they wanted. People needed real guarantees that their rights as citizens would be respected, he wrote, and "it is no secret" that "a significant part of Polish society does not believe that the present sociopolitical reality . . . can provide such guarantees." Although Poland desperately needed genuinely pluralist dialog, Turowicz complained, in the eighteen months since Solidarity was disbanded "we have usually heard but one voice." If this was the future of Poland, it was a grim one indeed.6 Almost as surprising as the fact that this article was allowed to appear was that government press spokesman Jerzy Urban wrote a formal reply, which Tygodnik Powszechny published along with Turowicz's unrepentant response.7 The Solidarity period had made sharp discussion of official policy a normal part of the public sphere, and this exchange suggested that it would continue to be possible afterward, as well.

Church and State

If the new regime sought stability without Solidarity, it had to find someone else people would listen to. That left the Church. While it had taken Solidarity many months to come around to a corporatist position, the Church had been ready from the beginning. In fact, the Church had already taken such a position in 1956, when it accepted privileges from Gomulka and defended him against the criticism of the revisionists. The Church, of course, is itself an extremely hierarchical body, long used to negotiating with other hierarchical bodies. Although sympathetic to Solidarity's quest for an independent civil society, the Church was suspicious of Solidarity's radicalism. Certainly there were exceptions.

The Poverty of Martial Law / 157 One priest, Father Jan Zieja, was a founding member of KOR, and the Church-affiliated Catholic Intellectual Clubs had provided extensive support to Solidarity. Among the hierarchy, however, the norm was people like Father Alojzy Orszulik. In December 1980, in the midst of an official campaign against Solidarity's advisers, Orszulik, as spokesman of the Polish Episcopate, openly weighed in on the government's side with his own public attack against Jacek Kuron. (In 1982, Orszulik was chosen by Church authorities to represent them in discussions with the interned Lech Wal~sa.) The topic of Church-Solidarity relations is complex, controversial, and beyond the scope of this work. 8 It is certainly fair to say, however, that Solidarity always felt far closer to the Church than the Church felt to Solidarity. In the last months before martial law, the Church was increasingly willing to playa part in bringing about a tripartite resolution. Primate Glemp was a frequent mediator between the government and the Solidarity leadership. After martial law, the government made a special point of showing that it was still interested in the views of the Church, and although the Episcopate issued many pastoral letters calling for an end to the state of war and for renewed dialog with Solidarity, many enion supporters were disappointed by what seemed to be the Church's overly conciliatory attitude toward the military authorities. It was not for nothing, however. Despite the worst housing crisis in decades, the decay of schools and hospitals, and an appalling lack of day care and nursing home facilities, the Church enjoyed a construction boom. In small towns and big cities, in new urban housing districts that did not even have telephone service-churches were being built everywhere. Publicly, the authorities praised the Church for its realism and continued providing the media access (during Easter 1982, for example) that the Church had long requested. And whether as a result of these favors or not, the Church did seem rather impatient with the Solidarity underground. In response to reporters' questions, Glemp publicly opposed the strike call for November 10 just four days before the strike was supposed to occur. On November 8, after meeting with Jaruzelski, he announced that the Pope would soon visit "at the invitation of the government." Later that month, Glemp played a key role in ending the actors' strike. Following a performance at a Warsaw church, where many actors had taken professional refuge, Glemp admonished the actors that their place was in the theater, not the church. What bothered many oppositionists,

158 / The Poverty of Martial Law and indicated that Church and state were already working too closely together on some issues, was that this incident took place just as the government was making the actors' boycott a major propaganda issue. Glemp's admonition to the actors had come immediately after the director of the National Theater had been fired for his role in the boycott, and just days before the entire Actors Union was dissolved. It was hard for many people to avoid the suspicion of a quid pro quo. 9 The Church certainly never supported martial law, and it continued to serve as a refuge and support center for persecuted Solidarity activists, but it was demonstrably willing to work with the government in this period. The government, meanwhile, was interested in working with the Church because it knew it had to reach out in some way to civil society at large. Even after crushing Solidarity, it was still groping for a new kind of compromise. Or at least parts of the government were. For the rapprochement with the Church was opposed by many important elements within the PZPR, and in 1984 they provoked two crises designed to derail it. The first was the "battle of the crosses," which began in the spring when a school principal. in the city of Garwolin forcibly removed a cross hanging "illegally" in a classroom and allegedly tossed it out the window. This sparked a widespread protest in defense of crosses in the public schools, a protest that neither the government nor most of the opposition particularly wanted to see. The principal's actions were clearly not part of any official plan, thus leading to suspicion that the event had been staged in order to provoke a conflict. There was no new legislation involved here; such legislation had been on the books, and unenforced, for years. This was certainly no time to quarrel over some crosses in some classrooms. Yet it was also an issue that the government could not publicly concede. If the anti-reformists in the Party welcomed the conflict, much of the secular opposition was embarrassed by it. Just as the conflict was dying out, however, with the government refusing to abandon the principle of secularity but tacitly agreeing to allow its occasional breach, another challenge to the rapprochement appeared, and this one had far more serious consequences. This was the murder of Father Jerzy Popieruszko. Widely known for his anti-government sermons during the martial law period, Popieruszko was kidnapped, tortured, and killed by three policemen in October 1984. That the policemen were acting against offi-

The Poverty of Martial Law / 159 cial policy became clear from the government's swift reaction. The three men, along with one of their superiors, were quickly arrested and put on trial, the first time policemen had been publicly prosecuted for a political crime anywhere in postwar East Europe. The defendants argued that they were trying to protect the honor of the socialist state by dealing with an enemy that they felt had been treated too liberally by the political authorities. Popieruszko had been arrested for anti-government activity a year earlier, but then released as part of the 1984 amnesty. The police said they felt cheated by the amnesty, as they watched Popieruszko go back to his old ways. They felt, they said at the trial, that someone had to teach him a lesson. The trial, which was extensively covered in the official press, revealed that the policemen had support from some higher-ups, and although no big names were revealed, the affair brought intra-governmental rivalry into a public arena where it had never been before. The defendants were convicted and given sentences of up to twenty-five years in prison. Other evidence of conflicts within the elite surfaced in an odd quarrel over abortion policy. After considerable pressure from the Church, the government agreed to prohibit abortions at a brand-new state hospital in Lldz. The ban raised a number of questions, but the only ones to seize on the issue were hard-line anti-Solidarity Party members, posing as women's liberationists in order to challenge yet another aspect of pro-Church policy on the part of the state .10 Perhaps the most important fact about all these signs of conflict was that the more conciliatory side prevailed in the end. It seemed that the government was really serious about working with at least some independent elements in a way it had not done before. It needed to do so in large part because of the economy, which clearly would not improve without social support for reform measures and some assistance from the West, both of which required a measure of social conciliation. And yet it still took time for the government to move to an openly reformist position. Whether because of severe internal conflicts or because it still hoped it could weather the crisis on its own, the government moved very slowly toward reform. And while it lingered, the old Solidarity opposition had to wait too, unable to pursue the political negotiations with the state that it still sought. The imposition of martial law inaugurated a period of stagnation that lasted almost five years. The break came in September 1986. The general amnesty of political prisoners, together

160 / The Poverty of Martial Law with announcements of major new political and economic reforms, inaugurated a new period in the post-1980 history of Poland, leading to the 1988 negotiations between the government and Lech Wal~sa and putting the neocorporatist idea back in the center of things. Having a good relationship with the Church, the government acknowledged, did not change things. With government approval rates near rock bottom, stability could only be achieved by integrating, in some way, the political opposition, and this is what the government now set out to do.

Amnesty and Disarray The limited amnesty declared on July 17, 1986, offered the opposition few indications that a new official policy was in operation. Even though people like Adam Michnik and GdaDsk union leader Bogdan Lis were soon released, there was nothing to suggest that they would not be back in jail as soon as they resumed their political activities. This uncertainty made the announcement of September I I all the more shocking. As a result of the "stabilization" of the internal situation and in the interest of "strengthening the process of national accord," Interior Minister General Czeslaw Kiszczak announced that 225 political prisoners would be unconditionally released within the next few days. This group included all the former Solidarity leaders still in jail, even Zbigniew Bujak, who had been captured only about two months earlier after four and a half years in hiding. The released prisoners were urged to give up their underground work, the futility of which the police tried to demonstrate by calling in for questioning some three thousand activists across the country. These people, many of whom had thought that the police did not know about them, were presented with detailed lists of their "illegal" activities and advised, usually politely, to give up their evil ways and work for the good of the country. The point, according to Kiszczak, was to show these activists "that their activities were futile, their clandestine character a sham." 11 Some were threatened with arrest for continuing their activities, but the general tone of these interrogations was that "we are entering a new stage," and that everyone should work together for the good of the country.12 The announcement of the amnesty threw Solidarity circles into disarray. The initial response was elation coupled with suspicion. For the

The Poverty of Martial Law / 161 first time since December 1981, all of the former Solidarity leaders could meet together freely. The government had released them unconditionally, knowing that they would try to reconstitute a Solidarity opposition in some form. What did it mean? Was this just another trick, or was it the first bit of evidence that the government was really moving to a program of reform? Wladyslaw Frasyniuk told a reporter that his release was merely a gesture designed to please the West. Wiktor Kulerski, the leader of the TKK following Bujak's arrest, also drew attention to the propaganda aspect in his first postamnesty interview. One underground pUblication said simply, "The authorities need dollars," while Tygodnik Mazowsze (Mazowsze Weekly), the semi-official journal of the underground, wrote, "Above all, the authorities are anxious to disarm the opposition." 13 Commentators cautioned that there was still a chance that everybody would be arrested again in a couple of months. And yet the amnesty could not be dismissed lightly. The release of political prisoners had been the opposition's number one demand since December 13, 1981. It was their sole precondition for talks with the government, and now it had been fulfilled. As Jan Lityiiski said, "Everything that we know about communism would force us not to believe in [the amnesty], except that this sort of rational thinking gets us nowhere. So we have to believe that this time it is different and to behave as if this were a genuine breakthrough." 14 And Jacek Koron, while noting that the authorities needed to do much more, reminded his audience that they did, however, take the first, real step; and if Solidarity fails to respond in an equally real fashion, it will be an unequivocal sign that there is no Solidarity. We hold the public's attention now, everyone is awaiting the voice of Solidarity ... and if we respond by just repeating what we have said so many times before, the public will feel that we have said nothing, or worse, that we have failed. IS But what was the Solidarity that needed to respond? To whom were the public's eyes turned? By late 1986, Solidarity was certainly no trade union. There were few underground cells actually functioning in the factories. For most people, Solidarity meant the well:known leaders from 1981: more specifically, it meant Lech Wal~sa. It was Wal~sa,

162 / The Poverty of Martial Law together with his hand-picked advisers and colleagues, who constituted the closest thing to a national Solidarity leadership. They were the ones who had to respond. They were the ones who had to create new structures. They were Solidarity now. Under pressure to figure out an organizational response, Wal~sa's Solidarity chose, once again, a dual strategy. Wanting to function legally but not knowing if this would be possible, the Solidarity leaders decided to create a new leadership body to act entirely aboveground, while maintaining the underground TKK "just in case." The leaders of the TKK, those who signed the documents, would surface, while the practical network created by the TKK would stay intact, coordinated now by a group of activists who would operate with strict anonymity. The new body, called the Provisional Council of Solidarity, or TRS, was created by Wal~sa on September 29, 1986. Originally made up of seven prominent Solidarity activists who had all at one time been members of the TKK, the TRS was charged with the task of preparing for Solidarity's return to legality. There were no central instructions regarding regional organizations; each region was allowed, as it pleased, to remain underground or "emerge." Most decided to create aboveground bodies; Wroclaw, whose leaders had no confidence whatsoever in the ability of opposition structures to operate legally, was a prominent exception. All these structures and organizations notwithstanding, this was a terribly disorganized period for Solidarity, at both a national and a regionallevel. Some activity was open, some was secret, and most people didn't really know which was which, or what the goal of either was supposed to be. Ironically, many of Solidarity's problems were due to the underground's success. The opposition had become so decentralized over the past five years that there were now just too many groups to bring into anyone coherent structure. Who should be leaders in the newly public bodies: the elected union leaders from December 1981 or those who had organized underground activity afterward? If the latter, then which underground group was "more important"? Which region, and which organization, should be rewarded with a position in the "new" Solidarity? And who was going to decide? Conspiratorial work is not conducive to trust, and when Solidarity activists were suddenly able to emerge from underground in 1986, the breadth of the internal differences was staggering. Personal conflicts and animosities were crippling opposition work in many parts of the country. Years of disarray had

The Poverty of Martial Law / 163 taken their toll. One gets a sense of the internal conflicts from Kuron's wry remark that "Lech Wal~sa deserves another Nobel Peace Prize" -this time for his work in trying to reconcile differences within Solidarity.16 In fact, reconciliation was no longer possible. There were just too many differences within the opposition. In the abstract, everyone might agree that the government's partner in a dialog should be "the free, self-governing trade union Solidarity," as Adam Michnik said at a postamnesty press conference. l ? But if Michnik was going to represent that Solidarity, many other oppositionists would want little to do with it. KOR had formally dissolved in September 1981, but many still objected to its continued ideological influence. The Warsaw Regional Executive Committee of Solidarity constituted itself as an aboveground organization with a leadership of Zbigniew Bujak, Konrad Bielinski, Wiktor Kulerski, Ewa Kulik, Jan Litytlski, and Henryk Wujec-all representatives of the KOR social democratic left and completely unacceptable to other Solidarity tendencies active in the Warsaw region. (Sure enough, Seweryn Jaworski, a popular Warsaw union leader in 1981, later denounced this group as usurpers.) 18 By late 1986, what used to be Solidarity was now a disparate collection of political oppositionists loosely held together by the authority of Lech Wal~sa. His authority was not all embracing. Wal~sa's old opponents on the 1981 National Commission were already asking him to call a meeting of that body, now that it could finally be done in the open. But Wal~sa refused. In light of the events of the intervening five years, the old National Commission was in no sense a coherent body. While his opponents protested and formed a faction of their own (the "Working Group of Solidarity"), Wal~sa set about naming his own leadership, from the movement's social democratic tendency, to a reconstructed official Solidarity. Beside personnel problems, Solidarity faced a difficult programmatic crisis as well. Many top leaders were no longer so convinced that trade union activity was the way to proceed. More and more, they were interested in systemic political reform, not in shopfloor disputes. Yet here the problems became greater. What kind of reform-political or economic? Which issues are most important? Should national Solidarity officials focus on what is good for workers, or on what will accelerate reform? There were too many questions now and too few answers. Kuron's

164 / The Poverty of Martial Law fears were quickly being realized. Solidarity activists were now all free and meeting in public, but they still did not know what to do to help the country out of its crisis. Union activists openly established Regional Executive Committees of Solidarity-but why should anybody now join? What was there actually to do? What was the goal? "Solidarity" was a symbol that promised a better and more democratic life, and most of society genuinely wished it well. But those who managed that symbol had few concrete tasks for its supporters to perform, aside from distributing underground literature. Solidarity's goal was now a national one, and could only be achieved through high-level negotiations with the state. There was little for ordinary people to do, and so Solidarity as such unmistakably began to atrophy. All opposition theorists returned to this theme in late 1986 and 1987. Solidarity was in a crisis. It was losing its sense of purpose. Many liked to say simply that "Solidarity is dead." The only groups to expand in this period were those with a specific, concrete goal, like the Freedom and Peace Movement. Originally organized on the model of Western peace movements (though it saw the Soviet Union as the source of tension and was not particularly concerned about the Western military buildup), Freedom and Peace had developed a well-organized campaign aimed at introducing the status of conscientious objector into military induction procedures. The organization carried on many other protest activities, too, in addition to conducting a dialog with Western peace movements (such as the U.S. Campaign for Peace and Democracy, chaired by Joanne Landy, a frequent visitor to Poland in those years, and the British Committee for European Nuclear Disarmament, or END). Freedom and Peace was, of course, sympathetic to Solidarity, but its success drew attention to Solidarity's decline, particularly its declining sense of purpose. 19 If Solidarity was, by late 1981, not only a trade union but a movement for systemic political reform, by 1986 it was almost entirely a movement for systemic reform, particularly on the national level. To be a trade union, management has to allow you to be one, and the government was still holding firm against that. At the factory level, some activists used the period after the amnesty to try, in vain, to register new trade unions called "Solidarity." But the national Solidarity leadership was uninterested in these efforts; it did not even comment on them until nearly a year after they began. 20 As they realized that the am-

The Poverty of Martial Law / 165 nesty signaled the possibility of broad political reform, most Solidarity leaders decided that they did not want to get bogged down in union work per se. They were after bigger game.

The Right-Wing Critique of Solidarity One reason the old leaders increasingly shunned union work was that the intellectual climate in the opposition had changed. Many theorists began to question the mass-movement and trade-union emphasis of the opposition, to challenge the KOR participatory theory and strategy that had led to the creation of Solidarity in the first place. The whole approach was increasingly criticized for being "too socialist" and "too left-wing." There was, in other words, a marked shift to the right, which did not dominate the opposition, but which affected it and its policies on all levels . One searches for culprits after any crime. When Solidarity was crushed in December 1981, it was obvious who had delivered the blow. What was not so obvious, however, was how an organization that seemed so incredibly strong, that embodied the interests of the clear majority of society, could be dispersed like this. Was there something within Solidarity that made it vulnerable? Was there something so essentially wrong that it must never be repeated? The right-wing critique of Solidarity began slowly. While thousands languished in prison, it did not seem proper to wash dirty linen in public. But by 1983, underground publications such as Niepodleglosc (Independence) and Polityka Polska (Polish Politics) took up the charge that Solidarity had been too "socialist," too tied to leftist faith in the power of the masses. 21 By 1984, however, when the reluctance to engage in critical self-examination had faded, the right wing became increasingly prominent and increasingly diverse, and its main themes were taken up in a wide number of publications. Andrzej Walicki, author of several books on Polish and Russian political philosophy, published a controversial article tracing the flaws of Solidarity to its character as a mass movement. When the campaign for free trade unions was a movement of the elite, in the 1970s, it had many good things in mind. But when it became a mass movement, writes Walicki, Solidarity "inevitably became the voice of the

166 / The Poverty of Martial Law average mentality, a mentality shaped precisely by 'real socialism.' "22 Solidarity's socialism, according to Walicki, was expressed in its attitude to government, governing, and the marketplace. First, Solidarity shared socialism's belief in the "omnipotence of political authority" and the "magical powers" of government: "The government gives, the government sustains us, the government produces, the government can do everything." A second flaw, according to Walicki, was Solidarity's belief in participation and self-governing. Solidarity strove for "participation in power" not for "limiting power in the name of individual freedom," and thus it was a dangerously "socialist mass movement." 23 Demanding a say in price setting, for example, only confirmed the politicization of what should be an impersonal process. And although this may be democratic, it is also totalitarian. Walicki goes so far as to accuse Solidarity of wanting to "preserve totalitarianism in a democratized form." 24 For Walicki, mass democracy is itself totalitarian. Solidarity was democratic, hence socialist, hence totalitarian. His other point is connected with this. Solidarity, he says, "was a democratic movement but not a liberal movement." It believed in egalitarianism and collectivism, the primacy of politics over economics, and it concurred in the abolition of market rights. Perhaps unfairly critical of Solidarity's anti-politics, Walicki accuses the union of having an "ethos of anti-individualism and anti-liberalism." 25 Overall, Solidarity was far too connected to a socialist legacy, a model, Walicki contends, that future oppositionists should decidedly reject. Demolishing Solidarity as a model was also the goal of other right oppositionists, the most influential of whom was Piotr Wierzbicki, a columnist for Tygodnik Powszechny. Wierzbicki brought the right wing a stunning dose of confidence with his 1985 underground bestseller, Thoughts of an Old-Fashioned Pole, in which he attributes all the defeats of the postwar opposition to the ideological hegemony of the left. Not only do intellectuals espouse the ideas of the left, but the population does as well. "Generally speaking," writes Wierzbicki, "we have a very leftist nation . . . . Without even knowing it, Poles are children of this system, and are in no great hurry to get rid of it." 26 And all this leftism was apparent in Solidarity: the clamor for participation, an excessive concern for democratic procedure, the constant demands made upon government, a distrust of strong personal leadership. Wal~sa was frequently attacked for being "too authoritarian," but Wierzbicki

The Poverty of Martial Law / 167 argues that that was precisely what Poland needed: strong and trusted authorityY Solidarity, according to Wierzbicki, was just the kind of organization Poland should avoid in the future. The right, he says, must assert itself, introducing a trust in market economics and a reliance on strong individual authority in politics and economics alike. Throughout the underground press, articles began to deplore the "collectivist" character of Solidarity. One article criticized Solidarity for being nothing more than a "Great Guardian" for the people, caring about their every need and thereby depriving them of the motivation to take responsibility for their own lives. In this view, Solidarity was literally no different from the state; martial law was merely the moment when "the wicked old guardian crushed the new one." 28 Another writer argued that tradl~ unions themselves were the problem, since "by their very nature, labor unions throughout the world are made up of leftists. Their aim is to reduce the role of the employer and to defend the employees, even at the cost of productivity and slowing down development." 29 Overall, the right clarified its views-" democracy is not the goal, freedom is" 3°_and this usually meant that Solidarity ought to be a thing of the past. The left, in crisis, did not know what to defend. Indeed, most of the left democratic opposition now began to shun the term. They agreed that the left had Ibeen the inspiration for Solidarity, but whereas this fact was once a point of pride, now, in the aftermath of December 13, it put them on the defensive. Most would go no farther than S. Zelazny, a KOR sympathizer who sheepishly defended the left for its focus on human cooperation and its sympathetic interest in the problems of the weak. 31 The most prominent exception here was the underground journalist Dawid Warszawski (a pseudonym), who criticized the new right while actively defending the left, suggesting that the concept, tradition, and ideals of the left were still valid (even if problematic).32 But if there was a single source of the left's unease, it was the question of the economy. For there was general agreement in Poland that some kind of market reform was necessary. People quarreled over how far it should go, but not over whether it was needed at all. And it was on this issue that many on the left began changing their minds. By 1984 marketization was being defended as the path to the independent civil society that the left had coveted all along. The critique of the left as pro-government was not very accurate. As

168 / The Poverty of Martial Law I tried to show in the first chapters, the Polish left conceived of politics as a community of free individuals and was not enamored of governmental authority. It felt close to a liberal conception of politics (Michnik cites J. S. Mill very favorably in his 1977 book, The Church and the Left: A Dialog) but had rejected the liberal position in economics, trying to secure the rights of citizenship in a democratic public sphere rather than in a market economy. But it was precisely this idea that underwent a radical change in the mid-1980s. It was as if the opposition remembered that burglische Gesellschaft means not just "civil society," but "bourgeois society" as well. Citizenship, they now "discovered," could best be achieved through the market economy.33 Whereas the slogan used to be "no economic reform without political reform," now it became "no political reform without economic reform." Solidarity's mistake, in this view, was that it had tried to bring about political reform without focusing on the market. Many former leftists now came around to this position. Jerzy Strzelecki, an adviser to Solidarity on self-management issues in 1981, denounced as a left anarcho-syndicalist by a prominent Party publication in 1982, became a leading exponent of conservative property rights theory in 1984.34 Jadwiga Staniszkis, another leading left-wing theoretician in 1981, also came around to the view that progress in Poland depended on the flourishing of private property.35 Aside from defending cooperative property instead of private property, the left had few new economic ideas of its own. On all fronts, the right was on a roll. In 1976 it was the left that was proud of its traditions and the right that was embarrassed by its own label; ten years later the situation was exactly the reverse. 36 More and more, the official Solidarity leadership bodies themselves adopted a pro-market position, culminating in an April 1987 document signed by WaI~sa, the TKK, and the TRS calling for extensive privatization of the Polish economy.37 So market-oriented was this program that Ryszard Bugaj, the chief economist of the left social democratic tendency of Solidarity, wrote that one might never know this was a trade union program if not for the union masthead at the top! 38 Solidarity's economic program was remarkably similar to the program the government had begun to push, and this convergence accelerated Solidarity's crisis as a trade union. With Solidarity focusing on reform, it was increasingly only the official trade unions that were talking about workers' interests per se. As Solidarity leaders demanded a reform pact with the state, it was the official unions that deplored the effects of

The Poverty of Martial Law / 169 refonn on workers. The possibility of losing supporters to the official unions, unthinkable only a short time before, suddenly seemed real, especially when the government introduced its "second stage" market refonn program in late 1987. The contradiction between market reform and trade union activity was always potentially ruinous to Solidarity. The union avoided the problem in 1981, mostly because the government did not embark on refonn at the time. And yet Solidarity could have managed the problem in 1981. It would have been difficult, but Solidarity could have used its clout to mitigate some hardships while explaining others as the price of refonn, represented by Solidarity's legal existence itself. This, after all, was the basis of the neocorporatist bargain. In the mid-1980s, however, Solidarity no longer had this clout. It could not mitigate hardships, because it was not recognized as a player by the authorities. By demanding refonn, Solidarity was put in the position of demanding hardship without being able to defend the workers against it. No wonder some workers started gravitating to the official unions. No wonder, also, that some veteran Solidarity activists began criticizing the high political concerns of the central leadership. On September 20, 1987, twenty-two members of the 1981 National Commission wrote to Wal~sa complaining of the "virtual lack of concern with social and standard-of-living problems" in the "statements and actions" of the official Solidarity leadership.39 Although this prompted the TRS to issue a statement in support of workers' self-management,40 the problem itself was far from resolved. In early 1988 the prominent Szczecin leader Marian Jurczyk, now allied with the Working Group, warned against Solidarity "becoming more of a socio-political movement" while its "original trade unionist role is being fulfilled only to a very limited degree."41 Since the central leadership continued to support broad economic refonn, however, the problem could not be easily resolved-as became apparent in the spring of 1988, when Solidarity officials offered only lukewarm support to the strikes that were directed in part against the economic reform itself.

Referendum and Reorganization By late 1987 Solidarity was on the defensive and in disarray. In an effort to recover the initiative, Wal~sa and others decided to scrap the existing organizational arrangement. As the threat of mass arrest re-

170 / The Poverty of Martial Law ceded in the new cli~ate of reform, the underground safeguard was no longer regarded as necessary. Moreover, its existence only led to internal quarrels, preventing Solidarity from talking with a single voice and making it more difficult for Wal~sa to enter into any possible negotiations with the government. Therefore, on October 25, both the underground TKK and the aboveground TRS were dissolved, replaced by a single, aboveground National Executive Commission (KKW), consisting of ten regional representatives and headed by Lech Wal~sa. The KKW's first task was to define Solidarity policy toward the just-announced referendum. This clever move by the government had put Solidarity in a very difficult position. The referendum asked whether the voters supported "radical economic reform" and favored "deep democratization." Solidarity, of course, favored both, but the government was treating the referendum as a vote of confidence, and Solidarity obviously could not provide that for nothing. Nor could it advise people to vote against reform. In a quandary, the KKW finally advised people to boycott the referendum. But even that wasn't quite right. "We're not calling for a boycott," Wal~sa adviser Geremek told a Western reporter. "We're just saying ignore it." 42 The referendum took place on November 29, 1987, and the next day the government announced that it had lost. Although a majority of those who voted, voted yes, the rules required the approval of a majority of eligible voters, and with a 33 percent boycott, the "yes" vote fell about 5 percent short. The astonishing thing was that the government allowed itself to lose. It had not been unwilling to falsify votes in the past. Was this a sign that it wanted to lose? Perhaps. Poland had recently been admitted into the International Monetary Fund. Before the vote, the government had said that "radical reform" entailed major price increases. Perhaps the "no" vote was intended to dissuade creditors from gemanding harsh austerity measures. Perhaps the government wanted to lose so as not to implement reform. Or perhaps the Party was terribly divided on whether to implement reform or not. Raising this last question posed a problem for Solidarity: If the Party was divided, shouldn't Solidarity try to work with those in the Party who favored reform? All the Solidarity commentary on the referendum pointed, for the first time in years, to the existence of an important reform faction in the Party. Solidarity was publicly admitting that there was a chance of meaningful reform, that even the group that had implemented martial law might yet be a partner for reform.

