SELF-MANAGEMENT AND THE POLITICS OF SOLIDARITY IN POLAND
Henry Norr
When massive strike waves broke over Poland in the summer of 1980, few predicted that the workers would succeed in building a genuinely independent and democratic trade union. Even fewer could have anticipated that the popular upsurge would also evolve into a mass movement demanding that the management of industry be put into the hands of elected workers’ councils.
Farfetched as it sounded in a country ruled by a Leninist party, the idea of free unions had been in the air among the militant workers of the Baltic Coast at least since 1970. Industrial self-management, on the other hand, was a concept almost no one in Poland cared about in 1980. There was—as there continues to be—a broad consensus in favor of some variety of workers’ democracy as a feature of an ideal economy.1 But in the grim reality of “actually existing socialism,” veteran activists and newly mobilized workers alike regarded direct participation in the management of enterprises as at best a second- or third-rank objective, and at worst a trap that might divert and coopt the movement. The fate of the workers’ councils that had arisen in 1956 seemed to show where such forms of “socialist democracy” would lead: within months of their origin the councils began to be stripped of their powers, and in 1958 they were involuntarily incorporated into umbrella entities (called Conferences of Workers’ Self-Management, or KSR) that were almost universally perceived as powerless ornaments dominated by management, by its allies in the party and in the discredited official trade unions, and by a handful of white-collar toadies.
As every close observer of the Polish scene has reported, the political consciousness of the Polish working class was centered on the “we”/“they” dichotomy, with the workers and “society” in general on one side and “the authorities”—the narrow elite of politicians, bureaucrats, and policemen—on the other. In this framework the idea of building an independent organization—“ours”—to stand up to “them” had a powerful allure, as the explosive growth of Solidarity in the months after August 1980 demonstrated; joining “their” institutions, helping “them” to run the system they had created and still controlled, had scarcely any appeal. And in 1980, with the Polish economy in a deepening debacle, the prospect of assuming responsibility for the organization of production was particularly uninviting.
True, in response to the spreading August protests, the official press had begun to hold out the possibility of a revitalization of the moribund self-management system, and the Gdansk Agreements included a provision committing the new unions to take part in formulating laws to that effect. But self-management had not even been mentioned in the Gdansk workers’ own Twenty-One Demands; the accord’s reference to the subject was proposed by government negotiators and incorporated into the document with little discussion. The emerging union’s orientation was more accurately reflected in the “Draft Program of Current Action,” a proposal that circulated in Gdansk in the first weeks of Solidarity’s existence: the union, the document declared, “has no intention of interfering with affairs under the competence of management, nor of replacing it, nor of taking responsibility for its activities.”2
The new organization’s leaders insisted repeatedly that the “partnership” with the authorities that they had in mind was to be an adversarial, not participatory, relationship. As a union in the strict sense, Solidarity wanted to compel the authorities to bargain with it on matters of immediate economic significance to it members. As an independent advocate of the interests of society, it would also demand the right to be consulted over broader issues of economic and social policy. But neither at the enterprise nor at the national level would it allow itself to be entangled in the apparatus of power.
Within a year, however, Solidarity had executed a dramatic turnaround in its approach to the question of self-management. From the grass roots of the union had arisen a vigorous popular movement with slogans like “Give us back our factories!” and elaborate plans for a reorganization of Polish industry that would put the management of each enterprise under the authority of its workforce. This new movement garnered support first from junior technocrats impatient with the waste and inefficiency that management by the party and the bureaucracy had produced, and from factory- and regional-level activists chafing at a model of reactive trade-unionism that seemed to be leading Solidarity into a dead end. In the tense summer of 1981 the idea of self-management started to catch on among rank-and-file workers as well, and before long the movement proved strong enough to force the issue upon Solidarity’s hitherto hesitant national leadership. By September, when union delegates assembled in Gdansk for Solidarity’s first national congress, self-management had emerged as the union’s foremost demand, the centerpiece of its program for a self-governing republic.3
Ironically, however, the very anxieties and tensions that gave rise to the self-management movement soon began to sap its strength. With the economy in shambles and the political climate deteriorating, self-management could not be the panacea some of its champions had advertised, and popular enthusiasm waned almost as fast as it had arisen. Compromise legislation accepted by the union leadership in the fall of 1981 was far-reaching in comparison with previous workplace participation schemes in Poland and elsewhere in the Soviet bloc, but fell far short of the radical objectives on which the self-management movement and, more recently, the union congress had insisted. The result was division and confusion. Dedicated activists continued to agitate over the issue, but the movement had already lost much of its momentum before the coup of December 13, 1981, brought the struggle—or rather, this phase of it—to an abrupt end.
In this essay space does not permit full discussion of the Poles’ attitudes toward and previous experiences with self-management, nor of the evolution of the situation during and since the “state of war.” The focus here will be on 1981. Through analysis of the complex coalition that gradually assembled under the banner of self-management, the motives of various strata drawn to the demand, and the ideological and political specificity of this Polish version of industrial democracy, I shall attempt to explain the unexpected and dramatic rise of the self-management movement, as well as its subsequent decline.
Attitudes toward self-management were generally measured only tangentially in the many official and unofficial surveys of opinion carried out during the Solidarity period,4 and hard sociological data about the orientation and composition of the movement are lacking. The interpretation presented here was extrapolated originally from the documentary record left by Solidarity and the self-management movement itself; their voluminous press, the protocols and resolutions of their meetings, and the testimony of their leaders.5 Subsequently, my understanding of the movement has been much enriched by conversations in Poland during 1984 with a number of participants in and advisers to the movement.6
Origins
The Polish upheaval of 1980–81 is sometimes, and with good reason, called the first social revolution actually led by the working class.7 In fact, of course, Solidarity was the product of a complicated interaction among the traditional proletariat, technical and white-collar employees, and professional intellectuals. So too was the movement for self-management. Production workers in heavy industry were ultimately the decisive force. From the very first months of Solidarity’s existence, scattered groups of them implemented a rough-and-tumble kind of self-management, by driving particularly tyrannical or inept bosses out of their enterprises.8 The grouping within Solidarity that later spearheaded the struggle for self-management (its cumbersome formal title was the Network of Solidarity Workplace Organizations of Leading Workplaces, but it will be referred to hereafter, as in Poland, simply as the Network) was made up of representatives from Poland’s largest industrial enterprises. And it was when significant numbers of ordinary workers at such plants became convinced that self-management was a necessity alongside the independent union that the issue moved to the center of the political stage.
But until mid-1981 rank-and-file workers did not mobilize in large numbers around the demand for self-management, and disproportionately few of the pioneers who built the movement came from proletarian ranks. It was among the intellectuals aligned with Solidarity that self-management had the broadest support, and it was chiefly members of the intermediate technical stratum in the factories—what may be called the “production intelligentsia”—who led the developing struggle.
The Intellectuals
Workplace self-management had long been part of the program of most opposition-minded intellectuals in Poland. In Catholic circles the idea was rooted in the doctrine of Personalism, the Christian social philosophy that has deeply influenced the thinking of Polish church (including that of Karol Wojtyła, now Pope John Paul II) in recent decades.9 For those of secular democratic orientation—notably members and supporters of KOR, the Committee for the Defense of the Workers/Committee for Social Self-Defense (the vanguard of the intellectual opposition since 1976)—self-management was an element of a much broader strategy and vision. It had been articulated over the course of the 1970s by Michnik, Kuroń, and their associates: winning a voice in the management of the enterprise was to be part of the process of self-organization through which Polish civil society would gradually restrict the scope of party power and regain at least partial control of its destiny.10
Among the economists who advised Solidarity about the reform of Poland’s disintegrating system of planning and management, support for self-management was likewise widespread. Some of them recalled the ideals of 1956 and of reformist Communists like Oskar Lange, who assigned an important role to the workers’ councils in proposals for restructuring the Stalinist economy that he drafted at that time. Other economists were drawn more toward managerialist models but supported self-management for instrumental reasons: they saw it as a concession that might be offered in exchange for the assent of workers to price increases, manpower redeployment, and other unpopular but necessary moves to rationalize the Polish system; over the longer haul they hoped it could serve as a mechanism for improving motivation and productivity and as a lever for prying the enterprises free from the grip of the central bureaucracies that had for so long mismanaged them.
Such broad-based intellectual endorsement for the notion of self-management undoubtedly contributed to its vague legitimacy, at least as a long-term objective, even in the first months when most of Solidarity was wary of any concrete involvement with the issue. Moreover, a few of Solidarity’s advisers—like Szymon Jakubowicz, an economist and former party journalist who worked for the union’s research center, and a handful of young intellectuals of radical Marxist persuasion, like Henryk Szlajfer (a leader in the 1968 student protests, and now an economist) and Zbigniew Kowalewski (an anthropologist who had spent several years in Cuba)—early on undertook a campaign to promote self-management as an important strategic goal for the union. Later, as the issue caught on, these men were to play highly visible parts as advisers and publicists in the cause of self-management. And, as we shall see, another adviser from academe, Jerzy Milewski, had a critical role in the entire history of the self-management struggle.
