REVIEWS:IDEAS OF SOLIDARITY
Rule, James B.
SOLIDARITY: POLAND 1980-81, by Alain Touraine et al. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 205 pp. Cloth $21.95; paper $9.95. POLAND'S SELF-LIMITING REVOLUTION, by...
...Thus discussions proceed under a cloud of abstractions many will find maddening...
...As a young sociologist, the author had taken major personal risks in opposing the regime well before 1980...
...Other measures, not without influence, were intended to keep conflicting interests below the threshold of articulation...
...The abrupt repression of Solidarity may have distracted attention from some important questions of self-definition that it never had a chance to answer...
...In a country where myths of national identity in the face of foreign persecution have enormous potency, the memory of Solidarity has become an enduring cultural, and hence political, force...
...377...
...Unfortunately, Staniszkis is one of those who cannot resist propounding at least one theory for every fact she reports...
...What Staniszkis gives us here is not so much an argument as theoretical stream of consciousness...
...They operated on several planes...
...The movement's sustained commitment to participation, egalitarianism, and nonviolence stands as an enormous historical and political achievement...
...352 pp...
...These highly personal testimonies remind us of something that distance may lead us to forget: that Solidarity was always a heterogeneous, volatile mixture of aspirations and tendencies not always compatible with one another...
...That year she was among the first to cement the ties between workers and intellectuals that added so much to the movement's stature...
...The Katowice group, for its part, was too rooted in working-class consciousness to see the transformation of economic institutions as centrally important...
...Staniszkis's theories often read as though they were racing to keep up with events...
...Given the events of that day, the questions remain for reflection by all who care about democratic renewal...
...Throughout its brief and tempestuous existence, Solidarity flourished as a movement of opposition in a system where opposition was in principle impossible...
...edited by Jan T. Gross...
...Solidarity is crushed, yet it is an open secret that the "victorious" regime cannot hope to realize its own ends without enlisting the political forces and personal energies that Solidarity captured...
...And, as if these questions were not agonizing enough in themselves, the debates took place against a backdrop of seeming total fluidity in national life—in a period when the nightmare of a Soviet-led invasion never seemed far away...
...Had Solidarity escaped destruction on December 13, 1981, its eventual responses to such questions would inevitably have altered its significance...
...All of this is highly suggestive and intriguing...
...It would be fascinating to know how both books' authors, and the informants who provided the material for Solidarity, would regard their positions of 1981 in the light of events since then...
...The curtailment of the movement has itself created a political and historical anomaly of extraordinary proportions—a case of Walzer's "failed totalitarianism" even more conspicuously failed than that of the U.S.S.R...
...If so, how would the prerogatives of economic power be reconciled with the ethic of egalitarianism...
...First, steps were taken that led to stabilizing the status quo by promulgating a peculiar definition of reality that saw no alternatives to the current institutional form of social life...
...But one yearns for examples that would make such statements concrete and persuasive...
...Should it seek worker-management, or a role in economic planning, if not political power...
...Though some of her book is straightforward history, most is an attempt to develop theories about intricacies of the Polish political situation that are bound, at first, to be obscure to most nonPolish readers...
...Should it, even if invited, participate in the exercise of state power...
...When such notions were monopolized by the superficial official language and grew devoid of meaning, they were no longer regarded by the population as an instrument of communication...
...These authors, sociologists all, worked as participant observers in Solidarity groups in six major Polish cities throughout much of the lifetime of the movement...
...THESE BOOKS, then, are raw materials for a history of Solidarity—a work yet to be written...
...both have the chaotic quality of works created in the midst of exhausting and heartbreaking events...
...Solidarity: Poland 1980-81, by the eminent French sociologist Alain Touraine and his collaborators, most of whom are Poles, is the far more accessible book...
...Both books were completed at about the time of the coup...
...As Solidarity flourished, she quickly became known as an originator of new and unpredictable visions of the movement's future...
...POLAND'S SELF-LIMITING REVOLUTION, by Jadwiga Staniszkis...
...Perhaps more than any episode since World War II, the rise of Solidarity reaffirmed the appeal of economic and political egalitarianism, the resilience of grass-roots democracy, and the ability of a movement based on such principles to thrive even against the ugliest sorts of totalitarian force...
...itself...
...The activists' thoughts captured in Solidarity were evolving from day to day as the researchers recorded them...
...General Jaruzelski's desperate coup against his own people bought his bankrupt regime some time...
...Democracy, these accounts demonstrate once 376 again, is an exhausting discipline...
...How much power—and what kind of power—could a grass-roots movement aspire to in a Soviet-bloc country...
...Often considered excessively radical, even outlandish, her views and her rapport with workers commanded respect throughout the movement...
...Summarizing the deliberations of the Warsaw group, the authors write: At the onset the group had found it difficult to accept the idea that Solidarity was a fusion of different elements, but it now settled itself much more firmly than the two other groups in the centre of the ground which we have defined as Solidarity II...
...Could it, should it remain a trade union—or seek to evolve into one or more political parties...
...Poland's Self-Limiting Revolution contains a series of theoretical essays on relations between movement, state, party, and the rest of Polish society...
...It also had the effect, no doubt quite unintended, of freezing Solidarity in time, and of ensuring that movement a permanent place in Poland's national mythology...
...In different ways, these two books treat these debates from the standpoint of thoughtful, engaged Poles living through the Solidarity months...
...Though there is some analysis, the book's importance is as a record of the soul-searchings and debates among rankandfile participants as to possibilities and prospects...
...Such questions received endless debate throughout the life of the movement...
...Yet she never held a major official position in Solidarity...
...How would a successful Solidarity come to terms with the needs to modernize and streamline the country's economy—with all the human disruption such a transition would inevitably occasion...
...25.00...
...many Solidarity supporters seem to have spent the months of the movement in a state of permanent exhaustion...
...Could it expect to avoid such participation, if it succeeded in its other aims...
...The Gdansk group remained too attached to the spirit of the Gdansk Agreement to accept without much reluctance that the movement should move on from that phase to another, while some members simply leapt forward to more immediately political positions...
...Princeton: Princeton University Press...
...The Warsaw group, on the other hand, took hold of the idea of self-management and placed it at the centre of its preoccupations, in order to avoid the threat of being split between a base completely taken up with the most immediate material problems and a leadership predominantly political in character...
...This was possible not only because society was atomized but also (indicative of much more advanced control) because various notions traditionally linked with the so-called liberal ethos were kept from being openly advanced...
...Have the faceless characters now running Poland really reckoned with this fact...
...Analyzing techniques used by the regime to control popular dissent, she writes, These techniques effectively prevented the emergence of conflict outside the framework of institutions...
Vol. 33 • July 1986 • No. 3