The Poverty of Martial Law / 171 The evidence seemed sound. The government had released political prisoners a year before, and since then had drastically reduced censorship, legalized independent associations, reduced centralized planning, expanded possibilities for private enterprise, and conducted an honest referendum. This last point was hopeful no matter how the opposition looked at it. If balloting was honest simply because, as the government claimed, it was now doing everything honestly, that was obviously a good sign. And if balloting was honest because Party officials opposed to reform refused to falsify it, that was also a good sign, for it meant that there were some officials who really did seek reform. Even Jan Litynski spoke of "reformers" and "anti-reformers" in his commentary on the referendum. Thus, the possibility of a new, pro-reform coalition began to emerge. Just as the Party seemed split into reformers and anti-reformers, so Solidarity was divided as well. The workers, Solidarity's putative rank and file, were already beginning to oppose reform, in deed if not in word. They wanted a "reform" that meant an immediate increase in the standard of living, while the reform they saw entailed a cut in living standards. The government argued that this was just the bitter pill on the road to recovery, but the workers, naturally, did not believe it. The Solidarity leadership, however, did believe it. They also called for an economic reform that would impose serious short-term costs, and many were quite sympathetic to the proposed "second stage." They wanted to support it, but insisted on political reform as the price for doing so. Thus, there was a basis for a reform alliance that would divide the workers, somewhat as Thatcherism has divided the workers in Britain. The problem, however, is that both groups of reformers face considerable internal obstacles. On the one hand, many workers oppose any kind of market reform and appeal to Solidarity to protect them. On the other hand, the local Party apparatus also opposes reform, since reform takes power out of its hands. This raises the possibility of a different kind of alliance, an alliance of anti-reformers. By the late 1980s, hard-line Party factions were already moving in this direction. Their newspapers, such as Rzeczywistosc (Reality) or Sprawy i Ludzie (Affairs and People) began fighting various official proposals that weaken welfare guarantees of the past, such as the suggestion that fees might soon be necessary for education and hospital expenses. It is not that these Stalinists care about workers' welfare; they merely exploit these issues to oppose reform. Thus, pro-reform and anti-reform factions were emerging in both

172 / The Poverty of Martial Law the Party and the opposition. The referendum helped bring the reformers together by making it clear that each group could be helped by the reformers in the other camp. On October 13, 1987, the Party announced that it was quietly holding talks with oppositionists, including "wellknown former advisers of Solidarity." Soon afterward, press spokesman Jerzy Urban was speaking about a favorable evolution on the part of some Solidarity people.43 And Solidarity was saying the same about some of those in the government. The question was how to bring the two together. And so, by late 1987, the basis of a neocorporatist alliance had begun to take shape again. Solidarity would reach an accord with the government on a program of comprehensive political and economic reform. This was no longer 1981, but such a pact was still a real possibility. For even in disarray, Solidarity, and particularly Lech WaI~sa, remained the symbolic representative of independent civil society. And so, in early 1988, prominent Solidarity advisers began making urgent pleas to the government to open up talks with Wal~sa and the opposition. What's more, the government permitted leading official newspapers to publish these appeals. In January 1988 the Party allowed the publication, in the most influential Polish weekly, of Professor Jerzy Holzer's "Open Letter to Wojciech Jaruzelski and Lech WaI~sa." 44 Holzer, an internee during martial law and author of a history of Solidarity published underground, called on the two leaders to make a historic pact, in the name of their respective social organizations (the government and Solidarity), to save the country from impending disaster. One month later, a prominent new journal published Bronislaw Geremek's call for the conclusion of an "anti-crisis pact" between the government and Solidarity.45 Previously, interviews with Geremek had been carefully censored out of the official press. Now he had an official imprimatur. The idea of a neocorporatist alliance had most definitely returned.

The Party Moves Toward Reform Before getting to the details of these proposals, which took on great political importance after the spontaneous wave of strikes in spring and then again in August 1988, we have to fill in the other side of the story. So far I have talked about what happened to Solidarity after 1986. But

The Poverty of Martial Law I 173 if a new accord seemed even remotely conceivable, this was largely due to changes in government policy. For the first time since martial law, the government seemed genuinely interested in real reform. And "real reform" meant opening up the public and political sphere to participation by independent citizens and social groups. It meant breaking the traditional monopoly of the Party. Within weeks after the amnesty, the government took its first tentative steps in this direction. It proposed the creation of a broad-based Social Consultative Council and urged the opposition to join. A group of people sitting around and talking to General Jaruzelski was not exactly what the opposition understood as political reform. But what made this body something new was the government's active pursuit of prominent oppositionists to serve on it. A special government committee met with a group of Catholic oppositionists, including two important advisers to Solidarity (Tadeusz Mazowiecki and Andrzej Wielowiejski), a former chair of the Primate's Social Council (Stanislaw Stomma), the head of the Warsaw Catholic Intellectual Clubs (Andrzej Swi~icki), and the editor of Tygodnik Powszechny (Jerzy Turowicz). The government promised that the Council would be an open forum where members could speak out publicly on all important issues of the day. The opposition wanted guarantees that policy suggestions could become binding, or at least that there would be some direct connection between Council proceedings and policy outcome. The government said that there would be a linkage, but refrained from offering anything formal. The oppositionists were hoping for something like the Social Council on the National Economy proposed by Solidarity in late 1981, but the government was unwilling to make the commitment. Divided on how to respond, the Catholic Intellectual Clubs (KIK) held an open meeting on November 15 to discuss the issue. For participants, the atmosphere was reminiscent of 1980, as hundreds of oppositionists legally congregated to discuss political dealings with the government. The question was whether or not to take part in the Council. Some argued that the government had taken an important first step -not enough, but something-in openly talking with the opposition as equals, proposing participation in government to people whom it had recently interned. Joining the Council would be a way to reward this initiative, to help the reformists in the Party and facilitate reform. Wasn't it necessary to pursue every possible avenue of reform? Swi~cicki argued that participating in the public life of the country at times of crisis was

174 / The Poverty of Martial Law an important part of the KIK tradition that should not be abandoned now. But the more vocal opposition argued that the Council was a fraud. The government wanted a few oppositionists for window dressing, for legitimation purposes; it was making piddling concessions only to avoid having to make more meaningful concessions. The proper response was to reject the Consultative Council and hold out for serious reform. The government must be committed to implementing reform, not just to listening to discussion about it. The issue was decided overwhelmingly in favor of non-participation.46 In general, it was too soon after the amnesty, and too long since the imposition of martial law, for the opposition to have any trust in the good intentions of the authorities. In rejecting participation in the Consultative Council, the opposition was following its policy of boycotting all official institutions, a policy that was the natural response to the imposition of martial law in 1981. In the first years after martial law, the opposition boycotted the new trade unions, the new self-management councils, the new professional associations-in short, every institution that was created to replace a similar institution from 1980-1981. The initial argument was that universal rejectionism might compel the authorities to re-Iegalize Solidarity. Suggestions that the opposition should join the new institutions in order to take them over were rejected for two very different reasons: (I) because cooperation would seem to legitimate martial law, and (2) because it was impractical. By 1986 the rejectionist attitude continued, but the reasons appeared increasingly dubious. In 1982 it might have seemed immoral to talk: about new institutions; the "politically correct" stand was to demand a return to the pre-martial law status quo. In 1986, however, it was obvious to everyone that there could be no "return" to the past. Political reform at this point necessarily meant working with the government-that is, with the people who had imposed martial law. If one was not prepared to overthrow them (and the opposition still was not), then one had no choice but to work with them. Similarly, the "impracticality" argument was becoming obsolete. Solidarity had decided against joining the new trade unions because it "knew" that they would not and could not truly represent their members. It took for granted that these would be the kind of institutions that existed before 1980. The first years after martial law saw occasional indications that something new was going on here-the government, for

The Poverty of Martial Law / 175 example, did not make up fake membership figures or pretend unions existed where they did not.47 By the middle and late 1980s, there were even clear signs that the unions often opposed the government. The Construction Workers Union staged a five-day protest in 1987, the official Transit Workers Union in Bydgoszcz began the strike that started off the strike wave of 1988, and the central union body persistently protested against the effects of market reforms on the workers. The old argument that nothing at all can be done in institutions created by the Communists seemed gradually to be losing its status as self-evident truth. The opposition rejected the Consultative Council, but it did not do so with the same sense of righteousness as in earlier years. When KIK Chairman Swi~icki decided to join the Council, the membership insisted that he do so as a private individual only. But when he actually resigned his chairmanship and joined, many people were privately eager to see what would happen. The only other oppositionist of note to join was the lawyer Wladyslaw Sila-Nowicki. Sila-Nowicki had a stunning oppositionist resume, from a 1946 death sentence for participation in the anti-communist underground to his role as a prominent legal adviser to Solidarity. When the Council finally began its work in December 1986, it included fifty-four members, mostly, but not exclusively, non-Party intellectuals and activists. As it turned out, the Council held a series of genuinely open and provocative discussions, which were published in full and helped extend the limits of acceptable political discourse. Sila-Nowicki used the sessions of the Council to cite acts of government lawlessness, defend Solidarity sympathizers, and even read into the public register passages from newspaper articles deleted by the censor.48 An annoyed Jaruzelski remarked that "SHa-Nowicki has made a habit of raising many questions not on the planned agenda." 49 The discussions even served to galvanize the opposition. In September 1987 no less an authority than Wroclaw Solidarity leader Wladyslaw Frasyniuk said that many Solidarity activists were avidly reading the Council's reports, often more eagerly than they read the underground press! so In 1981 the Experience and Future Group, a kind of Solidarity think-tank, proposed the establishment of an Ombudsman, or civil rights spokesperson, within the government. The Ombudsman would bring state abuses to the public eye and provide the citizen with an avenue of protest less costly and less arduous than the court system. Based on the Swedish model (although the office exists in a number of Western

176 I The Poverty of Martial Law European states, as well as in Yugoslavia and Tanzania), the Ombudsman would be a kind of special prosecutor acting for society against abuses by the state. The government never moved on the idea in 1981, one more example of its unwillingness to make necessary institutional reforms. The concept seemed dead until the fall of 1986, when the government suddenly announced that it was going to create a cabinet-level post of Officer of Civil Rights. The legislation that was drafted did not go as far as Experience and Future's original proposal, but it allowed the Ombudsman access to government archives during investigations of civil rights abuses, and permitted the lodging of extraordinary appeals against court verdicts. Ewa qtowska, a professor of law from the Polish Academy of Sciences and not a member of the Party, was appointed the first Ombudsman in November 1987. Although some Sejm members complained about her candidacy,51 qtwoska soon proved that the office would not be just another administrative arm of the government. One example is instructive. When miners in Silesia went on strike in August 1988, a group of pro-Party miners and managers appealed to the Civil Rights Spokesperson, as the Ombudsman is officially called, to intervene on their behalf against the strikers, who were allegedly depriving them of their constitutional right to work. Here, it seemed, was a classic case of governmental abuse of good laws, an institution meant to help society manipulated to serve the interests of the Party. Except that Professor qtowska said that since it was not the government blocking the miners' right to work, and the Ombudsman is meant only to protect citizens against the government, this was not a case for her office.52 The government's new policy was most dramatically expressed in print. Although by 1986 censorship had been liberalized, afterward it seemed almost to disappear. No longer was the underground press needed to talk about poor conditions on the job, about schools and hospitals falling apart, about the destruction of the environment. Official newspapers brutally dissected the ills of the system on their own. Catholic and Party papers alike denounced the authorities for bringing the economy to ruin and offered radical proposals for market reform, political pluralism, and curbing the power of the police. Authors and subjects systematically banned in the 1970S were the topics of symposia and extensive public discussion ten years later.53 George Orwell, Milan Kundera, Leszek Kolakowski-"forbidden" authors like these were now published widely. Tygodnik Powszechny and Polityka even

The Poverty of Martial Law / 177 began debating the essence of "totalitarianism," a concept that had long been taboo throughout the Soviet bloc. Interviews with key opposition activists appeared in major weeklies, and by 1988 even Adam Michnik was allowed to publish under his own name, writing about the Soviet Union, no less (and on May Day, no less).54 Some articles were still subject to confiscation, but now one could negotiate with the censor., The censorship office's "press spokesman" might even write a letter to the editor criticizing a newspaper's criticism of the censors.55 Meanwhile, harassment of underground publications was curtailed considerably. In early 1987 the Minister of Culture said of the underground press, "We do not support it, but we don't particularly try to stop it, either." 56 As for authors who write for the underground, "nothing bad will happen to them," a claim that authors publishing openly in both official and "second circulation" publications (as the underground has benignly come to be known) could soon confirm for themselves. The Party's renunciation of its monopoly over the public sphere was perhaps best illustrated by the remarkable 1987 decision to legalize an underground journal, the prominent theoretical quarterly Res Publica. Res Publica first appeared during the samizdat movement of the 1970s. Writers risked their futures in order to contribute to the journal. People could go to jail simply for possessing it. Printers had to steal paper from state enterprises and dodge the secret police in order to print it. Together they produced a first-rate theoretical journal on politics and power that was profoundly anti-communist-only to have the communist government later reward them for their efforts. It was a historic sign of a genuinely significant transformation in the politics of Poland. The editor, Marcin Kr61, remarked on the significance of legalization in the first issue of the "new" journal. The Poland of 1987, he said, was "a changed country, a different country." For the first time in postwar history, he argued, non-Party citizens were actually in a position to help shape the politics of the country.57 (Kr61 himself was among a select group of intellectuals chosen to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev in Warsaw in 1988.) In short, politics and citizenship had become possible, more than five years after martial law seemed to mark their doom. Many people thought that the new press freedoms would last only as long as the opposition remained quiet, but the events of 1988 proved them wrong. The press carried reports of the strikes of April-May and August, quoting strike leaders by name and reporting their demands in

178 / The Poverty of Martial Law full, including the one for the legalization of Solidarity. For years the government had asserted that "Solidarity is a chapter of the past," and the censors had prevented any public assertion to the contrary. By the fall of 1988, the press was full of open, explicit calls for the re-Iegalization of Solidarity.58 In short, by 1988 press freedom seemed to be virtually complete. So complete, in fact, that people started complaining about it the way people in the West do. One analogy illustrates this well. In 1967, only months before the Prague Spring, Czechoslovakian writers who were engaged in a clash with the official guardians of socialism issued an international appeal for support from intellectuals. The Austrian writers' union replied with a splendid statement defending the principles of freedom of the press, demanding that writers in Eastern Europe have all the rights of writers in the West. And yet, they shyly added, in a way they rather envied their Czech comrades. Here in the West, they said, we can write anything we want-but it doesn't make any difference, nobody listens to us anyway. And so we can't help but be a little envious of you in Czechoslovakia. There they take you seriously! There it matters what you write! So we support you against repression, but, well, the lack of repression isn't always such a great thing. Freedom of the press can be smothering, too. East European intellectuals have never been sympathetic to this kind of argument, and rightly so. They know how political censorship and repression cripple the minds of writer and reader alike. They know the personal costs involved, and that repression is only romanticized by those privileged enough to avoid it. You who say that free speech doesn't matter: believe us that it does! You think your words don't make a difference but they do; they matter just by being said, because they help shape a public opinion which affects things in the future. And this is something we're simply not in a position to do. We're sorry for your problems in the West, they would say, but those are just the sort of problems we long to have! How strange it is, therefore, to see a 1988 interview with a leading Polish intellectual begin like this: Let me reverse the order and ask you the first question: Don't you think that everything's already been said? ... Your magazine has carried interviews with Sila-Nowicki, Geremek, Kisielewski,

The Poverty of Martial Law / 179 Samsonowicz. These people and others, here and elsewhere, have said many wise things. Certain ideas and proposals keep being repeated-and what of it? Nothing, or almost nothing! You have to wonder whether these kinds of discussions make any sense any more. 59 This view was now heard everywhere. Here in Poland we can say anything we want, oppositionists complained, but it doesn't make any difference, nobody listens to us anyway. Over and over again, the remains of another old taboo have scarcely been swept away before someone complains that it doesn't really matter, since nothing's going to change. It is utterly astonishing: East Europeans saying that freedom of the press is no big deal. They are, of course, dead wrong, for precisely the reasons they gave when they rebuked Western intellectual critics not so long ago. But the mere fact that they belittle press freedom is the greatest proof that it exists.

Toward an Anti-Crisis Pact Marcin Kr61 wrote in early 1987 that Poland was "another country." Several months later, even Jacek Kuron had come to agree. "The opinion can still be heard," wrote Kuron in August 1987, "that all the recent changes in the system are just words without much substance." Such a view, he said, betrayed "a major misunderstanding" of the basis of communist rule. 60 Harking back to his ideas from the 1970s, Kuron argued that for the system to survive intact, the Party must control the public sphere and suppress independent social ties. It now turns out, he said, that despite martial law, the Solidarity period shattered these two conditions irrevocably. The press became so free and pluralist during the Solidarity period, as well as in the underground afterward, that the authorities could either "carry on with their pointless propaganda or agree to real information in the mass media. They chose the latter." 61 Consequently, "the official vision of the world has practically ceased to exist," 62 and with it has gone the Party's monopoly of public life. The Solidarity period also led to an explosion in the articulation of particular interests: "The belief that various interests must have their institutional expression, their representation, became prevalent." So prevalent, in

180 / The Poverty of Martial Law fact, that "the authorities accepted this principle," despite the fact that the system is founded precisely on rejecting it. When the government first began "appointing various consultative bodies, new unions, councils and committees, it all looked like a puppet theater." But because of "the experience of Solidarity and the existence of independent competition," these new organizations "could not remain in the realm of fiction -the official institutions became to a degree genuine." Those groups like the Consumers Federation and the ecological clubs are not just covers for the Party; they "really attempt to defend consumers' interests and to protect the environment." Even the official unions, wrote Kuron, "bear a closer resemblance to Solidarity than to the old unions." 63 Kuron came close to suggesting that Solidarity ought to merge into official life, to try to change it from within. This was what the government had been arguing, too. A disarming 1984 propaganda poster proclaimed: "You can't change things by standing on the sidelines. Vote!" What was astonishing about this slogan was its candid recognition that people desperately want change. The government was not saying that people support the system, but that they should try to change it from within. Now even Kuron was saying this was possible: "In a situation when the official press takes up real problems from our life and writes the truth about them, even the best of the underground publications cannot compare with it. Similarly, when the interests of various groups and milieus begin to be represented by officially recognized institutions, no underground structure can compete." 64 What Kuron announces here is that the strategy of the 1970S had succeeded despite martial law. The Solidarity period was so successful in recreating independent civil society that the post-Solidarity government had no choice but to maintain it. In terms that are not Kuron's, one might say that the inherent reformist tendencies of the post-Stalinist system had finally taken the upper hand over the inherent totalitarian tendencies. Kuron did not actually say that there was a reform-minded government with which the opposition could work, but he certainly did imply it. Six years after the imposition of martial law, reformists on each side were gradually coming back to the idea of a new accord. As in 1981, each side had something that the other side needed. The government, stymied by persistent social resistance and distrust, needed the legitimacy and social stability that the opposition could provide.

The Poverty of Martial Law / 181 The opposition, particularly those who stayed within the official Solidarity structures, sought the guarantees of societal pluralism that the state could provide. In 1988, in contrast to 1981, reaching an accord seemed both easier and more difficult. Easier because, as Geremek and WaI~sa argued in interviews with the official press, Party and opposition seemed to have learned a lot from the experiences of the previous eight years; more difficult because Solidarity no longer represented ten million people in a unified organization. By late 1987 the government was making significant overtures to the opposition. It had legalized Res Publica, begun genuine negotiations with leading Catholic oppositionists, embraced radical economic reform, and allowed the flourishing of truly independent societal organizations (although not of Solidarity). The opposition, meanwhile, was making its own overtures to the government. By late December, even government spokesman Jerzy Urban spoke favorably about changes in the part of the opposition led by Lech Wal~sa.65

It was in this context that Geremek came forth with his explicit proposal for a grand, neocorporatist accord: an "anti-crisis pact" between the government and the political opposition.66 The opposition would help provide social peace if the government would recognize society's right to organize itself, and agree to discuss political reforms with an opposition that still represented the desires of many people. Geremek was not denying that the authorities had already made genuine reforms. But, as was clear to everybody, they could not capitalize on these reforms, because too many people still distrusted the government. The pact was a way to ease that distrust. Geremek was speaking to the reformists within the Party: work with us and we'll work with you. We'll gladly recognize your control of foreign policy, defense issues, and the formal institutions of power. But you need to recognize us too. If you want reform, there's no other way to go. Geremek's remarks elicited an extraordinary response. Not only did the government agree to publish them, but leading officials soon began speaking of an "anti-crisis pact" too. J6zef Czyrek, the Politburo member who had initiated contacts with the opposition in July 1987, used the term favorably in an interview with Trybuna Ludu, and soon the press was filled with discussions of the possibility of government and "opposition" joining together to save the country. Yet there was

182 {- The Poverty of Martial Law little movement on the issue until after the strike wave in April and May 1988, which shocked not only the Party but also the official Solidarity opposition. The strikes of April-May 1988 resembled the ones of 1980 only in the way they appeared on the television screen: the same pictures of the same Pope were hung on the same iron slats in the same Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. But whereas those were strikes of hope, these were strikes of despair. And whereas those strikes protested against the lack of reform, these strikes were in part directed against the effects of the economic reform already under way. The strikers were different too. It was the young workers who led these strikes, people who were not even in high school when Solidarity existed legally. They were protesting against disappearing dreams and non-existent perspectives. Like workers in a Third World country, they saw reform as entailing higher prices and austerity alone, harming those who had the least to begin with. Most of these workers lived either with their parents or in dingy rooms in factory hostels. Unless they were lucky enough to work abroad and save a few thousand dollars, they had little chance of getting an apartment of their own for the next twenty or thirty years. For them, Solidarity was an organization that had brought them nothing. Most had no connections at all with underground Solidarity locals, which proved to be quite embarrassing to the locals. But these workers did not care to march with banners and distribute the products of a sophisticated, intellectual press. They wanted concrete improvements in their lives, and not necessarily the reforms that Solidarity wanted. And so Solidarity as such was isolated. Veteran activist Henryk Wujec conceded that Solidarity factory locals and higher-level structures alike "played practically no role whatsoever" in organizing these strikes. Some of the locals were so isolated that they were suspicious of those who did go on strike, fearing that their actions were inspired by agents provocateurs .67 The charge of provocation became widespread. 68 When workers at the Lenin Shipyard went on strike, WaI~sa joined them. But he appeared this time in his business suit, not his overalls, trying to play the role of elder statesman, which was his game, not theirs. "I'm not striking," he said, "but I'm not against you." Other than Wal~sa, few former Solidarity leaders-indeed, few other workers -joined the strikers. The older workers did not believe much could be gained by striking, and the older activists seemed to understand only

The Poverty of Martial Law / 183 these older workers, not the younger ones. (Just a few months earlier, Poznan Solidarity leader Janusz Palubicki had said there was no point in calling strikes.) 69 But Solidarity was not just surprised; it was also somewhat opposed. For these were strikes against higher prices, and Solidarity leaders did not want to fight higher prices per se. What they wanted was a say in implementing reforms, of which price rises were only one part. WaJ:~sa joined the workers, but he was pursuing his own program, not theirs. When workers demanded the restoration of Solidarity, which for them meant simply the right to form a new union that they would call "Solidarity," many former activists were not so sure they supported the call. A new "Solidarity" created by these workers could very well be anti-reform. They were in a difficult position: They still supported trade union pluralism, but only as part of a broad political solution. WaJ:~sa's Solidarity now supported the idea of reform more than it supported the immediate interests of Polish workers. The strikes ended in early May when the hundred or so workers who remained on strike in the shipyard (out of a workforce of more than ten thousand) were unable to bring anyone else out in their support. But they had succeeded in warning both the government and the official Solidarity opposition that time was running out for each of them. Politburo member Czyrek began traveling around the country talking up the idea of a "pact," and even of a "coalition form of government" involving representatives of various interests within society. The proposal did not specifically involve Solidarity, but it did not specifically exclude those who headed the existing Solidarity bodies. The idea, heretical not so long ago, that authentic interests exist outside the Party was now conceded unambiguously. "Pluralism," said Czyrek, "is the way things are, not an act of grace." 70 Nor were these hollow words. The government began working with independent experts, including former advisers to Solidarity, to come up with a new law on associations. By the fall of 1988, the two sides had drafted a historic bill granting virtually complete freedom of civic association. 71 The courts still retained the power to dissolve associations in extreme circumstances, but the ban on independent association, which Kolakowski and others had seen as the chief obstacle to reform in the 1970s, had been lifted definitively. By the time new strikes broke out in August, the Party leadership and WaJ:~sa's Solidarity had moved considerably closer together, at least on the issue of the need to sit down and talk. WaJ:~sa and his advisers

184 / The Poverty of Martial Law knew that if they were to talk with the government, they had to do so soon, before Solidarity lost all influence over young workers. People like Czyrek and Interior Minister Kiszczatc probably felt a similar urgency, but it looks as if they were unable to convince the Party leadership as a whole until they could point to the sudden wave of new strikes in August as proof that something drastic had to be done soon. The standard view is that Kiszczak invited Wal~sa to negotiate only when forced to do so by the strikes. But the invitation was made as the August strikes were dying down. If he really opposed negotiations, he could have waited till the strikes ended and then cite this as proof that there was nothing to talk about. What seems more likely is that Kiszczak himself had to "brandish the strike threat" against internal opponents. And so, for the first time since martial law, the government and Solidarity sat down for negotiations on August 31, 1988, the eighth anniversary of the signing of the Gdansk Accord. Wal~sa reported that he was pleased with the four-hour talks, and since he was more interested in winning formal recognition from the government than in winning the anti-reform demands of the workers, he considered the fact of negotiations to be an adequate basis on which to end the strikes. Not surprisingly, the workers themselves were not easily persuaded. Wal~sa prevailed, but only after long, tough meetings with angry young shipyard workers who accused him of selling out. The charges stung Wal~sa. "I've given twenty-five years of my life to this shipyard," he said. "I led strikes in 1970 and in 1980. I would have thought that I'd already given pretty good proof that I can't be bought out. But these young strikers don't care about experience. They have no respect for us veterans." 72 They showed this again only weeks later, when Wal~sa tried to hold back a strike action to protest against plans to close the Lenin Shipyard as part of the economic reform. Again he succeeded, but again just barely. Talks could still be meaningful, and older workers still had confidence in Wal~sa, but time seemed to be getting short. The August 31 meeting was supposed to be a prelude to a general "round table" discussion between Party and opposition, but it was unclear if and when this would actually take place. The initial negotiations constituted a major breakthrough, a recognition by the Party that there was no viable future without the participation of genuinely independent representatives of the political opposition. But the weeks and months afterward saw a sharp battle between reform and anti-reform

