Toledo Translation Fund

Help us complete the translation of Michal Sierminski’s award-winning work Broken Solidarity – The Intellectual Opposition and the Working Class 1964–81

Target Amount: 1,550 EUR

Zygmunt Bauman once described the Polish revolution of 1980–1 as the “first workers’ revolution in history”, highlighting its unprecedented mass scale, grassroots organisational structures, and organic working-class character. The dominant narrative of Solidarność, however, is that of a movement orchestrated primarily by intellectuals from the democratic opposition – figures such as Jacek Kuron and Adam Michnik. Michal Sierminski’s award-winning work Broken Solidarity – The Intellectual Opposition and the Working Class 1964–81 challenges this myth. Published in Polish on the 40th anniversary of the Gdansk Agreement, it comprehensively debunks the idea – canonical in Polish society and echoed in the West – that the movement was decisively shaped by an enlightened few who brought consciousness to the workers ‘from the outside’.

Sierminski traces the origins of the Solidarność movement to the autonomous actions and forms of organisation developed by the Polish working class during earlier protests, strikes, and occupations in the 1970s. The author convincingly demonstrates that Solidarność in 1980–81 was driven by the proletariat’s own aims, experiences, and revolutionary instinct – often in direct opposition to the efforts of intellectuals to contain its radicalism. This did not prevent the same intellectuals from later taking credit for all the achievements.

Sierminski examines the historical development of the Polish intelligentsia from the nineteenth century to its role in the democratic opposition of the 1970s. The Polish left, which emerged from the intelligentsia and remained attached to its values and high self-esteem, was repeatedly overtaken by autonomous working-class movements. The consciousness of the Polish working class developed independently – whether in the nineteenth century, when mass strikes prompted the formation of the Polish Socialist Party, or during the 1970 uprising on the Baltic coast, which marked a turning point in the class consciousness and organisational capacity of the proletariat.

Unlike earlier Marxist attempts to study the Polish revolution of 1980–81, Sierminki’s book offers a meticulous historical examination of the Solidarność movement, the KOR organisation of the intellectual opposition, and their respective precursors within the working class and intelligentsia. Crucially, there is an 80-page epilogue by Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski, a Polish Trotskyist and in 1980–81 a member of the regional leadership of Solidarność in Lodz and co-author of the union’s original programme. The text, ‘Workers and Bureaucrats’, reveals some of the theoretical assumptions underlying Sierminski's text and provides an excellent theoretical and historical foundation for its central arguments. The author succeeds in presenting a concise yet thorough analysis of the genesis and nature of the fundamental conflict that is key to understanding what happened in the Soviet Union and then, after the Second World War, throughout the Eastern Bloc – the conflict between the working class and the party-state bureaucracy. Kowalewski’s extensive use of the new knowledge brought by the opening of the post-Soviet archives, and the new historiography that emerged after this opening, allows him to present the phenomenon of class struggle under the Eastern Bloc regimes in a completely new way. It is a must read for anyone with the courage to think in truly materialist terms.

While the University of Warsaw has kindly agreed to cover the costs for the English translation of Michal Sierminski’s groundbreaking text, we still lack funds for the translation of Kowalewski’s indispensable epilogue. Previously translated into French, Portuguese and German, and is much appreciated by left-wing readers in those countries – it’s time for its English premiere! We ask you to contribute generously to complete this project, including Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski's essential epilogue.

• Prologue
• On the ‘exogenous’ sections in What Is To Be Done?
• The Russian revolution of 1905
• Introduction
• The Polish revolution of 1980–81
• ‘The opposition brought consciousness to the spontaneous workers’ movement’
• Opozycja wniosła świadomość do żywiołowego ruchu robotniczego”
• Workers’ autonomy
• Autonomia robotnicza

• Chapter I: March 1968 – The End of Marxist Revisionism and the Mythical Birth of the Democratic Opposition

• Introduction
• Kuroń, Modzelewski and the komandosi
• The March shock
• A pogrom atmosphere
• The great disillusionment
• Blind rebellion
• Birth of a myth

• Chapter II: The Turn to National Tradition and the Internalisation of the Ethos of the ‘Classical’ Polish Intelligentsia

• Introduction
• The ‘classical’ Polish intelligentsia
• New ideological lineages
• Guardians and defenders of values
• ‘The psychology of servitude’
• Chapter III: The period from December 1970 to August 1980
• Introduction
• The winter breakthrough
• ‘The intelligentsia is not interested in the workers’ question’
• June 1976 and the birth of KOR
• The concept of civil society
• Taking the programme to the workers
• Containing the ‘explosion’ of public anger
• Chapter III: The Solidarność Revolution: Problematic Comradeship
• Introduction
• August 1980
• Joy, hopes, expectations
• ‘Self-limiting revolution’
• The Bydgoszcz confrontation
• The struggle for self-government
• The concept of national government
• National-civic Solidarność
• Conclusion
• National-civic Solidarność
• Workers’ Solidarność
• Acknowledgments

• Afterword: Workers and bureaucrats. How Exploitative Relations Emerged and Functioned in the Soviet Bloc (by Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski)

• The irreversible fracturing of the workers’ state
• From workers’ bureaucracy to Thermidorian bureaucracy
• The construction of the Stalinist bureaucracy and the consolidation of the mode of exploitation
• Stalinist structural assimilation of the East European periphery
• Mode of production and exploitation in the Soviet bloc
• The struggle for surplus value and for control over labour processes
• Conclusion: there was a way out of the vicious circle
• Bibliography