4.3 - Constitution, Autogestion, Rupture

Summary

What unfolded in 1980/81 in Poland was one of the most striking experiments in industrial democracy in Europe, a leaf out of Rosa Luxemburg’s Mass Strike. If the events are today largely forgotten, this is partly because of Solidarity’s (Solidarność) later co-option and involvement as the party in government during the socially destructive programme of market implementation that took place in Poland after the fall of the Iron Curtain. But if it failed to impact on the democratic imagination of the West, it was for another reason too. What was distinctive about the Gdansk uprising was that it was an exercise both in autogestionnaire politics, and a re-assertion of the meaning of work buttressed by a collective commitment to its protection. Solidarity was an instance of a worker’s movement rising against a workers’ republic, unclassifiable in terms of the blunt binarisms that dominated the political imagination of both East and West. It was ‘unclassifiable’ because both the agent and the action defied locution in the constitutional space available to them at the time. This double negotiation (of agency and action) was only possible as an exercise of constituent power in the dynamic process of enactment of a labour constitution.