David Ost

The politics of interest in post-communist East Europe

The demise of communism in East Europe means that politics must be constructed anew. Those who toppled the old regimes and have come to head the new ones like to assure people that political life will be organized completely differently from the way its been organized in the past. Where civil society was subordinated to the state, now the state will be subordinated to society. Where politics ruled over markets, now markets will allocate resources. Where politics was largely the purview of the ruling party, now it will be open to all parties and interest groups. Where communism repressed particular interests, post-communism will embrace them. In short, where the communist system was state-centered, the new system will be society-centered.1

The Weakness of Strong Social Movements: Models of Unionism in the East European Context

Despite recent arguments that political and social movement unionism is the key to labour revitalization, this article shows that such strategies have been detrimental to labour in Eastern Europe, and that only a recent turn towards economic unionism has helped turn the tide. Through an analysis of East European labour strategies since 1989, particularly in Poland, the article argues that much recent theory is based on capitalist experiences that are inappropriate for understanding post-communism. Whether social movement unionism will be beneficial to labour depends on the kind of social movement of which unions see themselves a part.

Politics as the Mobilization of Anger: Emotions in Movements and in Power

In most academic research on politics, emotions are deemed important only to the realm of subjects or citizens, not to power. Emotions are presented as a problem power has to deal with, not something with which power is itself intimately involved. This article discusses recent attempts to reintroduce emotions into political analysis and argue that they are incomplete insofar as they look only at opposition social movements, not at mainstream parties. With a nod to Carl Schmitt, I argue that anger is not something that only occasionally bursts onto the political scene, but is central to ‘normal’ politics as well. Anger is central to politics both as a diffuse, untargeted sentiment citizens experience, usually economically, and as the emotion political organizers need to capture and channel, which they do by offering up an ‘enemy’ they identify as the source of the problem. Opposition movements and parties of power alike succeed when they persuade people to accept the enemy they propose.

The Transformation of Solidarity and the Future of Central Europe

Evolution in the Soviet bloc was never expected to be like this. Free elections to a Senate and guaranteed seats for the opposition in the Sejm, the relegalization of Solidarity and the legalization of much of the underground press, guaranteed access to radio and TV and permission for the opposition to start its own daily newspaper, equal treatment of public and private sectors and a commitment to marketization of the economy — the changes that have swept over Poland these last months are truly epoch-making. Poland is now on its way to establishing a multiparty, neo-corporatist market system, in which opposition parties compete for influence in a state formally run by a Leninist party (albeit one with fewer and fewer principles to defend).

Class after Communism Introduction to the Special Issue

After 1989, class appeared to be everywhere and nowhere. The messy consequences of the emergence of new classes and new types of economic inequalities were plain for all to see, but no one uttered the term “class.” The concept appeared illegitimate because of associations with the old regime, even though it always had more success explaining developments in the capitalist world east Europe was entering than the state socialist world it was leaving. The media and academy adopted a discourse of “normality” instead: New rules resulted not from policy choices empowering certain groups at the expense of others but from necessity, and people just had to adapt. Because the economic collapse nevertheless elicited much anger and frustration, the absence of class talk contributed to a proliferation of nationalist talk, and thus had political consequences. The paper rehearses reasons for the decline of class analysis in the region, and notes the post-1989 fascination with the “middle class.” It explores the evolution of class analysis during the communist period, culminating in the embrace of a stratification theory that resisted discussion of power, which made sense at the time but became a burden after 1989. Several critical class analyses of state socialism, from the 1930s to today, are then introduced, demonstrating both their relevance and their unfortunate absence from debates. New types of class analyses promoted by younger scholars and activists are emerging, however, and are discussed in the summaries of the other essays in this collection.

Introduction: Shock Therapy and Its Discontents

Finally, real information about Poland is becoming available. The first years following the collapse of communism found scholars as confused as what they were studying. Nice-sounding slogans of “democratization,” “marketization,” “privatization,” “civil society,” and “cutting back the state” substituted for empirical studies. Political analysis meant little more than reporting the statements of the various new political figures and parties dancing on the post-communist stage. And that was concrete compared to discussions of economic developments, more concerned with ones attitude to “shock therapy” than anything actually happening. This is beginning to change, as the following contributions show. Instead of accounts of government policies, we have accounts of how various social groups have responded to the transition.

Stuck in the Past and the Future Class Analysis in Postcommunist Poland

Class became virtually a taboo topic in Poland after the fall of the communist system, and a discourse of “normality” took hold. Social scientists and journalists considered new market institutions natural and inescapable and urged people to adapt. Sociologists were more interested in the identity of the new elites than the social consequences of the new capitalism, and a cult of a not-yet-existing “middle class” quickly grew. Inequality and poverty, previously understood as systemic, were now presented as due to individual pathology. That class talk became so marginalized despite the historical robustness of Polish sociology as a discipline is explained by the dominance of a functionalist stratification paradigm, which kept questions relevant to the new system, about emerging class relations and power, from even being raised. Polish sociology thus appeared stuck in the past and in the future—thinking about stratification without power, and imagining an individualist meritocracy as already in effect—but not ready to ask about the class formation and new economic relations of the present. The paucity of class analysis allowed illiberal populist nationalism to grow, blaming economic problems on internal “anti-Polish” enemies. New kinds of class thinking has revived in the new millennium, promoted by a new generation raised in a capitalist society and trained in western universities, and legitimized in part by class analyses of postcommunism by scholars from abroad. Though hobbled, class analysis is making a modest comeback.

The Crisis of Liberalism in Poland

Recent parliamentary elections in Poland have confirmed what had long been obvious: that the veteran liberal opposition, the intellectual ideologues of the “independent civil society” — Michnik, Kuron, and the old KOR milieu, presently grouped around the Democratic Union and the newspaper Gazeta Wyboreza (but not the small, recently-formed, liberal Democratic Party, the pro-Walesa Gdansk party of former prime minister Jan Krzysztof Bielecki) — have finally lost out. Although the Democratic Union won 13.8% of the vote, making it the largest party of a divided parliament, just barely ahead of the former Communists, the depth of their isolation was revealed after the elections when their efforts to put together a governmental majority failed miserably.

The Sham, and the Damage, of “Living in Truth”

This essay criticizes Havel’s famous “living in truth” paradigm and parable of the greengrocer as morally wrong, politically false, and complicit in the later emergence of a backlash against liberal intellectuals and democracy. By vilifying the weak, Havel disregards the role resources play in enabling opposition. By insisting that the opposite of living in truth is “obedience,” he disregards the particular weapons of the weak. Havel’s approach is contrasted with Polish versions of independent civic activism, whose intellectual theorists, understanding their privileged resources and making a calculated play for political influence, urged people to disobey but never derided anyone for not doing so. In the end, “living in truth” is seen as of little relevance to the success of past opposition, and Havel’s approach dangerous to hold up as a model.

Class, Nation, and the Katyn Massacre

Victor Zaslavsky has written a moving and powerful short book that is less about the actual events of the horrendous crimes of Katyn than about the mechanisms that produced them and about the cover-ups—both inside the Soviet Union and in much of the rest of the world—that followed. The crimes themselves, which are still poorly known in the world outside of Poland, took place in March 1940, both in the Katyn forests in Russia and in other camps in the Soviet Union where Polish prisoners were being held. The Soviets had taken the prisoners during and immediately after their invasion…