by Pyzik, Agata
Was there a proletarian culture?
While we condemn the socialist period for the belatedness of our economy and being the “lesser Europe”, the future of our modern history was already decided in the small industrial enterprises and factories in the imperial United Kingdom. I will focus here on the un/development of the working class culture in Poland, to demonstrate some of the many reasons why the anti-capitalist revolution didn’t succeed in Eastern Europe.
Poland, though a major European power in the early modern era, experienced much slowing of its development, as its elites of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries weren’t interested in the accumulation of capital via cities and coasts, both decisive for the progress of capitalism, but mainly in the lands worked by serfs that they owned in the East. Subsequent wars and annexations weakened Poland to the degree it was partitioned in late eighteenth century and was swallowed by Prussia, the Russian Empire and Austria for over 120 years. Poland entered the twentieth century underindustralized, still with the terrible effects of peasant serfdom and the cult of the aristocracy-landowners and the Catholic Church as the carriers of Polish patriotism. This wasn’t a great soil for a strong labor movement. Despite this, a certain proletarian culture started to develop in big cities, especially in the Prussian partition in Pozńan and Silesia as a result of industralization begun in the last decades of the nineteenth century; and in the Russian partition, there were strong socialist currents in Warsaw and especially Łódz, where a movement against both Tsarist and industrial exploitation, concentrated in textile factories, had a major role in the 1905 Revolution. But in general, the labor movement and labor culture were not strong in Poland.
After independence in 1918, the newly formed Communist Party was banned. The moderate socialist party, the PPS, was influential in the factories and in the parliament, but its power was circumscribed after the May 1926 coup by its former leader, Marshal Josef Piłsudski. So despite the efforts and the memory of 1905, Polish proletarian culture was weak. In the 1930s, the whole of Europe was characterized by growing nationalisms and dictatorships, and it was no different in Poland under the dictatorship first of Marshal Piłsudski and then his associates. Our traditions were weaker than in the Soviet Union, where the massive revolution of 1917 pervaded the whole nation. We also had a weaker trade union movement than Germany and France. All this made the development of ‘proletarian culture’ unlikely. But it wasn’t even bourgeois culture that was considered the national culture. It was the deeply rural peasant culture and the aristocratic culture of their landlords. This caste was also identical with the bearers of Polish patriotism and, though it’s never named this way, our “imperial” aspirations and ambitions - sympathies which were kept alive throughout the whole existence of the PRL by the intelligentsia. In this way the liberatory forces in the Polish tradition were at the same time often deeply reactionary, and the only vision of Poland that was truly Polish had to be necessarily a vision that was nationalistic, Catholic, and what’s more, a vision of the grandiose Poland, claiming the ownership of the Kresy. As it’s beyond doubt that Poland has borne a huge burden of suffering – the Holocaust, severe repression and destruction by the Nazi occupiers, and then Stalinism - it proposes a history in which only revenge over the enemy is at play, refusing to see or recognize its own colonial claims and nationalism.
Although these were among the reasons why the Polish social experiment that started after 1945 and lasted for 44 years wasn’t that successful, much else was the fault of the communist regime itself. It was imposed from the outside, set up initially as a Soviet colony, and it committed many crimes, which didn’t exactly help to legitimize it. It systematically lied about its recent history – about everything from the dissolution and mass murder of the first Polish Communist Party by the Soviets in the late 1930s, to the denial of Soviet responsibility for the massacre of thousands of Polish officers at Katyn.
But many of today’s class relations and people’s relationship to the recent history, as well as the refusal to criticize the capitalist transition, still comes from this pre-Soviet history. As it should be clear now, even if the war didn’t happen, Poland would still hardly have been on the economic level of the Western countries, even if we are to devote our time to such speculation. Yet we base our pretensions and dreams of being a ‘regular European country’ precisely on those claims. But the new regime, even if it raised Polish cities from the rubble, didn’t make it easier to identify or accept its rules. Even if it was introducing egalitarian rules, it was doing so via coercion. As it was rebuilding the country and elevating the peasantry or proletariat to previously unknown levels of literacy (books went from having a circulation of 1000 before the war to have 50,000 or 100,000 – the number often proudly displayed on the title page), building schools, libraries and propagating culture, at the same time it fought the intelligentsia, who were plagued with repressions. Under Stalinism, if the Party wanted to promote the proletariat, it did so by keeping children of the intelligentsia out of university, or sending them to the country for ‘reeducation’.
At the same time, they necessarily created their own ruling class and their own intelligentsia. This meant the upper echelon of the bureaucracy, but also a wholly new class of specialists, engineers, scientists and teachers, newly educated in the new circumstances. In some way, there was a continuity with the past, as a part of the previous intelligentsia survived the war. Yet, despite building this new ruling class, they couldn’t openly admit that they, the Communists, had become it, as to do so would be to abandon any claims to socialism.