The Poverty of Martial Law / 185 tendencies, particularly within the Party. On the one hand, Trybuna Ludu began publishing attacks on some of the advisers Wal~sa was planning to take with him to the "round table." The Party daily was not exactly advising its readers that a new dawn had come. Yet the reform tendency was also active, as could be seen in a remarkable discussion published in Polityka in September. The editors asked government officials as well as prominent oppositionists to respond to the following questions: (I) What topics should be discussed in the dialog between the government and opposition circles? and (2) Do you think the opposition can become an integral part of the state structure in Poland? The very idea of a non-communist opposition had always been taboo; now there was talk about its becoming part of the state! The people not long ago charged with treason were now being asked whether they and their organizations could and should become part of the state structure. Even Antoni Macierewicz was polled by Polityka, the first time (other than 1980-1981) that the Party press ever solicited his views on politics. And although a list of his full oppositionist credentials was cut short by the censor, he was able to call publicly for full societal pluralism, including the registration of Solidarity and for open elections to representative bodies. 73

•

•

•

On November 15, 1988, Politburo member Alfred Miodowicz, leader of the official OPZZ trade union federation, challenged Lech Wal~sa to a televised debate. For Miodowicz, an uncharismatic and bland public speaker, it was a serious blunder. Insisting only that the encounter be transmitted live, Wal~sa immediately accepted. Even Miodowicz had to admit that Wal~sa won the November 30 encounter decisively. The Solidarity leader spoke clearly and convincingly of the need for genuine democratic reform that would allow all organizations and trade unions the right to exist. He thanked the public for their continued support for Solidarity and told the government that only negotiations with a re-Iegalized Solidarity could bring social peace. The debate seemed to change the political atmosphere in the last days of 1988. An official commentary in Trybuna Ludu called Wal~sa a "worthy spokesman of national agreement." 74 Everyone was talking of reform and trying to work out a precise formula in which it could work. The key issue facing Solidarity was how to maintain its new political

186 / The Poverty of Martial Law role without giving up its trade union status. On December 18, it came up with a tentative answer. Meeting in Warsaw at the personal invitation of Lech WaI~sa, 128 prominent intellectuals and activists announced the formation of the Solidarity Citizens Committee. The new body, formed as a political advisory board to Lech WaI~sa as chairman of the union, was led by Solidarity'S most influential social democratic advisers, such as Bronislaw Geremek, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, and Andrzej Stelmachowski, and was presided over by veteran KOR and Solidarity activist Henryk Wujec. It also included Ryszard Reiff, the former PAX leader who had pushed the hardest for a neocorporatist deal in 1981. The formation of the Citizens Committee was given prominent notice in the official media. Here at last was the political arm that Solidarity had always lacked. People referred to the Citizens Committee as a shadow cabinet, and with its fifteen commissions covering areas such as political reform, economic policy, housing, agriculture, education, environmental problems, and minority affairs, each of which was charged with preparing a "program of action" within three months, the label was not far from the truth. In 1981 the Party had denounced Solidarity for becoming a political organization; in 1988 it welcomed that evolution, for it had become essential to the deal that both sides now wanted to make. By the start of 1989, therefore, the possibility of a neocorporatist accord seemed greater than ever. Continued democratic reforms seemed inescapable. The press was freer than ever, an independent press functioned without great obstacles, the government had accepted society's right to form independent social and economic organizations, it had recognized the opposition as a legitimate part of the system, trade union pluralism was probably not far off, and the possibility of oppositionists joining in a coalition government with the Party, either as individuals or as part of a Solidarity political club, was now on the agenda. All in all, the old system had been thoroughly de-legitimated. As Marcin Kr61 wrote in the first issue of the legal Res Publica, this was indeed "a new country."

The Viability of an Accord

Solidarity was created as a trade union and social movement rooted in an "anti-political" ideology of societal democratization. This was reflected in its initial focus on expanding civic rights and its rigorous eschewal of intervention in state politics. Solidarity became concerned with the state only in late 1980, when the state could no longer be avoided. Although the results of the movement of the 1970S demonstrated the success of this orientation as a strategy of opposition, the experience of Solidarity demonstrated that anti-politics alone, lacking a positive program for institutional reform, is insufficient as an overall programmatic solution. It fails because of its detached stance toward the state, precisely the aspect that made it a potent opposition movement in the first place. During the Solidarity period, the state was forced to retreat from its control of civil society. But since this was not accompanied by any institutional transformation of the state, which Solidarity, in accordance with its ideological foundations, did not demand, the result was a breakdown in the system, which led to the imposition of martial law. After martial law, however, the authorities were still faced with the problem that plagues all post-Stalinist state socialist societies: where to now? How are particular social interests to be represented in society at large? How will particular social interests interact with the collective interests of the state? The post-Solidarity authorities might have tried to prevent civil society from forming its own organizations. They might, in other words, have tried returning to the familiar totalitarian tendency, and most oppositionists initially thought that they would. But the totalitarian model has not been viable for some time, for its necessary preconditions are lacking. The conditions are that the population be extraordinarily submissive, convinced that the public arena is a sphere

188 / The Viability of an Accord in which ordinary people like themselves have no right to participate; and that there be a powerful repressive apparatus to contain the demands of citizens, as well as an elite that does not mind the inevitable stagnation resulting therefrom. As East European populations have become more educated, they have put greater pressure on the state to respect the basic rights of citizenship, to allow independent initiatives, whether economic or political. As KOR demonstrated, the Polish system already provided more opportunities for civic activity in the 1970S than previously. And in 1980 Solidarity was the catalyst for a genuine civic revolution, wherein all citizens suddenly felt that they had a right to participate in public life. In this context, the post-Solidarity authorities decided not to try to return to the totalitarian model. By 1986 the partystate itself was moving in the direction of greater societal independence and of institutional political reform. It was moving in the democratic direction that Solidarity had been pushing all along. Only now it did so without Solidarity. By the beginning of 1989, civil society had gained greater independence than ever before. But this had not yet led to political stability, because without a new governmental arrangement, the state still had no legitimacy. The Party faced the same problem-where to now? There is no existing model of an alternative socialism, where an independent civil society is combined with Party control of the state. Theoretically, there are two ways the state can obtain legitimacy from an independent civil society: state pluralism (polyarchy) and societal corporatism. In the former, social groups get their interests represented in the state by forming political parties that then compete for state power. This alternative has been unacceptable in Eastern Europe, chiefly because of Soviet resistance, but also because of internal Party resistance. And although changes in the Soviet Union and democratic electoral reforms throughout the Soviet bloc have made it increasingly conceivable, it is still not something the ruling Party can buy into in its own quest for reform. This leaves the neocorporatist framework, in which independent social groups obtain guaranteed input in policy formation in return for limiting their demands, upholding the authority of the state, and guaranteeing the continued rule of the Party. Once Solidarity realized it needed a program of state reform to go along with its "anti-political" politics of civic activity, this is the direction in which it inexorably moved. But if

The Viability of an Accord / 189 the neocorporatist option did not work in 1981, is there any chance that it could work today? Probably the chances are greater, if only because both sides are more aware that it is a real and legitimate option, and because nothing else seems likely to bring about legitimacy and social peace. Solidarity, ] have said, moved "inexorably" in a neocorporatist direction. "Inexorably" because not always consciously. In 1981 Solidarity was too divided to push consistently toward such a solution, and not sufficiently aware that this was indeed the solution it ought to pursue. Inheriting the KOR ideology of the 1970s, Solidarity leaders were for quite some time uncertain as to their position on institutional political reform. Only over time did it become clear that given its lack of interest in taking over the state, Solidarity's anti-politics necessarily led to a neocorporatist strategy. Neocorporatist proposals emerged only in late 1981, much too late to become part of the shared ideology of the union leadership. In 1989, however, the neocorporatist framework is at the heart of the reform proposals of Solidarity's leadership. Solidarity is, of course, divided and organizationally fractured. Yet even this development has increased the chances of cooperation. For the group that has always been in favor of neocorporatist compromise and accord, particularly Lech Wal~sa and his social democratic advisers, both Catholic and secular, is the group that has dominated Solidarity ever since martial law. No longer is the leadership as suffocatingly diverse as the National Commission of December 1981, when Solidarity represented so many tendencies that it could take no single, decisive political initiative on its own. In November 1981 WaI~sa could not even meet with General Jaruzelski and Primate Glemp without provoking the wrath and condemnation of a sizable portion of his own National Commission. In 1988 Wal~sa could unilateraUy decide to meet with Interior Minister Kiszczak or to debate on television with official union leader Alfred Miodowicz, without having to worry that his own organization would abandon him. Today he can actively pursue his neocorporatist agenda because most of his opponents have either voluntarily left Solidarity or been excluded. This thinning process has been going on ever since the declaration of martial law. When Bujak's pro-Wal~sa, non-confrontational line triumphed in the underground in 1982, many opponents simply left the

190 / The Viability of an Accord formal Solidarity underground and formed other organizations. Bujak's co-thinkers then began producing Tygodnik Mazowsze, generally recognized as the central organ of Solidarity after 1981. And Tygodnik Mazowsze was always close to the pro-accord neocorporatist tendency. It always privileged the statements of Wal~sa's pact-oriented social democratic advisers, while those who vehemently opposed this line were for the most part forced to publish elsewhere. When the amnesty and liberalization of 1986 gave all opposition tendencies the chance to speak out openly, WaI~sa ensured that his hard-line opponents would not come back into Solidarity by refusing to call a meeting of the old National Commission. In this way he maintained personal control over the make-up of the official leadership and was able to foreordain Solidarity's consistent movement toward an institutional pact with the state. As the 1988 statements of WaI~sa-or of his associates Onyszkiewicz, Geremek, and Bugaj-show clearly, Solidarity was now consciously and explicitly (and no longer just inexorably) pushing for a neocorporatist resolution of the crisis.' By 1988, the Party was also more ready to accept a neocorporatist solution than it was in 1981. In 1980-1981 the Party had the Soviets to contend with, as we know from Colonel Ryszard KukliDski, the highranking Polish army officer who fled to the United States in November 1981, just as he was about to be exposed as an informant of the CIA? KukliDski reveals that the Soviets pressed the Polish government to take action against Solidarity from the very beginning. He also reveals that the Polish government was not anxious to do so, and offers many examples of how laruzelski and others kept putting the Soviets off. The fact that the first Solidarity period lasted sixteen months, despite the fierce Soviet pressure, is evidence that there was high-level Party support for major political reform even in 1981. This support seemed to come chiefly from local Party apparatuses in such areas as Gdansk, Krakow, or Poznan. One can say that these Party locals had already worked out a neocorporatist arrangement with Solidarity, complete with Solidarity'S access to the local mass media and input into policy formation in certain areas, which is why these cities were among the calmest in 1981. Surely martial law was not introduced at their behest.3 Even in the period just after martial law, the Party continued to show some interest in a possible new accord. Although the police

The Viability of an Accord / 191 clearly knew where many of the underground presses producing Tygodnik Mazowsze were located, they did not use their full force to wipe them out. Pawel B~owski, an underground activist who played a key role in printing the journal in 1982, and an experienced samizdat worker since the 197os, says he often saw police agents following him in 1982 and 1983, when he was supposedly a wanted man. The authorities, he says, certainly knew where he was and what he was doing; they just didn't want to arrest him. They did not want to break up the network around Bujak because they wanted Bujak's pro-accord tendency to lead the underground; they preferred it to any of its more hard-line rivals. This, at any rate, is B~owski's argument, and it is quite convincing.4 Bujak was finally arrested only on May 31, 1986, just weeks before the amnesty put him back on the streets, this time to playa key role in Solidarity's new, open leadership bodies. That the Party leadership was trying to help the Bujak-Wal~sa tendency seems quite plausible in retrospect. Since 1986, the Party has moved openly, if unevenly, toward integrating this part of the opposition into the political system. By December 1988 Lech WaI~sa was again becoming a familiar face on the television news. (Some began jokingly to refer to him as the newest member of the Politburo!) 5 At year's end the authorities let WaI~sa travel to an international human rights symposium in France and announced that the Solidarity leader now showed himself to be a true supporter of national accord. From the government side as well as from Solidarity, the chances of an accord appeared far greater than they did in 1981. There are still many obstacles. In early 1989, on the verge of relegalization, Solidarity was more a symbol than a trade union. It could still calm unrest and provide legitimacy better than any other social force, but could not broker an accord the way it could in 1981. Yet the absence of a ten-million-member union does not mean that the whole neocorporatist idea is obsolete.6 The difference between a pact in 1981 and a pact in 1989 is that it could no longer be enforced so solidly. But the point of a neocorporatist reform is not to promise permanent stability (is there any such thing in politics?), but to advance the democratic reform process, bringing more and more people into the political arena, while providing some legitimacy for the state. It is something the Party can buy into. In contrast to the situation in 1981, it is also something the Soviet Union now appears willing to accept.

192 I The Viability of an Accord

The Basis of Soviet Acceptance The possibility of neocorporatist democratic reform still depends a great deal on external factors, chiefly the attitude of the Soviet Union. A great deal has changed in Soviet-East European relations since Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. By 1988, in visits to Yugoslavia in March and to the United Nations in December, Gorbachev was unequivocally defending the absolute right of each socialist country to follow its own path.7 Some skepticism is, of course, in order. Let us assume that there are still important Soviet constraints on East European developments. Within these constraints, is a neocorporatist reform conceivable? Was it conceivable in 1981? I think so. What does the USSR want? Regardless of internal differences on perestroika. the entire Soviet elite surely seeks to maintain political influence over its East European "allies." Thus, it needs a Party in power on which it can rely to defend its interests. Illegitimate regimes with tottering economies that invite massive social unrest and open anti-Soviet sentiment do not serve Soviet interests. But that is precisely what they have had to deal with for decades. It has long been in the Soviets' own interests to seek a new political deal in Eastern Europe. They began moving in that direction, however, only when Eastern Europe became an economic burden on the Soviet economy. This problem began in the 1960s and intensified in the 1970s, especially after the oil crisis of 1973, when the USSR was committed to sell to Eastern Europe at low prices for "soft" currency the oil it might have sold to the West at high prices for "hard" currency.8 As Eastern Europe became more of a burden on the Soviet Union's own economic development, the Soviets appeared increasingly anxious to do something about it. First, they encouraged East Europe's economic opening to the West, something they had always opposed in the past.9 More important, however, they began to realize that the price they must pay for reducing the economic burden was to allow greater political autonomy to the East European countries in domestic affairs. This budding awareness of the need for political liberalization can be seen in the Soviets' curious behavior vis-avis Poland in the 1970s. When Gierek turned to the West for billions of dollars of loans in the early 1970s, retooling part of Poland's industrial plant to make it dependent on Western imports and staking the viability of the Polish economy on favorable relations with the West, he did so

The Viability of an Accord / 193 with the full blessing of the Soviet leadership. The Soviets were ready to see Poland experiment with new economic forms that could decrease its dependence on Soviet imports, provided that it maintain its overall allegiance to the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. In 1975, therefore, the Polish government added to the Constitution an extremely controversial amendment that permanently enshrined the alliance with the USSR. Yet it was perhaps no coincidence that this remarkable public statement of fealty was followed by five years in which the Polish government experimented with a new kind of political relationship with the domestic opposition. In these years the government tolerated political opposition on a scale unprecedented in the Soviet bloc. In 1978 organizing committees of "Free Trade Unions" were established in both the Soviet Union and Poland. Wiithin weeks the Soviet police had arrested the Russian initiator, Vladimir Klebanov, and interned him in a psychiatric hospital. The founders of the Polish Free Trade Unions, however, were subjected to relatively minor harassment and went on to lead Solidarity two years later. Moreover, the Soviets did not protest against this laxity on the part of the Polish police. Their press was conspicuously free of criticism of the Poles, as were the usually hard-line Czech and East German media. Till the end of his tenure, Gierek was praised lavishly by the Soviets. All this, it seems, was part of a new model for Soviet-East European relations. In order to distance itself economically from Eastern Europe, the USSR would push its allies to trade more with the West and allow them to experiment with some new political forms. The free hand extended to the Poles may have been an attempt to find the proper degree of political autonomy that would push the Poles to fend for themselves economically while keeping them solidly in the Warsaw Pact. This would explain the Constitutional amendment too: accompanied by the de facto increase in political autonomy would be this de jure recognition of the principle of subordination to the USSR. Obviously the Polish experiment went awry in 1980, as far as the Soviets were concerned. But the Soviets faced a dilemma. They sought a return to Party-run orthodoxy, but they still did not want to pay the costs of imposing it. The original reasons for reducing East European dependency remained, but the political costs seemed, at least in the short run, too stiff. When martial law was imposed in Poland, bringing a rash of Western economic sanctions, the Soviets did pay the costs, providing more economic aid to Poland than they had in many years.

194 I The Viability of an Accord

But they were not willing to continue this for long, and the reluctance became more acute under Gorbachev, who is far more interested in building up the USSR than in subsidizing Eastern Europe, and who knows that the Soviet Union would itself gain more from an efficient, reformed Eastern Europe. Martial law, therefore, did not end the search for a new political solution. More than ever, the Soviets would like to see a political arrangement in East Europe that can guarantee Soviet strategic interests, reduce the drain on the Soviet economy, preserve formal Party control, and reduce internal unrest. And this is something a neocorporatist power-sharing arrangement may well be able to deliver. The neocorporatist model may offer a viable reform scenario for the USSR as well. Since Gorbachev has come to power, the Soviet system has been undergoing tremendous democratic transformation on all levels. Certainly the most significant is the systematic attack on the Party monopoly, which has led to the revitalization of civil society on a scale that almost approaches Poland's. 10 Thousands of independent citizens' groups have arisen in recent years, from rock and roll clubs to political discussion clubs and a great deal more. This is not a development that the authorities reluctantly tolerate; they themselves have been laying the theoretical foundations for this civic revival. These theoretical innovations, including the conscious abandoning of Leninist social principles in favor of an independent and democratic civil society, constitute the most important development of all in the long-term evolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, for they rob the system of its philosophical foundations. Of countless articles and essays illustrating this process, let one suffice: Professor Tatyana Zaslavskaya's "Economics Through the Prism of Sociology." 11 Author of a renowned critique of the Brezhnev period in the early 1980s, Zaslavskaya was brought to Moscow from the Novosibirsk Academy of Sciences soon after Gorbachev's rise to power. She has since become one ofthe Soviet Union's most influential scholars, as well as a leading academic adviser to Gorbachev. What is so pathbreaking about her article is its resurrection of the category of "particular interest," precisely the category that Leninism had abolished as the site of class antagonism. Leninism, following Marx's concept of a "universal class," claimed that "universal interests" were embodied in the Communist Party, while "particular interests" only led to intolerable class conflict. It was this argument that legitimated Stalinism's effort to

The Viability of an Accord / 195 stamp out independent civil society altogether. Now Zaslavskaya argues that socialism has outgrown this stage. The notion of universal interest may have been valid at the time of the Revolution, she suggests, when the task facing Soviet Russia was to emerge from poverty and become a modem nation. But now that that goal has been accomplished, interests necessarily, and desirably, become diverse. In mature socialism, she contends, the very concept of universal interest becomes meaningless. Social groups must be allowed to speak for themselves, to "pursue their own interests, . . . even when [these] are contrary to the interests of other groups." 12 Common interest develops from the interaction of particular interests, Zaslavskaya asserts, and not from a party that arbitrarily asserts its own universalist essence. With this argument, Zaslavskaya does no less than demolish the totalitarian implications of Bolshevik ideology. She destroys the Leninist premise for the destruction of independent civil society and establishes the claim that developed socialism needs societal independence. Clearly Gorbachev agrees with Zaslavskaya. The rise of independent associations and economic cooperatives, the introduction of secret ballots and multi-candidate elections, of an open and critical press in which even the nomenklatura (party patronage system) is questioned 13 -these are the foundations of a democratic civil society in the USSR itself. And just as in Poland, the question becomes: how is this new civil society to be organized? How are the interests of the state to be reconciled with the interests of civil society? The Leninist model is over, and the liberal democratic model still seems inconceivable. Here is where the Polish experience seems relevant. The Soviets, too, will have to negotiate with independent interests and give them a chance to influence political outcomes, and so they, too, will likely move in the direction of neocorporatism. In any case, there are many signs that the USSR is well prepared to accept such developments in Eastern Europe. Does this mean that the Soviet Union would now tolerate something like Solidarity? Asked this question at a news conference in September 1988, when the re-Iegalization of Solidarity was a hot topic in Poland, Nikolai Shishlin, chief of the propaganda department of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, replied that the Soviets would have no objection whatsoever to its re-Iegalization. 14 The current Soviet support for a pluralist civil society opens up reform possibilities in Eastern Europe that never existed before.

196 / The Viability of an Accord

In Hungary, where refonn has proceeded at least as far as it has in Poland, scholars, Party officials, and oppositionists all talk of a possible corporatist arrangement, using that very tenn. In a 1986 article in one of the leading official journals, Bela Pokol called for a "neocorporatist political institutionalization" to resolve the crisis in Hungary. In this scenario (which sounds strikingly similar to descriptions of neocorporatist politics in West Gennany), the diverse interests of civil society would meet behind the scenes, in "quasi-parliaments," to work out governmental policy. The official parliament would then meet in order to ratify these decisions, and to reinforce their legitimacy. IS Meanwhile, Hungarian Politburo member Imre Pozsgay travels the country saying that government and opposition must work closely together, and as if to prove the point, he himself attended the inaugural meeting of the Democratic Forum opposition group in 1988. His fans include not only many oppositionists in Hungary, but even Tygodnik Mazowsze in Warsaw. This chief journal of the Polish Solidarity opposition, calling Pozsgay "one of the most popular of Hungarian party refonners," published excerpts of a Pozsgay interview-certainly the first time the underground has used its limited press space to provide a forum for an East European Party leader!-in which he called the one-party system "an accident of history" and said that "representatives of other interest groups must sit in parliament alongside the communists." It might be too early to talk of "political parties," Pozsgay said in May 1988, but we can talk of "independent groups, or corporations." 16 Actually, it was only about six months too early. In November 1988 the Hungarian Council of Ministers approved legislation allowing anyone to set up and operate independent political parties and trade unions. And what was most astonishing about this was the fact that it was not astonishing at all. That for which Hungary was invaded in 1956 was only part of the ongoing refonn process in 1988. Given the progress of refonn since 1981 and events in the Soviet Union, the development of a genuine multi-party system is no longer unimaginable. In the 1988 elections to local government in Poland, oppositionists were able to run and win. These included former activists from Solidarity and Rural Solidarity, including at least one who was interned during martial law, as well as members of a Polish "Green" party, the Polish Ecological Club. 17 By early 1989, the democratic oppositions in both Poland and Hungary were already preparing themselves to contest national parliamentary elections, too, with the hope not so much of a parliamentary

The Viability of an Accord / 197 majority, as of establishing a presence that can further democratize the political sphere. What do these new electoral possibilities imply for a neocorporatist arrangement? If anything, they seem to strengthen its chances of success. One of the main arguments against the viability of a corporatist settlement in 1981 was that there were no guarantees that Solidarity would stop there. Even if a tripartite Grand Coalition had been created, the fundamentalists in the increasingly vocal "independence" faction might well have been able to sabotage it, interpreting any new pact as a sign of government weakness to be exploited until a multi-party democracy was achieved. The political differentiation within Solidarity must find its organizational expression, and a neocorporatism that would prevent this might not last. Are neocorporatist arrangements compatible with a mUlti-party system? In Western Europe they always go together. West European neocorporatist arrangements are legitimate precisely because they are covered by a mUlti-party electoral system, disguising the interest-group bargaining that takes place out of the public eye. Similarly, mUlti-party elections may be able to stabilize neocorporatism in East Europe, as Pokol proposed. The difference is that whereas West European corporatism means reserving special privileges for labor organizations that do not have majority electoral support, a multi-party East European corporatism would mean reserving special privileges for a Communist Party that would not have much electoral support. One of those privileges, of course, is that it formally runs the state, but this has long been part of the deal, and most oppositionists are willing to accept it.

