Monday 2 March 2015

Seminar Series 6

Title: Marxism, Christianity, liberalism: Polish democratic opposition and the idea of civil society, 1956-1989
SpeakerDariusz Gawin (Warsaw Uprising Museum)
DiscussantJim Bjork (King's College London)

Abstract:

Professor Dariusz Gawin analyses the change in oppositional, political thinking in Poland from the Letter to Party members” by Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski, 1965 until the advent of the Solidarity movement in 1981. He shows that the political identity of opposition groups in Poland underwent a significant transformation between 1968 and 1976. While the myth of revolution was still constitutive for the 1965 “Letter”, after the events of 1968, when workers were instrumentalised for anti-Semitic and anti-intellectual state action against oppositional students, the faith in the revolutionary messianism of the working class was lost. A new intellectual coalition developed, which abandoned the dialectical conflict between the reactionary and progressive forces, uniting both the “lay left” and “liberal Catholics” in a middle way between left and right, from which a new division between totalitarianism and democracy emerged. In this anti-totalitarian vision, the identity of the leftist Polish opposition came to be based on the civil society and took real shape in the movement of independent social initiatives between 1976 and 1980, culminating in the ten-million-strong Solidarity movement which called for the introduction of the self-government, democracy and pluralism.


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  3. See the photos: Click here

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