With the shipyards, mines, and even the famous Ursus tractor factory gone, former Solidarity activist Mariusz Ambrosiak asks, “Where are all the enterprises where we all fought together?” (Photo: John Feffer)
Cross-posted from JohnFeffer.com.
When I met with Mariusz Ambroziak in 1993, he was secretary for the Solidarity trade union in the Mazowsze area around Warsaw. He’d been a Solidarity activist for most of his life, starting out as a young worker involved in the famous Solidarity chapter at the Ursus tractor factory in Warsaw.
But by 1993, he was having difficulties getting up in the morning and going to work. It took two alarm clocks, he confessed to me, to get him roused out of bed. The union was shrinking in membership, and it just didn’t have the resources to help people. Moreover, its reputation was taking a beating. “The union,” Ambroziak pointed out,
”is paying today with its name because
under the banner of Solidarity the entire
economic reform was undertaken.”
As it turned out, Ambroziak didn’t stay much longer with Solidarity.
“I worked in Solidarity until the end of 1993,” he told me when I caught up with him in Warsaw in August 2013. “That’s when I resigned, but not for political or ideological reasons. It was simply because I was looking for some kind of new path for self-development connected above all to economic independence. Already the enthusiasm from the end of the 1980s and the beginning of 1990 had ended. I saw that other people, my friends and acquaintances, were already taking advantage of the free market. I simply went my own way, professionally.”
Today, Ambroziak is involved in a variety of businesses and charitable activities. He keeps in touch with his colleagues from the old days. But they’ve become trade union professionals working a job, no longer inspired by a mission.
“When I look at Solidarity today it’s as if time has stopped,” he told me. “Sometimes I go to the Mazowsze regional office, after five, 10, 15 years. I meet with the same people, only they’re older. It’s apparent that the organization has not been revitalized, that there’s been no internal changes. But perhaps there’s nowhere to change to? Because all the time there’s the same group of members, since there’s nowhere to get young leaders.”
Many of the workplaces where Solidarity was so strong – the shipyards, the mines – are no more. Even the Ursus tractor factory has disappeared. “We also as activists often asked the question, ‘Where are all the enterprises where we all fought together?’” Ambroziak said. “And that’s a difficult question. Of course after 1989 several million firms were created in Poland, but that one doesn’t exist any more. And it had been around in Poland for 100 years. It was a very valued firm before the war in Poland. The key mistakes in this matter were in 1990 and 1991. Maybe there would have been not 20,000 workers at a restructured Ursus but maybe 5,000 or 3,000. Still, the brand, the tradition, the history, all that potential could have continued until this day.”
He believes that unions still play an important role in Poland and will do so in the future. But he also believes that Poland needs a “business-oriented administration.”
He told me, “I have to say that I am satisfied with the way my family and friends accommodated themselves in capitalism. The overwhelming majority has their own businesses. Some of them are more successful, some of them less, but the overall result is definitely positive. That is why I believe we need a business-oriented administration that would serve as a helping hand for the business sector. The current state institutions either don’t understand the way the business is conducted nowadays or they approach it in too administrative or rigid a way. The bureaucracy is overdeveloped. Every issue is now being solved by new regulations. It’s completely different than at the beginning of the 1990s. The state administration does not see entrepreneurs as people creating value. Instead their initiatives are perceived as suspicious. This is absolutely wrong.”
We also talked about privatization, decentralization, and the meaning of active citizenship.
The Interview
At the moment, you are working in a private office. What does that mean?
I’m working now in the insurance and building industry. In the insurance industry, I’m an insurance broker, and in the building industry I help manage projects under the name IDS. That’s a rather large construction firm in Warsaw.
When we talked 22 years later, you were…
I was then the secretary of Solidarity in the Mazowsze region in Warsaw. I think we met on Alej Ujazdowskij, near the American embassy.
Yes, that’s right. And how long did you work there?
I worked in Solidarity until the end of 1993. That’s when I resigned, but not for political or ideological reasons. It was simply because I was looking for some kind of new path for self-development connected above all to economic independence. Already the enthusiasm from the end of the 1980s and the beginning of 1990 had ended. I saw that other people, my friends and acquaintances, were already taking advantage of the free market. I simply went my own way, professionally. But I didn’t resign from public or social activities. I remain active until today in the civic sphere. Over the last 20 years, I’ve been connected to dozens of different associations and foundations. The majority of those foundations are active in very different spheres: social, charitable, political, civic, local. It’s my passion to help organize civic life in this way, through such associations.
How did you first become involved with Solidarity and the opposition in general?
I come from a small town about 100 kilometers outside of Warsaw. At the time, that seemed to me very far away. Today I know it really isn’t. I came here to attend middle school in Warsaw, in Ursus, where my brother was working. I was on the professional trade track at Ursus, at the tractor factory there. It was winter 1985, and I was 15 years old. I was part of a group of young people who announced a work stoppage. There were 10 or 15 of us, and we thought of ourselves as demonstrators. But it was just a mess.
That’s when an underground Solidarity activist approached me, Marek Jarosinski. I was able to watch what he was doing, and we started to cooperate. He was older than me by eight years and had already worked several years at the factory. And he asked me to cooperate, and we began actions together.
My brother already worked in the tractor factory at Ursus before 1980. He was one of the first people who introduced me to the history of the opposition when I was still a child. That’s how the first newspapers and leaflets appeared in our home. He wasn’t involved in an active manner. He’d talk about it, but it was more just a way of building awareness. Plus, of course, in many Polish homes there was Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, BBC, and so on. That was standard. But for a kid like me, who was 11 years old in 1980, it was already enough. This atmosphere remained in my head, along with a family that provided me the historical background. No more was necessary.
And during Martial Law?
At the time of Martial Law in 1981, I was still living with my family in the countryside. Of course, I remember that day very well. I remember the reaction of my parents, the reactions of the neighbors. And of course I remember what took place on the street. We were living in a place where there were basically two roads, and down both these roads came the tanks.