Poland and the "Spanish Road" The future of Poland and Eastern Europe is hard to predict-not just because politics is treacherous and ambiguous and in the end dependent on so many subjective factors, but because there exists no model of what a reformed state socialist system looks like. Everyone knows that the system must be reformed, but it is not so clear what it must be reformed to. Timothy Garton Ash has called this the "Ottomanization" of Eastern Europe: the unplanned, chaotic, but inexorable reform of a declining empire. "Emancipation in decay," he calls it, and leaves it at that. 18 But is there really no model at all? Must we be so agnostic about the

198 / The Viability of an Accord future? Without claiming too much, I would like to suggest that there is perhaps one model worthy of comparison: the late Francoist period in Spain, particularly the decade before Franco's death in 1975. The terror, the mass arrests, and the prohibition of political opposition that marked the early years of Franco's rule had all subsided by the 1970s. The number of political prisoners had dropped from an astounding 250,000 after the end of the civil war to about a thousand by 1975. 19 The Falange Party formally continued to rule, and no other parties were legal, but it had become increasingly unideological. It had never had the systematic world-view of a communist party, but it did have an ideology that frowned upon particular interests and the idea of an independent civil society. It had never set out to destroy civil society as the East European communists had, but it did try to replace the natural conflict of interests with a corporatist idea of grand social unity presided over by a benevolent caudillo. In the 1960s, though, the Francoist regime embarked on a program of marketization and modernization. The Falange formally continued to rule, but government policies were largely made by a group of technocrats, many associated with the Catholic Opus Dei organization, committed only to developing Spain as a modern market economy, with the diverse and conflictual civil society this implied. As the Falange retreated from the social space it had previously occupied, civil society began to flourish. Anti-Falangist social groups were tolerated, as were the workers' commissions and independent student associations that strongly opposed the regime. Strikes became legal, censorship was greatly relaxed, and all of society became substantially more open. The state alone muddled through without change. There were no democratic elections, no legal political parties, no restrictions on the Falange's right to rule. And so, despite the liberalization, the regime remained widely distrusted. The system had not "really" changed, many people said. "In essence" it was still the same "fascist" system as always. Substitute "communist" for "fascist" and we have a familiar Polish refrain. And there are other similarities as well: a de-ideologized ruling party formally running the state, extensive possibilities for independent social activity, toleration of political opposition and an extremely critical press, a commitment to marketization without a concomitant commitment to liberal democracy, and a deep popular mistrust that makes the situation inherently unstable. Of course the correspondences are not exact. The commitment to the market is still far from what it was in

The Viability of an Accord / 199 Spain, and the nature of the Polish system makes it much more difficult to introduce. The PZPR has traditionally exercised more control than the Falange ever did, and is encumbered by more ideological constraints in trying to give it up. Yet even Jacek Kuron says that the Party has given up its monopoly of public life, and even the World Bank applauds Poland's progress in marketization, and every step in this direction only makes further steps ideologically more acceptable. Meanwhile, the geopolitical constraints on Poland have been extraordinarily loosened by Gorbachev, to the point where the pressure is to increase democratic reform rather than to stifle it. Just as Marxists were legally published in late Francoist Spain, so the major theorists of capitalism and "bourgeois democracy" are legally published in Poland. Just as the Falange sought to identify itself only with the state and not with any particular ideology, so the PZPR has been moving rapidly in this direction ever since the imposition of martial law. As Vice-Premier Zdzislaw Sadowski said when asked if the communist PZPR might allow a free market for capital, "We're not excluding anything." 20 They are not even excluding anti-communist technocrats from the government; in fact, they are encouraging their participation. In October 1988 Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Rakowski offered a key post in the housing ministry to Aleksander Paszy6.ski, an expert on private housing and perhaps the most active promoter of private enterprise in all of Poland. Paszynski's articles have appeared regularly in the underground press, published under his own name. Paszynski declined the offer, partly because he felt that the opposition was not prepared to accept his cooperation with the state. He did not doubt the government's seriousness, nor did he reject the offer on principle.21 A government of market-oriented technocrats under the formal rule of the PZPR can no longer be ruled out. In 1983 the idea that any socialist country might come to resemble late Francoist Spain was dismissed by Leszek Kolakowski as "fantasy"-a rather nice one, he implied. 22 Five years later the comparison seemed more and more real. What does this imply for the future? If there are similarities to late Francoist Spain, might there also be similarities to post-Franco Spain? One possibility that has been suggested is that Poland might remain in a kind of late Francoist status quo, developing only its market-oriented premises. This is what Ivan Szelenyi calls the "Spanish road" of reform: the combination of a market economy and an undemocratic political

200 /

The Viability of an Accord

system under the pragmatic rule of a de-ideologized ruling party.23 In Poland it is known as the "Korean model." Many oppositionists believe that this is the kind of reform the government intends, and it has been enough to force some of them to question their support for the market, leaving them more despondent than ever. The left democratic opposition shared the general excitement about marketization in part because they had become convinced that "bourgeois" and "citizen" were more intertwined than they had previously thought. Since Solidarity's political struggle to secure universal rights of citizenship had failed, even the left was willing to consider that an economic struggle might succeed. They were persuaded, at least temporarily, by the claim that the road to citizenship was not through civic activity but through bourgeois activity. But then the government began pushing "bourgeois activity" too. And the opposition was disappointed by the results. As tens of thousands of Poles became involved in new private businesses, people became more business-like, not more citizen-like. They became more focused on their own narrow concerns, their own self-interest, without seeming to care about the civic interest at all. In mid-1988 Wal~sa estimated that "60 percent of society, and maybe even more, doesn't give a hoot about Wal~sa, pluralism, or Solidarity." 24 Oppositionists complained that fewer people read the opposition press, talked about politics, or seemed to care about public issues. The market was creating "bourgeois" all right, but it didn't seem to be sparking too much interest in "citizenship." The "benevolent invisible hand" seemed more invisible than benevolent, and many in the opposition began to despair that nothing can work in Poland, that citizens in the classic sense cannot be created either by civic activity or by bourgeois activity, and so the best thing to do is just emigrate. It is certainly true that "bourgeois" and "citizen" are two different things. That the former status does not necessarily lead to the latter is something market societies have long known and the Poles are just learning. And yet this isn't the whole truth. In state socialist countries marketization may well help the cause of democratization, may well expand the opportunities for citizens to participate in politics and even boost their willingness to do so-but not for the reasons normally given. Up to now, the main internal obstacle to democratic reform in state socialist countries has been the resistance of the Party elite, or nomenklatura. The vast ranks of the nomenklatura justly fear that if

The Viability of an Accord / 201 they lose their political positions, they lose everything. If they give up power, they lose their privileges, and not just theirs but their families' too. They cannot stay in the elite without staying in power, so why give any of it up? Why let anyone else in? The problem, in other words, is that they have nowhere to fall. And here is where even a "Spanish" or "Korean" kind of marketization can help, by providing the elite with an alternative. If it is possible to acquire wealth and privileges other than through the political apparatus, people in the nomenklatura will be more willing to vacate their political positions and seek social advancement elsewhere. If they can "lose power" yet maintain their elite status, they will have less reason to fear democratic reform. In this sense it is encouraging that 25 percent of those seeking licenses to run private enterprises in Gdansk in mid- 1987 were reported to be people from the Gdansk nomenklatura. 25 Those who favor further democratization should earnestly wish them success. Just as post-Franco Spain had to find a way to reconcile the military to democratic reform (they kept the military budget absurdly high so that the officers could remain an elite), so democratic reformists in Eastern Europe need to find a way to assuage the fears of the nomenklatura. Jerzy Strzelecki once said that the problem with corruption under Gierek was that it did not go far enough. Instead of bribing officials with the goodies produced by the factories, Gierek should have just given them the factories. As the private owners of these huge firms, reasoned Strzelecki, they would no longer need to stay on as Party secretaries.26 Marketization may thus facilitate democratic reform willy-nilly, although China suggests limits here as well. So where is Poland headed? The one thing that seems certain is that democratic reform will continue. Civil society has matured too much to allow a return to the past.27 It will never again be the passive object of politics, with the Party as the single, all-powerful subject. There will be setbacks and short-term retreats, the pace may be slow, too slow, and the future remains uncertain, but the process is too widespread to be uprooted. When the press legitimates a pluralist exchange of opinions and sanctions sharp, systemic criticism of the government, it cannot easily go back to slavish obedience. When the right of trade unions to be "independent and self-governing" is repeatedly invoked and codified as an integral part of the system, the unions cannot go back to being mere transmission belts. When the government speaks and acts as though the

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opposition is a legitimate part of the system and even tries to bring anti-communist experts into its ranks, it cannot go back to proclaiming the monopoly of the Party. In Poland as in Spain, the acceptance of political opposition in civil society makes it hard to exclude that opposition from the state. And so the possibility that Poland will turn into a parliamentary democracy, with the Party playing the caretaker role that the monarchy played in Spain, should not be ruled out. For reasons discussed above, a neocorporatist arrangement is, in the short term, more likely than a state pluralist one. But neither can an evolution resembling the post-Franco Spanish experience be excluded; Pozsgay, for example, seems to support precisely this kind of development in Hungary. The pervasive skepticism concerning democratic possibilities in Spain was proved mistaken, and although the conditions are still quite different, the pervasive skepticism in Eastern Europe may well prove mistaken, too. Taboos are being broken with breathtaking speed in the Soviet bloc of late.28 Certainly the experiences of Poland in this decade, and now of the USSR, have taught us to discard the unreformability thesis of the earlier totalitarian theoristS. 29 Neither theorists nor activists should be as ill-prepared for the changes of the 1990S as they were for the reforms of the 1980s .

•

•

•

When Kolakowski spoke of the Spanish solution as a "fantasy," his full context was this: Let us give rein to our fantasy and imagine a day when the Soviet political system is roughly similar to that of Spain in the last ten years of Franco's rule. This would be hailed by enlightened and liberal opinion of the West as the greatest triumph of democracy since Pericles and would ultimately prove the infinite superiority of the "Socialist democracy" over the bourgeois order.30 It is nice to see that Kolakowski was wrong-not only about these changes being a "fantasy," but particularly about the reaction of "enlightened opinion." As far as I know, no one has yet tried to defend Stalinism by pointing to present-day Poland the way, say, some on the right have defended Pinochet's bloody coup by pointing to the referen-

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dum of 1988, or the way neoconservative Ronald Radosh, armed with this very quotation of Kolakowski's, at least obliquely sanctioned early Francoism by pointing to late Francoist SpainY The reforms of the past years have made life better-certainly much more "reasonable," to use Kolakowski's term from 1971. But Eastern Europe is far indeed from the "third road" that much "enlightened" Western opinion, as well as the East European democratic left, had hoped would emerge from citizens' initiatives and political reform in a non-market economy. Still, people's expectations have changed a great deal in the past decade, and the anti-political third road has declined as a meaningful option precisely because of the experience of Solidarity. For what that experience demonstrated was that the democratic left's third road alternative, its exclusive focus on civic activity and open communication, its disregard for the state, and its belief in a "permanently open democracy"-in short, its politics of anti-politics-is inadequate, though not irrelevant, as a model for the future. It fails in its lack of an institutional model for political interaction, a model for reconciling the interests of the state with the many particular interests of civil society. Solidarity inherited the ideology of anti-politics and saw it become obsolete. It searched for an institutional model on its own, and gravitated toward neocorporatism. And this only seems to confirm Ivan Szelenyi's suggestion that there is no third road, or rather that the third road is "nothing more than a workable combination of the Western and Eastern models, a lasting, stable, mixed economy." 32 This does not mean that the legacy is negligible. What's left of the left's anti-politics is its emphasis on building a vibrant civil society-an ongoing project as urgent in the West as in the East. And Solidarity has an enormous amount to teach us about the possibilities and pitfalls of this alternative kind of politics. We can learn from its unsurpassed commitment to openness in politics, its vast communication and press network, its brilliant organizational structure. Solidarity tried to create a new modem social system based on openness, publicity, legality, and mass participation. It wanted to reintroduce morality into politics, not through force and coercion, but through a recapturing of the communitarian goals of the polis itself. It did not succeed in constructing this third road, but it has left the world a goldmine of evidence on what this project entails in modem-day practice. In Poland the anti-politics of Solidarity achieved a stunning suc-

204 I The Viability of an Accord

cess. August 1980 mobilized citizens to seize the public space that had hitherto been monopolized by the Party, and the victory has proved to be irreversible. The diverse, independent, and self-assured civil society it promoted ensured that democratic reform would continue, despite martial law. Thanks to anti-politics, politics is possible once again.

EPtWq

The New Solidarity

On January 18, 1989, the day this manuscript was sent to the publisher, General Jaruzelski told a plenary session of the PZPR Central Committee that the Party leadership was now willing to accept the relegalization of Solidarity. Less than three weeks later, on February 6, leaders of the Party and Solidarity sat down for the long-awaited Round Table negotiations to discuss the country's future. The two sides, formally referred to as "government-coalition" and "Solidarity-opposition," appointed representatives to a variety of committees and subcommittees charged with working out agreements on such issues as economic policy, trade union pluralism, political reform, health and education, mining, housing, youth problems, and the environment. The talks lasted eight weeks, weathering a perhaps expectable number of crises and near breakdowns. On April 5, the Round Table Accord was signed. On April 17, Solidarity was re-Iegalized as a trade union. On June 4, 1989, candidates of the Solidarity Citizens Committee won a spectacular victory in the first free elections since World War ll. The age of anti-politics had turned decisively to politics-and this book suddenly had a natural ending. I The changes happened with astonishing speed, too fast for anyone to make sense of. When I visited Poland in March 1989, I found Adam Michnik, Jacek Kuron, and other old KOR nemeses now appearing as regular television commentators, interpreting the political situation for a disbelieving public. Representatives of the "underground" press, wearing badges identifying the illegal papers they worked for, asked questions of government ministers at formal press conferences. Helena Luczywo went public as the long-time editor of Solidarity's official underground paper, Tygodnik Mazowsze, and would soon convert it into the first legal oppositionist daily in Eastern Europe, with an initial circu205

206 I Epilog

lation of 500,000. Even Po Prostu, the classic revisionist weekly closed down by Gomulka in 1957, was now allowed to resume publication. Dawid Warszawski announced that he was really Konstanty Gebert,2 though he said that his paper, KOS, would probably stay underground for technical reasons: it was easier to get paper on the black market than on the legal one. Still, Warszawski was now a public figure. Relishing his new status, he liked to show off a picture of himself shoving a long microphone into the bewildered face of government spokesman Jerzy Urban. Urban, for once, was not alone-everyone was bewildered by the pace of events. The "anti-socialist enemies" of yesterday were the "constructive opposition" of today, and no one quite knew how to play the new roles. In the space of a few short months in early 1989, Solidarityessentially won what it had been fighting for over the past eight years. With the signing of the Round Table Accord, we have the consummation of the neocorporatist deal for which Solidarity had been pushing since 1981. The Round Table itself was part of a classic corporatist scenario, as negotiators from the government, Solidarity, and the official trade unions, none of whom had been elected for the purpose, met in a series of closed-door sessions to work out a social contract binding upon all. This was no "consultative council" such as the government had offered in the past. These were real negotiations, producing substantive final documents that the government was obliged not merely to consider but to enact legislatively. In return for legalization, Solidarity agreed to the government's request for early parliamentary elections to cement the Party's hold on the state. The election agreement also followed a corporatist scenario, as the balance of power was decided on in advance. The two sides agreed that the PZPR and its allies (the Democratic Party, the United Peasant Party, and PAX) would be guaranteed 65 percent of the seats in the Sejm, with non-Party candidates allowed to contest the remaining 35 percent. Only the newly-created Senate would be decided by completely free ballot. The Party and its allies would have a guaranteed majority in the joint congress, and the two sides agreed that a mere majority would suffice to elect the President, also a newly created post. Responsible for international and military affairs, the President would be the formal guarantee for the stability of Poland's foreign policy while Polish civil society becomes fully democratized. Able to reassure the

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military and nomenklatura that they will not lose everything, the President is the key to the peaceful evolution of the system that Solidarity has always desired. (As it happened, Solidarity won 99 of 100 seats in the Senate and all 162 of its allotted maximum in the Sejm. With the Party coalition thereby denied the two-thirds Sejm majority needed to override a Senate veto, Solidarity has more power than anticipated, thus making the political situation both more interesting and more uncertain.) The most important decisions leading up to the pact were made by a mere handful of people. Solidarity leader Wal~sa and Interior Minister Kiszczak, together with their four or five closest advisers, met regularly during the Round Table talks in a suburban villa, with a Church representative as a neutral observer to try to resolve potential misunderstandings. The Magdalenka Group, as this body was known, turned out to be the real seat of power. The election deal, for example, was worked out and announced by the Magdalenka Group long before it was formally signed as part of the Round Table Accord. The b!te-a-tete between Kiszczak and Wal~sa continued after the signing of the accord, and even after the June parliamentary elections. With the Church as observer and potential arbiter, these summit meetings were a kind of institutionalization of the tripartite alliance proposed by Ryszard Reiff and others in 1981. After years of pretending that the modem state could govern adequately without dealing with the representatives of independent civil society, the ruling Party abandoned its totalistic aspirations once and for all. And so, Solidarity found itself legal once again. The transformation was staggering. An organization facing intense governmental opposition and no less intense internal disarray had suddenly become a leader in a historic political transition away from state socialism. In retrospect, the crucial turning point had been the strike wave of 1988. Insofar as these were strikes that Solidarity neither foresaw nor led, they pointed to Solidarity's weakness. The government presumably should have been pleased. It was not. The government had imagined that a weakened Solidarity would allow it to implement its policies without opposition and with minimum labor unrest. Now there was a weakened Solidarity, and yet labor unrest was escalating dangerously. Wal~sa had always warned that this would happen. He had long tried to frighten the Party into civility with the specter of an uncontrollable social explosion.

208 / Epilog The strike wave made the threat real, and so the government, now genuinely committed to economic reform, began moving toward WaI~sa as a mainstay of stability. Nevertheless, the strikes really did point to Solidarity's weakness. What value could there be in signing an accord with a trade union that could not control its workers? But here the strikes changed matters decisively. For, in a way that could not be foreseen at the time, the strike wave, which was in part directed against Solidarity, actually helped to revive Solidarity. The underground press of 1987, let us recall, was marked by one persistent theme: Solidarity was dead. When workers went on strike a year later and Solidarity activists did not even know who the strikers were, the death warrant seemed confirmed. Some underground Solidarity cells still existed in some factories, of course, but, as one Warsaw activist put it, these cells "were so deeply underground that many workers didn't even know they existed." 3 A Solidarity leadership existed, certainly: it consisted of WaI~sa and his National Executive Commission (KKW), which kept issuing statements and calling on the government to negotiate. The problem was that it had no base, as the strikes had just demonstrated. There was a new group of workers on the march, young workers, with their own organization and their own demands. They said they supported Solidarity, yet they opposed the economic reforms that Solidarity supported. The Solidarity they supported was an idea, not a real institution. And so, Solidarity's dirty little secret: it was not a union at all, it was a myth. Paradoxically, it was this very weakness that became Solidarity's new strength. For when young workers began to engage in union activity after the strikes of 1988, there was no one to stand in their way. They had demanded the restoration of Solidarity only to find that there was no Solidarity to restore; the union had to be built anew. And that is exactly what they did. By the end of the year, to the astonishment of Solidarity'S official leaders, Solidarity had a real trade union base once again. The new Solidarity is different from the old one in several ways, of which two are most significant. First, it is more of a workers' organization per se. The engineers and technicians who played such an important role in 1980-19814 are largely absent today. Some have gone abroad, others have started their own firms, and many, influenced by the intellectual climate of the mid-1980s, are simply not very fond of

Epilog / 209 trade union activity today. (As one scholar told me in March 1989, "Why bother with Solidarity? After all, the only sensible thing to do is to close down this wasteful Academy of Sciences altogether. But what trade union can say that?") As a result, the new Solidarity is left to the workers themselves. Second, the new Solidarity base is more opposed to economic reform than the old one was. In 1980-1981 people associated reform with improvement. By 1989 most workers tended to associate it with hardship. The young workers who make up the heart of Solidarity's new base began their union activity in protest against the price increases that resulted from reform. They do not want to swallow the "bitter pill" that the reformers unanimously prescribe. Hardship is all they have ever known. Now they want benefits. But not even the union's leaders talk about benefits in the immediate future. That leadership sees market reform as necessary for economic recovery. Aware that such reform entails serious short-term costs, it has exacted a political price to make the costs acceptable. For the millions of workers continuing to experience hardship, however, this may not be an acceptable tradeoff. Solidarity thus faces a new and potentially crippling dilemma. It has an official leadership that largely supports market reform and a rank and file that opposes it. As a result, although Solidarity is a viable trade union again, and thus in a position to act as a guarantor of stability in a time of deep syste:mic change, it may still be too divided to be able to play this role. The divisions have been expressed in a number of ways. There have been conflicts between young workers and the established Solidarity leadership, conflicts between radical youth and Solidarity, and intense conflicts within the old leadership itself. Walt:sa has had difficulties with young workers ever since he resumed discussions with the government in August 1988. Since then, the KKW has tried to end local strikes and bring the movement under control in order to strengthen its political bargaining position. As constant price hikes hacked away at living standards, however, workers began rebelling against Solidarity's restraint. In March ][989, for example, a group of Warsaw postal workers announced plans to form an independent union rather than abide by Solidarity's request for labor peace during the Round Table talks. In Gdansk, Wal~sa has had even more serious trouble. On the day the PZPR opened its pathbreaking January plenum, Wal~sa met with

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representatives of the new Gdansk Solidarity that had emerged in the aftermath of the 1988 strikes. His goal, as he stated at the outset, was to bring the new Solidarity under his control by forcing through the election of his own candidate as its leader. WaI~sa's choice was Bogdan Borusewicz, a former KOR activist (the only member from Gdansk) and a close Wal~sa associate from before Solidarity was even founded, as well as during the underground years after 1981. Many delegates rebelled against WaI~sa's "nomenklatura," as they put it. They liked the leader they had, and did not know why they were now supposed to choose someone else. They asked Borusewicz for his program, but WaI~sa cut in, "The program is unity. We have to centralize our activities. This is my man, vote for him." The group finally did, but in a bitterly divided vote (seventeen for, fifteen against, five abstentions) that resulted in several workers denouncing WaI~sa as a "dictator" and one of the locals withdrawing from the newly unified body.5 Gdansk Solidarity had accepted WaI~sa's authority, but it gave notice that it could not be counted on to support his policies fully in the future. Meanwhile, many youths have become even more disillusioned with Solidarity. Independent youth demonstrations became increasingly common after the 1988 strikes, and as the demonstrations began turning into violent clashes with the police, Solidarity began distancing itself from the demonstrators. Militant youths were coming to see WaI~sa as one of "them," a compromised representative of the establishment. On January 29, 1989, a thousand youths heckled WaI~sa at a rally in Gdansk, denouncing him as a "traitor." 6 Finally, the distrust of WaI~sa's Solidarity has been expressed in increasing support for the oppositionist Working Group. Bringing together Wal~sa's three opponents for union president in 1981 -Andrzej Gwiazda from Gdatisk, Marian Jurczyk from Szczecin, and Jan Rulewski from Bydgoszcz-as well as virtually all of the 1981 union leadership from LOdi, the Working Group has gained increasing prominence in some of Poland's key industrial centers. It has denounced Wal~sa as a usurper and opposed the Round Table talks as a capitulation to the antiworker program of the Party reformers. The Group has been forthright in its view of market reform as a new scourge of the working class. It denounces the growing tendency toward the embourgeoisment of Party officials: "By becoming proprietors, the Communist Party apparatchiks stop being communists, but they don't stop being enemies of free trade

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unions." The Working Group demands that Solidarity "concentrate all its efforts on defending the interests of the workers," which includes "fighting for maximum pay increases ... and refusing overtime work." 7 As the economic crisis worsens, the program of the Working Group will probably become increasingly attractive to the workers. In January 1989, the Group organized a brief strike in Wal~sa's own Lenin Shipyard, and it has played a key role in organizing strikes elsewhere. The Group does not have a specific political line. Its supporters include both left anarcho-syndicalists and Christian conservatives. What unites them is opposition to the market, to Wal~sa, and to his policy of cooperation with the Party. In the spring of 1989, the Working Group set up rival Solidarity organizations in Bydgoszcz, L6di, and Szczecin. 8 1t denounced the Round Table negotiations and for the most part boycotted the June 1989 electoral campaign.9 The surprisingly high (35 percent) abstention rate, although not due exclusively to the boycott effort, is certainly some evidence of its potential influence. At Solidarity's May Day rally in Warsaw, many young workers jeered the leadership, chanting "Senai wasz, zwigzek nasz" (The Senate's yours, the union's ours). It is a threat Wal~sa will have to take seriously. Thus, when the Round Table talks began, Solidarity was already in a bind. Its commitment to a stable, peaceful, power-sharing arrangement had brought the government to the negotiating table, but was simultaneously threatening to alienate the rank and file. In an attempt to halt this development, Solidarity negotiators took a number of radical pro-worker positions at the talks. For example, despite the fact that many Solidarity experts considered automatic cost-of-living increases inflationary and that no one in the union leadership had defended them at a key meeting only weeks before the talks began ,10 the Solidarity side, cognizant of the mood of its new base, decided to make "indexation" (cost-of-living riders) a firm condition of an accord. Yet even at the Round Table, Solidarity was upstaged-not by the Working Group, which was excluded from the talks, but by the representatives of the official National Federation of Trade Unions, the OPZZ. Perceiving a way to gain the popular support that had eluded it so far, OPZZ adopted some of the Working Group's positions and tried to present itself as the true defender of the workers' interests. It claimed that workers need not bear any of the costs of the crisis and called Solidarity'S position a scandalous attempt to let a few concessions

212 I Epilog to the opposition compensate for a massive cut in living standards. The "goal of the union movement," said the OPZZ vice-president, "is to defend and increase the workers' standard of living, not to discuss the price to be paid for lowering it." II It criticized Solidarity for accepting limits on the right to strike, for compromising on the five-day work week for miners, and for refusing to demand trade union rights for soldiers and police. While Solidarity discussed details of market reform with the government, OPZZ demanded that the government build an apartment for every family that needs it-"then we can discuss marketization." 12 Even on the question of indexation, OPZZ went Solidarity one better. While Solidarity called for an 80.percent correlation awarded proportionally (whereby higher-paid workers would receive more than lower-paid workers), OPZZ demanded 100 percent and an equal lumpsum payment for all. The OPZZ position was the more popUlist one, as equal payments help poorer workers most and tend to even out pay differentials over time. It was also, interestingly enough, the position Solidarity had insisted on in August 1980. The new Solidarity, however, together with the government, supported differentials as an incentive for higher-paid workers. The position of OPZZ at the Round Table negotiations raises one of the problems alluded to earlier: the possibility of a coalition of antireformers from Solidarity and the Party. OPZZ President Alfred Miodowicz is himself a member of the Politburo. There he has allied himself with other hard-liners to try to block the Party's new reformism. The extent of the political differentiation in Poland cannot be captured in any short discussion. The PZPR now includes some reformers who could probably find themselves, without much difficulty, in the ranks of the Republican Party. One Party theorist, for example, argues that socialism should not be identified with anti-capitalism! 13 The Party entered 1989 with a new commitment to market reform. On January I, a series of radical new measures went into effect. These included the creation of several private banks, the tightening of credit to state firms, the right of citizens to import large amounts of Western materials duty-free, and a commitment to treat the public and private sectors of the economy eqUally. The Party's reformism has provoked a strong reaction-and not only from OPZZ. At the January Central Committee Plenum that voted to accept the re-Iegalization of Solidarity, Jaruzelski and Kiszczak had to threaten to resign in order to beat back the opposition of

Epilog / 213 those who rejected the new policy. The opposition retreated, but it has by no means been defeated. There are still influential forces in Poland that equate democracy with disorder and that remain in positions to cause at least temporary reversals of the new reformist policy. Soon after the January plenum, Stanislaw Kociolek, former Politburo member and Gdansk Party leader during the events of 1970, published a widely noted article in which he warned that the "benefits of socialism" were being eroded by marketization and the new official reformism. 14 Old-line Stalinists, it seems, are trying to become Marxist oppositionists again, ignoring the fact that it was the old system, and not a reformed one, that brought Poland to its present state of beggary, with crumbling school buildings forced to reduce hours of instruction to handle the overload, decrepit hospitals closing down due to structural problems,15 and perhaps the worst environmental pollution in Europe. Nevertheless, with the Party committed to market reform, it will be increasingly possible to blame future hardship on the reform itself. All those who talk about the "death of communism" miss this essential point: as reform proceeds apace, the slogans of Marxism will come to be in vogue once again. Moreover, the conflicts within Solidarity may well prove to be a good thing. In 1980-1981, people wanted the union to be everything to everybody. As a result, Solidarity was often unable to take the concrete but unpopular steps that are necessary for working out a long-term deal with the state. In 1989, Solidarity is taking many concrete steps and is consequently producing many opponents. Either these opponents will succeed in derailing the reform efforts or they will become part of a new democratic and pluralist public sphere. Nevertheless, the problems have taken their toll. For another difference between the new and old Solidarity is its size: the new one is much smaller. By March 1989, organizing committees had been established in only about 115 enterprises in the Gdansk area, seven times fewer than had signed on during the tense moments of August 1980 and far less than 10 percent of the total enterprises in this traditional Solidarity stronghold. In Warsaw the situation is worse. In early April, Solidarity branches had been set up in 100 worksites and had a total of 60,000 members, compared to 4,000 worksites with 300,000 members in 1981. 16 There are many reasons for the numerical decline. In 1980, people felt that the mere presence of Solidarity would make everything better. Mter a decade of crisis and tension, few believe that anything

214 / Epilog can make things better. Many citizens fear that the new Solidarity period will recreate the old political stalemate, with perhaps the same tragic aftermath. And the internal divisions are also keeping people away. People are not sure exactly what this Solidarity is going to defend, what this union is going to be, and they are holding back before joining up once more. In the spring of 1989, Adam Michnik, writing as the co-editor of Solidarity's new legal daily, proclaimed that "a specter is haunting Europe": the specter of democratization. Andrzej Gwiazda, meanwhile, invoked a different ghost: the "specter of marketization." 17 The fault line within the new Solidarity will probably lie precisely here: between those who favor using Solidarity to facilitate democratization and those who would use the union chiefly to fight the effects of marketization . Other disputes will also flare up. Among those who support marketization in general, there is sharp disagreement over how extensive it should be. Although social democrats and free marketeers are united against the Working Group, they disagree fiercely among themselves. Then there is a serious conflict between Christian fundamentalists and secular liberals over issues such as the right to abortion and the role of religion in the schools. When some parliamentary deputies proposed an anti-abortion law during the 1989 election campaign, Solidarity tried to sidestep the issue, calling it divisive. Fundamentalists, however, were not so reticent, and they even used the union's daily to voice their opinions .18 Issues like this have led Michnik to speak out against the potential "Iranization" of Poland,19 and they will surely divide Solidarity in the period ahead .

