Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T02:40:43.667Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Eighteenth Brumaire of General Wojciech Jaruzelski

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Richard Spielman
Richard Spielman
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Get access

Extract

Engels once remarked in a letter to Marx, that it really looks as if old Hegel is directing History as World Spirit from his grave, and with the greatest conscientiousness lets everything spin out twice, once as great tragedy, and the second time as running farce, Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, Barthelemn for Saint-Just, Flocon for Carnot, and Mondkalb with the top dozen most debt-ridden lieutenants for the little corporal and his roundtable of marshals. Thus, as for the 18th Brumaire—we've been there before.1

Type
Review Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , July 1985 , pp. 562 - 585
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1985

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Friedrich Engels in a letter to Karl Marx, December 3, 1851. Bebel, A. and Bernstein, E., eds., Der Briefwechsel zwischen Friedrich Engels und Karl Marx, 1844 bis 1883 [Correspondence between Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, 1844–1883], Vol. I (Stuttgart: J.W.H. Dietz, 1913), 271–72.Google Scholar

2 Marx, Karl, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Tucker, Robert C., ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 436.Google Scholar

3 Anderson, Perry, The Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: NLB, 1974), 23.Google Scholar

4 Marx (fn. 2), 437.

5 Ibid., 515

6 Ibid., 515–16; emphasis added. This criterion of the relation to the means of administration is, of course, a very Weberian way of looking at class politics, and explains the great power of Marx's essay.

7 Ibid.; emphasis added.

8 Lenin, V. I., What Is To Be Done, in Tucker, Robert C., ed., The Lenin Anthology (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 24.Google Scholar

9 “The Russian Communist Party is maintaining the dictatorship of the proletariat in a country where the peasant population has a preponderant majority”. From the resolution of trade organization, “The Role of Trade Unions Under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, adopted at the ioth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), in 1921.

10 Lenin, V. I., Collected Worlds, Vol. 32 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 20.Google Scholar

11 Ibid.

12 The selection of executive personnel of the trade union movement should be made, of course, under the directing control of the party. But party organizations must exercise particular care in applying the normal methods of proletarian democracy precisely in the trade unions, which are the one place more than any other where the selection of leaders should be done by the organized masses themselves. In this way, conditions will be created whereby the party organizations, while fully maintaining control in their hands, will not have to interfere directly and repeatedly in the internal activities of the trade unions.

From “The Role of Trade Unions …” (fn 9).

13 Schapiro, Leonard, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York: Vintage Books, 1971). 337Google Scholar

14 Protocol porozumien Gdansk Proto^oly porozumien Gdansk, Szczecin, Jastrzebie [Protocol of the Gdansk Understanding, from the protocols of the Gdansk, Szczecin, Jastrzebie Understanding] (Warsaw: Krajowa agencja wydawnicza, 1980), 2; author's translation.

15 Max Weber's definition of the political dimensions of citizenship. Weber notes three “distinct significations” of the concept of citizenship (Bürgertum). First, “certain social categories or classes which have some specific communal or economic interests.” Second, “citizenship signifies membership in the state, with its connotation as the holder of certain political rights.” Third, there are citizens in the class sense of a shared social culture “in contrast with the bureaucracy or the proletariat and others outside their circle, as ‘persons of property and culture’. “Weber, , General Economic History, Knight, Frank, trans. (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1927), 315.Google Scholar

16 Parliament's failure to pass the Party-sponsored resolution on factory manager appointments in October 1980 was correctly recognized by Walesa's advisor Bronislaw Geremek as an extremely significant event, but was generally lost on the union as a whole.

17 Michnik, Adam, “Wir sind alle Geiseln”, Der Spiegel (March 8, 1982), 128.Google Scholar In this letter from prison, Michnik also observed that Solidarity did not produce “socialism with a human face"—it was more like “communism with its teeth knocked out.” Author's translation.

18 Marx (fn. 2), 523.

19 The trial of Father Popieluszko's murderers is most directly related to the fact that the crime was conceived as an attack upon Jaruzelski's leadership; hence, in order to maintain inner-Party control, Jaruzelski had to punish the perpetrators, but he did not have to do it with such public fanfare. This unprecedented event is a further demonstration of General Jaruzelski's non-Leninist sensibilities and legalistic orientation, as well as how errant it is to dismiss him as a typical “normalizer”, even though the trial ended with polemics against the church.

20 According to unofficial statistics, approximately 600 churches are now under construction, whereas only 538 new churches were built between 1945 and 1978. For statistics on past church construction, see Szajkowski, Bogdan, Next to God … Poland (London: Frances Pinter, 1983), 27.Google Scholar

21 The Party press account of the official trade union's plenary meeting to discuss the food price increases is almost a parody of itself. It notes the Executive Committee's report on their opinion of the price increases; reports the popular support for this “opinion” among the rank and file; notes that the Executive Committee's stance was approved by the trade union plenum “with one abstention”; and that this “stance” was conveyed to government representatives. But nowhere does the article mention what that “stance” was! (It was unequivocal rejection of the food price increases.) See Trybuna ludu, February 25, 1985.