I remember that the first decision that my father made was to kill a pig. That came from his experience. During World War II, my father was a child. His entire family, including his grandfather, was displaced during the course of the war. They were evicted from their farms, displaced. Somewhere deep in their thinking, they believed it could happen again. This experience was something passed down from generation to generation.
Two-and-a-half years after that, I showed up in Ursus as a middle school student. I was aware that in this city, in this factory, there was a strong Solidarity chapter. It wasn’t all new to me. I had this picture in my head of something big, something great. Later it turned out that it wasn’t really such a big group of activists. Over the course of a year or two it was possible to get to know and meet all of them. It wasn’t that everyone was an activist. But it was somehow part of the atmosphere.
And you were also a member of the Independent Students Association NZS?
No, no. I was a Solidarity activist at Ursus. I was an activist later in the Mazowsze region, and in between I was an activist with Freedom and Peace (WiP).
Here in Warsaw?
In Warsaw. I began to work here with Jacek Czaputowicz, Piotr Niemczyk, Jan Maria Rokita, that circle of people. In 1987 I got called up for military service, and I wrote to them that I was refusing to serve for political reasons. Not for religious reasons or for health reasons, only for political reasons. This was in the provinces, not in Warsaw and therefore I received a postponement. And one year later came the law on alternative military service.
We started up an office at Ursus for people who’d refused military service for political reasons. Later came all the rest, the strikes in 1988. At that point, I was an 18-year-old on the strike committee at Ursus. Later came all the varieties of actions: strikes, demonstrations. Everything was connected to underground activities.
When the strikes took place in 1988…
There were two. The first was in May. That was the strike they were waiting for in Gdansk and Silesia that would push things forward in Warsaw. That was a very difficult period of time. We met a couple of days before the strike at Ursus – 10 or 12 people, including Zbigniew Janas and Zbigniew Bujak. The strike was going to begin on a Friday. We met on the Friday before and then Saturday and Sunday. We arrived on Sunday at the meeting and of the 12 people we expected there were only four. The rest had been arrested. I remained with just three other colleagues. We had a big dilemma: should we or should we not begin the strike?
We decided to go ahead with it. We were on site. Of course, the there was military, the security service. It was general chaos. The main leaders were not there because they’d been seized. We began the strike and continued it until 12 at night. By that time, 300 people remained in the factory. Then we began to talk with the administration in order to find some kind of exit. There were so few people to continue the strike and yet, on the other hand, there were such high expectations for us to go forward.
Our main demands at the time were the release of political prisoners, the registration of Solidarity, and a few other social matters. There were a lot of social incentives for more people to participate in the strike and for the government not to crack down on strike participants. We wrote up a paper and at night, like 1 or 2 am, we received certain general guarantees. So we gave up. The strike committee was appointed the next day, and all the demands became the subject of future talks with the administration. And we struggled for these demands for several more days. Later, Prof. Andrzej Stelmachowski, Andrzej Wielowiejski, and Piotr Lukasz Andrzejewski got in touch with us. So, we had the support of very committed experts. That was in May 1988.
The situation repeated itself again in August. Only in August it was a different atmosphere. First of all, the situation was much more intense in Silesia. The authorities were scared of the miners — that holds true even to this day – plus there were many other enterprises involved. And the people were already very serious. It was a similar situation: we held a march in front of the factory and then the militia attacked the march, and there was a confrontation. Nobody on our side did anything, except for a minor things. But the confrontation took place anyway. It was a group of 500 or 1,000 people. Several people were arrested right there on site. A number of us, including me, fled. After a few days we found each other again. Later already were the talks between Walesa and Kiszczak. And the talks between Stelmachowski and Czyrek began. That was the pre-Round Table atmosphere.
What did you think about the Round Table? Was it a good step?
At the time I was absolutely convinced that it was a good direction. The rest were participating in dozens of meetings at the enterprise level that connected to the various sub-tables, for instance the youth sub-table with Andrzej Celinski, Jan Maria Rokita, and the MZS group where we represented Solidarity youth. I was absolutely convinced that this was a good idea. Besides which, I was close to the perspective of the Church and its conception of non-violent struggle. Poland is a country where people respect the teaching of the Pope and Cardinal Wyszynski to find a compromise at all costs and avoid the spilling of blood. I understood this. For me this was really obvious.
There are a number of things that I know today that allow me to look at this more clearly and make some slight adjustments. But back then I was a big enthusiast about everything that happened. I was happy about everything even if in the end I didn’t appreciate what was going on. But certainly I was fascinated with that period. It occurred to me that once we had freedom all our problems would be solved. It was just a question of what we could do. Because once we had the freedom to act, there’d be no problems. I was 100 percent convinced of this. We know now that’s not the case. But back then we, my contemporaries and I, were convinced that freedom would in principle solve all problems.
You were an optimist at that time.
Yes, I was. And I’m an optimist to this day. However, looking at public, social, and political matters, I was absolutely convinced that this was a good direction. Of course, our knowledge of politics, economics, and international affairs was weak. But perhaps our enthusiasm also resulted from that lack of knowledge. If we’d had deep specific knowledge, then maybe most of us would have made different decisions, right? In terms of my social and civic experience, that was the most important period in life. I can say that as well today.
At that time, at Ursus in particular, the workers expected that the economic situation would be more difficult? Given the competition between….
I can tell you from my own point of view at that time. It seemed to me that most of us were absolutely convinced that with our independence and sovereignty we would have more influence on reality, that workers would begin to make more money, that firms would begin to develop better.
Of course, today I know that in order for a factory like Ursus to continue until today in the shape that it was in at that time, in that place, would have required even more radical restructuring, more radical economic transformation at the very beginning. From just the political standpoint, the process of change was stretched out over a longer period. There just wasn’t enough time for the market to save the factory. It was a Communist-era factory that was considered strategic, a key part of the economic order. It was a really energy-intensive factory. A lot of the money in that factory was wasted. Only a conscious management in cooperation with the workers could have maybe saved the factory. And that process was stretched out for, I don’t know, 10 years.
