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Breaking the Barrier: The Rise of Solidarity in Poland
In the last year the world has been electrified as one Soviet bloc government after another has collapsed. The Berlin Wall has been dismantled and Germany reunited, Vaclav Havel went from the prisons to the presidency of Czechoslovakia, and the Hungarian people have dismantled the one-party
state. But ten full years before any of these tumultuous events came the first successful challenge to the Leninist state--the shipworker's strike which began in Gdansk, and which led to the formation of the first free and independent trade union in the communist world, Solidarnosc.
Now, in Breaking the Barrier , Lawrence Goodwyn provides a fascinating history of the Solidarity movement, tracing thirty-five years of working class activism and state repression that preceded and defined the climactic struggle of 1980 on the Baltic coast of Poland. Goodwyn demonstrates the
extent to which Solidarnosc grew out of the workers themselves, not out of intellectual theories. He describes the strikes in 1956, 1970, and 1976, and shows how they provided workers with the knowledge to create Solidarnosc. Indeed in 1980, when they formulated and bargained for twenty-one demands
which shocked even sympathetic observers, the workers proved themselves far better political strategists than the elite intellectuals of the "democratic opposition" who came to advise them. Moreover, Goodwyn does not simply recount these dramatic events. In his gripping narrative, the movement comes
we see Lech Walesa standing up to the powers of a physically and politically intimidating bureaucracy; we watch the difficult emergence of an alliance between the workers and Warsaw intellectuals, as the strikers adamantly refuse to compromise their demand for free unions, and we find
touching portraits of the martyred priest, Jerzy Popieluszko, and the dissident, Adam Michnik.
In the epilogue, Goodwyn offers a provocative critique of Poland and Eastern Europe today, in which he defines the distance still to be traversed to fulfill the democratic legacy of the early years of Solidarnosc. Based on personal interviews with Polish workers and intellectuals, as well as
extensive historical research, this vivid interpretation of collective heroism and government corruption will interest anyone who has been amazed by the democratic revolutions in the East and who wants to know the real story of how it all began.
state. But ten full years before any of these tumultuous events came the first successful challenge to the Leninist state--the shipworker's strike which began in Gdansk, and which led to the formation of the first free and independent trade union in the communist world, Solidarnosc.
Now, in Breaking the Barrier , Lawrence Goodwyn provides a fascinating history of the Solidarity movement, tracing thirty-five years of working class activism and state repression that preceded and defined the climactic struggle of 1980 on the Baltic coast of Poland. Goodwyn demonstrates the
extent to which Solidarnosc grew out of the workers themselves, not out of intellectual theories. He describes the strikes in 1956, 1970, and 1976, and shows how they provided workers with the knowledge to create Solidarnosc. Indeed in 1980, when they formulated and bargained for twenty-one demands
which shocked even sympathetic observers, the workers proved themselves far better political strategists than the elite intellectuals of the "democratic opposition" who came to advise them. Moreover, Goodwyn does not simply recount these dramatic events. In his gripping narrative, the movement comes
we see Lech Walesa standing up to the powers of a physically and politically intimidating bureaucracy; we watch the difficult emergence of an alliance between the workers and Warsaw intellectuals, as the strikers adamantly refuse to compromise their demand for free unions, and we find
touching portraits of the martyred priest, Jerzy Popieluszko, and the dissident, Adam Michnik.
In the epilogue, Goodwyn offers a provocative critique of Poland and Eastern Europe today, in which he defines the distance still to be traversed to fulfill the democratic legacy of the early years of Solidarnosc. Based on personal interviews with Polish workers and intellectuals, as well as
extensive historical research, this vivid interpretation of collective heroism and government corruption will interest anyone who has been amazed by the democratic revolutions in the East and who wants to know the real story of how it all began.