Still, it is important to resist the conclusion—prominently featured in official Polish and Soviet propaganda, and echoed in some Western treatments—that Solidarity’s intellectuals bear responsibility for the union’s evolution during 1981 toward a more radical strategy, and specifically for its turn toward the self-management program.11 Nearly all of the principal advisers shared the prevailing tendency to regard self-management, however desirable, as a demand to which Solidarity could not or should not actively attach itself. Most of them greeted the emergence of the Network and its program with some reserve; only a few of the leading advisers—and none of the most prominent—were directly linked with the new movement. The caution of the mainstream union intellectuals is apparent in the draft program that Solidarity’s “brain trust” (formally, the Center for Socio-Occupational Studies) prepared for discussion in the union in the late winter of 1980-81: under the heading of “The Character of the Changes Expected,” self-management is there endorsed as “indispensable,” but the language used is notably moderate compared with the proposals the Network was soon to offer, and the document insisted that it was not the union’s role to draft specific plans for reform.12
Because friends and foes alike often exaggerate the role of KOR, the group deserves special attention in this context. Despite the philosophical affinity of its main currents for the concept of self-management, its members (by 1981 the group had ceased to function as a unified organization) played no direct role in promoting the demand as a strategy for Solidarity. Robotnik, the influential bulletin for workers that KOR helped to support, had decided, even before 1980, to emphasize trade-union independence in preference to self-management as the central plank of its platform.13 Although Jacek Kuroń and his associates eventually played an important role in making self-government in a more generalized sense the keynote of Solidarity’s visionary program, they continued to express considerable doubt about emphasizing control at the enterprise level. “For me,” Kuroń remarked in a public debate in August 1981, “the main function of the self-management movement is not managing the factories—after all, that’s impossible in present conditions. I’m talking about a self-management movement that would create, through its central structure, a new mechanism for making decisions . . . on the scale of the whole economy.”14
The “Production Intelligentsia”
The sympathy for self-management that was prevalent among Solidarity’s intellectuals thus had little direct impact on the union’s strategic posture. It was only when other elements in the Solidarity coalition—beginning with the industrial engineers and technicians—began to take up the cause that self-management emerged as a pressing issue. In this light the case of Jerzy Milewski is a revealing one. At first glance it seems to support the argument that the self-management movement was a creation of the intelligentsia in the usual sense: Milewski, a member of the research staff and Solidarity leader at the Polish Academy of Sciences’ branch in Gdansk, cofounded the Network; as its secretary and coordinator, he became the movement’s key strategist and propagandist; and in the end he rode its momentum to a position of some prominence in Solidarity as a whole.15 Milewski, however, was not a traditional political intellectual, but, significantly, a technologist, an expert in fluid-dynamic machinery. His success in bringing self-management to the top of Solidarity’s agenda stemmed not from his direct influence on the union’s leaders (though he had served as an adviser to the Lenin Shipyard local) nor from the eloquence of his political writing (the pamphlets he wrote about his pet project, a new political organization to be called the Polish Labor Party, were something of an embarrassment to many in the movement), but rather from the ties he established with a remarkable group of young activists from regional and factory-level Solidarity committees.
Aside from their union responsibilities, most of the group were engineers, employed at low-level, nonmanagerial positions. Frustrated by Solidarity’s reluctance and the authorities’ apparent inability to develop an effective program to combat the deepening national crisis, they were hungry for bold new approaches. In conversation with Milewski, they fastened on to the idea of a Solidarity initiative in the field of self-management, and it was they and others like them who organized the Network and quickly made it a powerful force in the politics of the union and the nation.
The production intelligentsia is ordinarily overshadowed in our perceptions of Solidarity. The pictures transmitted from Poland in 1980-81 were typically of the classic Proletariat of mine, mill, and production line: hard-hatted shipyard workers from the Baltic ports, grimy Silesian coal-haulers, occasionally a weary woman from the textile mills. “Crisis of Marxism” notwithstanding, such images still evoke spectres that loom powerfully in the smoggy depths of the Western political imagination. The intellectuals who stepped forth from the democratic and Catholic opposition to articulate the movement’s aspirations and advise its leaders also captivate our attention, though for other reasons: linguistically and politically, they speak in Western tongues, and foreign journalists and scholars, relying on their insights and admiring (perhaps even envying) their eloquence, courage, and influence, tend unwittingly to attribute to them a role even larger than the undoubtedly significant one they actually played. Even in the age of high technology, the manufacturing engineer and the quality-control technician are less compelling figures, but their significance in Solidarity—especially at the enterprise and regional levels of the organization—was enormous, and nowhere was it more visible than in the movement toward self-management.
These young technicians and engineers were part of an army of cadres trained under Communist rule to staff Poland’s expanding industrial base.16 Often of peasant or worker origin, and posted to jobs where they earned no more than many of the production workers around them, they shared the full range of economic, political, and cultural grievances that inspired the rise of Solidarity. But temperament, education, and experience gave them some special sensitivities; like the engineers Veblen expected to find in the American corporation, they were appalled at the chaos and irrationality festering behind the facade of orderly planning in the economy, and they were positioned close enough to management to see that the strategic mistakes and venality of the Gierek team had only exacerbated the problems of a system desperately in need of structural reform. In the technical colleges they had attended they had studied rationalistic disciplines and, typically, adopted the technocratic outlook that all the Soviet-style regimes now promote (nominally, at least) under the rubric of “scientific-technical revolution”; on the job they faced the reality that in “actually existing socialism” political subservience and bureaucratic back-scratching count for more than technical competence or economic rationality.
In the 1970s as stratification patterns created by the postwar transformations began to rigidify, rates of social mobility had slowed. Younger engineers and technicians in particular found paths to career advancement blocked, often by senior colleagues with inferior educations and little expertise in the new technologies imported from the West; indeed, contrary to the image of technocracy the previous Polish administration had tried, with some success, to give itself, the tendency for key posts in economic enterprises to go to older people with lower qualifications “became more pronounced than attenuated under the Gierek regime.”17 Most galling of all, promotion continued to depend in large part on political criteria: under the nomenklatura system, all key personnel decisions remain subject to the approval of the pertinent party body.18
Before Solidarity, a large proportion of the young technical cadres—including many who later became active in the self-management movement—had responded to the situation by joining the party, sometimes as a purely pragmatic effort to “play the game,” sometimes in hopes of fostering rationalization from within the system. (Some of the Network’s key leaders even now confess that personally they are drawn more to technocratic and managerialist visions of the social order than to syndicalist or participatory models.) But by 1981 the incumbent authorities were so thoroughly discredited—so widely identified as defenders of a system irrational to the core—and the workers’ movement so powerful and hungry for change, that support for reform seemed more likely to come from below than above. As part of the “socialist renewal” it was promising. The party leadership had made rhetorical commitments to economic reform and self-management, but the seemingly paralyzed regime had been unable to agree on any concrete proposal for serious reform; the draft plans slowly making their way through official channels in the winter and spring of 1981 were not notably bold or coherent to begin with, and the conservative bureaucratic apparatus was already succeeding in watering down their key provisions.
It was in this context that the Network was born and the self-management movement began to gather momentum. In March 1981 Milewski started to meet regularly with acquaintances from the Baltic shipyards and other large plants. They quickly agreed to challenge the notion that economic reform was not Solidarity’s business by preparing and promoting a series of proposals for industrial reorganization. (In the original conception the self-management plan was to be only the first of many projects.) While most of the union was caught up in the crisis provoked by the police beatings at Bydgoszcz, the Network’s founders—“a circle of enthusiasts,” they called themselves—began crisscrossing Poland to seek out like-minded colleagues. A formal structure was established, with one flagship plant to represent each region of the country. With Milewski coordinating, the emerging group was soon churning out an imposing collection of documents about self-management—position papers, model by-laws and electoral statutes for workers’ councils, and, most importantly, a “Draft Bill on the Social Enterprise,” proffered as an alternative to the legislation the authorities had under consideration.
The Network’s Plan
The keynote of the Network proposal was the concept of the “social enterprise,” to contrast with the official category of “state enterprise” for the basic unit of the industrial economy.19 The distinction gave rise to an extensive theoretical debate—full of references to old laws and the Polish constitution, but only rarely to the Marxist classics—between the movement and its official critics. The discussion was often obscure, but the underlying issue was clear enough: the Network wanted control of the means of production to rest in the hands of each enterprise’s workforce, not those of the vanguard party or the state bureaucracy. The authorities were therefore right to regard this concept as a fundamental challenge to the system of authority on which their regime, like all the others descended from the Bolshevik Revolution, rested.