Now the firm doesn’t exist. In general, firms like that have disappeared, as well as the entire range of things connected to those firms. We also as activists often asked the question, “Where are all the enterprises where we all fought together?” And that’s a difficult question. Of course after 1989 several million firms were created in Poland, but that one doesn’t exist any more. And it had been around in Poland for 100 years. It was a very valued firm before the war in Poland. The key mistakes in this matter were in 1990 and 1991. Maybe there would have been not 20,000 workers at a restructured Ursus but maybe 5,000 or 3,000. Still, the brand, the tradition, the history, all that potential could have continued until this day.
The brand still exists: the company is listed on the stock exchange. But it was sold. It’s still a valuable brand, but it’s no longer connected to the factory in Ursus. That was a loss.
In general, what do you think of the Balcerowicz reforms? Were they more or less good, or should there have been changes in the plan?
In general the entire plan was good. But it could have been accompanied by at least a couple more elements. I’ll tell you about two of them. The first element is a vision of development for the Polish industrial economy that would not have given up on enterprises like Ursus. There should have been a determination of which parts of the Polish economy could have been preserved and which ones subjected to total competition. Poland had several sectors of the economy with potential, which could have been nurtured and, over the years, transformed into competitive sectors, not just in Poland but in Europe and in the world.
The second element was that the process of distributing property in Poland should have been sped up. That was a good period, 1989-90, to systematically decide the matter of returning property that had been taken from Polish citizens after the war. Maybe it was the only moment to solve that problem. Several thousand national enterprises needed to be transferred to the original owners. Many of these factories had fallen apart. But that was the one moment when it was possible to conclude a systematic understanding with the people who had the right to get back property they’d lost as a result of World War II. Perhaps a large number of those firms are today still functioning. Warsaw has documented claims for a very large amount of money. More than a million undocumented claims are still in legal process. These claims would absorb the entire budget of a city, even of Warsaw, the biggest city in Poland! But there’s an obligation to resolve this specific historical matter.
All of the things that were done back then, from today’s perspective, I believe were the right things to do. But it seems to me that several radical decisions were not made.
Because that was the moment when things could have been solved.
It was a very brief moment.
Yes, very brief. And yet it was a very interesting moment too. But I think the moment in Poland was longer than in other countries. Because there was the Round Table and the process was a bit stretched out.
Yes. Also that was my experience and observation. It was clear that there was at that time major problems: inflation, the lack of a banking system, the lack of personnel, of knowledge, of experience. And some issues have still to this day not been decided, like the return of property. During the transition from the 1980s to the 1990s was the time when it was possible to include something in the various social agreements. “We can’t give you everything,” the government might have said, “because everyone is poor. But you’ll get something, maybe 20 percent.” But the problem continues today. And Poland doesn’t have a budget surplus. Poland all the time needs capital, all the time needs investment, all the time needs social stabilization. For all that, money is necessary.
I have a question about Solidarity’s strategy in 1989-90. Of course, Solidarity’s support for the government was very important, but eventually Solidarity decided to strike. Do you think that Solidarity’s strategy at this time was the best from the perspective, on the one hand, of a trade union, and on the other from the perspective of the commonwealth?
Solidarity in 1989-1990 was a national liberation movement that succeeded without violence to regain sovereignty for Poland. The expectations for this movement were that it would quickly change Polish reality in all aspects – economic, social, everything. But only a small number of people had the kind of knowledge or experience to develop a vision of national development. Otherwise it was mostly a series of trial and error: decisions, errors, decisions, errors, and then learning from errors. Solidarity leaders were not political leaders in the sense of being prepared to take power. There were very few who had lived in a free environment, who knew the world, knew how to benefit from global experience. Only a very few were consciously prepared to take over responsibility for governing. Those were either older people who still remembered the Second Republic or people who functioned somehow during the Communist period.
In addition, the Solidarity environment contained a lot of people who had very different perspectives, particularly different economic views. Some believed that state property was sufficiently well-administered, that there was no theft or waste, that it was wisely managed. Some thought that there should only be private property. There was a variety of interests. During that period of 1989-91, it would have been possible to bring about political changes more quickly. It didn’t have to wait for parliamentary elections in October 1991. Those elections already should have taken place in 1990. If that had happened, maybe the enthusiasm could have been sustained for longer. Of course, there was talk of a distracted parliament. People complained that the Communists voted against everything that Solidarity presented. However from today’s perspective it seems that that was a political mistake.
Meanwhile, the union was then only in the public sector, for there was no private sector. That’s still the weakness of Solidarity. It’s not been able to, and this applies to trade unions in general, be attractive in Poland’s private sector. There are many reasons for that. Meanwhile, Solidarity was on the one hand withdrawing from politics, and on the other hand everyone looked to Solidarity to maintain the power that it had at the beginning when it was acting in the tradition of a national movement representing all of society. I don’t really know how Solidarity could have acted otherwise as a union. But maybe the historical leaders of the movement too quickly left the union, and a dissonance emerged between the institution of Solidarity and the Solidarity leaders who had been the symbol of Solidarity. People couldn’t understand how the Solidarity leadership de facto took a stand against them. People were saying, “Those leaders marched at the head of the demonstrations, and now they’re on the opposite side, and they’re saying that everything must change and Solidarity also must become something else.” They tried to achieve an optimal model at the time, both representing workers and taking responsibility for the state. It was also a very difficult period in the psychosocial sense, emotionally.
It was not a normal situation.
No, it was not a normal situation. Many Solidarity activists withdrew from union activities, and the authority of Solidarity in the public sphere fell very rapidly. But that was the price of freedom, the price of democracy. Solidarity no longer represented all of society. For a long period Solidarity was the political emanation of Poles. But then the institution that represented all of society became the parliament, right? If you wanted to look after your own interests then you participated in the elections. After a year or two, the changes were underway. By 1991 or 1992 already the political center had moved from Gdansk and the shipyard to the parliament.