•

•

•

Solidarity's formal entry into the political sphere is the topic of another book, not this one, but let me hazard a few words on some implications of the new situation. Today it is not only Solidarity that faces new problems, but Europe as a whole, for Europe is in a period of great transition, and Poland's future is no longer Poland's alone. A full economic integration of Western Europe is set for 1992. A single vast European market will soon become a reality. But on what grounds should a united Europe include Portugal but not Poland? Greece but not Hungary? The only grounds, so far, have been that the Soviet Union would not accept it and that Hungary's or Poland's political system was incompatible with the rest of Europe's. But these grounds are increas-

Epilog /

215

ingly obsolete. Gorbachev has taken up the European peace movement's slogan of a "common European home from the Atlantic to the Urals," and does not shrink even from the slogan's implications for a reunited Gennany.20 Will Gorbachev really allow the breakup of the old empire? His policies lead nowhere else. The standard assumption that Gorbachev will never do anything to "weaken Soviet interests" misses the point that there are now serious disagreements within the Soviet Union over where these interests lie. Gorbachev is a Westernizer, not a Slavophile, and he seems to be like Lenin in one crucial respect: exasperated with traditional Russian backwardness and perceived laziness, he longs for Western "civilization" to shake up old Russia once and for all. Lenin pined for the Great European Revolution to save Soviet Russia from the "beggar's socialism" he knew it could not avoid on its own. Now Gorbachev tries to introduce European efficiency from above. It is a treacherous undertaking, for it lacks a solid base in Russian tradition. In order for it to succeed, Gorbachev needs to tap non-Russian traditions -just as he has with his support for autonomy movements in the Baltic republics and his encouragement of refonn in East Europe. Gorbachev has consistently pushed East Europe toward the West, from his support for Polish and Hungarian membership in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to his support for their pluralistic political evolution today. The stage is set, therefore, for the creation of a new, unified, nonaligned Europe. In June 1989, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union were all granted "special guest" status in the West European Council of Europe. In July, the Soviet Union withdrew longstanding objections and. supported Austria's request for membership in the Common Market. What will come next? My own view is that Poland and Hungary will formally petition for entry into the Common Market in 1991, with the support of Gorbachev. In any case, the possibilities are vast. The 1990S will be the decade of the New Europe, and Poland will playa central part in it. In other words, Europe's political future will in many ways be influenced by Solidarity's colorful, imaginative, and radical "anti-political" past.

Postscript

On August 24, 1989, Tadeusz Mazowiecki became Prime Minister of the Polish People's Republic, ending the communists' forty-four-year monopoly on power. Sooner than anyone had expected, and sooner than Solidarity had wanted, Solidarity itself took over the reins of state. Solidarity had entered the postelection era in June-when the Epilog above was written-hoping to be a tough opposition. Why take responsibility for an economic crisis that it had not created and that it had no idea how to resolve? Solidarity wanted to take things slowly-slowly for the Party, slowly for the USSR, and, perhaps most important, slowly for itself. Opposition is what its members were used to, not power, and they wanted to learn more about power before actually taking it. But Solidarity'S electoral triumph was too overwhelming. While Party candidates suffered humiliating defeats, "Wal~sa's team" won all but one of the 262 seats it was allowed to contest. It became difficult for the two sides to abide by the provisions of the Round Table Accord, which guaranteed state power for the Party, without making a mockery of the voters. And if the goal was to get the country out of its economic crisis by persuading people to accept austerity voluntarily, who could afford to mock the electorate? Solidarity gave General Jaruzelski the crucial tacit support that enabled him to win the presidency, and it was ready to accept his nominee for prime minister, too. But the Party botched the process. Although it graciously conceded defeat in the elections, it proposed merely to reshuffle the same top leadership, among the same top posts: former Party leader Jaruzelski became President, former Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Rakowski became Party leader, and former Interior Minister Czeslaw Kiszczak was chosen to be Prime Minister. This did 21 7

218 /

Postscript

not look like the "drawing of consequences" that the Party had promised in the wake of defeat. And so, once again, people began to feel that nothing had really changed, that the rulers were still the rulers, that Solidarity had been taken for a ride, that the whole process was a sham. The Solidarity leadership did not feel that way: Kiszczak, after all, was the Party leader who had done the most to bring about an accord, the man with whom Lech WaI~sa had been meeting regularly for over a year. But it was now unable to convince society at large, and, more important, unable to stop the new wave of strikes that threatened to drive the economy farther down the road to ruin. Solidarity had entered the parliamentary path to promote a democratic order in Poland, with emphasis on both parts of the equation. Disorder threatened to undermine everything, discrediting Party and Solidarity alike. And so, on August 7, WaI~sa came to the rescue, storming into the Sejm to announce that Solidarity would not support Kiszczak's candidacy; he formed an alliance with the United Peasant Party and the Democratic Party, now desperate to gain a modicum of legitimacy, that gave Solidarity the votes needed to form a government. On August 19, President Jaruzelski formally asked Tadeusz Mazowiecki to form a cabinet. Five days later, the Sejm approved. Solidarity had come to power. Henryk Wujec, the KOR activist who became chief organizer of Solidarity's parliamentary contingent, described the days after the June elections as "surrealistic," when "virtually straight from prison, we find ourselves in the 'palaces of power.' " 1 Perhaps nothing was as surrealistic as Jacek Kuron's being named Minister of Labor, and even the PZPR voted for him. Yet the surrealism knew no bounds-not even national ones. Not only did Adam Michnik travel to Moscow, but he spoke there before a group of reformist deputies to the Supreme Soviet, which drew up a communique calling for cooperation between Soviet and Solidarity parliamentarians. Weeks later, Michnik went again to the Soviet Union, this· time to Kiev, where he spoke at the founding conference of the Ukrainian National Movement, shouting "Long live a free Ukraine!" Komsomolskaya Pravda then ran an extensive interview with Michnik in late September, allowing him to present his views freely to the paper's few million Soviet readers. The Soviet response to East European events has been extraordinary. When Party leader Rakowski expressed reservations about cooper-

Postscript / 219 ating with a Solidarity government, it was Gorbachev who called him on the phone to argue that cooperation was essential. The Hungarian ruling party has officially renounced Leninism, dismantled its barbedwire border with Austria, allowed East Germans to go West, legalized all political parties, announced free elections for spring 1990-and Gorbachev applauds it all. Developments in East Germany meanwhile, open up the Pandora's box of a reunified Germany. Many wry jokes have been made about the Brezhnev Doctrine, which sanctioned Soviet intervention in the affairs of East Europe, but none so wild as the one Soviet spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov told reporters in October. Traveling with Gorbachev in Finland, Gerasimov said that the Brezhnev Doctrine had been replaced-by the "Sinatra Doctrine," and that Hungary and Poland were already "doing it their way." 2 Have the Polish events gone beyond the neocorporatist stage? Not yet. After all, this is a coalition government, with communists heading the Defense, Interior, Transport, and Foreign Trade ministries, and where the President, General Jaruzelski, is commander-in-chief and the ultimate guarantor of the country's alliances. The Party, in other words, has been guaranteed a great deal of influence due to the interests it represents, and not to the votes it received. Then there is the Prime Minister himself. Tadeusz Mazowiecki represents the tripartite alliance between state, Church, and Solidarity in his very own person. For although people like Wujec and Kuron did indeed come straight from prison to the "palaces of power," Mazowiecki had seen the inside of those palaces before. From 1961 to 1971 he was a member of the Sejm from the Znak group of Catholic deputies. (Until 1955, he belonged to the pro-regime PAX organization.) While in the Sejm, Mazowiecki set up links with the secular opposition through the influential Catholic monthly of the same name, Links (Wifi). Founded and edited by Mazowiecki, Links played a crucial role in bringing together the secular and Catholic opposition in the 197os.3 With firm credentials among Catholics and oppositionists, his position as parliamentarian established his respectability vis-a-vis the state as well. Mazowiecki joined with WaI:~sa and Solidarity from the very beginning. He came to the Lenin Shipyard in August 1980 and played an important role in the commission of experts set up to help the workers negotiate with the state. His connection with workers lasted, as he was one of the few intellectuals to come to the Lenin Shipyard during the

220 / Postscript more gloomy strike days of August 1988. Mazowiecki was the editor of Solidarity Weekly in 1981, and then again in 1989, until he left to become Prime Minister. All in all, he had excellent credentials on all sides -precisely the sort of person needed to oversee this historic coalition arrangement. Solidarity did not want to come to power so soon, but popular dissatisfaction forced its hand. In this way, Solidarity played the last trump card it knew it had. If it couldn't produce results now, popular unrest might accelerate to catastrophic proportions, and no one would know how to calm things down. This is the huge problem that the Solidarity government faces. It is not the only problem Solidarity as a whole faces now. With Mazowiecki in power, Solidarity as a trade union is up against the biggest crisis of its existence. With Solidarity as the government, was there any reason to join the union? In early September 1989, Solidarity had only about 15 percent of the members it had at the same stage of its existence in 1980.4 By October 1989, Solidarity had about 2.2 million members, just over 20 percent of its strength at its 1981 high point. And those who had joined were not too anxious to pay dues. In October 1989, the Solidarity press reported that only 15 percent of Warsaw union locals were paying dues to the regional office, while in Wroclaw, the city known throughout the 1980s as the stronghold of militant Solidarity, the corresponding figure was only 30 percent.5 Clearly, the problem was that no one knew what Solidarity was anymore. It was a trade union and the government and a group of some 260 parliamentarians. Presumably, Solidarity should support Solidarity. But that meant that the purpose of the trade union was to support the government-and that sounded to too many people like the old Stalinist conundrum again. What was Solidarity to do? It had to define itself anew. First, it had to reassert its independence: the union had to try to separate itself from the government it had spawned. Although most of the intellectual advisers to the Solidarity movement drifted into parliamentary, government, and journalistic activities, a good number of the old working-class activists stayed behind to do union work. Foremost, of course, was Wal~sa, who wisely refused to run for office or serve any government post that might tarnish his aura as a figure above the fray. But there were others too-Bujak of Warsaw and Frasyniuk of Wroclaw, for example -who eschewed parliament to keep the union in order. Their task is not

Postscript / 221 an easy one. In the first place, they are a bit too sympathetic to the new government, staffed by all their old friends, to be able to carve out much of a unionist vision of their own. Nevertheless, they have tried. While the Solidarity political authorities, for example, supported the market reform program proposed by Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, the Solidarity union newspaper noted that Sachs's much-heralded "success" in Bolivia led only to the immediate closing of 75 percent of that country's mines and to an unacceptable increase in hunger and unemployment. 6 As the economy continues to slide, Solidarity's dilemma becomes increasingly acute. If vast aid were forthcoming, such as a new Marshall Plan for East Europe, perhaps the awful austerity could be avoided. But part of the reason for the Marshall Plan was precisely the "Red Menace" that has now been exorcised. As the Cold War subsides, so, apparently, has the will to provide extensive economic assistance to Europe. Many Poles have assumed that if it were not for the division of Europe, all of Europe would have shared the prosperity that went to the West. What they didn't take into account is that West Europe's prosperity may have been partially due to the Cold War, that East Europe's misfortunes may have contributed to West Europe's successes by bringing in the Cold War dollars. This dirty little secret of the postwar era is now exacting its price, as East Europeans break out of their web of misfortunes but find no one greeting them with open arms. In Poland, this situation gives new life to the anti-reform unionists in the OPZZ and forces the Solidarity union to take a tougher stance. On August 7, 1989, Wal~sa walked into the Sejm and changed the political future of Poland by announcing that Solidarity was going to form a government on its own. When it did, he withdrew to his union post in Gdansk. A little over a month later, anxious to subordinate the union organ to his own authority, Wal~sa walked into the offices of Solidarity Weekly and announced that he was narning a new editor-inchlef. The staff of veteran underground activists, furious at the lack of consultation, resigned in protest against Wal~sa's "dictatorial" ways.? With a Solidarity government unable to meet all the hopes that have been placed in it, Wal~sa is acting more and more like Jozef Pilsudski in the 192os, a figure symbolically above petty political conflict but not unwilling to immerse himself in it "temporarily," in order to bring about the "democratic order" the people cannot come up with on their own. Is this really what the present times call for? In August, Solidarity was

222 /

Postscript

forced by the public to take the power it would have preferred to take much later. Pushed from below, WaJ:~sa toppled Kiszczak's government before it had a chance to be established. Will there soon be pressure to topple the Mazowiecki government too? If Kiszczak's departure led to a Solidarity government, what could Mazowiecki's departure lead to? Is WaJ:~sa, like Pilsudski, the "strongman" waiting to put things in order, just in case nobody else can? One hopes that, with international assistance and the continued creative imagination that has always been Solidarity's forte, we won't have to find out.

Notes

CHAPTER ONE: The Style of Solidarity I. Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, "An Open Letter to the Party," in Revolutionary Marxist Students in Poland Speak Out (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972), p. 68. 2. Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism: The Left Wing Alternative (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968). 3. Conversation between Dany Cohn-Bendit and Adam Michnik, published under the title "Pewien polski etos ... " [A certain Polish ethos], in Kontakt (Paris) Nos. 74-75, July-August 1988 , p. 54. 4. This description is based largely on conversations and personal observation. Some information on this generation's attitudes can be found in Anna Wyka, "On Some Avant-Garde and Alternative Milieux in Poland," in Polish Sociological Bulletin (Warsaw) No. I, 1981. A wonderful Polish film Kung Fu, made by Janusz Kijowski in 1979, also deals with the values of the generation of 1968, and particularly of those who tried, with varying degrees of success, to fit into the system in the 1970s. A recent attempt to deal with Polish values as "postmaterialist" can be seen in Ronald Inglehart and Renata Siemanski, "Changing Values and Political Dissatisfaction in Poland and the West," in Government and Opposition (London) 23:4, Autumn 1988. 5. George Konrad, Antipolitics (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 199· 6. Hannah Arendt, "What Is Freedom?" in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 146. 7. Hannah Arendt, "Communicative Power," ibid.; and Jiirgen Habermas, "Hannah Arendt's Communications Concept of Power," in Steven Lukes, ed., Power (New York: New York University Press, 1986). 8. Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 15, 20. 9. See also A. J. Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 1-5; and Zygmunt Bauman, "On the Maturation of Socialism," in Telos (New York) No. 47, Spring 1981. 10. Crick, In Defence of Politics , p. 20. II. Timothy Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution (New York: Scribners, 1983), p. 307. Instead of "manipUlating the Polish revolution until it fits our

223

224 / Notes to Pages 7-13 existing categories," Ash continues, "we might do better to adjust our categories until they fit the Polish revolution." 12. This charge was first raised in 1982 and 1983 by the conservative, rightwing underground journals Niepodleglosc [Independence] and Polityka Polska [Polish politics]. Andrzej Walicki, the prominent historian of political theory, developed the idea in his influential "Mysli 0 sytuacji politycznej i moralnopyschologicznej w Polsce" [Thoughts on the political and moral-psychological situation in Poland], in Aneks (London) No. 35, 1984. The veteran journalist Stefan Kisielewski concurred: "0 falszywych slowach i falszywych nadziejach" [False words and false hopes], in Aneks No. 36, 1984. The columnist Piotr Wierzbicki continued this train of thought in a very influential text, Mysli staroswieckiego Polaka [Thoughts of an old-fashioned Pole], published underground in Poland in 1985, and reprinted by PuIs Publications, London, in 1985. These ideas will be discussed more fully in Chapter Seven. 13. The story of the internal struggles, manifested quite openly in the pages of local union newspapers, has still not been written up adequately in any publication, in Polish or English. Gdansk was also the center of fierce internal struggle, in 1980-1981 as well as afterward. These conflicts were often rooted in differences as personal as they were political. 14. Ryszard Kapuscinski, "Notatki z Wybrzeza" [Notes from the coast], in Kultura (Warsaw), September 14, 1980; reprinted in GraZyna Pomian, Polska Solidarnosci [Solidarity's Poland] (Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1982), p. 76. This and all other translations from Polish-language sources are mine, unless noted otherwise. 15· Ibid., p. 75. 16. Ibid., p. 77. 17. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952),

PP·4- 6 . 18. Cohn-Bendit and Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism, p. 80. 19. This view is quite widespread among left critics of the state socialist system. See, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre's essay "The Socialism That Came in from the Cold," in Antonin Liehm, ed., The Politics of Culture (New York: Grove Press, 1970). The same point is suggested by Milan Simecka in The Restoration of Order: The Normalization of Czechoslovakia 1969-76 (London: Verso, 1984). 20. S. Zelazny, "Lewica-kryzyz tozsamosci" [The left-A crisis of identity], in Krytyka [Critique] (Warsaw) No. 18, 1984. 21. Personal conversations with Wyszkowski in Warsaw, December 1982 and July 1984. 22. Wal~sa first read about the new union movement in Robotnik Wybrzeia [The coastal worker], which was edited by KOR activists Jan Litynski and

Notes to Pages 14-21 / 225 Bogdan Borusewicz. He writes of this, and of Wyszkowski's influence, in his autobiography: A Time of Hope (New York: Holt, 1987), p. 99. 23· Konrad, Antipolitics, p. 35. 24. This is similar to how the Western new left perceived its goal. The same problematic unity offreedom and community can be seen, for example, in the American Students for a Democratic Society. See James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), particularly chap. 8. 25. Paul Breines was right to call Solidarity a "democratic redemptionist" social movement, thus alluding to its connections with the left as well as with modernity. This is similar to how I understand the term "postmodern left." See Breines' "Redeeming Redemption," in Telos No. 65, Fall 1985, p. 153. 26. See, for example, Charles Jencks, What Is Post-Modernism? (New York: St. Martin's/ Academy Editions, 1987), esp. pp. 7-16. 27. The "left" that emerges from Adam Michnik's writings self-consciously includes elements from all these traditions. See, for example, his Kosciol-Lewica-Dialog [The Church and the left: A dialog] (Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1977; English trans., David Ost, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming); "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors," and "Conversation in the Citadel," in Lettersfrom Prison, trans. Maya Latynski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 28. Todd Gitlin, "Postmodernism: Roots and Politics," in Dissent (New York) Winter 1989, p. 108. 29. Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), p. xv. CHAPTER TWO: Civil Society and the "Third Road" I. See, for example, Jean L. Cohen, Class and Civil Society: The Limits of Marxian Critical Theory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982); John Keane, ed., Civil Society and the State (London: Verso, 1988), and the same author's Democracy and Civil Society (London: Verso, 1988). 2. Interview with Ludwik Krasucki, in Konfrontacje [Confrontations] (Warsaw) NO.2, February 1988, p. 9. 3. Andrew Shonfield, Modern Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965). 4. Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Alain Touraine, The May Movement: Revolt and Reform (New York: Random House, 1971). 5. Jiirgen Habermas, "The Public Sphere," in New German Critique (Mil-

226

I Notes to Pages

21-26

waukee) NO.3, Fall 1974, p. 49. This is an excerpt from a book on the history of the public sphere published in German in 1964. 6. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3d ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1950; orig. 1942), pp. 295, 273. 7. Inglehart, Silent Revolution. This term has been widely used to describe the attitudes of supporters of the new social movements in the West, and particularly the Greens in Germany. 8. These examples were cited to me by people who had lived in Latin American dictatorships. Interestingly, the second scenario-in which a private company employs political oppositionists-became possible in Poland after 1982, when martial law was combined with a liberalized economy. 9. See, for example, Thomas C. Bruneau, "Continuity and Change in Portuguese Politics," in West European Politics 7:2, April 1984; P. N. Diamandouros, "Transition to, and Consolidation of, Democratic Politics in Greece, 1974-83," ibid.; Robert Harvey, Portugal: Birth of a Democracy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978); Jose Maravall, Dictatorship and Political Dissent: Workers and Students in Franco's Spain (London: Tavistock, 1978); Jose Maravall, The Transition to Democracy in Spain (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982); Kenneth Maxwell, "The Emergence of Portuguese Democracy," in John Herz, ed., From Dictatorship to Democracy: Coping with the Legacies of Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982). 10. Habermas, "Public Sphere," p. 49. II. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy qfRight, trans. T. M. Knox (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), paras. 215, 224. 12. Habermas, "Public Sphere." 13· Ibid., p. 54. 14. Ibid. 15. For a superb comparison of the public sphere in "capitalism" and in "socialism," see Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, On Cultural Freedom: An Exploration qf Public Life in Poland and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). The collapse of public life in Western market societies has been the subject of countless books. 1\vo of the best are Philip Slater's The Pursuit qf Loneliness (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), and Richard Sennett's The FaU qf Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1977). 16. Hegel, Philosophy qf Right, paras. 182-256. 17. Ibid.: addition to para. 215. 18. The best contemporary expression of such sentiment can surely be found in Friedrich Schiller's late eighteenth-century On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. 19. Jose Casanova, "Review Article," in Telos No. 59, Spring 1984, P·19 0 .

Notes to Pages 26-34 / 227 20. Cohen, Class and Civil Society, p. 37. 21. Karl Marx, "Toward the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law: Introduction," in Loyd Easton and Kurt Guddat, eds., Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1977), p. 263; emphases in original. 22. Cohen, Class and Civil Society, p. 28. 23. This has been well documented by Hal Draper. He writes that a consistent "leitmotiv" of Marx's attitude toward democracy, no matter what the social order, was the demand for the "minimization of the executive power [and] the state bureaucracy," along with a "maximization of the weight in the governmental structure of the representative system." See Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory o/Revolution, vol. 1: State and Bureaucracy (New York: Monthly Review, 1977), p. 297· 24. See Cohen, Class and Civil Society, and her "Rethinking Social Movements," in Berkeley Journal 0/ Sociology 28, 1983, for discussion of the Marxist project of "de-differentiating" state and society. 25. Leszek Kolakowski, "Marxist Roots of Stalinism," in Robert C. Thcker, ed., Stalinism (New York: Norton, 1977). 26. This development led to the rise of "interest-group theory" among Sovietologists. See, for example, Jerry Hough, The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), and H. Gordon Skilling and Franklyn Griffiths, Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). 27. On the new social movements in Latin America, see Scott Mainwaring and Eduardo Viola, "New Social Movements, Politics, Culture and Democracy," in Telos No. 61, Fall 1984. 28. Cohen, "Rethinking Social Movements," and, by the same author, "Strategy of Identity: New Theoretical Paradigms and Contemporary Social Movements," in Social Research 52:4, 1985 (a special issue on social movements edited by Cohen). 29. Walter J. Adamson, "Gramsci and the Politics of Civil Society," in Praxis International (Oxford) 7:3-4, Winter 1987/88. 30. Z. A. Pelczynski, "Solidarity and 'The Rebirth of Civil Society' in Poland, 1976-1981," in Keane, Civil Society and the State, p. 379, n. 14, on Tocqueville.

CHAPTER THREE: The Genesis of Political Opposition 1. The best statement of the necessary contingency and ambiguity of politics is Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969; orig. 1947). On the ambiguity of postwar communist politics in East

228 /

Notes to Pages 34-37

Europe, see Isaac Deutscher's 1950 essay, "The Tragic Life of a Polrugarian Minister," in Heretics and Renegades (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969). 2. One might mention Marx and Kolakowski: the former's "Men make their own history, although not under conditions they choose" is echoed by the latter's assertion that the "rigidity" of a social system "depends partly on the degree to which people living under it are convinced of its rigidity" (Leszek Kolakowski, "Hope and Hopelessness," in Survey [London] 17:3, Summer 1971, p. 42). Probably the best logical case against historical determinism is presented by Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). 3. The Polish Committee for National Liberation (or PKWN) was formed on July 22, 1944. Formally, the PKWN became the provisional government only on January I, 1945, although it was already acting as such in July. See Krystyna Kersten, Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Lubelskie, 1965). 4. Stefan Korbonski, Warsaw in Chains (New York: Macmillan, 1959), describes the continual harassment and blackmailing of PSL members right after the war. 5. This description comes from a long historical essay on postwar Poland by Krystyna Kersten, which was scheduled to appear in Tygodnik Solidarnosc [Solidarity Weekly] (Warsaw) in late December 1981, before martial law prevented its publication. I thank Nina Gladziuk for allowing me to see the galleys. See also Krystyna Kersten, Narodziny Systemu Wladzy: Polska 1942-1948 [Origins of the system of power] (Paris: Libella, 1986). 6. For the most detailed account of the political position of the London government-in-exile, see Wladyslaw Pob6g-Malinowski, Najnowsza historia polityczna Polski [Modem political history of Poland], vol. 3, 3d ed. (London: Caldra House, 1983; orig. 1960), chap. 30. 7. Some revealing new accounts of this election fraud, based on personal testimony of some who helped perpetrate it, are in a collection of interviews conducted by Teresa Toranska. First published as an underground sensation in 1985 (Oni, Warsaw: Nowa), it has been translated into English as "Them": Stalin's Polish Puppets (New York: Harper and Row, 1987). 8. The best account of this is Konstanty Throwski, "Dzieje Stronnictwa Pracy w latach 1945-1946" [The Party of Labor in 1945-1946], in ChrzeScijanin w Swiecie [Christian in the World] (Krakow) No. 103, April 1982. 9. See Jerzy Holzer, PPS: Szkic Dziejow [The PPS: An historical sketch] (Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, 1977); and the same author's Agonia PPS: Socjalisci polscy w sojuszu z PPR 1944-48 [The agony of the PPS: Polish socialists in alliance with the PPR] (Warsaw: Nowa, 1981). 10. Julian Hochfeld's collection of essays written between 1945 and 1947

Notes to Pages 37-41 /

229

tries to explain why a non-communist must choose to side with the communists. See Julian Hochfeld, My, socjalisci [We, socialists] (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1947). II. Many of these private meetings between the PPR and the PPS have only recently been documented. For example, volume 7 of the Archiwum Ruchu Robotniczego [Archives of the workers' movement] (Warsaw: Kzi~a i Wiedza, 1982) published for the first time several documents of the postwar political struggle. These include minutes of a joint session of the PPR Central Committee and the PPS Central Executive Committee from July 1945, as well as stenographic reports of the PPR's first National Congress (1945) and plenary sessions from 1945 and 1947. Other interesting documents can be found in other volumes of the Archiwum. In addition, the Polish quarterly Z Pola Walki [From the battlefield] (Warsaw) has in recent years published many good articles based on previously closed archives. On the PPS's political program, see Jerzy Jagiello, 0 pols~ drogr do socjalizmu [The Polish road to socialism] (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1983); Jan Kantyka, Burzliwe Lata [Stormy years] (Warsaw: PWN, 1977); Antoni Reiss, Z problem6w odbudowy i rozwoju organizacyjnego PPS 1944-46 [Problems in the reconstitution and organizational development of the PPS] (Warsaw: Kzi~ka i Wiedza, 1971); as well as the 1945-1946 issues of the PPS journal Przeglgd Socjalistyczny [Socialist Review] (Warsaw). 12. A. J. Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 130. 13. Ibid., p. 212. 14. This argument is developed in an article of mine; see "Towards a Corporatist Solution in Eastern Europe: The Case of Poland," in Eastern European Politics and Societies (Berkeley) 3: I, Winter 1989. 15. These were not limited to Warsaw: Witold Jedlicki, the chief historian of the clubs, notes that the very first one arose in Brzoz6w, "a paltry little spot out in the hinterland in the Rzesz6w region, a good many miles from the nearest railway station." See his Klub Krzywego Kola [The Club of the Crooked Circle] (Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1963), p. 65. 16. On the Poznan events, see Jaroslaw Maciejewski and Zofia Trojanowiczowa, Poznanski czerwiec 1956 [The Poznan June of 1956] (Poznan: Wydawnictwo Poznlll'iskie, 1981). 17. Cited in Konrad Syrop, Spring in October (New York: Praeger, 1957), P·57· 18. Ibid., p. 71. 19· Ibid., p. 57. 20. This story is told by Stefan Korbonski in his diary entry for June 18, 1947. Korbonski was a PSL leader who had to flee Poland in late 1947. See his Warsaw in Chains, p. 241.

230 I Notes to Pages 42-47 21. It is interesting that in his 1945-1947 diary, Korbonski betrays an unmistakable sympathy for Gomulka, a feeling that this guy is somehow different from the others, and better. This is particularly clear in Warsaw in Chains, pp. 241-42. 22. Ibid., p. 98. This and other quotations from Gomulka's speech to the VITI Plenum on October 20, 1956, are translated and cited by Syrop, Spring in October, pp. 98-110. 23. Kenneth Jowitt, The Leninist Response to National Dependency", Research Series No. 37 (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1978). 24. For an account of earlier postwar agricultural cooperatives sponsored by the socialists but liquidated with the onset of Stalinism, see Janusz Kalinski, "Forsowna Kolektywizacja rolnictwa 1948-1956," [Forced collectivization of agriculture], in Kwartalnik Historyczny [Historical Quarterly] (Warsaw) NO.1, 1984. 25. Quoted by Syrop, Spring in October, p. 106. 26. Ibid., p. 107. Socialist newspapers in 1944 and 1945 repeatedly expressed positions on foreign relations consistent with Gomulka's words here. 27. Ibid., p. 106. See also Jan Strzelecki, Kontynuacje (2) [Continuations] (Warsaw: PiW, 1974). 28. For the best account of this period, see Andrzej Micewski, Wsp61rzr;dzic czy nie ktamaC? Pax i Znak w Polsce 1945-1976 [To co-govern or refuse to lie: Pax and Znak in Poland] (Paris: Libella, 1978). During this period, Jan Dobraczynski, a Catholic collaborator with the regime, became the editor of Tygodnik Powszechny. In the post-Solidarity era Dobraczynski re-emerged as leader of the collaborationist PRON organization. 29. Gomul:ka said this in an interview with the Danish press agency, reprinted in Trybuna Lullu [The People's Tribune] (Warsaw) on September 10, 1957; quoted in Wladyslaw Gomulka, Przemowienia 1957-1958 [Speeches] (Warsaw: Kzi~a i Wiedza, 1959), p. 10. 30. See David Mason, Public Opinion and Political Change in Poland, 1980-82 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 31. Witold Jedlicki, the historian of the CCC and a former club official himself, reports that the club's members were divided over why the club was tolerated for so long: because it was having an effect, because it was being ignored, or because the Party wanted to keep an eye on the revisionists (see Jedlicki, Klub, chap. I). Jedlicki himself was convinced that the club had a generally positive effect on the government. 32. Quoted in Ray Taras, Ideology in a Socialist State: Poland 1956-1983 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 67. 33. Ibid., chap. 4.

Notes to Pages 48-52 / 231 34. For the complete text of the "Letter of the 34," see Peter Raina, Political Opposition in Poland 1954-1977 (London: Poets' and Painters' Press, 1978), p. 75· 35· Ibid., p. 77· 36. As a recent Polish writer has put it: "Before 1968, the Polish communist in power and the Polish intellectual in opposition were able to cooperate, or at least to talk in a friendly atmosphere. After 1968 they no longer could." Malgorzata Dziewulska, speaking at a 1988 round-table discussion on 1968, published as "0 Marcu-dzis" (March today) in Res Publica (Warsaw), March 1988, p. 7· 37. On the rise of the Partisans, see Michael Checinski, Poland: Nationalism, Communism, Anti-Semitism (New York: Karz-Cohl, 1983); see also Raina, Political Opposition, pp. 64ff, 104ff. 38. For the full text of this leaflet in rhyme, see Raina, Political Opposition, p.116. 39. For more in English on the events of 1968, see Neal Ascherson, The Polish August (New York: Viking, 1982); J. Banas, The Scapegoats: The Exodus of the Remnants of Polish Jewry (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979); Checinski, Poland; Jakub Karpinsky, Countdown (New York: KarzCohl, 1982); and, for an excellent general piece on Jews in postwar Poland, Aleksander Smolar, "Jews as a Polish Problem," in Daedalus 116:3, Spring 1987. An increasing amount of literature on 1968 is being published in Poland. In March 1981 Solidarity sponsored a week-long colloquium at Warsaw University on the events of 1968, and the proceedings were published in a samizdat edition. Recently, much has appeared in the legal press as well, particularly since the Polish government's official "apology" for the anti-SeInitic "excesses" of the time. (The apology was first announced in February 1988 at a conference on Polish Jewry held in Israel; an official statement appeared in Trybuna Ludu, March 2, 1988. See my "Poles, Jews (and Palestinians)," in Jewish Currents (New York) April 1988.) Probably the best of the recent Polish discussions on 1968 is the special issue of Res Publica from March 1988. 40. For some accounts of the December events in English, see Ascherson, Polish August; Karpinski, Countdown. See Roman Laba, "Worker Roots of Solidarity," in Problems of Communism (Washington, D.C.), July-August 1986, on the demands of the strikers in 1970. 41. For criticism of the intellectuals' lack of response to the 1970 events, see Kolakowski, "Hope and Hopelessness," and his 1974 article "Sprawa polska" [The Polish question], reprinted in Leszek Kolakowski, Czy diabel moie bye zbawiony i 27 innych kazan [Can the devil be saved and 27 other sermons] (London: Aneks, 1982). 42. Adam Michnik, "A New Evolutionism," my translation from Mich-

232 / Notes to Pages 52-58 nik's collection of essays, Ugoda, praca organiczna. mysl zaprzeczna [Conciliation, organic work, critical thought] (Warsaw: Nowa, 1983), pp. 142, 141. An English translation is in Michnik's Letters/rom Prison. 43. Cited in Raina, Political Opposition, pp. II6-17. CHAPTER FOUR: Opposition and Civil Society I. For two first-rate articles on the Polish economy in the 1970S see Zbigniew Fallenbuchl, "The Polish Economy in the 1970s," in U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, East European Economies Post-Helsinki (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1977); and the same author's "The Polish Economy at the Beginning of the 1980s," in U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, East European Economic Assessment, pt. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1981). See also Peter Green, "The Third Round in Poland," in New Left Review (London) Nos. 101-102, 1977. 2. A tape recording of Gierek's encounter with strikers in Szczecin was smuggled out of the country and dramatized in the BBC program "Three Days in Szczecin," broadcast in 1976. See Boleslaw Sulik, "Robotnicy" [Workers], in Kultura (Paris), October 1976. 3. Sulik, "Robotnicy," p. 74. 4. See almost any Trybuna Ludu from late June or July 1976. 5. In one plant in Radom, it was the Party's counteraction that caused the unrest. Leather workers at the "Podhale" plant struck on June 30 in anger at a factory resolution slandering demonstrators from Radom and Ursus and supporting the Party's stand. Some two hundred workers were dismissed as a result of this strike. See Solidarnose Dolnoslf)Ska (Wroclaw) No. 26 (40), June 25,1981, p. 10. 6. This term is borrowed from Kenneth Jowitt, The Leninist Response to National Dependency, Research Series, No. 37 (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1978), who uses it to describe how the Leninist theory of the peasantry, although based on a false theory, produced great success for the Party. 7. This is the phrase Leszek Kolakowski uses to describe the Polish events of 1968: "Hope and Hopelessness," in Survey (London) 17:3, Summer 1971. 8. See ibid., as well as Kolakowski's "Sprawa polska" [The Polish question], in Czy diabel moze bye zbawiony i 27 innych kazaft [Can the devil be saved and 27 other sermons] (London: Aneks, 1982). These articles explicitly attempted to arouse the Polish intelligentsia from its political passivity. In his 1974 article "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors," Michnik noted that friends who used to be willing to take risks to advance the opposition's cause were suddenly no longer willing and had become quite cynical about the entire effort.

Notes to Pages 58-61 / 233 In this piece Michnik harks back to J6zefPilsudski's early activity in the Polish Socialist Party as an example of the political activity that can be done in seemingly hopeless times. See Michnik, Letters from Prison, trans. Maya Latynski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); the Polish original is in Ugoda, praca organicza, mysl zaprzeczna [Conciliation, organic work, critical thought] (Warsaw: Nowa, 1983). 9. The orginal Polish version is included in Kolakowski's selected essays: Czy diabel mote bye zbawiony. References here are to the Survey translation. 10. Kolakowski, "Hope and Hopelessness," p. 38. These seven theses are from pp. 38-41. II. For another view on this, see Hillel Ticktin, "Soviet Society and Professor Bettelheim," Critique (Glasgow) No.6, 1976. Ticktin argued, from an economic rather than a political perspective, that waste and inefficiency are necessarily built into the state socialist economic system. See also David Ost, "Socialist World Market as Strategy for Ascent?" in Edward Friedman, ed., Ascent and Decline in the World-System (Los Angeles: Sage, 1982). 12. Kolakowski, "Hope and Hopelessness," p. 41. 13. Ibid., p. 37· 14. Ibid., p. 4I. 15. lbid·,P·42. 16. Ibid. 17· Ibid., p. 43. 18. If the "all or nothing" mentality comes from a certain kind of Marxism, clearly this belief in the emancipatory potential of human praxis also derives from Marxism: from the tradition of Marxist humanism, which was enjoying a revival, particularly in Eastern Europe, at the time Kolakowski was writing. On the understanding of praxis in Eastern Europe, see Gerson Sher, Praxis: Marxist Criticism and Dissent in Socialist Yugoslavia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), and Gajo Petrovic, Marx in the Mid-20th Century (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1967). On the philosophy of praxis in general, see Richard J. Bernstein, Praxis and Action (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971); Adolfo Sanchez Vasquez, The Philosophy of Praxis (London: Merlin Press, 1977; orig. 1966); and, of course, the prison writings of Antonio Gramsci: Selections From the Prison Notebooks, ed. by Quintin Hoare (New York: International Publishers, 1971). 19. It should be noted that this comparison between Kolakowski and Marcuse is not one with which Kolakowski would feel comfortable. In his tbreevolume history of Marxism, Kolakowski attacks Marcuse as the most dangerous and muddle-headed of all Marxist thinkers, calling him "the ideologist of obscurantism" (Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 3: The Breakdown [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978], p. 420). My point is not that Kolakowski and

234 I Notes to Pages 62-67 Marcuse are in any sense "co-thinkers," but only that they offered similar ideas on how to deal with "totalitarianism," and thus helped inspire similar kinds of opposition movements in both East and West. It does not matter if Western society was not quite as Marcuse claimed. What I see as similar is not the validity of their arguments but the nature of their advice. 20. Kolakowski, "Hope and Hopelessness," p. 42. I have made slight changes in this English translation to bring it into line with the Polish original (Czy diabel moie bye zbawiony, p. 290); emphasis added. 21. Kolakowski, "Hope and Hopelessness," p. 44. 22. Ibid. 23· Ibid., p. 42. 24. Ibid., p. 52. 25. The Walterowcy were named after Karol Swierczewski, a Polish communist known as General Walter when he fought in the international brigades in Spain in the 1930s. See Jan J6zef Lipski, KOR: History of the Workers' Defense Committee in Poland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 14-15. Kuron based his pedagogical principles on those expounded by the old Bolshevik pedagogue Aleksander Makarenko, who was active in the Soviet Union in the 1920S. 26. This article was originally published in Kultura (Paris) in November 1974. It is included in Jacek Kuron, Polityka i odpowiedzialnose [Politics and responsibility] (London: Aneks, 1984). 27. In a fascinating interview conducted in the middle of the Solidarity period in 1981 but unpublished at the time, Kur011 sharply criticized this fusion of emancipatory praxis and political democracy. Opposing his earlier views, Kuron now expressed skepticism about whether people really do strive to be free, creative beings and doubts about whether a political democracy can (or ought to try to) make them so. In 198 I Kuron saw the compulsory fusion of freedom and democracy as one of the roots of totalitarianism. The interview was published only in 1984, under the title "Nie do druku" [Not for publication], in Kuron, Polityka. 28. See Andrew Arato's interesting essay on theories of democratization in the Polish opposition, The Democratic Theory of the Polish Opposition, Working Paper No. 15 (Notre Dame: Kellogg Institute for International Studies, 1984). 29. Kuron, Polityka, p. 107. 30. Ibid., pp. 107-8. 31. Ibid., p. 108. 32. This essay was quickly translated into English and appeared in Survey, Summer/Autumn 1976; it has been republished in Michnik's Lettersfrom Prison. The Polish original is in Michnik's excellent collection, Ugoda. Page references below are to the original English translation in Survey.

Notes to Pages 67-72 / 235 33. Michnik, "New Evolutionism," p. 275. 34. Ibid., p. 269. This is an exaggeration, for the revisionists did of course encourage the rise of workers' self-management bodies and independent discussion clubs. Nevertheless, Michnik's view became the standard one for the opposition and is important here chiefly for that reason. 35. Ibid., p. 272. 36. Ibid., p. 268. 37. Ibid., p. 272. 38. Ibid., p. 273. 39. Michnik had expressed a similar line of thought in his earlier historical essays. In "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors," he extolled Pilsudski in particular for his anticipatory activity on behalf of Polish independence. 40. Michnik, "New Evolutionism," p. 276. 41. Kuron, "Mysli 0 programie dzialania" [Reflections on a program of action], reprinted in Polityka, p. 142. This essay was first published in Polish in the London journal Aneks, Nos. 13-14, 1977. An English translation appeared in the Polish Review (New York) No. 22, 1977. 42. Kuron, "Notatki 0 samorz~dzie" [Notes on self-government], reprinted in Polityka, p. 58. This essay was first published in the Warsaw samizdat journal Glos [Voice] No. I, 1977. 43. Kuron, Polityka, p. 145. This article was first printed in the Warsaw sarnizdat publication Biuletyn lnformacyjny [Information bulletin] (Warsaw) NO·3 (29), April 1979. 44· Ibid., p. 147· 45. Lech Wal~sa, A Time of Hope (New York: Holt, 1987), p. 99. 46. The most complete account of KOR's activities is by Lipski, KOR. See also Jakub Andrzejewski's excellent 1984 review of Lipski's book, "KOR od zewniltrz" [KOR from the inside], in Aneks No. 34, which provides a lively portrait of the character and personalities of KOR and its supporters, in contrast to Lipski's excessively fact-oriented approach. 47. Lipski, KOR. Lipski begins with a similar quotation in an excerpt of the book. See "KOR: Ethics of a Movement," in Dissent, Winter 1986. 48. A similar process took place elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Thus, the Hungarian George Konrad's Antipolitics (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984) is actually a first-rate political treatise, "antipolitical" only in its disregard for the state. 49. Kuroii, "Reflections on a Program of Action," in the Polish Review (New York) No. 22, 1977, p. 64. 50. Kuron, "W stron~ demokracji" [Toward democracy], in Polityka, p. 53; this essay was first published in the Warsaw samizdat periodical Krytyka [Critique] NO.3, Winter 1978/79.

236 / Notes to Pages 72-82 51. Michnik, Ugoda, p. 148; emphasis added. This is my own translation from the Polish original. 52. Michnik, "New Evolutionism," p. 273. 53. Ibid., p. 274; emphasis added. 54. This concept comes from the program adopted by the Founding Conference of the Fourth International in 1938. Written by Trotsky, it is usually referred to simply as the "Thansitional Program." It was published as Leon Trotsky, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1946). 55. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), p. 257· CHAPTER FIVE: Politics, Anti-Politics, and Solidarity I. The MKS's acceptance of this political language, which has long been a controversial issue, is discussed in more detail below. 2. Polityka (Warsaw), November I, 1980. 3. For a history of Solidarity's attitude to self-management, see manuscript by Henry Norr, "Quite a Frog to Eat: Self-Management and the Politics of Solidarity," 1983, parts of which have appeared in print: "Solidarity and SelfManagement, May-June 1981," in Poland Watch (Washington, D.C.) NO.7, 1985; "Solidarity and Self-Management," in Carmen Sirianni, ed., Worker Participation and the Politics ofReform (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987). 4. This is from a 1988 conversation between Michnik and Dany CohnBendit, "Pewien polski etos ... " [A certain Polish ethos], in Kontakt (Paris) Nos. 74-75, July-August 1988, p. 50. 5. See Adam Michnik, "What we want to do and what we can do," in Telos No. 47, Spring 1981. This is a transcript of a speech Michnik gave at Warsaw University on November 14, 1980. 6. See the Solidarity journal from Lublin, Miesigce [Months] No. I, Fall 198 I, for various entries on the strike in the LZNS plant. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., p. 7. 9. See interview with independent union leaders from Gdansk in Polityka, November I, 1980. 10. Mieczyslaw Jagielski at first negotiating session, August 23, 1980, quoted in A. Kemp-Welsh, The Birth of Solidarity: The Gdansk Negotiations. I9Bo (New York: St. Martin's, 1983), p. 41. II. See entries on the strike at Lokomotywownia in Miesigce, No. I, Fall 1981.

Notes to Pages 82-85 I 237 12. Boleslaw Sulik, "Robotnicy" [Workers], in Kultura (Paris), October 1976. 13. On September 10, after the Gdansk Accord, the Independent Factory Council reconstituted itself as the Founding Committee of the Independent Self-Governing Trade Unions and declared affiliation with Gdansk Solidarity. 14. Quoted in Kemp-Welsh, Birth of Solidarity, pp. 69-70. 15. Quoted in ibid., p. 76. 16. Quoted in ibid., p. 188, n. 5. 17. Tadeusz Kowalik, "Experts and the Working Group," in Kemp-Welsh, Birth o/Solidarity, p. 147. 18. Jadwiga Staniszkis, Poland's Self-Limiting Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 54. 19. Kowalik, "Experts," pp. 147-48; Staniszkis, Poland's Self-Limiting Revolution, p. 57. 20. Kowalik, "Experts," p. 157. 21. Jadwiga Staniszkis dropped out of the working group on account of the willingness of Kowalik and the others to accept such political language. She saw the government's insistence on this clause as a critical turning point-the moment when she became aware of "the limits of possible reforms" (Poland's Self-Limiting Revolution, p. 57). Any explicit language upholding "the leading role of the Party" could, she felt, be used to subordinate the MKS to the Party (p. 58). Her own position was that the workers should reject the clause about the Party even if it meant scrapping the entire accord, keeping "the idea of independent unions ... as a pure, utopian dream for the future" (p. 59). In the end, the fact that Solidarity managed to retain its independence despite the clause would seem to demonstrate that the language was not so important after all. Kowalik insists that when the experts first discussed the matter with the MKS Presidium, there was little reaction from the workers ("Experts," p. 149). Later on, however, the acceptance of this language became the basis for accusations that the experts, and WaI~sa too, had "betrayed" the strikers. Those interested in following this controversy should read the accounts by Staniszkis (chap. I, particularly pp. 57-61) and Kowalik. 22. Kowalik, "Experts," pp. 152, 154. 23. Quoted ibid., p. 109. 24. The strikers had first called for the formation of "free" trade unions, but their advisers recommended that the adjective, with its Cold War symbolism, be changed to "independent, self-governing," whose allusion to socialist values might make the institutions more palatable to the authorities. This advice, culled from the tenets of revisionism, proved sound. 25. WaI~sa revealed this at the September 17. 1980, meeting of independent union representatives in Gdansk. A typed transcript of the proceedings has

238 / Notes to Pages 85-88 been typed up (in Polish) and is in my possession. It will be referred to below simply as "Transcript." (A somewhat different account of the proceedings was published in the Polish underground journal Krytyka, (Warsaw), No. 18, 1984.) 26. Point I, section 4, of Gdansk Accord. This, along with the other accords, has been published in several editions, official and unofficial, in Poland. A translation of the Gdansk Accord is available in Kemp-Welsh, Birth of Solidarity, pp. 168-79, and atso in Labour Focus on Eastern Europe (London) 4:1-3, Spring-Autumn 1980; the excellent Labour Focus collection of documents is also available in book form: Oliver MacDonald, The Polish August (San Francisco: Ztangi Press, 1981). 27. Point I, section 4, of Gdansk Accord. 28. Quoted in Kemp-Welsh, Birth of Solidarity, p. 83. 29. Ibid. 30. Kowalik writes that it was the Gdansk MKS that postponed signing the accord from the thirtieth till the thirty-first because of rising tensions at the Lenin Shipyard, whereas the government wanted to sign both accords on the same day ("Experts," pp. 158-59). Other evidence indicates that the government also wanted to wait; my point, in any case, is only that the government wanted to make sure that it was not Gdansk that would set the precedent. 31. Conversation with Adam Lopatka in Prawo i Zycie [Law and Life] (Warsaw), August 28, 1982; quoted in Kowalik, "Experts," p. 164. 32. Szczecin MKS demands are in Labour Focus on Eastern Europe 4, Nos. 1-3, Spring-Autumn 1980, p. 41; and in MacDonald, Polish August. 33. This is my translation. The first translation of the Szczecin Accord published in The Times (London) on September I, 1980, and reproduced in Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, is flawed in that it makes the accord sound much more explicit than it actually was. 34. The former "Conferences on Workers' Self-Management" were introduced in 1958 as an artificial substitute for what workers were demanding in 1956-1957. (The terms "self-governing" and "self-managing" are the same word in Polish: samorzQ.dne.) 35. Neal Ascherson, The Polish August (New York: Viking, 1982), makes this claim, and Staniszkis, Poland's Self-Limiting Revolution, chap. I, certainly implies it. Similarly, Adam Ringer, an extremely well-informed scholar in Sweden, has argued this in a valuable personal communication, September 1988. 36. Malgorzata Szejnert, "Chwila Przed Podr6:i," [A moment before departure], in Literatura (Warsaw), September 13, 1980; reprinted in GraZyna Pomian, Polska Solidarnosci [Solidarity's Poland] (Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1982), pp. 88-95· 37. Janusz Brych, "Porozumienie Szczecmskie-zostala zawarte z klas,

Notes to Pages 88-93 / 239 robotnicz, a nie ze Solidarnosci," [The Szczecin Accord was made with the working class, and not with Solidarity], in Glos Szczeciftski [Szczecin voice], October 1-3, 1982, cited by Tadeusz Kowalik in an unpublished manuscript from 1983 in my possession. In his published paper, "Experts," p. 162, Kowalik cites a different piece by Brych from this same period, revealing other points of the secret accords. 38. Bernard Rossiter, "Polish Aide Says Warsaw Didn't Fear Soviet Police," New York Times, September 10, 1980. The reporter's phrase "newly independent unions" was probably also suggested by the Party official, since it implies that the old unions were transformed into "independent" ones. 39. Part I of Jas~bie Accord. 40. The text of this accord was published in Biuletyn Informacyjny [Information bulletin] of the GdaDsk Lenin Shipyard, NO.2, September 18, 1980. Rozplochowski's Interfactory Workers Committee was separate from-and even a rival to-the other Silesian Interfactory Workers Committee, which was led by Party member Jaroslaw Sienkiewicz. It was the second committee that led the earlier strikes and signed the Jas~bie Accord. 41. Ireneusz KrzeIninski, "Narodziny niezaleznych samorz,dnych zwifZk6w zawodowych" [Origins of the independent self-governing trade unions], in Polacy-jesien '80, CZfSC I [Poles-Fall '80, Part I] (Warsaw: Warsaw University, 1984), p. 272. The examples that follow are derived largely from Krzemmski's thoroughly documented account, esp. pp. 272-73. 42. Ibid., p. 273. The housing example is from a personal source; the quotation is my own. 43· Ibid., p. 274· 44. "Transcript," p. 16. 45. Ibid., pp. 17, 15. 46. Information on this strike comes from an unusually informative article in the legal press by Joanna Siedlecka, "HaIa i biurowiec" [The hall and the office building], in Kultura (Warsaw), October 19, 1980; reprinted in PoInian, Polska Solidarnosci. 47. Cited by Marta Wesolowska in "'ftzeba pat:rzeC na~" [One must watch carefully], in Polityka, October II, 1980; reprinted in PoInian, Polska Solidarnosci. 48. See Miesi9ce No. I, Fall 1981. 49. Poland: A Chronology of Events, JuIy-November I980, compiled by Anna Sabat and Roman Stefanowski, RAD Background Report 91, Radio Free Europe Research (New York, 1981), p. 13. This will be referred to below as Chronology . 50. Quoted in Staniszkis, Poland's Self-Limiting Revolution, p. 53 n.