The enterprise envisioned in the Network’s plan would have been governed, formally at least, in a highly democratic way. Solidarity as such would have had no privileged position within the self-management system. The ultimate authority was to be the plant workforce as a whole, expressing itself by majority vote—at a general meeting of all employees or (in large enterprises) of their elected delegates, or through a referendum. Ordinarily, the crew would delegate its authority to an employee council chosen in general, direct, and secret elections. (The traditional term “workers’ council,” which in Polish as in English has blue-collar connotations, was forsaken in favor of the more inclusive “employee council.”) The councils would have had wide powers over all aspects of the enterprise’s economic activity, organizational structure, and future development. The enterprise director would be hired by the council and could be fired by it or by referendum of the entire workforce: the director’s role would, in principle, be that of “executor of the decisions of the organs of employee self-management.”
The statute the Network drafted thus combined representative, plebiscitary, and participatory procedures. But the element of direct democracy—the active participation of rank-and-file workers in the governance of the enterprise—got little emphasis in the Network’s discussions and appeals. One of the most striking features of the whole movement was the almost total absence of references to such lofty objectives as overcoming alienation, transcending the mental-manual division of labor, or enhancing the citizen-worker’s sense of social efficacy—themes featured prominently in recent Western theoretical discussions of participatory democracy, as well as in the discourse of the New Left.20 Neither the technocratically minded founders of the movement nor, it appears, the other activists and ordinary workers who came to support it gave much weight to the purportedly uplifting effects of collective decision making.
The emphasis, rather, was on rationality and effectiveness: the Network’s case was built from the start on the premise that, in Polish conditions at least, enterprises would be run more sensibly and economically under workers’ control than under the party-state’s. In the West there is a widespread suspicion, shared even by many advocates of industrial democracy, that implementation of the idea in any large sense—that is, establishment of a system that would give workers power, not just influence, over “higher-level” (enterprise-wide and long-term) decisions as well as “lower-level” activity (day-to-day shopfloor operations)21—would necessarily entail some sacrifice of the efficiency expected of a well-ordered hierarchical structure. In Poland, as the Network saw things, the situation was reversed: there was nothing to lose, no existing efficiency to be jeopardized. Hierarchical control meant subordination to the party and state bureaucracies, which had come to represent nothing so much as corruption, incompetence, and waste. Managers appointed from above had stronger incentives to be loyal and submissive to their superiors than to run an effective operation, and even a dedicated executive could accomplish little when the enterprise was enmeshed in a “command economy” that no longer responded to commands but lacked any other effective steering mechanism.
The workers, on the other hand, were more likely (or so the proponents of self-management argued) to understand and respect the claims of rationality. They were, in the first place, beholden to no outside force putting its organizational or ideological interests above the collective’s and society’s welfare. Having learned from the crisis how high the price of poor planning and sloppy management could be, and who ultimately would pay it, they would be ready—or at least could be persuaded—to swallow the bitter pills that had to be taken to restore the economy’s health. And since the Network’s plan would make every enterprise financially as well as organizationally independent, each worker would have a direct material stake in making responsible decisions. (The economics of the Network proposal will be considered briefly below.)
For most participants in the struggle, then, self-management was above all a means, not an end—a means to overcoming the crisis of the Polish economy. To treat the Network’s program as a call for “participatory democracy” is literally correct but many be misleading as to the movement’s concerns. “Democratic managerialism” is a more apt characterization, for the assumption was always that the most important task of self-management would be to select the most competent professional available as enterprise director, and that the director would, in essence, run the enterprise. The movement’s position was not that the masses possessed the expertise necessary to run an industrial economy effectively, but only that they had the ability and the motivation to recognize those who did. Few believed that the primary object—economic rationality—could be attained by entangling the workers in technical and financial discussions for which they had little preparation. The Network’s draft law did put a long list of powers (including control over the enterprise’s annual plan, acquisition and disposal of fixed assets, distribution of enterprise income, social welfare programs) within the competence of the employee councils, and had the plan been enacted as written, council delegates in some plants would no doubt have attempted aggressively to exercise these powers themselves. In most cases, however, the role of the council would probably have been primarily one of oversight (backed by the latent threat of veto) over policies developed by full-time managers. Self-management activists were especially anxious not to get stuck with responsibility for routine enterprise operations; at the Lenin Shipyard the committee laying the groundwork for self-management even modified the wording of the model plant code that the Network had drafted, in order to make clearer that such burdens would still fall on the shoulders of the administration, not of the workers’ representatives.
Because the plan foresaw such a critical role for the factories’ professional staff, the question of who would have the power to appoint or dismiss the enterprise director from the start overshadowed all other issues. From the point of view of a society all too familiar with the regime’s cynical manipulation of the rhetoric of socialist democracy, the new councils seemed likely to end up as powerless as their post-1956 predecessors, no matter what other rights they might have on paper, if they lacked the power to hire and fire the plant’s chief executive. The ruling party in effect shared the same assumption: it too treated the power of appointment as the crux of the controversy, even though much of its propaganda took the form of ideological disputation about the theory of ownership and the menace of what it called “group property.” Both sides knew that whichever could choose the director would control the decisive voice in the life of the enterprise. A director indebted to the workers for his position would ultimately have to respect their preferences; one chosen through the usual procedures of the nomenklatura might make a more or less sincere effort to cooperate with the crew’s representatives, but in the end could be expected to come down on the side of bureaucratic superiors.
The Network plan allowed the workers’ council to choose the director on the basis of an open konkurs, a competition in which the qualifications and proposals of every candidate would be evaluated by representatives of the workforce. The designated director would be given a contract for a fixed period, but the council could remove the director before its expiration by rejecting the annual report, or at the end of the term by simply refusing to renew the contract; the enterprise workforce itself could remove the director at any time by referendum. The official draft law, on the other hand, stated that “the director of an enterprise is appointed and dismissed by the founding organ [ordinarily, the relevant industrial ministry], with the agreement of the Workers’ Council”; the council could present its own nominees when the directorship was vacant, or request the removal of an incumbent with whom it was dissatisfied. While the somewhat ambiguous wording held out the prospect of negotiations over managerial appointments, it was clear that final authority would remain with the party-dominated central bureaucracy.
Economically, the Network’s plan embodied what one Western economist has called an “almost [Milton-]Friedmanite faith in the virtue of markets and prices.”22 Most of its supporters saw self-management not as a necessary complement to the system of central economic planning, but as the foundation of an alternative to that system. That alternative was definitely not restoration of private ownership of the means of industrial production; most Polish workers, despite their pronounced distaste for what they had experienced as “socialism” and their envy of the living standards generated by the developed market economies, still viewed capitalism with considerable reserve, and restoring it was for almost everyone unimaginable in light of Poland’s geography and history. (As a quip popular at the time put it, “Who would take over the Lenin Shipyard—the Lenin family?”) Yet in its haste to get rid of the bureaucratic command economy, the Network would have made the free market the primary, if not the sole, mechanism of economic coordination. Enterprises were to function as independent entities, free of any direct state control. The operative principles were called the “three S’s”: samorządność (self-management), samodzielność (independence), and samofmansowanie (self-financing). Investment and production decisions were to be made with profitability as the chief criterion; they would be compiled and codified only in the enterprise’s own plan and in its contracts with customers and suppliers.
The state would influence the economy solely by way of laws and “economic parameters” (taxes, tariffs, credits). Although the experts who prepared Solidarity’s draft program had advocated a combination of self-management and democratized central planning, the Network, in its early pronouncements, scarcely mentioned the plan (or the party!). The Network’s later and more elaborate position papers did call for a central plan to be established by a democratically elected parliament. But the plan would have been purely “indicative,” as in the Western European economies; it was emphasized that “the central plan is a plan only for the government and cannot include any direct orders for the enterprises.”23
In 1981, with the old economic mechanisms teetering on the brink of complete disintegration, “marketization” was in the air. Rooted in several generations of Polish economic thought, it was, to some degree, a feature of each of the more than half-dozen full-scale reform proposals then in circulation, including the state’s. (Official publications even today present the “three S’s” as the core of the reform.) The Network did not go as far as one group of Solidarity’s economic advisers, who were calling for the activization of private capital. In insisting on absolute enterprise autonomy and downgrading all central mechanisms, the Network proposal did, however, constitute an extreme version of “market socialism.”
