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NEWS & LETTERS, September-October 2005Woman as ReasonOn the 25th anniversary of Solidarityby Urszula Wislanka SOLIDARITY'S SECRET, THE WOMEN WHO DEFEATED COMMUNISM IN POLAND, by Shana Penn, University of Michigan Press, 2005 * * * This is the 25th anniversary of Poland's Solidarity movement, in which the self-activity of workers, women, and peasants reached an unprecedented level of organization before being crushed by martial law. It electrified the world and led to the fall of the Russian-centered Communist empire a decade later. It's important to recollect the high points and barriers it faced so as to understand history without the prejudice of what is accepted today as "settled." A good example is Shana Penn's recently published study of women in Solidarity. Penn's book tells the untold stories of Helena Luczywo, Ewa Kulik, Anna Bikont, Zofia Bydlinska, Malgorzata Pawlicka and other women participants. Anna Walentynowicz is best known as the spark who organized Polish workers and peasants to form Solidarity, a trade union that challenged 35 years of Polish totalitarianism. Barbara Labuda created the workers' "flying university," the engine of how Solidarity spread. After the declaration of martial law in December 1981 and the arrest of most of legal Solidarity's mostly male leadership, seven women formed a "Ladies' Operations Unit" and published TYGODNIK MAZOWSZE (Mazowsze Weekly), Solidarity's Warsaw-based newspaper. When Communism fell in 1989, they founded GAZETA WYBORCZA (Election Gazette), Poland's most prestigious daily. Penn says "Anna [Dodziuk] and her circle of friends...were inspired by the fearless actions of [Kuron and Modzelewski's 1964 "Open Letter to the Party," which analyzed Poland as a state-capitalist society].... 'We thought in terms of socialism, and we came to realize that, according to Marxist analysis, the working class was oppressed, just as Marx had written.... We decided the best solution would be to increase participation of the workers... We thought…with the workers' involvement, the system would automatically change'" (118). MECHANICAL FEMINISM VS. REASON It is exhilarating to read, in the women's own words, of Solidarity's existence after martial law, especially since it is centered on women's decisive, organizing role. The way Penn tells the story, however, Solidarity as a workers'--and therefore, according to her, a one-issue, male-oriented--movement failed with the declaration of martial law. Penn's is a mechanical feminism that reduces the revolutionary moment of the 1980 historic strike and the 16-month-long experience of trying to build freedom, to a "single-issue movement that is bigger and more urgent than gender equality"(64). Although the women she interviewed kept repeating that Solidarity was about freedom, Penn made a distinction between freedom and her singular framework for feminism, "gender equality." But feminism is not reducible to "gender equality." What might have been most troubling to Penn is that the women she wrote about said publicly that they did not recognize themselves in her telling of their story. In an article reprinted from GAZETA WYBORCZA by Penn, Joanna Szczesna said Penn's characterization of her "perfectly reflects what happens to reality when predetermined viewpoints are applied to it. Shana Penn came to Poland with a ready thesis...: the women involved in [the anticommunist] conspiracy failed to notice gender discrimination within the resistance movement (for they lacked feminist consciousness), discrimination which, for Shana Penn as an American woman, was visible at first glance" (331). In distinction to Penn's feminism, Ms. Szczesna says: "I'd rather get involved in activities protesting the use of physical violence by the police than in a struggle for the equal distribution of a policeman's blows"(332-33). (For feminist analyses of Solidairty, which Solidarity activists embraced, see Terry Moon's "Solidarity with Polish women!" January-February 1982 N&L, and Urszula Wislanka's "The revolutionary activity of Polish women," March 1982 N&L.) THEORETICIANS MIS-LEAD The tragedy of Solidarity is that Dodziuk was only half right. As long as a massive movement of workers was thriving, it did not seem to matter what theoreticians thought. Kuron, given the history of Russia's bloody invasions of East European countries which pushed "too far," and the lack of real support from the West, proposed setting a limit beyond which he claimed the movement should not press for fear of an invasion and terrific loss of life. Repeatedly the movement went beyond his "limit," altering the geopolitical situation in the process. But Kuron did not rethink the theory. He only set another limit. The movement certainly recognized Marx. The slogan of a huge 1981 demonstration in Lodz over food shortages was "Hungry of the world, unite!" Unfortunately, Kuron saw Marxism only as a tool to analyze the objective situation, not as providing the theoretical posture needed to give a movement a direction--a philosophic rudder. While his activities were in support of the workers, his theory was based not on the development of the movement he loved, but on the situation outside of it. The Solidarity movement wanted to transform the mode of production in many ways, including through active strikes. But their leaders missed the significance of the new human relations--the key to Marx's concept of freedom--in both women's participation and the crucial new human relations in workers' activity that could determine a different future, the direct dispersal between workers themselves of the products of their own labor. Active strikes were in embryo a new form of directly social labor in production. NEEDED PHILOSOPHIC RUDDER Change is not automatic. By the time Solidarity arose, Marxism was no longer accepted as the basis for how to achieve freedom in a new society. Kuron's theoretical response to the vitality of the movement was a theory of "self-limiting revolution." Jaruzelski's "Military Council for National Salvation" also used as its rationale for imposing martial law, the desire to save Polish lives from a Russian invasion. With martial law, the women carried on the activity of Solidarity. However, without workers' massive participation, the 1989 fall of Communism was not the change the society fought for, but merely a swap of one form of capitalism for another. Shana Penn's book contributes to the recovery of women's important legacy. But since history is a battleground for how to move forward, it's crucial to capture the Reason of women as they reach to freedom by overcoming the concrete barriers they face. The discussion worth having is what is freedom, including the liberation of women in overcoming capitalism. |
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