240 /

Notes to Pages 93-99

51. Chronology, p. 13. 52. On October 6, 1980, at the VI Plenum, Szydlak was also dismissed from the Central Committee. 53. Chronology, p. 37 (September 12, 1980). 54. Because the NTO would soon dissolve into Solidarity, not much has been written about it. This is unfortunate, not only because it was the first and one of the most interesting of the nCfw unions, but because it developed an organizational model different from the one adopted by Solidarity. The fullest account is by Ireneusz Krzeminski, "Jak powstal i dzialal niezalezny samorz~y zwi~ pracownik6w NTO" [The origins and activities of NTO], in Polacy-jesien '8o, Cz~sc 2 [Poles-Fall '80, Part 2] (Warsaw: Warsaw University, 1984). NTO also produced a union newsletter, Nauka-TechnikaOswiata [Science-technology-education] (Warsaw). 55. Chronology, p. 57 (September 27, 1980). 56. iycie Warszawy [Warsaw Life], October 9, 1980, p. I. 57. See, for example, ibid., October 10, 1980, p. 5, and October 13, 1980, p. 6. 58. Ibid., October 28, 1980, p. 2:2. Number after colon refers to column number. 59. Ibid., October 29, 1980, p. 2. 60. Ibid., October 21, 1980, and October 29, 1980. 61. The relevant document is Decree No. 81/80 of the Council of Ministers, issued September 6, 1980. WaI~sa signed the protest on October I I. The text of the protest is in the bulletin of the Warsaw NTO union, Nauka-Technika -Oswiata NO.3, October 17, 1980, pp. 4-5· 62. The one full report on this situation is by Helena Kowalik, "Sto Lat SamotnoSci" [A hundred years of solitude], in iycie Literackie [Literary Life] (Krak6w), June 1981; reprinted in Pomian, Polska Solidarnosci. 63. See Seweryn Ozdowski, "The Polish Industrial Enterprise," in Critique (Glasgow) No. 12, 1979. 64. Conversation with Strzelecki in Warsaw, November 1982. 65. See the official statement of the MKZ of the Gdansk ISTU, dated September 16 and printed in Biuletyn Informacyjny Stoczni Gdariskiej [Information bulletin of the Gdansk Shipyard] No.2, September 18, 1980, p. 2. 66. "Telewizyjne Wyslfpienie Kazimierza Barcikowskiego" [Televised speech ofK. Barcikowski], iniycie Warszawy, October 1,1980. 67. Ibid. 68. See Kania's report to the VI Plenum, printed in most Polish newspapers, includingiycie Warszawy, October 5,1980. 69. For example, the meeting between the rising star Andrzej Zabinski

Notes to Pages 100-8 / 241 (promoted to the Central Committee Secretariat, the Politburo, and the post of First Party Secretary of Katowice since the onset of the crisis) and Katowice Party activists in late 1980. A tape recording of this meeting was leaked to Solidarity, whose local bulletins published extensive transcripts from it. 70. In the small city of Przasnysz (pop. 5,000), some sixty miles north of Warsaw, a Solidarity branch began only in December 1980. (Conversation with Tadeusz Witkowski, one of the founders of Przasnysz Solidarity, in Madison, Wisconsin, July 1983.) 71. Interview with Karol Modzelewski in Kultura (Warsaw), November 30, 1980, p. 10:1. Modzelewski was talking about the government's information policy, and he immediately added that Solidarity felt that the degree of evolution was still insufficient. 72. Gdansk Accotd, Point I, section 4. 73. For a fuller discussion of Solidarity's structure and the problems of centralization and decentralization, see David Ost, "Indispensable Ambiguity: Solidarity's Internal Authority Structure," in Studies in Comparative Communism 21:2, Summer 1988. 74. Kowalik, "Experts," pp. 149-50. 75. This account of the decentralist position is based largely on discussions with some of its supporters, including Krzysztof Wyszkowski, veteran oppositionist and founder of the Free Trade Unions in Gdansk; Krystyna Kersten, historian and NTO activist; socialist scholar Jan Strzelecki; and journalist Jolanta Strzelecka. Another source is the NTO press as well as Krzeminski, "Jak Powstal." For a somewhat different rendering of this dispute and its implications for Solidarity's structure, see Ost, "Indispensable Ambiguity." 76. Conversation with Jolanta Strzelecka in Warsaw, November 1982. 77· "'franscript," pp. 43-44. (See note 25 above.) 78. Ibid., p. 46. 79. lowe this observation to Krzysztof Wyszkowski. For more on this point, see Ost, "Indispensable Ambiguity," particularly n. 13. 80. "Transcript," p. 51. 81. Ibid., p. 47. 82. Ibid., p. 51. 83. For the Court's objections, see Zycie Warszawy, October 20, 1980, p. 1:4. For Solidarity's sudden concession, see Zycie Warszawy, October 25, 1980, p. 2:2. 84· "1i"anscript," p. 53· 85. See, for example, Wlodzimierz Pankow, "Zawodowe czy branZowe?" [Professional or branch unions?], in Kultura (Warsaw), November 16, 1980, p. 7. This excellent article on the implications of Solidarity's branch method

242 / Notes to Pages 114-16 of interest representation was the beginning of an important debate that never took place. CHAPTER SIX: Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism I. Ryszard Reiff, "Czy zdolamy zapobiec katastrofie i wyjsc z kryzysu?" [Can we manage to avoid a catastrophe and solve the crisis?], in Kierunki [Directions] (Warsaw) No. 50, December 13, 1981. 2. For another approach to the question of a neocorporatist solution in Eastern Europe, and the inadequacy of totalitarian models for understanding Soviet-type systems today, see David Ost, "Towards a Corporatist Solution in Eastern Europe: The Case of Poland," in Eastern European Politics and Societies (Berkeley) 3:1, Winter 1989. 3. Philippe Schmitter, "Still the Century of Corporatism?" in Fredrick Pike and Thomas Stritch, eds., The New Corporatism (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), p. 86. 4· Ibid., pp. 93-94· 5. Ibid., p. 105. 6. Philippe Schmitter, "Democratic Theory and Neocorporatist Practice," in Social Research (New York) 50:4, Winter 1983, p. 896. See also the collection of essays edited by John H. Goldthorpe about corporatist arrangements in modern Western polities: Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalist Societies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). Again, only societal corporatism is discussed. 7. Thus the mention of "neocorporatist practice" in the title of his 1983 essay, which concerns societal corporatism alone. 8. Daniel Chirot, "The Corporatist Model and Socialism," in Theory and Society NO.9, March 1980, pp. 367-68. On the relevance of Latin American corporatism to Eastern Europe, see Melvin Croan, "Is Mexico the Future of Eastern Europe?" in Samuel Huntington and Barrington Moore, eds., Authoritarian Politics in Modern Society (New York: Basic Books, 1970). 9· Ibid., pp. 371-72. 10. Jadwiga Staniszkis, "The Evolution of Forms of Working Class Protest: Sociological Reflections on the Gdansk-Szczecin Case, August 1980," in Soviet Studies (Glasgow) 33:2, April 1981, p. 204. This article constitutes chapter 7 of Staniszkis's book, Poland's Self-Limiting Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); quotation appears on pp. 38-39. II. Staniszkis, "Forms of Working Class Protest," pp. 204-5; Poland's Self-Limiting Revolution, p. 39. 12. See, for example, the excellent collection of essays edited by Suzanne Berger, Organizing Interests in Western Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

Notes to Pages 117-22 / 243 ve~ity Press, 1981); Schmitter, "Democratic Theory," and Geoff Dow et al., "From the Politics of Production to the Production of Politics," in Thesis Eleven (Melbourne) NO.9, July 1984· 13. This is Schmitter's characterization of pluralism, in "Century of Corporatism," p. 97. 14. Modzelewski's remarks at a meeting of the Solidarity National Commission on August II, 1981, as cited in ~e minutes of the Solidarity bulletin AS (short for Agencja Solidarnosc [Solidarity press agency]) No. 29, August 10-12, 1981, p. 106. AS carried detailed reports of Solidarity meetings and negotiations based on notes taken by union reporters. The speeches, as presented in AS, are reconstructed from these notes. Although the quotes cannot be guaranteed as exact, any serious discrepancy would have been challenged by the speaker. None of the speeches cited below were ever challenged. 15. In theory, an anarcho-syndicalist alternative might have been proposed in which Solidarity would try to seize power in the factories, creating a government of producers that might in this way "solve" the problem of state and society. But this traditional revolutionary position was seen by opposition theorists as the primal error of the Communists, and it lacked mass support throughout the Solidarity period. See Henry Norr, "Solidarity and Self-Management," in Carmen Sirianni, ed., Worker Participation and the Politics of Reform (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); "Solidarity and Self-Management, May-July 1981," in Poland Watch (Washington, D.C.) NO.7, 1985. 16. Schmitter, "Democratic Theory," p. 913. 17. Ibid., p. 891. 18. Ibid., p. 916. 19. Contemporary advocates in Australia, for example, have argued that neocorporatism is necessary to protect labor against "the pace and content of capital accumulation." See Dow et al., "Politics of Production," p. 30. 20. Andrew Arato, "Civil Society vs. the State: Poland 1980-81," in Telos No. 47, Spring 1981, p. 39. 2 I. For example, in a chronological account of the "free Saturday" dispute issued by Wroclaw Solidarity, the listing for August 1980 says that the government agreed to reduce the work week. The next entry, dated September 3, 1980, says that the Jastrzt:bie Accord made the earlier agreements "precise," providing for all Saturdays to be free in 1981. See Solidarnosc Dolnoslf)ska (Wroclaw) NO.2 (16), January 15, 1981, p. I. There is no suggestion here that Jastrzt:bie might only have addressed the specific situation of the miners, which was the position of the government. See, for example, comments by Vice-Minister of Labor Piotr Karpiuk, in Zycie Warszawy, December 24-26, 1980, pp. 1-2. 22. Walt:sa's statement, signed on behalf of the Solidarity National Coordinating Commission, was dated December 23. The Commission signed a

244 / Notes to Pages 123-32 similar statement on December 30. See text in Solidarnosc DolnoslfJska, January9, 1981,P. I. 23. This line of reasoning was spelled out very clearly in the remarkable interview with Lech Walpsa, Andrzej Gwiazda, and other leaders of Gdansk Solidarity, in Polityka, November I, 1980. 24. For the union's account of the negotiations, see "Prawda 0 negocjacjach" [The truth about the negotiations], by Solidarity press spokesperson (at the time) Karol Modzelewski, a participant in the talks, in Solidarnosc DolnoslfJSka NO.4 (18), January 29, 1981. For the government's version of the dispute, see the texts of the important speeches delivered on television by Vice-Premiers Mieczyslaw Jagielski (Zycie Warszawy, January 8, 1981) and Stanislaw Mach (ibid., January 19, 1981). 25. See Maciej Zipba, "UwaZam, ze" [My opinion], in Solidarnosc Dolnosi(JSka NO.5 (19), February 5, 1981, p. 8. 26. Schmitter, "Democratic Theory," p. 921. 27. AS No. 27, July 28-August 4, 1981, p. 001. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. See Kacala's statement in AS No. 28, August 5-9, 1981, p. 002. 31. Ibid., p. 003. 32. See comments by union spokesperson Janusz Onyszkiewicz in AS No. 29, August 10-12,1981, p. 101. 33. AS No. 27, p. 003. The Polish phrase is "ostro konftiktowa." 34. AS No. 29, p. 104. 35. Ibid.; emphasis added. As noted earlier, the quotations in AS are not exactly verbatim. 36. Ibid., p. 106. 37. Ibid., p. 105· 38. Ibid., pp. 104-5. 39. Ibid., p. 105· 40. See Kuron's remarks, ibid. 41. Even after two eventful months, Kuron said that such a solution, while absolutely necessary, was still a long way off: interview in Glos Wolny [The Free Voice], October 2, 1981. (This publication, from Gdansk, was in print only during the Solidarity National Congress, September-October 1981.) 42. AS No. 29, p. 105· 43. "Appeal" (Apel) of National Commission of Solidarity, August 12, 1981; published in AS No. 29, as well as in Tygodnik Solidarnosc No. 21, August2l, 1981, p. I. The other quotations in this passage are from this document. For a fuller examination of the "Appeal," see David Ost, "Indispensable Am-

Notes to Pages 132-36 / 245 biguity: Solidarity's Internal Authority Structure," in Studies in Comparative Communism 21:2, Summer 1988. 44. This was especially strong in the west-central city of Mawy. See the "Zycie i Nowoczesno§c" [Modem life] section of Zycie Warszawy, November 5,1981. 45. Zbigniew Kowalewski, "Taktyka Strajku Czynnego" (Tactics of the active strike), inNTO (Warsaw) No. 10, September-October 1981. Kowalewski was one of the few self-proclaimed "revolutionary Marxists" active in Solidarity. He had lived for some years in Cuba and had personal links to the 'frotskyist and anarchist movements in the Iberian world. Conversation with Kowalewski in L6df, November 1981. 46. There were two leadership bodies in Solidarity in late 1981: the National Commission and the Presidium. The National Commission was made up of the leaders of all the regional unions plus individual delegates elected by the union's National Congress as a whole, and included altogether just over a hundred members. The Presidium, which was created after the Bydgoszcz crisis of March 1981, was the National Commission's executive committee, made up of fifteen to twenty members who would stay in Gdansk and work closely with the union president. Although theoretically the Presidium was to be elected by the National Commission, in practice it was hand-picked by the president. Wal{:sa insisted on having it this way, saying that he needed a group of people he could work with. By late 1981 the National Commission had started resembling a parliament whose members held various points of view, with the Presidium as the voice of the governing party. But since the Presidium was an executive body only when the National Commission was not in session, a more apt analogy would compare the National Commission to the Central Committee and the Presidium to the Politburo. In late 1981, the Presidium always stood with Wal{:sa, but the National Commission was increasingly out of his control. 47. Congress Post, supplement, October I, 1981; emphasis added. The Congress Post was published daily, in English, by the Foreign Department of the GdaDsk Solidarity press bureau during the Solidarity National Congress. 48. For the controversy on the decree (Uchwala Nr. 199), see Tygodnik Solidarnosc (Warsaw) and Solidarnosc Dolnoslt;ska (Wroclaw) for October and November 1981. 49. Polityka, October 17,1981, p. 6:4· 50. Waldemar KuczyDski, "Potrzeba antykryzysowa" [Fighting the crisis], in Tygodnik Solitiarnosc No. 32, November 6, 1981. 51. Kuron never developed his neocorporatist ideas in detail, but he hinted at them in several speeches and interviews at the time. Besides his remarks at the mid-August meeting of the Solidarity National Commission (recorded in AS

246 / Notes to Pages 137-42 No. 29 and cited above), see his comments in Glos Wolny, October 2, 1981; and the interview with Kuron in the Polish daily Sztandar Mlodych, [Banner of youth] (Warsaw), November 5, 1981. (The editor of this daily was fired for permitting publication of the interview. It is reprinted in Jacek Kuron, Polityka i Odpowiedzialnosc [Politics and responsibility] (London: Aneks, 1984). 52. Jerzy Holzer, Solidarnosc I98o-I98I (paris: Instytut Literacki, 1984), pp. 317, 324, 328-29. On the Party's idea of "partnership," see Timothy Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution (New York: Scribner's, 1983), chap. 6. 53. This was the statement of Grzegorz Palka, chief of Solidarity's negotiating committee on economic affairs, in rejecting the union's participation in this commission in mid-October 1981. (See Holzer, Solitiarnosc, p. 307.) 54. Solidarity's ambiguous authority structure makes it hard to say whether the strikes were really wildcats. They often had the support of the regional locals, and those locals had often been considered autonomous in the past. Now, however, WaI~sa needed discipline, and so he stressed Solidarity's statutory structure as a centralized union, which would make these strikes wildcats. 55. PAX, from the Latin word for "peace," is an ostensibly Catholic organization, but it has been criticized and even ostracized by the Church. Its founder, and Reiff's predecessor, was Boleslaw Piasecki, a prewar fascist turned Party collaborator. For a history of PAX, see Andrzej Micewski, Wsp6lrzgdzic czy nie klamae?: PAX i Znak w Polsce I945-I976 [To co-govern or refuse to lie: PAX and Znak in Poland] (paris:Libella, 1978). The Council of State (Rada Panstwa) had little real decision-making authority, although it was the body that had to formally declare martial law in December 1981. Reiff was the only member to vote against the declaration of martial law. 56. Conversation with Ryszard Reiff in Warsaw, November 1982. 57. Reiff, "Czy zdolamy zapobiec katastrofie?" 58. See interview with Rakowski in Kultura (Warsaw), August 12, 1981. 59. Reiff, "Czy zdolamy zapobiec katastrofie?" p. I. The Polish phrase is "obok przedstawicieli ukladu wladzy." 60. Ibid., p. 1:2. 61. Ibid., p. 2:1. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid., p. 2:5. 65. Holzer, Solidarnosc, p. 321. 66. Lech WaI~sa, A Time of Hope (New York: Holt, 1987), p. 199. 67. Conversation with Bronislaw Geremek in Warsaw, July 1984. 68. Having been in Poland at the time, I recall that people around Solidarity seemed to be stunned at this propaganda assault, which claimed that tensions were rising daily just when many long and drawn-out strikes had finally been

Notes to Pages 142-48 / 247 settled. In late November some people (including myself) had the experience of reading about the "dangerous situation" in the country and immediately checking the date on the paper to see if we were not reading something from a month or two before! 69. Warsaw shopkeepers at the time told me that the police had virtually stopped responding to calls about trouble in the long lines outside stores. Timothy Garton Ash reports that the government refused a $2,000 interest-free loan from a group of concerned citizens who had read that exactly that sum was needed to restart an idle washing machine plant: The Polish Revolution (New York: Scribners, 1983), p. 240. 70. WaI~sa, Time of Hope, p. 194. 71. Holzer, Solidarnosc, p. 323; WaI~sa, Time of Hope, pp. 198-99. 72. Holzer, Solidarnosc, p. 337. 73· Ibid., p. 339· 74. Quoted in "Ostatnie posiedzenie KK" [The last session of the National Commission), in the samizdatjournalArka (Krak6w) No. I, 1983, p. 4. 75. Ibid., p. 15; Holzer, Solidarnosc, pp. 334-35. 76. "Ostatnie posiedzenie KK," p. 15. 77. Ibid., p. 17; Wiadomosci dnia [News of the day) (Warsaw), December II, 1981, p. I. 78. Solidarity almost always published detailed stenographic reports of National Commission and Presidium meetings, even when these touched upon sensitive matters. The government did not really need to wiretap the meetitig in Radom: If it had waited a week, it would have seen all the "confrontational" comments and choice one-liners reported in Solidarity'S own bulletin, AS. The commitment to internal democracy was so great that at the Warsaw regional Solidarity conference held one week before martial law, Zbigniew Bujak told the delegates that if Solidarity was forced to decide on confrontation, the motion would first be presented to the factory locals for a two-week-Iong discussion! No one asked what the opponent state would be doing during these two weeks. 79. WaI~sa, Time of Hope, p. 193· 80. Kuron developed these ideas brilliantly in an interview in February 198 I-brilliantly, but at the same time tragically, because it was now clear to him that many of the old hopes were no longer viable. Rather than cause disappointment, Kuron forbade publication of the interview. It was published only after the imposition of martial law, under the title "Nie do druku" [Not for publication), in Kuron, Polityka. 81. Reiff, "Czy Zdolamy zapobiec katastrofie?" p. 2:2.

248 / Notes to Pages 150-58

CHAPTER SEVEN: The Poverty of Martial Law I. Matgorzata Melchior, a member of the 1981 research team headed by Alain Touraine, reported to me that the miners at "Wujek," where the tragedy took place, had told her months earlier that if it came to confrontation, they would not sit on the sidelines: they wanted to prove to the population that the miners were not a privileged caste who cared only about themselves. 2. English texts of this exchange of letters were published in Labour Focus on Eastern Europe (London) 5:3-4, Summer 1982. 3. See the description of this and other activities of the underground in a remarkable publication, Konspira: Rzecz 0 podziemnej Solidarnosci [Conspiracy: a treatise on underground Solidarity] (London: Puis, 1986). First published underground in Poland (forthcoming in English translation by Jane Care, University of California Press), the book consists of detailed discussions with leaders of the Solidarity underground, recorded and even published while they were still in hiding, where they talk openly about many aspects of their work. Solidarity's unprecedented commitment to openness continued even when it went underground! 4. For more on the October and November strikes, see David Ost, "November 1982: Opposition at a Thrning Point," in Poland Watch (Washington, D.C.) No.2, 1983. 5. For excerpts from the indictment, see "The Indictment Against KOR," in Poland Watch NO.4, 1983. No formal indictment was prepared for the other set of charges. The KOR trial began in 1984, but was quickly dismissed due to an official amnesty. See Jane Cave, "Amnesty for Political Prisoners," in Poland Watch No.6, 1984. 6. Jerzy Throwicz, "Jaki B¢Zie Ten Kraj?" [What is the future of this country?], in TygodnikPowszechny (Krakow) July 31,1983, p. I. 7. Tygodnik Powszechny, August 28,1983. 8. On Church-Solidarity relations in the final weeks before martial law, see Andrzej Micewski, "Kosci610strzegal 'Solidarnosc' " [The Church warned "Solidarity"], in Znaki Czasu [Signs of the time] (Vienna) NO.3, 1987; reprinted in Polityka, November 14, 1987. Micewski, a close associate of Glemp's, was responding to criticism made by Solidarity leader Karol Modzelewski, published underground in 1985 and reprinted in Zeszyty Historyczne [Historical Notebooks] (Paris) No. 70, 1987. See also Daniel Passent, "Mi{:dzy Kosciolem a Solidamosci~" [Between the Church and Solidarity], in Polityka, March 19, 1988. 9. This assessment of the attitude of the time is based on personal conversations. For more on the Church and the opposition in late 1982, see Ost, "November 1982."

Notes to Pages 159-64 / 249 10. See Sprawy i Ludzie [Affairs and People] (Wroclaw), June 7, 1984. A fuller discussion is in David Ost, "Poland Revisited: Normalization and Opposition," in Poland Watch NO.7, 1985. I I. Interview with Interior Minister Czeslaw Kiszczak on Polish television, September II, 1986, reprinted in Uncensored Poland News Bulletin (London) No. 18, September 23, 1986, p. 15. 12. On the polite nature of most of these interrogations, see the account in Tygodnik Mazowsze [Mazowsze Weekly] (Warsaw) No. 181, September 24, 1986, summarized by Anna Pomian in Uncensored Poland No. 18, p. 2528. For an English translation of a sample copy of Tygodnik Mazowsze, see "Mazowsze Weekly" in Poland Watch No.6, 1984. 13. See Anna Pomian's summary of opposition views in Radio Free Europe Research, Polish Independent Press Review No. 13, November 10, 1986, pp. 38. This publication will be referred to below as RFE Press Review. 14. Tygodnik Mazowsze No. 181, September 24, 1986, quoted in RFE Press Review No. 13, p. 4. 15. Tygodnik Mazowsze No. 182, October I, 1986; quoted in RFE Press Review No. 13, p. 20. 16. Kuron in Tygodnik Mazowsze No. 182, October I, 1986 (summarized in RFE Press Review No. 13, p. 21). Also see Henryk Wujec's article in Tygodnik Mazowsze No. 185, October 22, 1986, where he laments the animosities and confusion rife at all levels of union work (summarized in RFE Press Review No. 14, December 12, 1986, p. 19). 17. Tygodnik Mazowsze No. 181, October I, 1986. 18. He did so at a public debate held in a church meeting hall in November 1987; cited in Tygodnik Mazowsze No. 227, November I I, 1987; English version in Uncensored Poland News Bulletin No. I, January 8, 1988, p. 15. 19. On Solidarity's crisis in this period, see the extremely interesting discussion with Krzysztof Wolicki, Warsaw correspondent for Le Matin de Paris, published in the Paris emigre Solidarity journal Kontakt No. 67, November 1987, pp. 5-21. On the relationship between the Polish and Western peace movements, see the exchange of letters between KOS and END, in END (London) December 1983/January 1984; also, the exchange between Timothy Garton Ash and E. P. Thompson, in the Spectator (London), August 21 and October 30, 1982; Thompson's piece is reprinted in his book The Heavy Dancers (New York: Pantheon, 1985). Also see Andrzej Tymowski, "Underground Solidarity and the Western Peace Movement," in Poland Watch NO.5, 1984; interviews with Polish peace activists by Franek Michalski, "Conversations with the Polish Underground," in New Politics (New York) 1:2, Winter 1987, and same author's article on the Polish Freedom and Peace movement, "ViPing Poland into Shape," The Nation, May 23, 1987. For an interesting discussion in

250 / Notes to Pages 164-67 the Polish underground press, see the exchange between Ivan Slinkman (of the United States) and Dawid Warszawski in Vacat (Warsaw) No. 21, SeptemberOctober 1984. Both names are pseudonyms. 20. The first attempt to register a Solidarity local occurred in November 1986. The first comments by the national leadership came in AugustSeptember 1987. See Maria Zagorska, "The Campaign to Register Solidarity Chapters: Background" and "Recent Developments," in RFE Press Review NO·4, May 18, 1988, pp. 15-23. 21. The view that KOR and Solidarity were "communist" organizations had long been argued by the extreInist, anti-SeInitic, eInigre right, in a venomous and obscurantist style that is completely different from the critique of Solidarity discussed here. The scurrilous J¢rzej Giertych, for example, writes that the union was created and doIninated by the "Jewish Trotskyite Zionists" of KOR, which was an organization of "unsatisfied communists." See Opoka [Bedrock] (London) No. 29, November 1987, pp. 32-34, passim. 22. Andrzej Walicki, "Mysli 0 sytuacji politycznej i moralno-psychologicznej w Polsce [Thoughts on the political and moral-psychological situation in Poland], in Aneks (London) No. 35, 1984. Also, see his "Liberalism in Poland," in Critical lTU/uiry (Chicago) 15:2, Winter 1988. 23. Ibid., p. 103. 24. Ibid., p. 100. 25. Ibid. 26. Piotr Wierzbicki, Mysli staroswieckiego Polaka [Thoughts of an oldfashioned Pole] (London: Puls, 1985), p. 49. 27· Ibid., p. 77. 28. Replika (an underground Solidarity journal from Lower Silesia) No. 48, Spring 1986; summarized by Anna Pomian in RFE Press Review No. 14, December 12,1986, p. 14. 29. Readers' comments in Baza No. 10 (36), 1986; summarized by Nina Krzeczunowicz in RFE Press Review No. I, January 30, 1987, p. 14. 30. "Jakiej prawicy nam potrzeba?" [What kind of right do we need?], in Polityka Polska [Polish politics] (Warsaw) No.6, June 1984. 31. S. Zelazny, "Lewica-kryzyz toi:samosci" [The left-a crisis ofidentity], in Krytyka (Warsaw) No. 18, 1984, p. 74. 32. Warszawski was the chief writer for the Warsaw underground journal KOS. He was the only prominent Solidarity writer to publicly denounce the U.S. invasion of Grenada in October 1983. For a strong theoretical critique of the right, and a discussion of the meaning of the terms "left" and "right" in the Polish context, see his "Wobec Prawicy" (Concerning the right) in Aneks (London) No. 40, 1985.

