Letter From Poland

You know things have changed when you go to the historic Gdansk shipyard, where Solidarity was born, and find unemployed shipworkers hired out as ushers for a theater company renting part of the famed site. The company's doing a run of Brecht's Happy End, and these workers escort theatergoers from the factory gate to the theater, telling stories about the glory days. You thank them when you get there and wish them better luck, but then the curtain comes up and there they are, on stage, holding signs reading "Unemployed! We Want Work!"

In other words: unemployed workers temping as former workers doubling as part-time actors playing unemployed workers. Right by the monument erected in 1980 to those "who died so that we might live in dignity."

Taken together, the pieces of the decline of the neoliberal model in Poland are all right here. The dire economic situation has created critics where once there were only boosters. The humbling of a powerful labor movement has led to the specter of an authoritarian populist backlash. And then there's Brecht. This Old Left master was purged from the repertoire after 1989. His revival here is a sign too, of the willingness of a new generation to think left alternatives again.

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