496 pages, Hardcover
First published May 2, 1991
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 11, 2019
Sadly forgotten in both Poland and the USA, Poland's Solidarity movement has been buried under Reagan-era stereotypes, overtaken by fundamentalist nationalism, and sold out on the "free market" by its opportunistic vanguard. Yet in reliving Solidarity's glory days historian Lawrence Goodwyn - known for his treatment of American populism - offered the most in-depth analysis of democracy itself, against the background of the most democratic social movement in postwar Europe.
So fundamental was the reach of Polish Solidarity in touching the human core of its host society that it exposed not only the pretensions of "people's" democracy, but the hollowness of the West's own staid Sunday-go-to-meeting ritualism. In Poland in 1980 it was ordinary *people* connecting - not parties, NGOs, nor through a mass movement united by a "great leader" (Walesa's hagiographers to the contrary.) For a few brief months, until overtaken by hunger and fatigue and crushed from above, Poland was a truly self-governing democratic republic in the most basic sense - One Big Union, as in the old syndicalist phrase. Whether this could have lasted, or served only as a transition to something less ideal, will never be known. This is why I bother reviewing this book long - and sadly - out of print.
But I must offer some obverse caveats about Solidarity, Poland, and Goodwyn's treatment of both. For all of Poland's official Marxism-Leninism, it was yet a far freer and civil society than the formal democracies of Central America. A Salvadoran Lech Walesa would have ended up decapitated in a body dump in the summer of 1980, with Ronald Reagan looking the other way if not nodding to his executioners.
And though Goodwyn's take on Polish history follows the usual Western trajectory - righteous, freedom-seeking people, united against a repressive Communist Apparat ruling only by illegitimate grace of Stalin since 1944 - the curtain of fear had its other side. As Jan T. Gross showed in "Neighbors" and "Fear," Polish society was capable of self-mobilizing in quite negative ways against the Leninist Regime. Kielce and other atrocities were not forgotten by Holocaust survivors. The Peoples' Republic could also exploit this memory in fighting Solidarity as it too lived in the shadow of pogrom: "Red" and "Jew" were synonymous bogeymen in the Catholic-nationalist underground.
Like nearly all Western academics and journalists, Goodwyn is oblivious to the positive (and necessary) side of 1944: the land reform that broke the entrenched aristocracy, the removal of the reactionary military clique from state power, the separation of state and church, the curbing of anti-Semitism at official and street level. (The public trial of pogromists, as at Kielce in '46, would have been improbable in the rightist military regime of prewar decades - and not because such violence couldn't have happened in "Free Poland.")
Though Poland's workers were rebelling against their Marxist-Leninist status as nationalized labor, the socialization of production - by eliminating the propertied middle class - "horizontalized" society. This made possible the unimpeded rise of a mass-national workers' movement like Solidarity. The democratic mandate of "Lublin Poland" was thus as genuine as its London-based rival. And while Peoples' Poland sank into smug, abusive corruption it was but following a hallowed Polish tradition - to the point that Poland's Communists had to save themselves from the threat of a real peoples' democracy through crowning hypocrisy: smashing a national liberation movement, led by the working class, via another reactionary general drawn from the landed aristocracy, at the bidding of an imperial great power. In other contexts, Wojciech Jaruzelski would have been lauded with Chilean applause.
Solidarity's later betrayal by its intellectual and church allies was also predictable. The intelligentsia and the church knew a good ride when they saw it. Though they did help transform Solidarity from a class into a national movement, the intelligentsia's class infatuation with free-market Reaganism, the church's lapse into traditional clerical thuggery, and the union bossism of Walesa's clique all combined to betray this revolution, too, to which Goodwyn alluded even then. All the more do the glory days shine through in retrospect.
So fundamental was the reach of Polish Solidarity in touching the human core of its host society that it exposed not only the pretensions of "people's" democracy, but the hollowness of the West's own staid Sunday-go-to-meeting ritualism. In Poland in 1980 it was ordinary *people* connecting - not parties, NGOs, nor through a mass movement united by a "great leader" (Walesa's hagiographers to the contrary.) For a few brief months, until overtaken by hunger and fatigue and crushed from above, Poland was a truly self-governing democratic republic in the most basic sense - One Big Union, as in the old syndicalist phrase. Whether this could have lasted, or served only as a transition to something less ideal, will never be known. This is why I bother reviewing this book long - and sadly - out of print.
