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FIVE Politics, Anti-Politics, and the Beginnings of Solidarity In August 1980, provoked by rising prices, a deteriorating economy , and a long-simmering anger, shipworkers in Gdansk and Szczecin walked out on strike. Within days the strikes became general, guided in each city by an Interfactory Strike Committee that demanded that the government recognize the workers' right to form independent trade unions. Initially intransigent, the government finally began negotiating when the workers could not be broken and the strikes began to spread. An agreement was signed in Szczecin on August 30 and in Gdansk one day later, marking the first time a Leninist party state had recognized the right of groups within civil society to organize in defense of their own particular interests. The victory of August 1980 was the crowning triumph of the antipolitical strategy of democratizing society rather than the state. Suddenly it became permissible, even if not yet strictly legal, to engage in the various kinds of social activities the 1970S opposition had made the focus of its agitation, including, most importantly, the construction of independent trade unions recognized by enterprise management. The next few months became a kind of emancipatory celebration of civic life, as millions of people began discussing politics, attending meetings , reading and printing samizdat leaflets, and establishing unions, and doing so with an enthusiasm that gave Poland the flavor and feel of the great radical insurrections of the past. Poland's "revolutionaries," however, did not seek to overthrow the state. They carefully refrained from demanding changes in the party or state structure, for that was "politics," and the new union movement stated clearly from the beginning that it did not want to be a political movement. This was part of the price of the Gdansk Accord, but it 75 76 I Politics and the Beginnings of Solidarity was paid willingly. Reared in the ideology of the KOR opposition, and remarkably loyal to it, the new union leaders were quite comfortable in disavowing "political" ambitions. Of course, not everybody shared these views. In Gdansk, many workers vehemently protested against the decision of WaI~sa and the other strike leaders to append onto the Gdansk Accord, at the insistence of the government, a "preamble" stating that the new unions accepted the constitutional guarantee of the Party's "leading role in the state." From the point of view of the new opposition, however, the preamble was no problem whatsoever: the party and state were supposed to be left to "them"; only society was "ours." By accepting the preamble, Solidarity leaders were only showing how much the KOR ideology had become their own.I And they continued to show it afterward, too. They had no comment when Gierek was ousted and replaced by Stanislaw Kania; that was "their" business, not "ours." For many months, Solidarity refused even to present its views publicly on solutions to the economic crisis. In a remarkable October 1980 interview with the influential weekly Polityka, Lech WaI~sa, Andrzej Gwiazda, and other Gdansk Solidarity leaders kept squirming away from the editors' questions, obviously feeling that they represented some kind of a trap. We can't say exactly what the government should do on this or that issue, they pleaded. That's "politics ," they said, the government's business, and Solidarity is just a trade union that cannot and will not interfere in the affairs of the government.2 Similarly, Solidarity for a long time refused to get involved with proposals for workers' self-management councils: running the state-owned enterprises was the "political" business of the government.3 Yet, as soon became clear, the anti-political approach was completely inadequate to the new period. If the goal prior to August was to reconstruct civil society, the goal after August was to institutionalize it. If the goal before August was for independent trade unions to exist, the goal afterward was for independent unions to continue to exist. Yet for Solidarity to become a normal part of the system, there quite obviously had to be political changes, for the state socialist system does not naturally allow independent social institutions to exist. The government had accepted the principle of independent trade unions, but it still needed to alter the system in a way that could allow the unions to function. A new arrangement for the mediation of conflicting interests had to be worked out. New rules had to be devised, for example, for problems such as how autonomous unions can negotiate with heteronomous management; [18.218...

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