Polish labor before and after solidarity

International Labor and Working-Class History

Volumn , Issue 50, 1996, Pages 29-43

  Ost, David ^a  

^a HOBART AND WILLIAM SMITH COLLEGES   (United States)

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Indexed keywords

EID: 0030495126     PISSN: 01475479     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0147547900013193     Document Type: Article

References (8)

1. Union acceptance of the loss of workers' rights is amply borne out by a 1994 research project undertaken by Marc Weinstein and David Ost. Trade unionists surveyed in ninety-five industrial enterprises throughout Poland revealed general acquiescence to the erosion of employee participation in the workplace and to the decline in the social welfare net. See David Ost and Marc Weinstein, "The Emergence of New Enterprise Institutions in Post-Communist Poland," a set of two research reports (1995, 1996) submitted to the National Council for Soviet and Eastern European Research, which generously funded the project. Papers for publication are in process.
2. Here I adopt Victoria Hattam's notion that working-class consciousness entails recognition of its subordinate role in relationship to capital. American labor, she argues, developed class consciousness only when it gave up illusions about changing capitalism and devoted its efforts to getting a better deal within it. Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States (Princeton, 1993), 137-38, 204-15.
3. Polish labor history is guilty, as Joan Scott has put it, of telling "a fiction about a universal subject whose universality was achieved through implicit processes of differentiation, marginalization, and exclusion." Scott is cited in Anson Rabinbach, "Intellectual Shift or Paradigm Shift?," International Labor and Working-Class History 46 (Fall 1994):77. This deficiency has not yet been addressed in the literature. A crucial difference, however, is that in Poland this historical subject was universalized not by labor historians but by the state. Male industrial laborers were central to patriotic mythology, and were heroes not of labor history but of state history.
4. This is the term used by George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi in their The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (New York, 1979), referring chiefly to technocratic intellectuals, those who legitimate power through knowledge. Michael D. Kennedy calls them "professionals": Kennedy, Professionals, Power, and Solidarity in Poland (Cambridge, 1991). Roman Laba and Lawrence Goodwyn seem to use the term "intellectuals" to refer both to technocratic and to creative intellectuals such as writers and artists. Laba, The Roots of Solidarity: A Political Sociology of Poland's Working-Class Democratization (Princeton, 1991); Lawrence Goodwyn, Breaking the Barrier: The Rise of Solidarity in Poland (New York, 1991).
5. This is the term used by George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi in their The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (New York, 1979), referring chiefly to technocratic intellectuals, those who legitimate power through knowledge. Michael D. Kennedy calls them "professionals": Kennedy, Professionals, Power, and Solidarity in Poland (Cambridge, 1991). Roman Laba and Lawrence Goodwyn seem to use the term "intellectuals" to refer both to technocratic and to creative intellectuals such as writers and artists. Laba, The Roots of Solidarity: A Political Sociology of Poland's Working-Class Democratization (Princeton, 1991); Lawrence Goodwyn, Breaking the Barrier: The Rise of Solidarity in Poland (New York, 1991).
6. This is the term used by George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi in their The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (New York, 1979), referring chiefly to technocratic intellectuals, those who legitimate power through knowledge. Michael D. Kennedy calls them "professionals": Kennedy, Professionals, Power, and Solidarity in Poland (Cambridge, 1991). Roman Laba and Lawrence Goodwyn seem to use the term "intellectuals" to refer both to technocratic and to creative intellectuals such as writers and artists. Laba, The Roots of Solidarity: A Political Sociology of Poland's Working-Class Democratization (Princeton, 1991); Lawrence Goodwyn, Breaking the Barrier: The Rise of Solidarity in Poland (New York, 1991).
7. This is the term used by George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi in their The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (New York, 1979), referring chiefly to technocratic intellectuals, those who legitimate power through knowledge. Michael D. Kennedy calls them "professionals": Kennedy, Professionals, Power, and Solidarity in Poland (Cambridge, 1991). Roman Laba and Lawrence Goodwyn seem to use the term "intellectuals" to refer both to technocratic and to creative intellectuals such as writers and artists. Laba, The Roots of Solidarity: A Political Sociology of Poland's Working-Class Democratization (Princeton, 1991); Lawrence Goodwyn, Breaking the Barrier: The Rise of Solidarity in Poland (New York, 1991).
8. The best account of this period is Padraic Kenney, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945-1950 (Ithaca, 1996).