Solidarity, 25 Years Later

Twenty-five years ago this summer, the world's attention was focused on Gdansk. The images--of thousands of workers sitting down in the Lenin Shipyard demanding independent trade unions and the right to strike, while back in the printing shop bearded intellectuals, 20-year-old students and middle-aged shipworkers collaborated to produce the strike's daily bulletin, Solidarity--offered an improbable vision of a society united against the state. And when, against all odds, they forced the government to capitulate--the same government that had sent tanks against strikers ten years earlier, killing dozens--the Solidarity movement quickly galvanized the world. Especially the world's left.

For although Solidarity fought against the official Communist world, the left welcomed it more than the right. While bankers feared the movement might jeopardize the repayment of Poland's large debts, and conservatives feared mass democratic movements in general, radical activists from Brazil to South Africa sent their greetings and their representatives, trying to figure out what this unusual trade union/social movement, led by 37-year-old electrician Lech Walesa, was all about.

As demonstrated over the next sixteen months, Solidarity's real innovation was its commitment to radical social transformation without bothering about the state. Partly because party dictatorship put the state off-limits and partly because Solidarity's key ideologues had themselves been 1960s radicals inspired by the anti-authority ethos of the time, Solidarity developed the groundbreaking concept of "antipolitics." The idea was not to "take" power but to get away from power and let society transform itself.

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