From a strictly economic point of view, even advocates of the market might question the wisdom of an abrupt transition, especially at a moment of extraordinary economic dislocation. With hard currency, energy, and materials of all sorts in desperately short supply, it is not clear, to say the least, that throwing the task of resource allocation to the market would have produced economically or socially optimal results. Capitalist states typically move in the direction of increased central control during situations of crisis, and it could be argued that for all the failings of the central planners and ministries, the same logic held for Poland, at least until a modicum of stability could be restored to the economy. But the activists of the Network were not thinking in such categories and still reject the logic of this argument. In their view the center had shown itself incapable of mastering the situation. Once the enterprises were liberated from the tutelage of the bureaucracy and the good sense and energy of the workers were unleashed, the situation could only improve. Besides, politics, not economics, was the fundamental problem, as the activists saw it. They believed that they were facing a rare opportunity to displace a system that had failed them and the nation, and they could not afford to squander it in the probably vain hope of finding a better opportunity later.
Solidarity’s Activists Take Up the Cause
The Network’s initiative found a wide response, for others in Solidarity had been moving independently in the same direction. In Łódź, one of Poland’s oldest industrial cities and the center of its textile industry, union leaders had been expressing interest in electing new workers’ councils since the fall. Over the winter Zbigniew Bujak, leader of the Solidarity’s Mazowsze (Warsaw) branch, did the same, and his regional organization sponsored a conference on the subject in early March. In the union press Jakubowicz and some of the other economic advisers began to publish articles and proposals about self-management. Party propaganda, too, had an effect: the official media were now actively promoting self-management as the key to the forthcoming economic reforms, and in a number of enterprises party organizations—hoping in some cases to enlist Solidarity’s cooperation, in others to outflank the burgeoning union—were moving to create new councils or revive moribund ones.
So long as most union activists remained committed to the original conception of Solidarity as a trade union eschewing participatory entanglements and leaving policy initiatives to the authorities, the union’s official bodies on the national level and in most regions continued to react warily to the rising discussion of self-management. But in the spring of 1981 Solidarity found itself at a strategic impasse. The police beating of union activists at Bydgoszcz in March had brought passions to a peak, but the expected climax never came: the last-minute agreements that averted the general strike for which the whole movement had mobilized were undoubtedly a relief to most Solidarity supporters, but they left the issues unresolved and the union frustrated, divided, and uncertain. In the aftermath a “crisis of identity” set in, in Jadwiga Staniszkis’ phrase,24 and more and more of the Solidarity’s members and activists began to question the assumptions that had so far oriented its activity. With production figures plummeting, it seemed futile, if not downright counterproductive, to press short-term economic demands and to rely on the now familiar strike tactic. On the other hand, the political function Solidarity had envisaged for itself seemed equally unrealistic: Bydgoszcz was widely taken as confirmation that the authorities were more interested in obstructing and provoking the union than in dealing with it as a genuine partner entitled to a voice in the formulation of state policy and institutional reforms. In the eyes of most of the population, the legitimacy of party rule had all but disappeared, yet there was no plausible way to replace it. Solidarity seemed to be standing by passively as the fate of the nation hung in the balance: as Staniszkis argues, its power was enormous but useless, its day-to-day activities seemed to make little contribution to its long-term goals, and “self-limiting revolution” was becoming a formula for frustration.
For union officials at the factory and regional levels, the problem had an acute and personal dimension. In preparation for Solidarity’s upcoming national congress, elections to lower leadership levels were getting under way, and the leaders who had emerged more or less spontaneously at the union’s birth now had to face constituents wondering when and how the the August victory would yield some tangible improvement in their lives. For some ambitious militants—both incumbents and challengers—self-management provided an ideal platform: it allowed them to make a name for themselves at the local level (Solidarity-backed “founding committees for self-management” were now springing up in the factories); it addressed the most immediate source of popular frustration, the deteriorating economic situation; and, without explicitly challenging the principle of Communist rule (a step most Poles—whatever their private sentiments—would still at this time have considered dangerous) it gave vent to anti-party resentment.
By June of 1981, although Solidarity’s national leadership still had no clear-cut position on the question of self-management and had made only half-hearted acknowledgment of the Network’s existence, each day brought news of some new union body getting on board what was fast becoming a bandwagon in support of the Network’s initiative. In Lower Silesia the regional committee countermanded a resolution (passed only months earlier) denouncing self-management as a sham and explicitly endorsed the Network. From regional conventions in Warsaw, Łódź, and elsewhere came programmatic proposals putting the struggle for self-management at the top of Solidarity’s agenda. Resolutions in support of the idea poured forth in all directions—to the Sejm, to the Network, to the union leadership, to no one in particular. By the end of the spring, Alain Touraine’s sociological teams discovered, self-management had become the principal topic of discussion among Solidarity activists.25
Even the authorities were forced to respond to this unanticipated change of mood among the unionists: in June the Social-Industrial Department of party Central Committee’s staff sent out a secret (but soon leaked) bulletin warning party functionaries that the Network’s ideas were taking hold in Solidarity and that it was “impossible to overestimate the dangers inherent” in them.26 In a striking mixture of bureaucratic jargon and dogmatic rhetoric, the authors called for an immediate “politico-organizational and program-agitational counter-offensive” against a movement that, they spluttered, smacked of the Soviet Workers’ Opposition, Yugoslav and Czech (1968) revisionism, contemporary bourgeois theory, and various other deviations. The columns of most official papers were soon filled with vituperative denunciations of a movement that the obviously frightened rulers plainly considered a serious threat.
In a few short months, then, self-management had moved from the fringes to the foreground of Solidarity’s, and thus of Poland’s, political stage. The idea had caught the fancy not only of young technical cadres like the Network’s founders, but also, increasingly, of Solidarity activists from diverse backgrounds. For all the excitement, however, it was still not clear that the rank and file had been won over to the new cause. Among ordinary production workers, most observers agree, there remained considerable wariness about any form of institutional participation in the system of power. But as the movement developed, self-management’s advocates found that some of their themes did strike a chord even among the skeptics, and these they began to emphasize more and more.
One such theme was the argument that self-management—and self-management alone—could stem the collapse of the national economy. By mid-1981, with lines growing ever longer and even necessities sometimes simply unavailable, economic reform was no longer just an abstract desideratum, the specter (if not yet the reality) of hunger now hung over the land. Public confidence in the capacities of the authorities, which had risen somewhat when the reputedly sincere and efficient General Jaruzelski had taken over as premier in February 1981, faded again as one official commission after another studied the crisis but no consistent policy seemed to emerge. Solidarity members debated whether it was unwillingness or inability (or both) that kept the regime from breaking with the old system of central control and allocation of resources, a system that was perceived with increasing clarity as the root of the crisis. The Network’s original declarations had been remarkably dry and almost technical in tone, but with frustration mounting its spokesmen began to play on public emotion: “Without self-management,” an orator at one of its sessions warned, “each of us, together with our families and loved ones, will fall into such hunger and destitution, dependence and servility as we have not known in the entire thousand years of our history.”27 The slogan of self-management was repeated over and over like an incantation; the concept seemed to take on almost magical properties as if it were some panacea for the Polish economy’s many ills. The proclamation of a national conference of self-management activists called it “the only guarantee of Poland’s escape from the crisis, the only way to relieve society from its daily uncertainty about the next day . . . . Self-management means a quick increase in the effectiveness of the economy, the liquidation of the total waste which as before remains the nightmare of the economy. . . . Self-management lets us see things as they are, not as they appear. Self-management is economic raison d’etat.”28
A case from Wrocław, in Lower Silesia, exemplifies the shift in the movement’s tone. The struggle for self-management had begun there in the spring with a controversy over the appointment of a new director for one of the city’s major factories. The plant’s Solidarity committee and its experts had devised an elaborate scheme for screening candidates: each was subjected to a grueling round of psychological testing, expert evaluation, and public oral examinations, before a commission representing the workforce voted on a final choice. By midsummer, however, the emphasis had shifted from this meritocratic mania to more mundane matters. The regional union took up the struggle to force a hesitant ministry to approve the workers’ choice (who turned out, after all the testing was completed, to be a popular engineer already serving on the factory’s Solidarity committee), but the headlines on the leaflets with which local activists plastered the city revealed the pitch the union was now taking: “Hunger won’t let us wait—” they read. “Self-management is our chance.” (The enterprise in question made heavy construction equipment.)29
The other thread increasingly prominent in the campaign was the notion of self-management as a blow against the nomenklatura system and, by extension, against the party’s monopoly of power. As the crisis sharpened, long latent antagonism toward the “reds” became ever more open and radical. Self-management’s advocates found that even audiences otherwise unmoved began to respond when they raised the once-taboo question of the nomenklatura. And it was no longer simply a question of appointing qualified managers, instead of political hacks; now people were seeing self-management in a broader perspective, as a move against party rule as a whole. Even if the rulers could not be displaced altogether, there was growing sentiment that the crisis made it necessary and possible to put new limits on their power. Self-management was presented as a further step in what Western commentators have called the reconstruction of civil society, beyond the reach of the political apparatus.30 In 1980 the party had been stripped of control over the unions; now the time had come to push it out of the industrial economy altogether. The official media’s intemperate response to the Network’s proposal seemed to confirm that the party was vulnerable to such an attack on its “material base.” In the eyes of a deeply anti-Communist population, the reaction only enhanced the proposal’s appeal.