I remember back in 1989-90 when these delegations from all over the world came to Solidarity: Chinese dissidents, Cuban dissidents, American businessmen, German industrialists. We were meeting with everyone. But that was only in the sphere of symbols, emotions, values, not the sphere of interests. The sphere of interests was the province of state structures. At the same time, there were strikes at various workplaces. In the fall of 1989 and in 1990 there were plenty of strikes – economic, social – as well as demonstrations and protests. We organized a meeting at Warsaw University in the big hall, the Auditorium Maximum. At the time there weren’t many large meeting places in Warsaw. Strikers from a thousand workplaces showed up. Strike, strike, strike. That was the autumn, the October I was talking about when the Mazowiecki government was created and there were so many expectations.
We also had a specific meeting at Warsaw University of the Factory Commission, the factory structure of Solidarity. The whole hall was full of activists and at the same time the Mazowiecki government was created. I heard “strike, strike,” and I knew that the Mazowiecki government would soon come into being. I was at the lectern saying, “Dear activists of Solidarity, Poles, we can’t strike right now because finally we’ll have our ideal government. Everything will change.” We were saying that the workers at Ursus didn’t depend on money. They depended on a free independent Poland. People didn’t depend on money? Today if someone said something like that, that workers don’t depend on money, it would be a provocation. But that was a different time.
What’s the future of Solidarity and trade unions in general? For instance, here in Poland, on the one hand, trade unions have become simply weaker. On the other hand perhaps there will be a Labor Party. I know that there was an attempt before to create such a party, but perhaps there will be a future attempt as well.
First of all, the social structure has changed here in Poland. The main Solidarity trade union organizing was in the large factories. Those large workplaces are much fewer. A huge number of people left the industrial sector for the small business sector – for the service sector or to run their own businesses. The largest trade union base is still in the largest industries like mining, the post office, that type of firm. As far as we can observe today, the unions don’t have any idea about how to function in, for instance, large-scale trade operations like hypermarkets. In fact the relations there between employers and workers are not good, and certainly trade union activities would be very necessary and useful. But the union doesn’t have any idea about how to do that.
Meanwhile, in small workplaces, people don’t feel the need for a union. Where there are 10, 20, 30 workers, they have non-stop contact with the employer. The union officials who represent them in relations with the employer are not generally effective. On the other hand, unions have pretty good organizational and financial structures.
In 1989-90 when Solidarity was officially back in the workplaces, we abhorred the post-Communist unions. They were disgusting clerks, these Communists, and they didn’t represent workers. They were just an apparat. Meanwhile, we were the authentic representatives coming directly out of the workers. But it’s been 20-some years since then. Some activists have been trade unionists for those 20 years. And the perspective of such people changes too. Someone who is a 20-year trade unionist, it’s difficult to imagine that person returning to the workplace, to production, if only because the work itself has changed. There are different tools, different technology, different habits and knowledge. Along the line these union activists have somehow lost an awareness and an understanding of the authentic needs of the workers. I know that if I said that today to a Solidarity colleague, they’d be 100 percent offended. I think that that’s also a problem.
On the one hand the union has become a profession. There are trainings, various courses. There’s dedication, greater precision. On the other hand it seems to me that in most cases there’s a lack of relations between union leaders and an authentic understanding of workers’ needs — not union needs but workers’ needs.
What’s the future? There will always be unions in some form. Solidarity still has its ideology, its historic achievements. There’s still a feeling of historical commitment. I have many colleagues that I was active with and who continue to be active today. I’ve kept all these relations and contacts. We meet. But it’s not like public activity, more like professional activity. They’re not Solidarity activists as dissidents, only activists as professional trade unionists. It’s work. It’s not a mission.
When I look at Solidarity today it’s as if time has stopped. Sometimes I go to the Mazowsze regional office, after five, 10, 15 years. I meet with the same people, only they’re older. It’s apparent that the organization has not been revitalized, that there’s been no internal changes. But perhaps there’s nowhere to change to? Because all the time there’s the same group of members, since there’s nowhere to get young leaders.
You were here in Poland in 1990. Michal Boni was the leader of the Mazowsze Region. Michal Boni, Maciej Jankowski. Do you remember those names?
I remember their names, but I didn’t meet them.
You’re familiar with Michal Boni?
I remember his name.
He’s a member of the government now. He’s the minister of digitization and administration. He’s been one of the closest co-workers of the premier for the last six years. He was also in the Bielecki government, but that’s already history. Back then when they were leaders in Solidarity, every one of them had a vision. They were people who were known not only in the union but in a public sense. They were important people in the public debate. But that’s not the case now with the leaders of Solidarity, outside of the leader of the entire union who is still an important character. Take the leader of Solidarity in Warsaw. If you conducted a research survey, maybe 5 or 10 percent would know who he is. But back then, it was 80 percent.
I’d like to ask you about self-government. I talked with Jan Litynski and he told me that this has been a success in Poland, self-government at various levels from the gmina down to the locality.
There’s a title of a book: A Country Recovered. In other words, Poland has recovered its subjectivity, its sovereignty. We can talk about that at various levels: mental, in business, at the local or regional level. Of course, the self-government reforms in the 1990s and the transmission of authority to the level of the town, the gmina, the region, launched a huge amount of activity that changed the sentiments of Poles. In 1990 there were problems in the north, the east, the west. Warsaw had the authority and that was it. This entirely changed, and now people are aware that many things depend on the distribution of authority to the base. Many cities have developed economically and socially. Certainly this development accompanied the entrance of Poland into the EU and the additional economic possibilities. Now many cities in Poland are no different from cities in Western Europe or anywhere else in the free parts of the world. There are still many things to do in the material sphere, but in many Polish cities there’s been indeed a lot of authentic development both in terms of civilization and infrastructure. People now identify with their cities, their regions, their own little homelands. In general, I consider self-government very positively. In every system there are mistakes, in every system there are pathologies, but the system in general is okay.
Most Poles are a little apathetic around national politics. They prefer to focus on private matters. But self-government is something else: it seems to be an exception to this rule. Poles want to participate in local politics, which suggests that self-government is more or less strong. It seems like a paradox. In other countries, local activity is quite weak, in the Czech Republic or Hungary, for instance, because Budapest and Prague are huge and powerful compared to other cities in those countries. But here in Poland it’s something else entirely. There’s Wroclaw, Krakow, Gdansk -
Poznań. And other large cities like Białystok and Częstochowa.