22 For sophisticated documentation of Jaruzelski's restorational activities, see Poland Watch, a quarterly journal published in Washington, DC. For the definitive study of the relation of censorship to the pathology of Poland's communist order, see Curry, Jane Leftwich, trans, and ed., The Blacky Book of Polish Censorship (New York: Vintage Books, 1984).Google Scholar

23 That [Pilsudski], the restorer of the Polish state, the father of its army, the protagonist of a strong presidency, should lead a revolt against the state authorities, sunder the unity of the army, and overthrow a constitutional president—for [President Stanislaw] Wojciechowski refused to legitimate the coup by remaining in office—were facts that would haunt Pilsudski for the remaining nine years of his life. This was not merely a case of a remorseful personal conscience, but of a violated political model. Rothschild, Joseph, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1974), 55.Google Scholar It is this violation that makes Pilsudski a tragic figure in the Greek sense of the term.

24 After declaring a state of war, Jaruzelski attempted to create a non-Party personal following, organized as the Patriotic Movement for National Rebirth (commonly referred to by its Polish initials, PRON), much as Pilsudski created the Nonpartisan Bloc for Cooperation with the Government (BBWR). PRON never drew sufficient social support for Jaruzelski to use it as a political counterweight to the PUWP. Compare Rothschild, ibid., 59–60.

25 Powiorski, Jan, “The Poles of '81: Public Opinion on the Eve of Martial Law”, Poland Watch, No. 3 (Spring-Summer 1983), 124.Google Scholar One-third of the respondents, however, agreed with the proposition that “Poland now needs a decentralized government without the leadership of the PUWP and based on the participation of various social forces.” This public survey vividly documents the politically divided nature of the nation.

26 On the relation of Glemp, Cardinal to Dalbor, Cardinal, see Slowo powszechne; September 11, 12, 13, 1981, p. 7.Google Scholar Further, in assessing Glemp's political behavior, one must realize that Cardinal Wyszynski on his deathbed bequeathed to the church in Poland an aggressive Eastern strategy: “From here, the Church goes East … the east is open in its entirety, to be won by the Church in Poland.” Szajkowski (fn. 20), 235–38.

27 Co-founder of the seminal, pre-Solidarity “Baltic Coast Free Trade Union”.

28 It appears that Ash arrived for his first lengthy stay (and possibly his first visit ever) in Poland during the August 1980 strikes. If that is true, it explains many of the book's main deficiencies.

29 From the mid-18th century virtually until the collapse of the Polish state, a single nay vote in the Polish Sejm would dissolve the parliament. The most sophisticated case for this understanding of Polish history has been made by the Polish historian Marian Malowist, particularly in his major work, Wschod a Zachod Europy w XIII-XVI wieku [East and West Europe in the 13th to 16th centuries]. Malowist's ideas have been made available to an English-speaking audience by Wallerstein, Immanuel in The Modem World System (New York: Academic Press, 1974).Google Scholar

30 In 1575, the Polish nobility “acquired a formal jus vitae et necis over its serfs, which technically allowed it to execute them at will”; they could legally claim their labor services for up to six days a week. Anderson (fn. 3), 283.

31 In the 16th century the municipal autonomy of the urban patriciates was virtually everywhere suppressed, and with it the chances of developing industry. The Germanic port of Danzig [Gdansk] alone escaped the elimination of medieval urban privileges by the szlachta: the monopolistic export control which it consequently enjoyed further stifled the inland towns. An agrarian monoculture was thus increasingly created, which imported its manufactured goods from the West in an aristocratic prefiguration of the overseas economies of the 19th century.

32 One magnate “empire” in the Eastern Ukraine had no less than 230,000 subjects; the Radziwill house in Lithuania owned 10,000,000 acres.

33 Anderson (fn 3), 285.

34 For a distinguished and important new analysis of the political history of this border change, see Terry, Sarah Meiklejohn, Poland's Place in Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

35 The biggest recent shift—from the Germans to the Russians—in the popular evaluation of who is the greater threat to the country occurred among teenagers during the Solidarity years.

36 Piesowicz, Kazimierz, “Zmiany w rozmieszczeniu i w strukturze ludnosci Polski w latach 1939–50” [Changes in the distribution and structure of the Polish people in 1939–50], unpub. (Pracja habilitacyjna, Warsaw, 1976), 63–72.Google Scholar

37 Ibid., 151.

38 See Walentynowicz's, interview by Krall, Hanna, trans. Tymowski, Andy, The Strife in Gdansk (New Haven, CT: Don't Hold Back Press, 1981)Google Scholar. This interview is, to my mind, the finest document we have on the social and cultural roots of Poland's ex-peasant workers.

39 One is grateful to Staniszkis's editor, Jan T. Gross, for his contribution in rendering the text as lucid as it is.

40 Staniszkis attributes her admitted “preoccupation with power and manipulation” to the experiences of her generation. She was arrested during the March 1968 student protests, and spent nine months in jail. See her response to Bienkowski's criticism of her fascination with power (p. 312).

41 This is not to imply that Staniszkis endorsed such a policy. For her, Solidarity's solution lay in rank-and-file Solidarity activists making common cause with segments of the Party apparatus.

42 See Sartori, Giovanni, “Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics, American Political Science Review 64 (December 1970), 1033–53, at 1042.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43 On the administrative corruption of the PUWP and the state under Edward Gierek—a corruption leading to the Party's loss of control of the state and the state's loss of control over the economy—see Lewis, Paul G., “Political Consequences of the Changes in PartyState Structures under Gierek”, in Woodall, Jean, ed., Policy and Politics in Contemporary Poland (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982), 76–98.Google Scholar

44 See Jowitt, Kenneth, The Leninist Response to National Development (Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Relations, 1978).Google Scholar