5.3 Monumentalisation of labour. Stalin removed from compulsory worker’s reading after 1956.
The lyrics listed at the beginning of the chapter come from songs, which, mostly in the Stalinist period (1949-54) and around the Thaw (1956), were intended to encourage, empower and ennoble the working class and the task of labor. They were mostly written in the poetics of socialist realism - incredibly simplistic, grandiose, spectacular and heavy. The style spread from the architecture of Stalinist skyscrapers to the choral songs, played on the radio, exalting the labor and glory of the working classes, resurrecting the dead, destroyed Polish cities from the rubble. The moment to build a new culture after the war couldn’t have been more perfect: there was literally nothing left, as the Nazis left Poland in pieces. With its bourgeois and nationalist traditions, Polish society, only after enduring the loss respectively of its Jewish proletarian-petit-bourgeois base and a great deal of its intelligentsia and elites, had the ground “ready” to completely reformulate its structures.
5.4 Przekroj. The beauty of labour.
In principle and on the surface, within socialism it was finally the proletarian culture which was to become the dominant culture. Also, for the first time it was given a splendour, scale and magnificence it never had before. Never before were such palaces of marble and gold, devoted to culture and development of the laboring class ever built. Proletarian culture became the official culture: culture designed for the working classes, in theory at least. Because it must be asked if people really did enjoy it or feel that it was theirs? The solemnity, heaviness, seriousness and scariness of the new sotsrealist art must’ve been also a deterrent. Especially in its Stalinist period, it was designed by the same token, to discipline and intimidate people: the grandiose socialist realist design had the effect of domination and stifling as much as ‘encouragement’. In reality, both reactions to the new culture were conceived to discipline people: as we know, communism was by no means accepted by the whole Polish society. So the initial efforts of the new authorities were designed to both please and rule an unruly society.
Post-Thaw, when there briefly was relative freedom and a lowering of censorship, culture, while becoming less heavy and rough (as must’ve been the stereotype of the proletariat), became lighter, more elegant…could we say more bourgeois? Today the locally patriotic songs sound nearly charming, especially about the biggest success of the post-war recon
struction, that is the capital, Warsaw. There are hundreds of propagandistic pro-Warsawian songs, often dressed as popular radio songs. From lighter tunes, cherishing the beauty of the Polish cities’ streets, with “I could be a Parisian boulevard flaneur, but would it be as good as promenading in Warsaw?” (of course, the question is rhetorical), to the much scarier and heavier, choral songs such as “We’re building the new Poland”, giving the quasi-religious or even operatic properties to these – what are they? – folk songs? Agitation songs? Of course, the political song has a long tradition. But it was only by “stealing” from the already existing and established high cultural forms that the pathos and splendor could be given to this equivalent of proletcult.
But was this culture really empowering by the sheer value of singing of the working class? First of all, the new culture, even though it was glorifying “labor” and workers, claimed that labor was in fact a pleasure and an honor, because it served the building of the beloved socialist country, never mentioning the unpleasant, wearying, life-shortening aspects of hard work. Work becomes the “most beautiful dream”, membership in the party or organizations becomes “a new life”, and the factory becomes “our beloved port”. Crude and unimaginative as they are, they projected a reality on which work had incredible dignity, importance and its role was finally valued properly according to the value it had in the society. Yes, the working class is a necessary muscle of every society, without which any other activity wouldn’t be possible, yet it’s ritually dismissed and never written about in bourgeois art or literature. That was now to change. But was that just a revenge? And was PRL just a revenge on the previous exploiting class?
Cinemas were now full of films where heroic, beautiful proletarians (though with a rather characteristic muscular beauty) were reclaiming not only the themes and medium up to then reserved for the upper classes, but were also introducing a completely new aesthetics to that medium. But could we, at any step, call it a proletarian culture? Or was it rather another propagandistic way to keep the people out of the streets, to prevent any social dissent? From the beginning it was artificial: never being the real, spontaneous culture of workers, socialist realism was imposed on them from the start. But then we’d have to answer the question, what is the ‘real’ proletarian culture? A similar example is the way the ‘folk culture’ existed in PRL – in the form of orientalized, exoticized mass produced ‘folk art’, like that stocked in the national chain Cepelia, who sold examples of Polish folk art, relying on a patronizing, compromized vision of the Polish countryside.
Last but not least, proletarian culture couldn’t really be dominant, but constituted a certain façade: PRL wasn’t exactly a dictatorship of the proletariat, but a clandestine rule of the bureaucracy, which only gave the surface impression of letting the working class govern: the workers were a rising class within PRL, yet with no actual power, except perhaps briefly for the workers councils of 1956. The only real revolution that happened in Poland was the one forced without the participation of Poles at all, at least according to the ‘lost revolution’ thesis of the Freudian thinker Andrzej Leder, expounded recently in Krytyka Polityczna. The social revolution was the erasure of two social classes: Jewish labor and Jewish entrepreneurs destroyed by the Nazis, and the Polish landlord class destroyed by the Soviets. That’s why it could never be acknowledged. As they themselves had not carried out this revolution, the mentality of most post-war citizens was determined by the countryside, and they took that consciousness to the city with them when Poland urbanized and industrialized. Yet, for political reasons, this goes completely unacknowledged by Polish society, making it impossible to gain any sort of social class-consciousness. That’s why we prefer to choose myths about ourselves: noblemen, landowners, the myth of the intelligentsia of interwar Poland.