Notes to Pages 168-75 / 251 33. On the change in Solidarity's understanding of the concept of citizenship, see David Ost, "The Transformation of Solidarity and the Future of Central Europe," in Telos No. 79, Spring 1989. 34. Jerzy Strzelecki, Teoria Praw Wlasnosci: geneza, podstawowe pojrcia i twierdzenia; uwagi 0 zastosowaniu do analizy gospodarki socjalistycznej [Property rights theory: origins, basic ideas and claims; notes on its application to the analysis of the socialist economy] (Warsaw: SGPiS [Main School of Planning and Statistics] 1984). This influential paper was presented to a conference on "Systems of Property" held at Warsaw's Main School of Planning and Statistics in July 1984. 35. Jadwiga Staniszkis, "For a Theory of 'Real Socialism,' " in Labour Focus on Eastern Europe 9:2, July-October 1987, pp. 17-21. 36. Aleksander Smolar, "Polska Opozycja" [The Polish Opposition], manuscript delivered at 1987 National Conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, p. 44. 37. Stanowisko NSZZ Solidarnost w sprawie gospodarczej polskiej [Solidarity's position on the Polish economy]. See the summary of this statement in Kontakt (Paris) Nos. 63-64, July-August 1987, pp. 57-59. 38. Tygodnik Mazowsze No. 212, May 20, 1987. 39. Text of this letter in Uncensored Poland News Bulletin, No. 19, September29, 1987, pp. 16-17. 40. Text of Provisional Council Statement on Economic Reform in ibid., No. 20, October 14, 1987, pp. IO-II. 41. Marian Jurczyk, "Divide et impera." See translation in Uncensored Poland News Bulletin No.8, April 29, 1988, p. II. 42. William Echikson, in Christian Science Monitor, November 17, 1987, p.lO. 43. Polityka, January 2, 1988, p. 2:3. 44. Ibid., January 16, 1988, p. 4. 45. Konfrontacje (Warsaw) February 1988. 46. For an account of the KIK meeting, see Ewa Berberyusz, "Rada" [Council] in KOS Nos. 106-107, December 8, 1986. 47. Nor did the government pretend that self-management councils existed. By late 1986, most large industrial enterprises in Warsaw still lacked self-management councils because not enough people were interested in forming one. See Stanislaw Podemski, "Linia ci,gla" [Straight line], in Polityka, November 1,1986. 48. Ibid., p. 11:4. The passage in question here was a quotation from a Soviet professor, saying that Poles should know the truth about the Katyn massacre.

252

I Notes to Pages 175-80

49. "Siodme posiedzenie Rady Konsultacyjnej" [Seventh Session of the Council], in Rada Narodowa, Wydanie Specjalne [National Council, special edition] (Warsaw) NO.7, June 29, 1988, p. 22:3. 50. Tygodnik Mazowsze No. 220, September 16, 1987; translated in Uncensored Poland News Bulletin No. 22, November 13, 1987, p. 36. 51. See Deputy Ryszard Bender's comments to the Sejm, November 19, 1987, in Trybuna Ludu, November 20, 1987. Bender's remarks focused specifically on the fact that the government called for a vote on the nomination immediately after introducing Letowska, not allowing a wide discussion of her qualifications. 52. Polityka, September 15, 1988, p. 2. 53. For a detailed look at Polish censorship instructions from the I970s, see Jane L. Curry, ed., Black Book of Polish Censorship (New York: Random House, 1983). 54. Adam Michnik, "Wij,:cej marze6!" [More dreams], in Tygodnik Powszechny, April 24, 1988, and May I, 1988. 55. Justyn Sobol, "List Rzecznika Prasowego GUKPiW" [Letter of publication board press spokesman], in Lad [Order] (Warsaw), December 6, 1987, P·3· 56. Minister of Culture Aleksander Krawczuk, speaking at a press conference and quoted in the "Obraz Tygodnia" [View of the Week] column of Tygodnik Powszechny, February 15, 1987, p. I. 57. Marcin Kr61, "Inny kraj" [Another country], in Res Publica (Warsaw) No. I, June 1987, pp. 19-24. 58. See, for example, the discussion in Polityka, October 10 and October 17, 1988; or Aleksander Hall's article, "Dostrzeganie reali6w" [Recognizing realities], in Tygodnik Powszechny, October 30, 1988, p. I. Hall is a very prominent opposition leader, head of the conservative Young Poland Movement in the 1970S and briefly active in the underground of 1982, with extensive access to the official Catholic press. 59. Interview with Professor Klemens Szaniawski, in Konfrontacje, June 1988, p. 6. Stefan Kisie1ewski is a prominent conservative journalist, a columnist for Tygodnik Powszechny, and active in public life since the 1930S. Henryk Samsonowicz is a professor at Warsaw University, where he was elected rector in 1981, a post from which he was dismissed during martial law. 60. Jacek Kur06, "Landscape After the Battle," in Uncensored Poland News Bulletin No. 23, November 30, 1987, p. 28. (Translation of "Krajobraz po bitwie," Tygodnik Mazowsze No. 219, September 2, 1987.) 61. Ibid., p. 27. 62. Ibid., p. 28. 63. Ibid. Cons~tative

Notes to Pages 180-91 / 253 64. Ibid., p. 30. 65. Polityka, January 2, 1988, p. 2. 66. Interview with Bronislaw Geremek, KonJrontacje, February 1988. 67. Henryk Wujec, "Leckcja ostatnich tygodni" [Lessons of recent weeks], in Tygodnik Mazowsze No. 251, May 18, 1988. He cited Nowa Huta as a place where local Solidarity organizers distrusted those who went on strike. 68. Jacek Kuron draws attention to the pervasiveness of these charges in his article "Zdobyc rnilczl!ca wi~kszosc" [Winning the silent majority], in Tygodnik Mazowsze, No. 252, May 25, 1988, p. 2. For one such accusation see Andrzej Laszcz's piece in the Wroclaw underground journal Obecnosf: [Presence] No. 21, 1988. 69. Uncensored Poland News Bulletin NO.4, February 19, 1988, p. 14. 70. Polityka, July 16, 1988, p. 3. 71. See discussion in Polityka, October 15, 1988, pp. 1,4. 72. Interview with Lech Wal~sa, in KonJrontacje, September 1988, p. 7:1. The interview (the first legally published interview with Wal~sa since December 1981) was conducted immediately after the end of the strikes. Its publication in the official press was initially held up, then allowed on the intervention of a high-ranking Politburo member. 73· Polityka, September 17,1988 , p. 3· 74. Trybuna Ludu, December 5, 1988. CHAPTER EIGHT: The Viability of an Accord I. See, for example, the interview with Wal~sa in KonJrontacje (Warsaw) NO.9, September 1988; the interview with Geremek, ibid., February 1988; and the interview with Bugaj in Lad [Order] (Warsaw), July 31, 1988. 2. A full interview with Kuklinski can be found in Kultura (Paris) NO.4, April 1987; an abbreviated English-language version was published in Orbis (Philadelphia) 32: I, Winter 1988. 3. Lech Wal~sa reports that when he saw Tadeusz Fiszbach and Jerzy Kolodziejski (heads of the Gdansk Party and government, respectively) only hours after the declaration of martial law, both were visibly surprised by what had just happened: A Time oJHope (New York: Holt, 1987), pp. 208-10. 4. See Ewa Hauser's interview with Bi!kowski in Poland Watch (Washington, D.C.) No.6, 1984: "Pawei Bi!kowski: Underground Publishing," pp. 41-62. My account is also based on my own discussions with Bi!kowski in Amherst, Massachusetts, December 1988. 5. Jackson Diehl, Washington Post reporter, speaking on National Public Radio, "All Things Considered," December 1988. 6. This became the position of some Solidarity commentators. See, for

254 / Notes to Pages 192-96 example, Witold Gadomski, "Od dolu czy od g6ry?" [Bottom up or top down?] in Lad, July 3, 1988; translated in Uncensored Poland News Builtin (London) No. 15, August 18, 1988. 7. In Yugoslavia, for example, Gorbachev readily agreed to eliminate from the final communique such codewords for intervention as "socialist internationalism" and "comradely relations." William Echikson, "Taking Glasnost on the Road," in Christian Science Monitor, March 16, 1988, p. I. 8. See Morris Bomstein, "East-West Relations and Soviet-East European Economic Relations," in U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Soviet Economy in a Time o/Change, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1979). 9. In 1947, for example, the Soviet Union vetoed Poland's and Czechoslovakia's requests to participate in the Marshall Plan and to join the International Monetary Fund. For more, see David Ost, "Socialist World Market as Strategy for Ascent?" in Edward Friedman, ed., Ascent and Decline in the World-System (Los Angeles: Sage, 1982). 10. One good report on these citizens' initiatives is James Weinstein, "Living Perestroika," in In These Times (Chicago), December 21, 1988-January 10, 1989, pp. 11-13. II. English translation in Soviet Review 27:4, Winter 1986-1987. Russian original published in 1985. 12. Ibid., p. 26. 13. One of the first and best critiques of the nomenklatura system was in Izvestiya, January 13, 1987. See Current Digest of the Soviet Press 39:3, 1987, pp.6-7· 14. Bernard Guetta, "Le pluralisme syndical n'est pas une heresie," in Le Monde, September 7,1988. 15. Valosag [Reality] (Budapest) No. 12, 1986. The title of the article translates as "Alternatives for political reform." I am grateful to Miklos Sukosd for pointing out and summarizing this article for me. 16. "Nowy styl" (New style), in Tygodnik Mazowsze No. 254, June 8, 1988. The Catholic opposition paper Tygodnik Powszechny has also written favorably about Pozsgay. 17. The formerly interned oppositionist was Ryszard Kardasz from Tamobrzeg. See the interview with him in Polityka, July 23, 1988, p. 6. On the Polish Ecological Club, see Sabine Rosenbladt's excellent piece on the ecological crisis in Poland: "Is Poland Lost?" in Greenpeace (Washington, D.C.), NovemberDecember 1988. Solidarity formally boycotted the 1988 elections, but even the underground press occasionally supported oppositionists who decided to run on their own. See "Wybory w Fajslawicach" [Elections in Fajslawice] in the underground Przeglr;d Wiadomosci Agencyjnych [News Agency Review] (Warsaw) No. 22, June I, 1988.

Notes to Pages 197-206 / 255 18. Timothy Garton Ash, "The Empire in Decay," in New York Review

of Books, September 29, 1988, p. 56. This is part I of a three-part series on reform in Eastern Europe. 19. John Coverdale, The Political Transformation of Spain After Franco (New York: Praeger, 1979), p. 13. 20. Witold Gadomski's interview with Zdzislaw Sadowski, in Lad, January 3,1988. 21. "Dlaczego nie wchod~ do rz~u Rakowskiego" [Why I'm not entering Rakowski's government], interview with Aleksander Paszy6.ski in Tygodnik Mazowsze No. 266, October 5, 1988. On Paszy6.ski's activity as chairman of the Warsaw Economic Association, see "Pogoda dla biznesmen6w," [Climate for businessmen], an interview with Paszy6.ski in the official Tygodnik Kulturalny [Cultural weekly] (Warsaw), November 6, 1988. 22. Leszek Kolakowski, "Totalitarianism and the Virtue of the Lie," in Irving Howe, ed., I9B4 Revisited (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), p. 134. 23. Ivan Szelenyi, "The Prospects and Limits of the East European New Class Project," in Politics and Society (Madison, Wisc.) 15:2, 1986-1987. 24. Interview with Walt:sa, Konfrontacje, p. 7:3. 25. Personal communication from Dawid Warszawski. 26. Conversation with Strzelecki, Warsaw, September 1982. 27. Moshe Lewin argues the same as far as the Soviet Union is concerned. See his book, The Gorbachev Phenomenon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 28. As a leading theoretician for the PZPR noted in early 1988: "Today in Poland there are political features that, ten and even five years ago, would have sounded heretical or utopian. And in five or ten years there will be features that seem heretical or utopian today." Interview with Ludwik Krasucki, in Konfrontacje NO.2, February 1988, p. 9. 29. As Timothy Garton Ash writes, "It would be amusing, although perhaps a little cruel, to compile a small anthology of statements from Soviet and East European experts of the form 'what is unthinkable is ... ' or 'one thing is certain .. .' ": "The Empire in Decay," p. 53. 30. Kolakowski, "Totalitarianism," p. 134. 31. "Was the Spanish Civil War 'Our Cause'? An Exchange Between Irving Howe and Ronald Radosh," in Dissent, Winter 1987. 32. Szelenyi, "New Class Project," p. 140. EPILOG: The New Solidarity I. For more on these developments, see David Ost, "The Transformation of Solidarity and the Future of Central Europe," in Telos No. 79, Spring 1989. 2. See Konstanty Gebert, "Warunki powrotu" (Conditions for return), in

256 /

Notes to Pages 208-12

KOS (Warsaw) No.6 (156), March 12, 1989, p. 12. As Gebert, Warszawski has been a prominent Jewish scholar and activist. Gebert has lectured in Poland on the Kaballah and other topics of Jewish history. In 1979, he helped organize the discussion club known as the Jewish Flying University, which met regularly until the imposition of martial law. 3. "Ostatni moment na powr6t" (Last chance for a comeback), an interview with Maciej Jankowski, member of Warsaw Solidarity leadership, inArka (Krak6w) No. 24, 1988, p. 69. 4. Michael D. Kennedy, "Polish Engineers' Participation in the Solidarity Movement," in Social Forces (Chapel Hill) 65: 3, March 1987. 5. This account is based on an unpublished stenographic report of the meeting of the Gda6.sk Interfactory Organizing Committee (MKO) on January 16, 1989. Responding to the charge of dictatorship, Wal~sa said, "that's just the way it's got to be." Solidarity, as the transcript shows, has preserved its policy of openness at even the most controversial meetings. 6. See Anna Pomian's account in Radio Free Europe's Polish Independent Press Review NO.1, February 9,1989, pp. 15-20. 7. "Spory w Solidarnosci" (Conflicts in Solidarity), in Polityka, January 14, 1989, p. 6. 8. See Witold Pasek's report of Wal~sa's visit in Bydgoszcz, "Rulewski, nie przeszkadzaj!" (Don't obstruct us, Rulewski), in Gazeta Wyborcza [Election News] (Warsaw), May 23, 1989, p. 5. On the situation in L6di, see Krzysztof Krubski, " 'Poziomki' w Solidarnosci" ("Levellers" in Solidarity), inPolityka, June 24, 1989, p. 3. 9. In the few places where the Working Group did run candidates, it lost to official Solidarity candidates. The Group's potential strength, however, is in the factories, not in the electorate as a whole. 10. "Na posiedzeniu KKW" (At the meeting of the KKW), in Tygodnik Mazowsze No. 279, January 25,1989, p. 2:1. 11. Comments of Wladyslaw Martyniuk, speaking at the March 6, 1989, meeting of the economic committee of the Round Table. (Unpublished stenographic report is in my possession, p. 73.) 12. Ibid., p. 76. 13. These are the comments of Krak6w Party theorist Bronislaw Lagowski. "For many years," says Lagowski, "the Party has understood socialism as the negation of capitalism, or as anti-capitalism .... This is the conception of socialism that has led the Party to its present state [of crisis]." Comments in "Wyzwania dla partii" (Challenges for the party), a discussion published in Zdanie [Opinion] (Krak6w), February 1989, p. 12. For more on Lagowski, see Andrzej Walicki, "Liberalism in Poland," in Critical Inquiry (Chicago) 15:2, Winter 1988.

Notes to Pages 213-20 I 257 14. "Will 'radical' refonns truly help solve existing social problems," Kociolek asks demagogically, "or will they just help the 'enterprising' elite more rapaciously appropriate the national wealth, while pushing working people deeper into the abyss of crushing inflation?" Stanislaw Kociolek, "0 'Okr,giy St6I' w Partii" (The "Round Table" in the Party), inZycie Literackie (Krak6w) , January 29, 1989. 15. A Krak6w newspaper reported the closing of one seventy-five-year old hospital when its plumbing completely broke down, leaving tens of thousands of residents in Nowy Targ and surrounding areas without any hospital at all. Dziennik Polski (Krak6w), August 29-30, 1987, p. I. 16. Figures on Gdansk were obtained from a personal visit to local headquarters on March 23, 1989. Warsaw figures are from Jan Litynski, "An Historic Thming Point," in New Politics (New York) 2:3, Summer 1989, p. 119. 17. Adam Michnik, "Widmo krl!iy po Europie" (A specter is haunting Europe), in Gazeta Wyborcza, May 9,1989, p. 3. Gwiazda's comment is from a personal conversation I had with him in Gdansk, March 23, 1989. 18. See the exchange on the anti-abortion bill in Solidarity's Gazeta Wyborcza, May 18, 1989, p. 3. The supporter of the new law states that "no one must be allowed to kill a human being," while the opponent focuses his remarks on the political context of the bill's submission. 19. Michnik first mentioned this in a 1987 essay, "Klopot" (Troubles), written as part of a Festschrift for Leszek Kolakowski on his sixtieth birthday, Obecnosc [Presence] (London: Aneks, 1987). An English version is to be published as appendix to my translation of Michnik's Church and the Left: A Dialog (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). Michnik frequently warned against "Iranization" in his television appearances during the 1989 Round Table discussions. 20. When asked about the Berlin Wall during his June 1989 trip to West Gennany, Gorbachev remarked that nothing should be considered eternal. POSTSCRIPT I. See interview with Henryk Wujec in Harper's, December 1989, my translation. The Polish original appeared in Tygodnik Powszechny, August 13, 1989. 2. New York Times, October 26, 1989, p. I. 3. Michnik discusses the important role of WifZ in his Kosci61-Lewica -Dialog [The Church and the left: A dialog], forthcoming English translation from University of Chicago Press. 4. Comments by Solidarity adviser Jan Olszewski, quoted in Polityka, September 23, 1989, p. 2:4.

258 /

Notes to Pages 220-21

5. Tygodnik Solidarnosc No. 19 (56), October 6, 1989, p. 15:2. 6. "Szukanie wyjscia" [Seeking a way out], in Tygodnik Solidarnosc No. 15 (52), September 8, 1989, p. I. 7. See discussion in Tygodnik Solidarnosc No. 19 (56), October 6, 1989. This was the last issue under the editorial staff put together by Mazowiecki.

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259

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Index

Abortion, 159, 214, 25In.18 Active strike, 132-33 Actors' strike (1982), 157-58 Agencja Solidarrwsc, 13, 243n.14 Albania, 122 Amnesty: of 1984, 154, 159; of 1986, 149, 159, 160-61 Anti-crisis pact, 181, 183-84. See also Neocorporatism; Round Table negotiations; 1i"ipartism Anti-politics: definition of, 1-5, 14-17; inadequacy of, 76-77,109,146-48, 187; legacy of, 203-4; opposition embrace of, 30-32, 58-70, 75-78. See also Civil society; Public sphere Anti-semitism, 49-51, 52 "Appeal to Society" (August 1981), 132-33, 135 Arato, Andrew, 119 Arendt,fmnnah,4,23,31-32 Ascherson, Neil, 8 August Accords (1980): government acceptance of, 97-100; govermnent resistance to, 79-97; limitations of, 84, 104, 123; and opposition's surprise, 73, 77-78, 98; signing of, 75, 88-90. See also Gdatisk Accord; Jastrzt:bie Accord; Katowice Accord; Szczecin Accord Austria, 215 Bpkowski, Pawel, 191 Baluka, Edmund, 56 Barcelona, 10, 147 Barcikowski, Kazimierz, 86, 89, 99 Bauman, Zygmunt, 58 Berkeley Free Speech Movement, 3

Berlin, Sir Isaiah, 65 Bialystok, 92-93 Bielinski, Konrad, 13, 163 Blumsztajn, Seweryn, 3, 13-14 Bolivia, 219 Borusewicz, Bogdan, 210, 224-25n.22 Brezhnev, Leonid, 154 Brezhnev Doctrine, 73; demise of, 19297, 214-15,219 Brus, Wlodzimierz, 58 Brych, Janusz, 88 Bugaj, Ryszard, 168, 190, 253n.1 Bujak, Zbigniew, 14, 151-52; before martial law, 144, 247n.78; in late 1980s, 163,220; underground activity of, 151-52, 160, 189-91 Bukovsky, Vladimir, 7 Bydgoszcz, 125, 175,211; and "Bydgoszcz crisis," 125-26 Campaign for Peace and Democracy, 164 Catholic Church: relations with Solidarity, 16, 156-58,214; relations with state, 38, 44, 116, 156-59; and Tripartism, III, 139-40, 143, 157,207. See also Tripartism Catholic Intellectuals Clubs (KIK), 157, 173-75 Catholic press, 44, 176. See also Tygodnik Powszechny

Censorship, 126, 176-78 Central Trade Union Council. See Official unions "Charter 77," 31 ChIS Guevara, 12 Chile, 12 Chirot, Daniel, 1I5

272 / Index Chojecki, Miroslaw, 13 Church. See Catholic Church CIA, 190 Civil society: and capitalism, 22-24, 30, 168; concept of, explained, 1921; as goal of opposition, 4-5, 16, 30-32,56-70,103,203; and martiallaw, 155-56; during 1980-1981, 70-72,76-78,97, 146-48, 180;official acceptance of, 179-80, 183; and Spanish model, 198-201; and state socialism, 24-30, 38-39, 66; and USSR, 194-95. See also Anti-politics Club of the Crooked Circle, 47, 230n.31 Cohen, Jean, 26 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 3, 10 "Commandos," 51 Common Market, 215 Constitution, Polish: 1975 changes in, 12, 193; and Solidarity, 84, 87-88, 140-41 Cooperatives, 37, 44-45,132,168 Corporatism. See Neocorporatism; State corporatism Cost-of-Iiving riders, 2II-12 Council of Europe, 215 Council of Ministers, 96 Council of State, 98, 240n.65 Crick, Bernard, 4, 5 CTUC. See Official unions Cyrankiewicz, J6zef, 40, 48, 49 Czechoslovakia: effects on Poland, of Soviet invasion of, 2, 33-34, 49, 58; opposition in, 6, 31 Czyrek, J6zef, 181, 183-84 Damton, John, 8 December events (Poland, 1970), 52, 58, III, 150 Democracy, parliamentary: on limitations of, 65, II8-19; questions of attainability, 72, II3-14, 196-97,202. See also Anti-politics; Neocorporatism Democracy, participatory, 4, 7-10, 14-

16,65-70,103,146-48, 203-4. See also Anti-politics; Civil society;

Public sphere Democratic Party (Polish), 36, 206, 218 Detente, 55 DobraczyDski, Jan, 230n.28 Dutschke, Rudi, 3 Economic crisis, 55; political implications of, no, 126, 130, 221 Economic reform, political implications of, 136, 168-69, 182-84, 199-200, 209-13 Egalitarianism, 108-9, 135, 166, 210-12 Elections: of 1947, 26; of 1957, 45; of 1989, 205-7,217 END (British Campaign for European Nuclear Disarmament), 164 Environmental issues, 176, 180, 186, 196, 213, 254fi.17 Europe, integration of, 214-15 Experience and Future group, 175-76 Experts: in 1980 strikes, 83-84, 87, 90; role of, according to Kolakowski, 59, 60 Falange Party (Spain), 198, 199 Farmers' union, 125, 132 Fiszbach, Tadeusz, III, 253n.3 "Flying University," 70 Food shortages, 121, 127 France (1968), 6, 10, 147 Francoism, 198-99 Frankfurt School, 31 Frasyniuk, Wladyslaw, 154, 161, 175, 220-21 Freedom and Peace Movement (WiP), 164 Free Saturdays: dispute over, 122-24, 243n.21; sacrifice of, 132-33, 134, 135 "Free Trade Unions" (1978), II, 12-13, 70, 193; in USSR, 193 Front of National Accord, 137

Index / 273 Garton Ash, Timothy, 7,8,197 Garwolin, 158 Gdansk: local authorities in, 137, 190, 201; strikes in 1970-1971, 10,52, 55; strikes in 1980, 8-9, 13, 73, 75, 77,80-86,88-89; strikes in 1982, 153; strikes in 1988, 182-84,2078; strikes in 1989, 209-10. See also 1970 events (Poland) Gdansk Accord: implications of, 71, 98, 116, 129-30; preamble of, 76, 84, 237n.21; provisions of, 85-86, 88, 101,102,122; signing of, 89, 238n.30 Gdynia, 52, 81. See also 1970 events (Poland) Gebert, Konstanty. See Warszawski, Dawid Geopolitics, as constraint on Solidarity, 68, 113, 117, 125, 126, 199 Geremek, Bronislaw: and anti-crisis pact, 141, 145, 172, 181, 190; in 1981, 134, 145; on 1987 referendum, 170; and Solidarity Citizens Committee, 186 Gierek, Edward, 52, 67, 76, 83; policies of, 55, 116, 192-93 Glemp, Cardinal J6zef, 138, 157-58, 189 Gluski, Krzysztof, 92 Gomulka, Wladyslaw, 33,41-47,50,52, 53, 93; and revisionism, 40-49 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 42; and democratization of East Europe, 192, 194, 199, 215,219,254fi·7 Gramsci, Antonio, 31 Greens: in Germany, 6, 31; in Poland, 196 Grotowski, Jerzy, 4, 47 Gwiazda, Andrzej: and martial law, 154; in 1980-1981,76,85, 134, 135; as opponent of 1989 Solidarity, 210, 214. See also Working Group of Solidarity Habermas,JOrgen,4-5,20-2I,23-24, 32

Haim, Franciszek, 90 Harassment of Solidarity activists (1980), 90-93 Hayden, Tom, 3 Hegel, G. W. F., 23, 24-25, 27-28 Hirszowicz, Maria, 58 IDasko, Marek, 47 Hochfeld, Julian, 40 Holzer, Jerzy, 144, 172 Hungary: and new Europe, 215; in 1945, 34; in 1956, 42, 58; reforms in, oflate 1980s, 196, 202, 219 Independent self-governing trade unions, name, 237n.21 Independent Student Association, 128 Intellectuals: and Gomulka, 41, 45-49; and martial law, 155-56; in 1968, 49-52, 23In.36; and reform in late 1980s, 176-79. See also Experts; Revisionism International Monetary Fund, 170,215, 254n ·9 Jablonski, Henryk, III Jagielski, Mieczyslaw, 81-83, 85, 86, 98 Jaruzelski, General Wojciech: and Consultative Council, 173, 175; and martial law, 143-44, 151; and 1989 reforms, 212-13, 217, 218, 219; and Solidarity, 137, 138, 205; and USSR, 205 Jasienica, Pawel, 48 Jas~bie Accord, 90, 122, 239n.40 Jaworski, Seweryn, 144, 154, 163 Jedlicki, Witold, 229n. IS, 230n.31 Jewish Flying University, 255n.2 Jews, in 1968, 49-51 Jurczyk, Marian: and criticism of new Solidarity, 169,210; and martial law, 154; in 1980-1981, 86,134, 135. See also Working Group of Solidarity Kacala, Andrzej, 127-28

274 / Index Kaczmarski, Jacek, II3, 147 Kania, Stanislaw, 76, 99, 123 Kantor, Tadeusz, 4, 47 Kapuscinski, Ryszard, 8-9, 10 Katowice Accord, 90, 122 Khrushchev, Nikita, 42 Kijowski, Janusz, 223n-4 KIK. See Catholic Intellectuals Clubs Kisielewski, Stefan, 178, 252n.59 Kiszczak, General Czeslaw: and amnesty, 160; and negotiations with Walc