That’s a big difference between Poland and other countries.
Yes, that’s a good observation. But Poles are still not engaged enough in the local communities. It’s probably the result of the Communist policy of the forced obedience of all citizens. When Communism collapsed, people started to act in the very opposite manner, which resulted in a growing number of initiatives of self-organization. People went from state coercion to the conscious need to do something with other people. Of course this is mostly visible in urban areas, rarely in rural areas. However, Polish people need some more time and knowledge to be more active within their own community. Also, it’s a matter of different social needs. At first people are mostly focused on satisfying basic economic and family-related needs. Only later do they go outside and try to engage in the public sphere. This pattern is changing rather slowly.
This is of course my subjective opinion. But as I mentioned to you before I established around 20 different organizations over the last 20 years, so I have some experience. Most of these organizations either focused on children aid or on the local community. In my hometown I founded an association that for the past 13 years has been working on dozens of different projects (cultural, social, charitable, grassroots). Although only a thousand people live in my hometown it took us three years to establish this organization. I am not involved in the activity of the association anymore, since fortunately a couple of other citizens agreed to devote part of their time to the local community and the work of the organization. By the way, your assistant managed to find me through this association’s website. We also publish books through the association. We don’t use public money from either the local or state budget. We use only private funds: we organize, write and publish by ourselves. We also do fundraising and thus we decide how we spend the collected money. This is an example of active citizenship.
What has changed in your perspective or point of view since you started to work in the Solidarity movement? Do you see the world differently?
In the world of politics? We have a political vacuum in our country. The positions of the statesmen are still not filled. From the procedural point of view everything looks fine. The biggest problem is the fact that people don’t want to be engaged in politics. On the other hand I hope that these well-educated people who now are gaining experience in local governments and businesses will later feel the need to become more engaged in politics. Maybe one day they will bring their practical experience to the world of politics and will not be only focused on pursuing their careers within their parties.
Let’s now turn to the economy. On one hand I have to say that I am satisfied with the way my family and friends accommodated themselves in capitalism. The overwhelming majority has their own businesses. Some of them are more successful, some of them less, but the overall result is definitely positive. That is why I believe we need a business-oriented administration that would serve as a helping hand for the business sector. The current state institutions either don’t understand the way the business is conducted nowadays or they approach it in too administrative or rigid a way. The bureaucracy is overdeveloped. Every issue is now being solved by new regulations. It’s completely different than at the beginning of the 1990s. The state administration does not see entrepreneurs as people creating value. Instead their initiatives are perceived as suspicious. This is absolutely wrong.
I will give you an example. One month ago I received an official letter from the Inland Revenue Office. This important letter from the Criminal Department of Inland Revenue Office asked me to appear before the office and explain why I was late with my tax returns. The letter was signed by a female commissioner, and I was supposed to show up in the office within two weeks. I called the commissioner and explained that during 22 years of having my own business I was late with tax returns only once (a one-day delay), and I paid a very small penalty. Therefore I asked her what this case was about. It affected my family: my wife got really upset.
The commissioner asked me to wait. After she returned she said that the letter was generated by the system by mistake and that she apologized for any inconvenience. I could not believe what I heard, so I asked, “Why was the system mistaken and why did you sign this letter, which clearly meant that you knew what the letter was about?” I got really upset. I said that I expected to receive a letter of apology within the next three days because this was not a joking matter for me. Some older people, after receiving this kind of letter, would not have been able to handle it very well. I didn’t really understand how the system made the mistake. The lady commissioner wrote and signed a letter addressed to me that said that if I did not show up at the office on the particular date, the police would act accordingly.
Let me give you an example how it should have been done. Since I used to be a deputy in parliament and a member of the Solidarity movement, and I’m a socially conscious citizen, I believe it would be enough to call me and ask me to come and explain the issue. I would just ask what time she was available and then I’d come and set the record straight. I understand that paying taxes is my duty. I use public healthcare, I am not a freeloader, and I think I do the best I can for my country in every field. However, the example of the letter shows that there is something wrong with our administration. The politicians who could influence it are either too weak or shaped by system, not the other way around. This is what you say about the Obama administration too, isn’t that right? Even the biggest authority cannot change the “system.” This is also a big problem in Poland. We are trying to facilitate the system by introducing changes in the voting system, we are trying to support entrepreneurs – but that is not the point. The main thing is that we should pay attention not to meddle in the economic sphere.
Other spheres also require changes. We don’t really talk much about the international position of our country because it seems to be secure nowadays. However we have to be very careful. From the perspective of recent years our membership in the EU and NATO makes our position on the international scene very beneficial and secure. But we have to remember that international politics tend to change rapidly. Yugoslavia had a similarly secure position, and no one really expected the outbreak of war in Europe on the scale of the 1990s. International conflicts tend to shift rapidly like the weather in the mountains.
As a Polish citizen I care mostly about economic and political position in international relations. The country’s potential is also important since the bigger capabilities the better position on the international scene. However taking into consideration our history and experience I tend to be skeptical. We all know that history has been harsh to our country. We currently have good relations with our neighbors, but we still have a lot to do. It is not ideal. We don’t have a solution for Ukraine, and Belarus has not defined its directions yet. Russia prioritizes strategic and economic goals without really taking care of its citizens. However, this is a topic for a different discussion.
Warsaw, August 27, 2013
Translated by John Feffer
Poland After Solidarity
by John Feffer
Peace and Democracy News
Winter 1992/93
In Solidarity’s regional office in Warsaw, Mariusz Ambroziak fielded my
questions like a penitent wrestling with
his conscience in the confessional.
Yes, he conceded, Poland’s famous trade
union was in deep trouble. Its membership
was declining precipitously, it wasn’t organizing in the new private sector, it could no
longer pay specialists to develop alternative
economic plans. Though only in his twenties, the Solidarity representative spoke with
the weariness of someone three times his
age.
Did he have any doubts about his work, I asked almost rhetorically. Ambroziak’s
broad, freckled face took on a pained and
humble look. “Every day I wake up and I
have my doubts,” he replied. “When Solidarity was registered in 1989, I didn’t use an
alarm clock to get up and come here to the
union headquarters at 5 a.m. Now I need two
alarm clocks to get me up in the morning for
work.” His voice dropped to a whisper.
”People call here with requests. And I can’t
give them anything. So, what am I doing
here? These people keep calling and what
can I do?”
With their country’s economic and political situation deteriorating daily, Poles
can tum to few places, other than the Catholic Church, for help. The traditional structures of Polish “civil society” have simply
collapsed. Offering little real assistance to
its members, Solidarity has become a memorial to itself; a Warsaw street has even
been named after the movement, a sign of
both its historical importance and current
irrelevance. Expected to capture second
place in the most recent parliamentary elections, the trade union’s party managed a distant ninth, just ahead of the Polish Beer-Lovers’ Party. Solidarity’s recent threat to
call a general strike over utility increases
went unheeded by the government. The
union backed down, and the rates went up. A
mass demonstration in April similarly extracted no concessions from the government.
“The union,” Ambroziak pointed out,
”is paying today with its name because
under the banner of Solidarity the entire
economic reform was undertaken.” Sup
porting a shock therapy that primarily hurt
its own core supporters, Solidarity has ex-
pended much of its once considerable moral
capital.
Solidarity’s rural chapter, meanwhile,
has been politically outmaneuvered by the
former Communist-allied Peasant Party . And
the Independent Students Association
(NZS)-the so-called third leg of the opposition-has declined from 20,000 to 1,000
members and spends most of its energies
functioning as a travel agency to the West,
once its chief criticism of the official student
union. Having personified the Solidarity
ethos for so many years, Lech Walesa has
become a president more committed to decrees than to democracy, a leader whose
pronouncements draw ridicule from the intelligentsia and increasingly command only
indifference among the workers.
Nor have other social movements taken
the place of the Solidarity-era groups. According to one European Community estimate, the largest social movement in Poland
today is the volunteer fire brigade. The
second largest is the Red Cross. Instead of
organizing the unemployed or building political movements from the bottom up, Poles
spend their precious free time putting out
fires and bandaging wounds.
Given the country’s present economic
crisis-12 percent unemployment, 38 percent annual inflation, a hard-to-cap budget
deficit, a recession that stretches month after month-the natural political beneficiary
should be a reinvigorated Polish left. Poland
was the first country in Eastern Europe to
host roundtable negotiations between the
Communists and the opposition, the first country to hold free elections, the first to form a non-Communist government, the
first to implement a radical shock-style economic reform. According to the pendulum-swing theory of politics, Poland should therefore witness the first authentic left-wing
revival.
But although it has great potential, the
Polish left remains fragmented, isolated,
and incapable of mustering any serious political threat. Both the traditional left based
in the trade union movement and a newer left
organized around a cluster of issues including feminism and environmentalism are still
marginal to Polish politics. Alert to the
possibilities inherent in the left’s eclipse, the
right wing has made a bid to take Poland
back, back to a time before Communism,
back to an imagined past when the Church
was always right, the nation was always
united, the men were always brave, and the
women were always pregnant.
Confusion of Left and Right
It has become a cliché to observe that the
categories of left and right make little political sense in Eastern Europe today. In the
Polish context, for instance, the non-Communist left-occupying what would ordinarily be a social-democratic slot-has
largely favored the most neo-liberal (or, if
you prefer, neo-conservative) economic
policy. Even the former Communists frequently vote on the Thatcher end of the
economic spectrum. The right wing parties, meanwhile, eschew capitalism’s most disruptive features, which destroy family,
community, and Church, in favor of a more
gradual and anti-recessional policy. The
groups which one would expect to have
comprised the left have embraced the modern project and its vision of hyper-capitalism uncritically; the right has, even as it
supports an apparently more progressive
economic position, decided to trade the twentieth century in for an earlier model.
Given both the domestic and international emphasis on bringing Poland into the
modern age, one might then expect the right
wing to be fundamentally incapable of leading the country forward. So I thought back
in 1990 when I trekked to the outskirts of
Warsaw to meet Antonin Macierewicz, a
prominent member of the Christian National Union (ZChN). Smoking a pipe and
looking every inch the Polish intellectual,
Macierewicz expounded on the principles of
this coalition of Christian-minded movements. The Church, he said, did not have to
be connected to the state. But state
policy-and even education in public schools-should nevertheless be formulated
along Christian principles. Thank God, I
thought at the time, that ZChN only has five
parliamentary representatives. Thank God
they are, like Macierewicz’s apartment, on
the outskirts of Polish life.
Two years later, Macierewicz was
Poland’s Minister of Home Affairs, a prominent if controversial member of the recently
removed right-of-center Olszewski government. His party today controls key posts in
the new Suchocka administration. The
speaker of the lower chamber of the Polish
parliament is a ZChN member.
In 1990, I also talked with Krzysztof
Krol, a spokesperson for the Confederation
for Polish Independence (KPN). Founded in
1979, KPN represented the most anti-Soviet, most militant wing of the Polish opposition. It refused to participate in the 1989
roundtable negotiations, or field candidates in the first partially free national elections in
June of that year. Later, when anew government was dispensing old Communist Party
property to new organizations, KPN did not
wait its turn but instead simply occupied the
offices of a former official youth organization located in a splendid structure on
Warsaw’s most fashionable street. No, I
thought in 1990, KPN is out of temper with
the times. Poland is on the road of compromise. The Communists have nearly exited
the stage, and militancy no longer commands much respect throughout society.
I look back at my notes from 1990: “Krol
predicts a renaissance of the right in Poland.” I didn’t take him seriously. He was
too young, too undisciplined. Today, Krol is
the head of KPN’s parliamentary faction
which, along with ZChN, has brought a new
variety of right-wing radicalism to the shaping of social policy.
After flirting with a right-wing coalition
that pledged more gradual economic reform, Poland is, as of July 1992, back under
the rule of the neo-liberals, led by the new
prime minister Hanna Suchocka. The term “rule” can be used only loosely, however.
After the 1991 national elections propelled
29 parties into parliament, Polish politics
can charitably be described as diverse or, perhaps more accurately, as incoherent. It is
not simply the number of parties or their relatively small size that lends an air of
~ chaos to parliamentary proceedings. These
5 groupings can barely compromise enough to maintain internal cohesion, much less work effectively with one another. Unable to
fashion an effective parliamentary bloc, the
three recent governments-Olszewski, Pawlak, Suchocka-have been forced to
preside over a fragmented mirror of Polish
society.
Particularly difficult for each of these
governments has been economic policy. For
instance, after promising to respect the wishes
of the Polish electorate by reversing shock
therapy, the Olszewski government reneged
in the spring of 1992 and proposed a budget
consistent with the demands of the International Monetary Fund. Parliament rejected
the plan. Caught between the IMP’s strictures and the electorate’s demands,
Olszewski became simply the latest of the
recession’s political victims when his government fell in June. Waldemar Pawlak of
the post-Communist Polish Peasant’s Party
lasted little more than a month. With rumors
of martial law floating around Warsaw, a
strange assortment of parties–from right-
wing Christian to secular liberals–came
together behind Suchocka. The result has
been the worst of all possible worlds: the
neo-liberals regained control of economic
policy while the right wing snatched up the
”soft” cultural posts in the government.
Theocracy in Poland?
Indeed, with its economic policy thwarted
by the IMP, the right wing has found greater
unity and surer success with its social project.
Its natural vehicle for transforming Poland is
the Catholic Church, the most powerful
social institution in the country. Last year,
several Polish officials broached the possibility of turning Poland into a theocracy.
The response from the intelligentsia not
being receptive, the proposal was quickly
withdrawn. “Don’t worry about this talk of
theocracy,” a Polish friend told me during
my recent trip to Warsaw. “It’s the step-by-step moves, the incremental strategy that
you should watch out for.”
That incremental strategy can be seen
most clearly on the issue of religion in
school. In 1990, the Church pressed the
Ministry of Education to introduce religious
instruction into public schools. The measure was neither discussed in Parliament nor
presented to the public in a referendum.
This year, the Church has pushed ahead with
stage two: pressuring the Ministry of Education to make religion an obligatory school
subject. An ethics course has been thrown in
to give the appearance of choice-but the
ethics in question are often simply Christian
and the course frequently taught by a priest.
If the Ministry and the Church have their
way, priests will also playa more important role in determining general school policy.
Abortion is the second front opened up
by the right wing. In 1991, the Polish
parliament defeated an especially restrictive anti-abortion law. Since that time, the
Polish Medical College has changed its code
of ethics to protect “unborn life”; any doctor
who performs abortions after May 1992 can
be discharged from the profession. At the
parliamentary level, the Church has, through
ZChN, reintroduced legislation to penalize
both women and doctors who destroy un-
born life. Yet 60 percent of the population
supports liberal abortion laws. Many Polish
intellectuals, regardless of the depth of their
religious conviction, are fond of pointing
out that, with the abortion and religion-in-
schools issues, the totalitarianism of the
Church has begun to replace the totalitarian-
ism of the state.
Economic Prosperity, Economic Shock
Warsaw gleams with a deceptive prosperity: the Mercedes-Benz dealership, the
casinos, the chic new restaurants, the five-
star hotels for visiting VIPs. Capitalism has
sprung up like weeds between the cracks of
the Stalinist concrete. A flashy sign indicates a peep show in the vestibule of an
entrance to the train station where once there
was only storage space. In the central post
office, a video store and a trinket kiosk have
been set up in the main hall. Around Stalin’s
gift to Warsaw, the Palace of Culture and
Science, the ramshackle collection of blankets and tables of two years ago has been
transformed into the official flea market of
today.
With a monthly salary of $150, the average Pole stretches out to touch these fruits of
capitalism only to find, like Tantalus, that
inflation and austerity measures always push
the branches just beyond reach. Warsaw’s
conspicuous wealth conceals the poverty of
its workers’ suburbs, of the outlying patches
of agricultural ruin, of the decaying industrial sprawl that embraces the textile factories of Lodz, the coal mines near Wroclaw,
the chemical plants around Katowice, the
shipyards of Gdansk. To judge Polish prosperity by its capital’s shiny new Euro-style
cafes is like trying to get a fix on the current
U.S. recession from a sushi bar in Silicon
Valley.
Given the “neo-con” credentials of the
economists whose advice it has solicited, it
is not surprising that Poland is in fact repeating many of the same mistakes as the United
States of the 1980s. Indeed, visiting Poland today is like being caught in one of those
science fiction stories where the time-traveler must watch a succession of childhood
mistakes without being permitted to intervene. Stop, I wanted to shout at the Poles.
Don’t you realize that the foundations of this
newly created wealth rest on the shifting
sands of Reaganomics? Don’t you realize
that ten years from now you too will be
writing articles about “what went wrong?”
In 1989, talking with a then little-known
Polish economist on the question of
privatization, I tried to indicate some of the
problems with his version of laissez-faire
capitalism. Don’t privatize health care, I
warned, for in the United States this has
meant 35 million people without coverage.
He didn’t skip a beat. “Well, 35,000 is not
really a problem.” “No,” I interrupted, “35
million. Million! Roughly the population of
your country!” I don’t think he believed me.
He went on to serve in government and play
a key role in developing the yet-to-be-implemented privatization plan.
With the help of such economists, Poland is rapidly developing a new kind of
class society. According to Andrzej
Miolkowski, who oversees Huta Warszawa’ s
privatization, wages at Warsaw’s steel plant
have fallen to 50 percent of their 1982 value,
based on what they can buy in today’ s stores.
The country’s unemployment rate is expected to rise from 12 percent to 20 percent
by year’s end. One of Solidarity’s former
economic advisors confessed to me that his
economic worst-case scenario would be 25
percent unemployed. If a mere five percent
separates mainstream expectations from
worst-case scenarios, Poland is indeed in
trouble.
In the face of growing class conflict, the
various governments consistently failed to
develop a coherent social welfare policy,
ignoring the recommendations of advisors
to the Ministry of Labor and relying instead
on the invisible hand of the market or the
limited charity of the private sector. Solidarity is not doing much better, having just
recently eliminated funding for Posredniak,
a newspaper that for two years had been
devoted to helping workers. Former editor
Zuzanna Dabrowska reported that some of
the recently laid-off have tried to create a
union of unemployed. But many workers
are reluctant to join such a group because it
takes time away from their own job searches.
And the organizers, in part because of their
initiative, have been the first to find employment and leave the movement.
Still, if only for the crassest of political motives, one would expect a more vigorous
attempt to represent these forgotten casual-
ties of economic reform. In the tradition of
class-based politics, several non-Communist left parties are considering a bid to form
a Labor Party (a compromise name since
both “socialism” and “Solidarity” have be-
come pejoratives in the public mind). The
social-democratic wing of the Democratic
Union, Labor Solidarity, Zbigniew Bujak’s
Democratic Social Movement, and perhaps
the Polish Socialist Party might form the
nucleus of such a party.
Even putting to one side the limited size
of these groups, many problems still remain.
The Democratic Union faction has a residual dependence on shock therapy, Labor
Solidarity is perceived as too eggheadish, Bujak stands virtually alone in his party, and
the Socialist Party has not yet recovered
from the 1991 death of its most prominent
leader, Jan Jozsef Lipski, a longtime oppositionist and member of the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR). Despite its strong
second-place showing in the most recent
parliamentary elections, the former Communists (the Democratic Left Alliance) re-
main politically isolated, an unlikely partner
for any new Labor Party. Some of the more
talented ex-Communists, such as former
high-ranking official Tomasz Nalecz, have
left the Alliance and await new political
opportunities.
The chief stumbling block for this left is
its allergy toward what it considers populism. Parliamentary representative Ryszard
Bugaj, Labor Solidarity’s leading member,
told me of the need to reach out to all the
Poles who didn’t vote in the last election
(nearly 60 percent of those eligible). But
when pressed on strategy, he could offer
only Bush-like prudence: “We have to be
careful not to be populist like KPN, not to
promise things which we can’t deliver on.
We want to be responsible and remain firmly
grounded in reality.”
While Bugaj speaks of responsible politics, one Pole has set out to prove that
irresponsibility is far more profitable. By
poking fun at the new pieties of clericalism
and nationalism, former Communist government spokesperson Jerzy Urban has be-
Come unspeakably rich from his best-selling
books and popular newspaper Nie (“No”).
Millions of Poles crave Urban’s critical
edge, so much so that they are even willing
to forget how much they despised him in his earlier incarnation. The left should be able
to take advantage of this sentiment as well,
fashioning a truly responsible, democratic populism in order to acquire political capital
where Urban has been content to accumulate the financial variety.
One group capable of appealing to popular discontent-the former Communist-controlled trade union (OPZZ}-has so far kept
a relatively low profile. With a membership
of four million (roughly twice that of Solidarity), OPZZ is the largest social movement in Eastern Europe, according to its
economic advisor Pawel Gieorgica (apparently the EC doesn’t count the union in its
tally of Polish social organizations). Despite its size and its sponsorship of several
important strikes, OPZZ has not overtly
challenged the authorities. Following
Gieorgica’s advice, its new leader Ewa Spychalska has adopted an instrumental
populism that guarantees her support among
the populace, but has gravitated toward a
collegial pragmatism as a post-Communist
deputy in parliament. This two-edged strategy has boosted Spychalska’s popularity
and placed OPZZ in an ideal position to
exploit the new class politics on the inside as
well.
Should the new Polish Labor Party, or
whatever the left decides to call itself, fail to
seize OPZZ’s standard, it will have neutralized its chief advantage. Poland’s new class
conflicts can be used creatively by the left,
if it is wise enough to distinguish between
principled political organizing and irresponsible populism. The right wing has meanwhile shown little hesitation to rush in where
the left fears to tread, whether in the form of
KPN’s paramilitary-style recruitment among
young people or ZChN’s assertion of religious community as an antidote to anomie.
The Struggling Women’s Movement
Malgorzata Tarasiewicz once worked
for Solidarity. Told by the International
Confederation of Free Trade Unions to de-
vote more energy to women’s issues, the
Solidarity leadership hired Tarasiewicz, a
young feminist and peace activist from
Gdansk, to rectify the situation. During her
brief tenure establishing a women’s section
within the union, she set up regional chapters, ran media workshops, tried to put together a working women’s agenda. Suspicious of her feminist proclivities, the Solidarity leadership never provided Tarasiewicz
sufficient resources to do her job and worse,
harassed representatives of the section’s regional chapters. Frustrated, Tarasiewicz
resigned in March 1991.
That June, although she had been banned from contacting members of the women’s
section, Tarasiewicz nevertheless convened
another meeting in Solidarity’s regional
headquarters in Warsaw. “I thought it necessary to meet again to explain why 1 was
forced to leave,” she says. Catching wind of
the event, the union’s Warsaw leadership
was determined to throw the participants out
of the building. But when 140 women from
17 regions showed up, the Solidarity leader-
ship was outnumbered. Thrown off guard by
this show of strength, union leaders responded by threatening Tarasiewicz herself,
both after the meeting and when a Helsinki
Watch report came out in March describing
the events in some detail. “They are using
Mafia methods to suppress authentic movements within Solidarity,” she exclaims.
Solidarity’s actions indicate a movement in decline, a movement threatened by
other movements. In the case of the women’s
section, the battle was between the union
leadership and the “new left.” Organized
around some very potent questions such as
women’s rights, this new left potentially has
a chance of gaining a foothold in Polish
politics.
For instance, one could not find a country more in need of a women’s movement
than Poland. Disproportionately affecte