This analysis would be attractive, if it was at least trying to present the point of view of all classes: yet eventually it’s just another analysis from the point of view of the bourgeoisie. There are many erased histories within the post-war period, and the Holocaust was not discussed enough in PRL, and nor were the pogroms started by Poles themselves. Yet this analysis doesn’t want to be compassionate with another ‘other’ in Polish consciousness - the proletarian. It chooses instead to present the masses as inherently primitive, peasant-like, backwards, conservative and reactionary, never public spirited enough to be really ‘collective’. A huge counter-argument against this theory is the existence of Solidarity, the union and the movement, which counted 10 million people at its peak in 1980-81. On one level, Solidarity may have been traditionalist, wedded to patriotism and Catholicism; but it was also based on the premises of equality and self-organization, and really proletarian in its political outlook, at least at first. Solidarity, rather than being the expression of some primitive peasant consciousness, was a collective, civic-minded and disciplined movement. But before Solidarity, there were many attempts to take culture to Poland’s new working class.
Aspirational magazines of Socialism
‘I read Polish magazines’, says a character in Edward Limonov’s Memoirs of a Russian Punk, set in Thaw-era Soviet Ukraine. ‘And why? Because I am interested in life and in culture’. During the Thaw, Poland had the most open press in the Bloc, in its publication of literature and also in the way its press were unashamedly presenting consumer goods, youth culture and popular culture. People all over the Bloc, like the poet Josif Brodsky, learned Polish just to be able to read uncensored stuff and world literature. The first post-war illustrated magazine designed for the new society in the wholly new circumstances was Przekroj (Slant) - the very same which tried briefly in 2012 to transform itself again into a leftist periodical - one of many adventures of the most important popular magazine in Polish history. 1945 was the Year Zero and as the reader should realize, the first few years after the war were a relative relaxation in comparison to what was to come. As early as May ’45 Przekroj was founded - the first illustrated magazine of People’s Poland, and which consciously embodied the revolution happening in Polish society. If I could describe it in one sentence, Przekroj was striving to make a magazine which could be read by all the new social classes of the New Poland, from the new elites to engineers to the kitchen lady, while at the same time smuggling in some of the pre-war charm and aspirations of the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie. It comprised of world news, columns, varying from cuisine to fashion and savoir vivre lessons to those serving the preservation of a material culture destroyed by the war. It had a mission, as one critic sarcastically put it, to “civilize” the nation, with the whole formation of its readers (circulation 500,000, and each copy was read by several people) considered “the civilization of Przekroj”.
Visually, Przekroj embodied the social formation it tried to represent. And together with it went a style connected to the cultural ideal and ambitions they promoted - a combination of the pre-war intelligentsia’s artistic aspirations and the new post-war democratization and homogenization of avant-garde and high art. Przekroj employed several graphic designers whose roots were in the pre-war avant-gardism, of course condemned as “formalism” in the Stalinist period. Przekroj took up what we could consider ‘liberal’ positions, yet the meaning of liberalism highly depends on the political context, and meant something else to what it did after 1989. Przekroj editors tried to discreetly ‘educate’ and raise the nation, publishing suggestions and various kinds of advice, which was mostly incredibly mundane and, read after the years, reflects the dramatic shortages and grinding poverty in the early PRL. The first two decades after ’45 were an era of special austerity: there was not enough good quality food, or food as such, housing was in a dramatic state, including people living in the “caves” left after bombings, crumbling infrastructure, no clothes or of very poor quality, not even mentioning care for their aesthetics or fashionability, and, of course, the already mentioned “social revolution”, which meant that the traditional codes of behavior, of savoir-vivre, traced from the bourgeois
society, were not only suspended, they were the part of the bourgeois past. Przekroj took the task of “recivilizing” the nation in the reality of the implosion of everything that was before, discreetly reinstalling the bourgeois culture.
5.5 Barbara Hoff’s Przekroj fashion column
Advice on cuisine, where various cheap vegetables were “pretend” meat, or how to dress/make up, having neither clothes nor cosmetics, was combined with witty stories, usually written under pseudonyms by the editor Marian Eile and his deputy Janina Ipohorska, both editors and artists established before the war. Wit, charm and delicate persuasion were the weapons of Przekrój in their mission. This was conveyed not didactically, which was the norm in the humourless and heavily stylized socialist press, but via tasteful jokes assisted by the original graphic design and lay-out. Przekroj dealt with the growing alcoholism, encouraging sobriety and good manners in public places; promoted good health, advocating sport (that inherent element of every socialist politics and ideology, as a “typical entertainment of the proletariat”); and it promoted healthy eating and a less formal, democratic elegance.