Communists and workers in a “red town”. : a microhistory of party politics and shopfloor relations in a Polish industrial centre from a trans-war perspective, 1926-1951

Abstract

It is well-established that the traditional working-class culture played a decisive role in shaping workers’ attitudes towards the communist parties and their rule in Central Europe in the aftermath of the World War II. However, the diverseness of workers’ culture arising from the pre-war developments is rarely taken into account. Moreover, in the Polish case, the post-war communist party is frequently treated as a homogeneous entity alien to the workers and their culture and not as a continuation of a pre-war organization of the Polish working class. This dissertation – a microhistorical study of shopfloor and local politics in Żyrardów, a company town in Central Poland – crosses the cesura of the war to illuminate the multitude of ideas and practices of the working class. The communist party is treated here as a heterogeneous organization divided along ideological and institutional lines in which working-class members possessed a degree of agency and influence. Many communists, often driven by post-Luxemburgist ideas, were responsible for organizing works councils in the years 1944-1945. They were countered by other party members in the state economic apparatus, and pre-war officials allied with them, striving to limit the scope of workers’ participation, and who by mid-1945 had succeeded. However, the skilled, male, working-class communists – who had dominated the party since the interwar period – were able to use the party structures to alter state and managerial policies until the late 1940s. Female unskilled workers, in turn, who before 1939 remained outside the labour movement had to, and frequently did, strike to communicate their demands. Simultaneously they were also the most eager to participate in the productivist policies. Unlike the skilled and unionized workers, they did not oppose the Taylorization of the shopfloor during the interwar period but embraced the ethos of individualized labour and this attitude persisted after the war.