Solidarity’s National Leadership
The absence of other strategic alternatives, the manifest appeal of self-management to many activists, and the inroads the movement seemed to be making among the rank and file of the union finally pushed Solidarity’s national leadership to endorse the Network’s approach. In May and June the National Coordinating Commission (KKP) of Solidarity and its Presidium had issued several statements noting the growing movement and expressing a “positive attitude toward the creation of authentic self-management,” but these conspicuously vague declarations had fallen short of the clear-cut endorsement the Network sought. In response, Network leaders, working behind the scenes with some of the many journalists and economists who were now gravitating toward their movement, organized a systematic campaign of pressure on union headquarters. Heeding a Network summons, regional union committees started binding their KKP delegates to fight for the self-management program, and in early July the Network flexed its new-found political muscle right at the leaders’ doorstep by staging a conference-rally that drew some 1,000 activists from factories all over Poland to the conference hall of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. Lech Walesa was invited to address the gathering, but the otherwise enthusiastic crowd was not pleased with his brief and uninspired address; in the discussion that followed the union chairman and his associates were roundly criticized for their “inertia” and “equivocation” over self-management. That very night Walesa personally telephoned a Gdansk acquaintance who was influential in the Network to ask for information about the growing movement and for advice about responding to it. Two days later the union chairman issued an unusual personal statement acknowledging criticism of the leadership’s approach and suggesting a considerably more positive attitude toward self-management.
Meanwhile, a labor-management conflict at the Polish national airlines, LOT, raised the prospect that a full-scale national crisis over self-management might blow up spontaneously, in a way Solidarity’s wary leaders (and the Network’s as well) considered intolerably risky. The airline’s managing director had recently retired, and its self-management body—in this case a pre-1980 “KSR” that had survived—won the backing of the local Solidarity for a plan to have the staff select his replacement. The government, referring to LOT’s potential “strategic significance” (to the amusement of Poles familiar with the line’s antiquated Soviet-made equipment), insisted on its own candidate, a general. When prolonged negotiations and a highly publicized warning strike that shut the airline down for four hours failed to break the impasse, the LOT workers scheduled an open-ended workstoppage.
A compromise designed to save face on both sides finally prevailed: the general got the job, the employees’ choice was installed as his deputy and de facto chief executive officer, and the strike was averted. But the incident was yet another reminder to Solidarity’s leaders that the self-management issue was becoming explosive and that the union still lacked a strong, coherent policy that would allow it to get out in front of a now-surging movement.
In this context the KKP assembled in late July for an unusually comprehensive review of the “the situation in the country and the union.” By then a consensus had developed among most of the union’s chief leaders and advisers: Solidarity would have to abandon its hesitations and make self-management the cornerstone of a more aggressive program for combating the crisis. There was little concrete political planning for the new initiative, and in the long discussion there were considerable implicit differences about the scope and meaning of the shift in policy, but nearly everyone addressing the session agreed that the old model of reactive, nonparticipatory trade-unionism had exhausted itself, and that self-management promised a new way out of the current impasse between union and society on the one hand and the party-state on the other.31
Thus the construction of the self-management coalition was complete. An idea that had originally had little active support in Solidarity had now swept through the organization—first to disgruntled engineers and technicians, to other activists looking for new programmatic approaches, then down the hierarchy to the rank and file and finally up to the union’s national leadership. The breadth of support self-management had acquired was reflected at Solidarity’s National Congress in September 1981. With union representatives getting nowhere in their efforts to negotiate with the authorities over the shape of the forthcoming reform, the congress approved a militant resolution on the subject. By a vote of 856 to one, with one abstention, the delegates called on all union members to rise to the defense of self-management, demanded a national referendum on the issue, and threatened to challenge any plan the Sejm might adopt that did not live up to the union’s expectations.
Broad as it had come to be, however, the self-management movement rested on what proved a fragile foundation. Behind the appearance of unity in support of the Network’s demands lay some troubling contradictions, for the social forces that had converged around the slogan of self-management in fact had diverse priorities and some conflicting orientations. For the technocratic types who had played such a key role in launching the movement and for its economic advisers, self-management was above all a vehicle for rationalization, and to most of them rationality meant increased wage differentials, more realistic (i.e., higher) prices for many consumer goods, and the elimination of superfluous positions on factory payrolls—an objective that raised the specter of large-scale unemployment. Among the rank and file, however, an often uncritical enthusiasm for market mechanisms in the abstract coexisted uneasily with a deep-seated egalitarianism and an understandable fear of price increases and layoffs, whatever the rationale behind them. In 1981 these differences were scarcely acknowledged, let alone debated fully.32 Had the Network’s program somehow been implemented, however, they would inevitably have surfaced; it is easy to imagine a popular reaction against the reform, and with it bitter divisions within Solidarity or, at the enterprise level, between the union and the workers’ councils.
None of this, of course, came to pass; self-management never got that far. The problems that the movement faced in the fall of 1981 were of a different order: they involved self-management not as an institution, but as a strategy. Even as the delegates to the union congress were enshrining self-management in Solidarity’s program, the movement that had put the issue on the agenda was already slowing. In the union’s last months of legality, interest in the issue of worker participation in factory management cooled noticeably. No one repudiated the idea, and a hard core of enthusiasts continued to organize around it. Self-management, however, had been advertised as something more than just another desirable reform—it had been packaged as the key that would open to resolution of the union’s and the nation’s dilemmas. When this promise began to lose its plausibility—as, I believe, it was bound to—enthusiasm for self-management waned.
The problem that began to catch up with the self-management movement was that in the face of a crisis as profound, multifaceted, and intractable as Poland’s, it was simply unable to fulfill the claims on which its appeal was based. As we have seen, few in Poland had shown much interest in employee participation as an end in itself; most of the movement’s supporters had been drawn to the Network’s proposal on instrumental and conjunctural grounds as a remedy for a collapsing economy and as a strategem for liberating new social space from the party. By late summer of 1981 it was becoming clear that in both respects the hopes vested in the self-management plan had been misplaced, or at least exaggerated.
The first difficulty was economic. Contrary to the rhetoric of some of its advocates, self-management was no cure-all, certainly not in the short run; letting workers elect directors would not put meat on Polish tables, or pay off the nation’s crushing foreign debt, or restore the flow of imported parts on which the manufacturing sector had grown dependent. At best, self-management, and the shift to market mechanisms that the Network’s version of it entailed, could produce positive results over the medium term, and even then only as part of a more comprehensive program of economic stabilization and reconstruction. But with conditions deteriorating palpably over the summer, the patience of the Poles was wearing thin and tempers were growing short. In an account that appeared in the Solidarity weekly,33 a union leader from Wroclaw presents a revealing vignette. Returning home from the late-July session at which the KKP had made the momentous decision to adopt the self-management strategy, and setting out to mobilize the rank and file behind the new approach, they found the atmosphere in the factories explosive. Union offices were deluged with phone calls, but it was not in fact self-management that the unionists’ constituents were exercised about—it was the latest round of food-ration cuts the authorities had just announced.
The Wroclaw leaders, like other Solidarity activists all over Poland, struggled to channel popular anger away from the supply situation and to turn it into enthusiasm for the management reforms the union was now backing, for there was a consensus among responsible unionists that direct confrontation over the food question would be dangerous and unproductive. In this sense self-management was yet another of the “surrogate conflicts” that marked the whole history of Poland’s “self-limiting revolution.”34 But the substitution did not work very well, for self-management was a demand too abstract and indirect to engage for long the emotions of people exhausted and enraged by an economic crisis that was now all too immediate.
The other dimension of the problem was political. Neither the Network nor the Solidarity leadership had devoted much thought to the likely reaction of the beneficiaries of the nomenklatura to what was openly advertised as a program to break that system’s back; the specific strategies and tactics that would be needed to win such a radical reform had not been developed. Perhaps because official inertia in the face of crisis had convinced Solidarity’s strategists of the regime’s impotence, they paid little heed to its repeated and unequivocal insistence that self-management in the Network’s sense could never be accepted. Implicitly, the popular assumption was that a movement that had already won one “impossible” concession—free trade unions—could surely win another the same way, by the sheer force of its determination, solidarity, and moral authority.
This time, however, the party’s prerogatives were on the line: self-management in the form Solidarity now sought threatened the power and privileges of the ruling elite and its dependents even more directly (if not ultimately more seriously) than independent unions. Though many rank-and-file Communists and some local party organizations supported the Network’s initiative, the party elite closed ranks against the threat. On this occasion the usual intra-organizational splits were scarcely visible; even prominent party “liberals” denounced the Network’s line as “demagogy, an anti-worker trick of anti-socialist character.”35 And while Soviet commentaries at this stage did not focus in detail on the self-management issue, it is safe to assume that the qualified backing the Kremlin offered the Polish leaders after the July congress of the PUWP would have evaporated quickly if the Polish comrades even contemplated serious concessions over something as fundamental to the structure of Soviet-type systems as the nomenklatura.
Thus the notion that self-management might serve as a roundabout way of setting new limits on party power, without a direct confrontation over control of the state, came to seem steadily less realistic as the weeks went by and the authorities showed no sign of caving in on the issue. One might, of course, argue that the strategy had never been a realistic one; the important point here is that some who had previously been willing to try it were now losing their faith. In the Sejm work continued on legislation about self-management and the state enterprise—official proposals that would have given workforce councils wide but largely consultative powers and left the appointment of managers in the hands of the bureaucracy. The parliamentary subcommittee hearing the bills did allow the participation of representatives of Solidarity, the Network, and other organizations, and informally some of the committee’s more independent members expressed sympathy for the Network’s bold and direct approach, but on fundamental issues no concessions were forthcoming. In September, after the first half of the Solidarity congress, its all-but-unanimous endorsement of self-management, and its provocative call to workers elsewhere in the Soviet camp to follow the Polish example, the party’s position seemed even to stiffen. The Soviets, meanwhile, attacked the congress as an “anti-Soviet orgy,”36 and new rumors of economic blackmail or military intervention from the East began to bubble up.
In the face of these hard realities, moods in Solidarity were evolving quickly. The movement’s most outspoken activists—both nationalistically inclined “fundamentalists” and secular radicals—moved closer to advocacy of an outright challenge to the party’s political monopoly, while “pragmatists” committed to the strategy of self-limitation redoubled their efforts to find some common ground with the authorities. Self-management, in a sense, fell between two stools; both of these broad currents within the union were in support of the Network’s plan, but for neither of them was it an issue that justified a full-scale confrontation.
Sizing up the situation, Walesa and his closest associates decided in effect to disregard the resolution of the Solidarity congress and to settle the issue on the best terms practically available. With the Sejm on the verge of approving a proposal close to the government’s draft, the union’s negotiators abruptly proposed a compromise, one that fell well short of the Network’s demands. In particular, they agreed to a clause that allowed the government to retain the power to name the management in enterprises “of fundamental significance” in the national economy. The list of such enterprises was to be negotiated between the Council of Ministers and the union, and in other enterprises the workforce would hold the initiative in the selection of the plant director, but it seemed clear to most observers that the compromise meant that the authorities would keep control of key firms throughout the heavy industrial and extractive sectors. And these, of course, constituted the backbone of Solidarity and of the self-management movement.
The settlement, approved at a poorly attended meeting of the Presidium of Solidarity’s National Commission between sessions of the union’s congress, provoked a storm of controversy.37 Whatever its merits in terms of political realism, the deal failed to take account of what Karol Modzelewski called the “psychic engagement” that the union, and especially its activists, had made over the preceding months in the Network’s radical plan. After several days of heated rhetoric, the union congress stopped just short of repudiating the deal, but it did denounce several aspects of the new legislation and issue a vague call for a referendum in the factories on disputed provisions. The most important political result, however, was a widespread sense of disappointment and disorientation among the movement’s activists.
As suggested above, the struggle for self-management was flagging even before the compromise; afterward, it faded quickly from the headlines. The new system was to come into being at the start of 1982, and workers in some plants did begin to elect their councils and make preparations for taking over management. In surveys support for the idea of a self-managed economy remained high,38 but the cause no longer commanded the enthusiasm it once had: in many enterprises in the last months of 1981, the workers’ committees charged with preparing for self-management had trouble mustering a quorum for meetings. A National Federation of Self-Managements, more radical and more independent of the Solidarity leadership than the Network, attempted to coordinate what was left of the movement and to push for the referendum the union congress had proposed, but its success in most areas was limited. Some of its leaders—notably the anthropologist Kowalewski (who has since become a Trotskyist activist in the West) tried to give the movement a more revolutionary thrust as the process of political polarization accelerated; indeed, his proposals for “active strikes” (wherein workers would not shut down their workplaces, but instead maintain production and decide for themselves how the output would be distributed) and for “workers’ guards” to defend occupied plants from interference attracted considerable attention.39
On the whole, however, participants in a conference on self-management convened in November 1981 by the Solidarity leadership agreed that the movement was in trouble. Only in some 15–20 percent of workplaces, their reports suggested, were the workers making concrete preparations to use such powers as the new laws gave them, and little enthusiasm was to be seen. Henryk Wujec, the mathematician and former KOR activist who reported to the gathering from the Mazowsze (Warsaw) region, summed up the situation: back in the summer, he recalled, “it seemed to us that self-management would begin to develop on its own, as had happened in the case of the union. It turned out that it’s not so simple. The idea has, as it were, lost its dynamism.” Jacek Merkel, a cofounder of the Network, newly elected member of Solidarity’s National Commission, and organizer of the conference, concluded that what was most important was that “the National Commission understand that it has lived up to now in the grip of the myth of self-management. Sometimes it seems as if the very word self-management would automatically resolve a lot of issues. That way things are a lot more comfortable and seemingly more secure, but reality is what it is.”40
Although some of Jaruzelski’s moderate advisers apparently urged him to leave the new self-management system intact when he launched the assault on Solidarity on December 13, 1981, in fact the general was not so foolish. The proclamation of martial law limited the implementation of the September 1981 laws, putting the workers’ councils, like every other independent social organization, in a state of suspension. The legislation was not repealed, however, and beginning in 1983 the councils were gradually permitted to resume activity. Today the authorities report that councils have been installed in over 90 percent of the eligible enterprises.
But in a political context transformed by the suppression of Solidarity, self-management is not at all what the 1981 movement envisioned. Amendments to the legislation have enhanced the directors’ power to overrule the decisions of the councils, and the list of firms where the regime retains the right to appoint the director—a list that was supposed to be negotiated with the unions—was imposed unilaterally by the state: it totals no fewer than 1,400 enterprises. Recently some of the councils’ powers over enterprise social-welfare programs have been transferred to the new official unions, which the regime is blatantly attempting to bolster as an alternative both to Solidarity and to the less reliable self-management groups. The authority of the councils has been further undermined by a renewed campaign to recombine enterprises into larger bureaucratic entities, where the work crews have no effective voice.
Although it is difficult to generalize—there has been considerable fluidity and diversity in the situation, and detailed information is hard to come by—the consensus among independent observers is that most of the councils permitted in the post-Solidarity period are as much a sham as those that preceded them before 1980. According to a report issued by the Polish Sociological Association in 1985, the majority of new self-management bodies have adopted an “attitude of passivity and submission to management,”41 and one of the best-informed of the Western correspondents in Warsaw estimates that only 10 percent of the elected councils, nationwide, have “shown the will to use their wide-ranging management prerogatives.”42 Solidarity’s experts compare the councils they call “decisionally inactive”—in their view, the large majority—to the discredited institutions of the 1960s and 1970s:
There is not much one can say about the role and functions of the councils dominated by the party and administration beyond what we already know from the KSR-ian past. . . . Transforming themselves quite quickly into a facade of industrial democracy, they carry out the routine functions of formal confirmation of plans, they willingly identify themselves with other “socio-political organizations” [a familiar euphemism for the party and associated organizations], at times they become the terrain for contests between (the latter) and the administration of the enterprise. The crews get nothing useful from them.43
Not surprisingly, in view of the character of most of the councils, public opinion polls reveal widespread indifference to them. The already numerous surveys on the subject—as always, a topic of great interest to Polish sociologists—suggest that “people’s interest in the self-management councils is very weak and clearly in decline,” as the Polish Sociological Association’s summary puts it.44 In one widely noted study prepared by the Central Committee’s Institute of Fundamental Problems of Marxism-Leninism, fewer than 30 percent of the workers surveyed reported that they were familiar with the “rights, possibilities, and tasks of self-management,” could say what issues their employee councils were concerned with at the time, or could name more than a few of the council members.45 In personal conversations workers from several major enterprises told me that they had no idea how their “representatives” had been “elected.”
Those councils that are genuinely independent and effective, however, have far more symbolic and political importance than their numbers suggest, for they constitute small islands of real, albeit limited, working-class autonomy—remainders, and therefore reminders, of the heady days of Solidarity’s legal existence. Some outspoken veterans of the 1981 movement are boycotting the self-management institutions altogether under present conditions, but Lech Wałęsa and the Solidarity underground leadership, who have so far discouraged any involvement with the new officially chartered unions, have publicly endorsed participation in self-management in certain circumstances.46 At some plants slates of activists more or less clearly identified with Solidarity traditions have swept to victory in enterprise elections. In a few cases—most notably Huta Warszawa, the Warsaw steel works that has become a bastion of support for the independent union—these councils have raised broad challenges to the plans of appointed management and its ministerial superiors, and even taken stands on a variety of public issues. More often, the active councils play a quasi-trade-union role, exposing management abuses, defending mistreated individuals, and bargaining over the distribution of wages and bonuses. The workers’ council at the Elana fiber plant in Torun has at least twice taken the initiative to recreate a new version of something like the old Network by calling meetings of representatives of self-management at large enterprises from all over Poland, but each time the authorities have ordered plant management to forbid any such convocation.
These independent councils help to sustain the morale of Poland’s weary workers, and in the country’s still volatile political situation they may yet play a significant role in the reconstruction of a mass movement capable of forcing change upon the regime. The social forces that turned to self-management in 1981 have hardly disappeared, and the grievances the self-management movement attempted to address—the frustration and resentment that political mismanagement of the economy engenders—are all the more acute today. As an ideal, self-management retains significant popular support: one recent independent survey of employees in heavy industry found that fully 87 percent of the sample supported the introduction of “full workers’ self-management.” (Only 56.25 percent, by contrast, favored an enhanced role for the church, and 78.1 percent supported truly free elections to the Sejm.)47 Many of the numerous political groupings that have sprouted in the underground in recent years have incorporated self-management into their platforms.48
But an ideal, no matter how broadly accepted, rarely inspires large-scale political activity unless its supporters sense both a need and an opportunity to realize their vision. With the Polish economy losing ground again after several years of slight relative improvement, and the economic reform (such as it was) being eroded by a resurgent bureaucracy, the problems self-management purports to remedy obviously remain. But the chances of the new workers’ councils accomplishing much in rebuilding Polish industry seem slight. It was Solidarity that created the space in which the self-management movement was born, and Solidarity’s backing that gave it its political muscle. With Solidarity driven into the margins, the councils now stand alone, facing the determined efforts of ministers, managers, party officials, and leaders of the new unions to undermine their autonomy and limit their scope. Without the protection of a union with the will, strength, and independence to stand up to the authorities, there is little likelihood that the surviving councils can fulfill the hopes that many Polish workers for a time vested in the idea of self-management. But for now, some of the councils are helping to keep the struggle alive. There will surely come a time when the Polish working class will find the strength to return to the offensive, and it may well be that self-management will again have a place on their banners.
Notes
1. In a major survey conducted in December 1980 researchers from the Polish Academy of Sciences examining popular “visions of the social order” found 57 percent of their sample “positively in favor” of a system of “full self-management of enterprises,” and another 28.7 percent “rather in favor.” See Lena Kolarska and Andrzej Rychard, “Visions of the Social Order,” Part 3 of “Polacy ‘80,” in Sisyphus 3 (1982):207. (This issue of Sisyphus, a Warsaw sociological journal, was in English. Wherever possible, citations here will be to English-language translations of Polish materials.)
2. Międzyzakładowa Komisja Założycielska, Aktualny Program Dzialania NSZZ (Gdansk, September 5, 1980). A somewhat different translation appears in Labour Focus on Eastern Europe 4, nos. 1–3 (Spring–Autumn 1980):48–49. In the Gdansk Agreements the references to self-management are in the section entitled “With regard to Point 6”; for one of the many available translations see A. Kemp-Welch, ed. and trans., The Birth of Solidarity: The Gdansk Negotiations, 1980 (London: Macmillan, 1983), 172. On the discussions that produced this part of the accord, see pp. 153-54 of the same volume for the comments of Tadeusz Kowalik (one of the “experts” who helped to negotiate for the workers) in his memoir on “Experts and the Working Group.”
3. In Polish the same word (samorząd—literally, “self-rule”) is used both for workplace self-management and for the more diffuse concept of self-government. Both translations will be used here, depending on the context. For a more detailed discussion of the dynamics that pushed Solidarity toward self-management in mid-1981, see Henry Norr, “ Solidarity and Self-Management, May–July 1981,” Poland Watch 7 (1985):97–122, and my book, forthcoming from Cornell University Press.
4. David S. Mason, Public Opinion and Political Change in Poland, 1980–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), provides a comprehensive review of the available survey data. On changing views of self-management, see esp. p. 96, table 4.4; p. 122, table 5.6; and p. 180, table 7.12.
5. The principal sources are Tygodnik Solidarność, the weekly paper the union began to publish in April 1981, and AS (Agencja Prasowa Solidarność), the press packets that a union agency issued every few days during 1981. The latter consists of protocols of leadership meetings, documents, reports on local events, studies by experts advising the union at the regional as well as national level, and excerpts from Solidarity’s vast, fascinating, and so far little studied regional and factory press.
6. Thanks go to the International Research and Exchanges Board for the grant that made the trip possible.
7. See, e.g., Jan T. Gross’s “Editor’s Preface” to Jadwiga Staniszkis, Poland’s Self-Limiting Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), x.
8. See, for instance, the stories recounted by Henryka Krzywonos, the Gdańsk train-driver-turned-Solidarity-official, in Jean-Yves Potel, The Promise of Solidarity (New York: Praeger, 1982), 188–89.
9. Personalism, a movement associated with the French theologians Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier, has exercised enormous influence in Poland, despite the traditional conservatism of the Polish church. Not surprisingly, the Catholic groups and publications that were part of this trend were also those most directly linked to Solidarity. See Stefania Szlek Miller, “Catholic Personalism and Pluralist Democracy in Poland,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 25, no. 3 (Sept. 1983):425–39; John Hellman, “John Paul II and the Personalist Movement,” Cross Currents 30, no. 4 (Winter 1980–81):401–19; and Carl Marzani, “The Vatican as Left Ally?” Monthly Review 34; no. 3 (July–Aug. 1982): 1–42, esp. 23–27.
10. The classic sources for the perspective that came to be associated with KOR are Leszek Kołekowski, “Hope and Hopelessness,” Survey 17, no. 3 (80) (1971):37–52; Adam Michnik, “The New Evolutionism,” Survey 22, nos. 3–4 (100–101) (1976):267–77; and Jacek Kuroń, “Reflections on a Program of Action,” Polish Review 22, no. 3 (1977):51–69. Among secondary sources see especially Jacques Rupnik, “Dissent in Poland, 1968–78: The End of Revisionism and the Rebirth of Civil Society,” in Rudolf L. Tokes, ed., Opposition in Eastern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 60–112; Andrew Arato, “Civil Society Against the State: Poland, 1980–81,” Telos 47 (Spring 1981):25–47; and idem, “Empire vs. Civil Society: Poland 1981–82,” Telos 50 (Winter 1981–82): 19–48.
11. Among Western sources, Albert Szymanski’s Class Struggle in Socialist Poland (New York: Praeger, 1984) is an egregious example of this kind of interpretation of the political dynamics of Solidarity, although it does not focus specifically on the issue of self-management.
12. Excerpts of the draft program, introduced and translated by Marta Petrusewicz, appeared in Socialist Review 59 (Sept.–Oct. 1981):159–79. Full translations are available in Peter Raina, Poland ‘81: Towards Social Renewal (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), 172–97, and Roman Stefanowski, comp., Poland: A Chronology of Events, February–July 1981 (New York: Radio Free Europe Research, March 5, 1982), 147–70. Raina’s book, like his two previous anthologies of documents from the Polish opposition, is a valuable compendium; Radio Free Europe’s periodic chronologies, along with its regular background and situation reports, also constitute a useful and generally reliable source.
13. Wojciech Arkuszewski and Piotr Rachtan, “Robotnik” (an interview with the bulletin’s editors), Tygodnik Solidarność 2 (April 10, 1981).
14. From “Co dalej?” Robotnik 78 (Aug. 27, 1981), translated as “One Year After August—What Shall We Do Next?” Labour Focus on Eastern Europe 5; nos. 1–2 (Spring 1982):15–19.
15. Milewski, who happened to be abroad on Dec. 13, 1981, has since been the banned union’s official representative in the West.
16. At the end of World War II there were only about 7,000 engineers in Poland. George Kolankiewicz, “The Technical Intelligentsia,” in David Lane and Kolankiewicz, Social Groups in Polish Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 183. By 1980, according to official Polish data, there were 355,985 engineers of one sort or another working in the socialized sector of the economy. Rocznik Statystyczny 1984 (Warsaw: Główny Urzad Statystyczny, 1984), 62; table 11(94). On the sociology and political history of the Polish engineering profession, see (besides Kolankiewicz, 180–232) Alexander Matejko, Social Change and Stratification in Eastern Europe (New York: Praeger, 1974), 163–69, and two recent, so far unpublished works by Michael D. Kennedy, “Professionals and Power in Polish Society” (Ph.D. diss., Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1985), esp. ch. 5, and “Polish Engineers’ Participation in the Solidarity Movement” (Sept. 12, 1985), a revised version of a paper presented at the 1985 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.
17. Jean Woodall, The Socialist Corporation and Technocratic Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 147 and ch. 5, passim. On the slowdown in rates of social mobility, see Krzysztof Zagórski, “Transformations of Social Structure and Social Mobility in Poland,” in Kazimierz Słomczyński and Tadeusz Krauze, Class Structure and Social Mobility in Poland (White Plains, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1978), 61–80; and Walter D. Connor, Socialism, Politics, and Equality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), chs. 4 and 5.
18. An official document formalizing the nomenklatura and identifying the specific positions to be controlled by various levels of the party hierarchy was adopted by the Politburo of the ruling Polish United Workers Party (PUWP) in 1972. It was first published as an annex to Thomas Lowit, “Y a-t-il des Etats en Europe de l’Est?” Revue Francaise de Sociologie, 20, no. 3 (July–Sept. 1979):431–66. An English translation appeared in Labour Focus on Eastern Europe 4, nos. 4–6 (1982):55–56.
19. The text of the Network’s draft appeared in AS 19:308–10. Excerpts are translated in the excellent anthology edited by Stan Persky and Henry Flam, The Solidarity Sourcebook (Vancouver, B.C.: New Star, 1982), 183–85. See also the discussion in Domenico Mario Nuti, “Poland: Economic Collapse and Socialist Renewal,” New Left Review 130 (Nov.–Dec. 1981):23–36.
20. See Michael Poole’s useful survey in “Theories of Industrial Democracy: The Emerging Synthesis,” The Sociological Review n.s. 30, no. 2 (May 1982):181–207. Poole (182–85) locates the works of Paul Blumberg and Carole Pateman in a tradition of “developmental” or “educative” democracy that he traces back to John Stuart Mill.
21. These distinctions are drawn from Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 67–73 and passim.
22. Nuti, “Poland,” 30. See also George Kolankiewicz, “Employee Self-Management and Socialist Trade-Unionism,” in Jean Woodall, ed., Policy and Politics in Contemporary Poland (London: Frances Pinter, 1982), 141.
23. AS 34:302.
24. Staniszkis, Self-Limiting Revolution, 21–22.
25. Alain Touraine et al., Solidarité (Paris: Fayard, 1982), 144.
26. A translation of this revealing document appears in Uncensored Poland (bulletin of the U.K. Information Centre for Polish Affairs) 11 (Aug. 4, 1981):12–15.
27. Józef Kusmierek, “Why Now?” (speech at a Network meeting in June), translated in Intercontinental Press, Sept. 7, 1981, 878–79.
28. AS 28:304.
29. On the evolution of the union line in Wrocław (in this respect a microcosm of the whole union), see especially J. Koziński et al., “Konkurs na dyrektora,” Tygodnik Solidarność 18 (July 31, 1981), and Jan Waszkiewicz, “Głodni ale samorządni” (Hungry but Self-Governing), Tygodnik Solidarność 21 (Aug. 21, 1981).
30. Arato in particular had developed this interpretation of the strategy of the Polish opposition and the significance of Solidarity. See n. 10 above.
31. In an unusual move the KKP, on Wałesa’s suggestion, had the transcript of its discussion published—see “O sytuacji w Kraju i Związku,” a special supplement to Tygodnik Solidarność 19 (Aug. 7, 1981). Timothy Garton Ash, whose book The Polish Revolution (New York: Scribner’s, 1984) is the best overall introduction to the Solidarity phenomenon, rightly perceives the pivotal character of the KKP’s July session—see 184–94. Extensive excerpts from the proceedings appear in French in Les Temps Modernes 445–46 (Aug.–Sept. 1983):406–26.
32. From the point of view of Western democrats, reluctance to come to grips with political differences within the movement was one of Solidarity’s less appealing traits. Participants in the organization, however, defend this “solidarism” as a conscious and necessary response to the danger of fragmentation that their massive and socially variegated movement inevitably faced, especially given the unrelenting pressure of a hostile and manipulative regime. In part, of course, the avoidance of political debate was also a function of the immaturity of an organization that few had even dreamed of a year earlier and of the political inexperience of a generation raised in a system that made a mockery of the slogan of “socialist democracy.” On a deeper level, however, Solidarity’s solidarism may also mirror a surrounding political culture built more around moral values than articulated interests. See Staniszkis, Self-Limiting Revolution, 22, and Rudolf Jaworski, “History and Tradition in Contemporary Poland,” East European Quarterly 19, no. 3 (Sept. 1985):349–62. Some critically minded Solidarity militants attempted to encourage political differentiation and the more open articulation of interests within the movement. See, e.g., Jan Lityński, “Dyskusja nad programem—czas zacząc się różnić?” Robotnik 75 (June 12, 1981).
33. Waszkiewicz, “Głodni” (n. 29 above).
34. Staniszkis, Self-Limiting Revolution, 73.
35. The phrase is from Edward Skrzypczak, the newly installed party chief at the large Cegielski works in Poznań, addressing the party’s Extraordinary Ninth Congress—IX Nadzwyczajny Zjazd PZPR: Stenogram z obrad plenarnych (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1983), 615. Skrzypczak’s attitude is all the more telling in that by all accounts he was in many ways a sincere reformist, who was removed from his local position and from the Central Committee shortly after the proclamation of martial law.
36. Pravda, Sept. 11, 1981.
37. AS 40:200–212.
38. Mason, Public Opinion, 180.
39. On the National Federation, and the “Lublin Group” of radical self-management activists that initiated it, see especially Jean-Yves Potel, “La revendication autogestionnaire dans la Pologne de Solidarité,” Sociologie du Travail 3 (1982); “Interview with Henryk Szlajfer,” Intercontinental Press (Sept. 7, 1981):876–78, and Zbigniew Kowalewski, “Solidarnosc on the Eve,” Labour Focus on Eastern Europe 5, nos. 1–2 (1982):25–29. In my view the importance of this current, which had significant influence in only a few regions and enterprises, is sometimes exaggerated, especially by left-leaning Western observers.
40. Merkel, “Krajobraz przez bitwą,” Tygodnik Solidarność 35 and 36 (Nov. 27 and Dec. 4, 1981).
41. Jerzy Osiatyński, Włodzimierz Panków, and Michał Fedorowicz, Samorzad w gospodarczej polskiej 1981-85 (Warsaw: Polskie Towarzystwo Socjologiczne, Oddział Warszawski, 1985). Not having access to the report itself, I have relied on a digest published in Tygodnik Mazowsze 147 (November 21, 1985).
42. Christopher Bobinski, Financial Times, Sept. 24, 1985.
43. Polska 5 lat po sierpniu (Warsaw: Miedzyzakładowa Struktura Solidarności, 1985), 65—a report prepared for Wałesa by a panel of anonymous but reputedly distinguished experts on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the birth of Solidarity, includes an extended discussion of the self-management problem; excerpts appear as “La Pologne, Cinq Ans Après,” Autogestions 22 (1985):30–40.
44. Osiatyński, Panków, and Fedorowicz, Samorząd (note 41 above).
45. Zdzisław Malak, “Samorząd—co o nim myślą?” Polityka 31 (July 30, 1983):4.
46. For Wałésa’s 1984 statement, and a taste of vigorous debate in the Polish underground press about the potential and limitations of the present self-management system, see “Three Articles on Workers’ Self-Management,” Radio Free Europe Research—Polish Samizdat Extracts 7A (Sept. 7, 1984); “A Chance for Self-Management: An Interview with Henryk Wujec,” “The Position of the Steelworkers’ Clandestine Committee on Workers’ Self-Management,” and “Self-Management: It Should Be Worth It,” all in Radio Free Europe Research—Polish Underground Extracts 9 (June 14, 1985):3–13; and “We Decided to Give It a Try—A Conversation with an Activist in the Workers’ Self-Management Council in Polfa,” in ibid. 13 (Sept. 11, 1985):17–20.
47. Preliminary results of the poll are reported by Janusz Bugajski, “Polish Workers Express Their Opinion,” Radio Free Europe Research—Poland Situation Report 16 (Oct. 11, 1985), from the summer 1985 issue of the underground journal Obecność. The survey encompassed workers at a number of major industrial complexes; the results reported so far are apparently based mainly on data from the Warski shipyard in Szczecin, but these are said to be representative of the whole panel.
48. Teresa Hanicka, “Political Groups in the Polish Underground,” Radio Free Europe Research—Background Report 118 (Oct. 14, 1985), provides a convenient survey of eleven of the explicitly political organizations (as distinguished from the underground union bodies).