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On 11 September an "autumn of discontent" started in Poland. The three union federations – Solidarność (Solidarity), the post-communist All-Poland Alliance of Trade Unions (OPZZ) and the Trade Unions Forum (FZZ) – together organised four days of action against the recent austerity measures of the Civic Platform government (the party's majority now teetering on the brink as a result of the defection of a third MP in as many weeks).
The government has abolished the eight-hour working day, lowered the minimum wage, raised the retirement age, and, as Solidarity leader Piotr Duda puts it, "neglected society". The protest is peaceful, yet the PM Donald Tusk has described it as "an attempt at overthrowing the government".
The recent political reforms and anti-union hostility in Poland are typical of what is happening in most of post-communist Europe. But in Poland it comes with a uniquely bitter aftertaste, as here much of the ruling class used to be one way or another involved in the erstwhile Solidarity union in the 70s and 80s, which in its today's form has no real power. At its height, the famous union from the Gdańsk shipyards counted 10 million members.
In heyday, Solidarity changed the course of modern Poland. Its 1980 strike, and its defiance in the face of martial law being imposed in 1981, eventually lead to the corrosion of an already crumbling state. Yet, despite the union's fight, workers rights in the free Poland that ensued became a liability on the road to capitalism. There's now only one kind of Solidarity those in power consider legitimate – the anti-communist movement from 30 years ago. An active, modern Solidarity union, with members fighting for workers' rights, is considered merely a usurper's class of union, with unionists considered to be protesting merely to "gain profits for themselves", as an editorial at Gazeta Wyborcza put it.
The only owners of the Solidarity narrative are the ruling class and it is they who decide if you can participate in it: just once a year, during the anniversaries of the August 1980 agreements. The rest of the time they complain about "scroungers" and support the employers' associations. In the modern Poland, those who profit from old Solidarity myth defend the rights of entrepreneurs, not the workers, to, as we're constantly told, fight the crisis and support national production. In this way the invocation of Solidarity in the 80s is used to deny the modern Solidarity any support.
Why? Because for our rulers, workers have replaced communists as the enemy of the state: these workers demand social rights and a welfare state, which are, in modern Poland, interpreted as a burden on our economy, associated with the communist regime. But there are other beneficiaries of this myth. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of the Law and Justice party (PiS) and the former prime minister, who channelled the most rightwing currents present within Solidarity – Catholicism and conservatism – initially supported the strike, but then cynically withdrew from it.
Yet PiS is the party that is currently deriving the greatest benefit from the strikes. As parliamentary elections loom ever closer, PiS are declaring social policies which are in direct opposition to those of the government. During a recent economic forum in Krynica, Kaczynski declared that a future PiS government would prioritise the raising of taxes on employers and would raise the minimum wage.
All of the liberal press in Poland, from Wyborcza to the English-language Warsaw Voice, reacted critically to this, as if it were a subversive coup. "Kaczynski offends businessmen" was the headline of one of the articles, complaining that he behaved like a guest at a party criticising the culinary tastes of the hosts. It seems that what Poland's elite fears most about the comeback of PiS is its relatively social democratic economic approach – not the bigotry for which its government was notorious when in power 2005-2007.
Tellingly, Kaczynski's current political idol is the hard-right Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Their shared economic programme is reminscent of Marshal Pilsudski's interwar Poland: it promises economic protectionism, social cohesion and a strong state. But they are close to more far-right groups, like the National Rebirth of Poland, who are anti-capitalist, but only as far as foreign capital is concerned (national capitalism is OK). Therefore, their counter-narrative to neoliberalism takes a mythical trip back to the pre-war era. Still, this is the only anti-austerity programme proposed with much conviction in the Polish mainstream.
According to the Fakty news programme, the protests are supported by 59% of Poles, which proves the unpopularity of the current government. Unless Poland rediscovers what the word "solidarity" actually means, the threat of Kaczinsky's Law and Justice gang making a comeback won't go away.
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