But I must offer some obverse caveats about Solidarity, Poland, and Goodwyn's treatment of both. For all of Poland's official Marxism-Leninism, it was yet a far freer and civil society than the formal democracies of Central America. A Salvadoran Lech Walesa would have ended up decapitated in a body dump in the summer of 1980, with Ronald Reagan looking the other way if not nodding to his executioners.
And though Goodwyn's take on Polish history follows the usual Western trajectory - righteous, freedom-seeking people, united against a repressive Communist Apparat ruling only by illegitimate grace of Stalin since 1944 - the curtain of fear had its other side. As Jan T. Gross showed in "Neighbors" and "Fear," Polish society was capable of self-mobilizing in quite negative ways against the Leninist Regime. Kielce and other atrocities were not forgotten by Holocaust survivors. The Peoples' Republic could also exploit this memory in fighting Solidarity as it too lived in the shadow of pogrom: "Red" and "Jew" were synonymous bogeymen in the Catholic-nationalist underground.
Like nearly all Western academics and journalists, Goodwyn is oblivious to the positive (and necessary) side of 1944: the land reform that broke the entrenched aristocracy, the removal of the reactionary military clique from state power, the separation of state and church, the curbing of anti-Semitism at official and street level. (The public trial of pogromists, as at Kielce in '46, would have been improbable in the rightist military regime of prewar decades - and not because such violence couldn't have happened in "Free Poland.")
Though Poland's workers were rebelling against their Marxist-Leninist status as nationalized labor, the socialization of production - by eliminating the propertied middle class - "horizontalized" society. This made possible the unimpeded rise of a mass-national workers' movement like Solidarity. The democratic mandate of "Lublin Poland" was thus as genuine as its London-based rival. And while Peoples' Poland sank into smug, abusive corruption it was but following a hallowed Polish tradition - to the point that Poland's Communists had to save themselves from the threat of a real peoples' democracy through crowning hypocrisy: smashing a national liberation movement, led by the working class, via another reactionary general drawn from the landed aristocracy, at the bidding of an imperial great power. In other contexts, Wojciech Jaruzelski would have been lauded with Chilean applause.
Solidarity's later betrayal by its intellectual and church allies was also predictable. The intelligentsia and the church knew a good ride when they saw it. Though they did help transform Solidarity from a class into a national movement, the intelligentsia's class infatuation with free-market Reaganism, the church's lapse into traditional clerical thuggery, and the union bossism of Walesa's clique all combined to betray this revolution, too, to which Goodwyn alluded even then. All the more do the glory days shine through in retrospect.
May 12, 2022
In both Poland and the USA, Poland's Solidarity movement has been buried under Reagan-era stereotypes, overtaken by fundamentalist nationalism, and sold out on the "free market" by its opportunistic vanguard. Yet in reliving Solidarity's glory days historian Lawrence Goodwyn - known for his treatment of American populism - offered the most in-depth analysis of democracy itself, against the background of the most democratic social movement in postwar Europe. So fundamental was the reach of Polish Solidarity in touching the human core of its host society that it exposed not only the pretensions of "people's" democracy, but the hollowness of the West's own staid Sunday-go-to-meeting ritualism. In Poland in 1980 it was ordinary *people* connecting - not parties, NGOs, nor through a mass movement united by a "great leader" (Walesa's hagiographers to the contrary.) For a few brief months, until overtaken by hunger and fatigue and crushed from above, Poland was a truly self-governing democratic republic in the most basic sense - One Big Union, as in the old syndicalist phrase. Whether this could have lasted or served only as a transition to something less ideal, will never be known. This is why I bother reviewing this book long - and sadly - out of print.
September 30, 2019
One of the best and most challenging books on social movement organizing I have ever read.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews