1. Union acceptance of the loss of workers' rights is amply borne out by a 1994 research project undertaken by Marc Weinstein and David Ost. Trade unionists surveyed in ninety-five industrial enterprises throughout Poland revealed general acquiescence to the erosion of employee participation in the workplace and to the decline in the social welfare net. See David Ost and Marc Weinstein. “The Emergence of New Enterprise Institutions in Post-Communist Poland.” a set of two research reports (1995, 1996) submitted to the National Council for Soviet and Eastern European Research, which generously funded the project. Papers for publication are in process.

2. Here I adopt Victoria Hattam's notion that working-class consciousness entails recognition of its subordinate role in relationship to capital. American labor, she argues, developed class consciousness only when it gave up illusions about changing capitalism and devoted its efforts to getting a better deal within it. Hattam, , Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States (Princeton, 1993). 137–38, 204–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Polish labor history is guilty, as Joan Scott has put it, of telling “a fiction about a universal subject whose universality was achieved through implicit processes of differentiation, marginalization, and exclusion.” Scott is cited in Rabinbach, Anson, “Intellectual Shift or Paradigm Shift?,” International Labor and Working-Class History 46 (Fall 1994):77. This deficiency has not yet been addressed in the literature. A crucial difference, however, is that in Poland this historical subject was universalized not by labor historians but by the state. Male industrial laborers were central to patriotic mythology, and were heroes not of labor history but of state history.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. This is the term used by Konrad, George and Szelenyi, Ivan in their The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (New York, 1979), referring chiefly to technocratic intellectuals. those who legitimate power through knowledge. Michael D. Kennedy calls them “professionals”Google Scholar: Kennedy, , Professionals, Power, and Solidarity in Poland (Cambridge, 1991). Roman Laba and Lawrence Goodwyn seem to use the term “intellectuals” to refer both to technocratic and to creative intellectuals such as writers and artists.CrossRefGoogle ScholarLaba, , The Roots of Solidarity: A Political Sociology of Poland's Working-Class Democratization (Princeton, 1991);CrossRefGoogle ScholarGoodwyn, Lawrence, Breaking the Barrier: The Rise of Solidarity in Poland (New York, 1991).Google Scholar

5. The best account of this period is Kenney, Padraic, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, 1996).Google Scholar

6. Ibid., 40. See also Reynolds, Jaime, “Communists, Socialists and Workers: Poland 1944–48,” Soviet Studies 30 (10 1978).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. See, for example, Kersten, Krystyna, The Establishment of Communist Rule in Poland, tr. Bernhard, Michael and Micgiel, John (Berkeley, 1991). Even many Polish right-wingers made their peace with Stalinism, which had gone a long way toward introducing the strong developmentalist state that they had long championed.Google Scholar

8. This section on labor policy borrows heavily from Weinstein, Marc, “Labor and Human Resources in Poland, 1944–1994,” Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1996.Google Scholar

9. Ibid., 10.

10. For example, Karpinski, Jakub, Countdown (New York, 1982);Google ScholarHarmon, Chris, Class Struggles In Eastern Europe 1945–83 (London, 1988).Google Scholar

11. Burawoy, Michael and Lukács, Janos, The Radiant Past: Ideology and Reality in Hungary's Road to Capitalism (Chicago, 1992);Google ScholarBurawoy, Michael, The Politics of Production (London, 1985);Google ScholarSabel, Charles and Stark, David, “Planning, Politics and Shopfloor Power: Hidden Forms of Bargaining in Soviet-Imposed State Socialist Societies,” Politics and Society 11 (1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. The best account of the 1956 events in English, with a focus on just how workers construct a “democratic public space,” is Goodwyn, , Breaking the Barrier, chap. 2.Google ScholarGoodwyn's own account is based heavily on Maciejewski, Jaroslaw and Trojanowicz, Zofia, Poznanski Czerwiec (Poznan, 1981).Google Scholar

13. Stefan Marody, a radical intellectual self-management activist from Warsaw, told me how he and others tried to persuade workers in one factory of the merits of self-management, while the skeptical workers kept asking what was in it for them (personal conversation, April 1995). Whereas for Marody this was a sign of the workers' backwardness, it is better seen as a sign of workers trying to defend their class interests. Again. I use Victoria Hattam's notion of class consciousness here, whereby workers defend their class interests when they seek to benefit their material conditions as workers, not when they pretend they are something else; Hattam, Labor Visions. For a similar view on self-management in Poland, see Biezenski, Robert, “Workers' Self-Management and the Technical Intelligentsia in People's Poland,” Politics and Society 22:1 (03 1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. Laba, , The Roots of Solidarity, 17.Google Scholar

15. Standard works and interpretations include ibid.; Goodwyn, , Breaking the Barrier;Google ScholarOst, David, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics (Philadelphia, 1990);Google ScholarOst, , “Indispensable Ambiguity: Solidarity's Internal Authority Structure,” Studies in Comparative Communism 21:2 (Summer 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. See Ost, David, “The Transformation of Solidarity and the Future of Central Europe,” Telos 79 (Spring 1989);Google ScholarOst, , ed., “Special Section on Poland,” Telos 92 (Summer 1992);Google ScholarOst, , “Labor, Class, and Democracy: Shaping Political Antagonisms in Post-Communist Society,” in Crawford, Beverley, ed., Markets, States, and Democracy: The Political Economy of Post-Communist Transformation (Boulder, 1995);Google ScholarWeinstein, , “Labor and Human Resources;” and Steven Stoltenberg, “An Underground Society: The Evolution of Poland's Solidarity 1982–1989 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1995).Google Scholar

17. Technically, most of agriculture in Poland was privately owned after 1956, but the severe restrictions placed on the buying and selling of land makes farmers virtually equivalent to proletarians.

18. On engineers and social class in Poland, see Kennedy, Michael, Professionals, Power, and Solidarity.Google ScholarOn the ambiguity of class in communist society, see Ost, David, “The Politics of Interest in Post-Communist East Europe,” Theory and Society 22 (08 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. See Konrad, and Szelenyi, , The Intellectuals.Google Scholar

20. Goodwyn, , Breaking the Barrier, 61.Google Scholar

21. For example, see Gora, Wladyslaw, ed., Ruch Robotniczy w wojewodztwie lodzkim w latach 1945–55 (Lodz, 1976);Google ScholarKolodziejczyk, Ryszard, ed., Kiasa Robotnicza i Ruch Robotniczv na zachodnim Mazowszu 1878–1948 (Warsaw, 1981). Numerous other books concern the Communist party or the Socialist party, and treat labor history in terms of these parties.Google Scholar

22. Some of the best Polish labor history cum sociology includes Sarapata, Adam, Klasa Robotnicza w Polsce Ludowej (Warsaw, 1963);Google ScholarDoktor, Kazimierz, Przedsiebiorstwo Przemyslowe: Studium Socjologiczne Zakladow Przemvslu Metalowego H. Cegielski (Warsaw, 1964);Google Scholarand Malanowski, Jan, Polscy Robotnicy (Warsaw, 1981).Google Scholar