Being Goral: Identity Politics and Globalization in Postsocialist Poland

Chapter 3: Elite Class Struggles and Authority

63 Chapter 3 ‫ﱜ‬ Elite Class Struggles and Authority Exploring the changing social structure of power in Z • ywiec in volves looking at class conflict around the political and economic changes resulting from the fall of communism—those local changes that are driven by national policies aimed at decentralizing the economy and political system. Rather than just looking at changes in class structure between socialism and the postsocialist era, to understand the current struggles in Z • ywiec, it is important first to examine the most important class divisions at the end of the Habsburg era and discuss how these social groups were changed in the socialist era. Only then can one understand how the power struggles and changes from the socialist period to the present work, because these power struggles often refer back to presocialist class categories and traditions of community authority. In the current era, then, I explore the interactions between the prewar elite, members of the former PZPR, those involved with the Solidarity movement during the 1980s, and the newly emerging political and economic entrepreneurs, the neocapitalists. I show that throughout these three eras, the classes in Z • ywiec have formed community organizations through which their conflict is acted out. Finally, I return to the theoretical implications of this multilayered process to discuss class change and conflict through the idioms of traditionalism and modernity. 64 Being Góral A central point of this chapter is that the members of prewar power networks and their descendants are reclaiming the identity of Góralism and establishing community authority by positioning themselves as the cultural elite for this ethnicity. This process began during the early socialist era (in the 1950s) but has gained substantial momentum in the post-1989 context, due in part to the breakdown of socialist authority structures and the return of property confiscated during the socialist era. These members of the prewar elite are attempting to recreate the prewar, patronage, social power structure, and, further, to parlay their positions within this older authority structure into positions of authority in the current system. They hope to do this through evoking a sense of traditionalism around the community identity and history—by “tradition,” therefore, they would be the most appropriate community leaders. The rhetoric of traditionalism is counterbalanced by ideas of modernity, which are invoked by global capitalism, the national policymakers, and, at the local level, the neocapitalists. The neocapitalists, who have seized the reins of formal political power in the community, oppose the prewar elite’s attempts to regain community authority, touting their skills and familiarity with the new social and political-economic order as a more appropriate basis for authority than the old patronage relationships. Neocapitalists see modernity as a fundamentally new era, where ethnic identity is important only as a folkloric past or to pull in tourists, and tradition is part of the past and certainly should not be the basis for deciding who is a community leader. The prewar elite paint a picture of the modern era as flowing directly from and being still intricately intertwined with their community’s past history and identity, not in conflict with tradition. These different ideas about tradition and modernity are used by these two opposing groups in the community to contest one another’s cultural authority and support their own positions. CLASS AND COMMUNITIES Karl Marx, in Das Kapital ([1867, 1885, 1894] 1978), attempts to deduce the basis for classes along the following argument: The first question to be answered is this: What constitutes a class?—and the reply to this follows naturally from the reply to another question, namely: What makes wagelabourers , capitalists and landlords constitute the three great social classes? At first glance—the identity of revenues and Elite Class Struggles and Authority 65 sources of revenue. There are three great social groups whose members, the individuals forming them, live on wages, profit and ground-rent respectively, on the realisation of their labour-power, their capital, and their landed property. (441–42) Class is thus reduced to how a person makes a living—the working class from wage labor, owners of business from their profits, and landowners from rents on their property. Marx goes on to state that this entirely economic definition of class is not satisfactory, because it will result in an “infinite fragmentation of interest and rank”; in other words, that merely having the same...