Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West Page 3

  1.2 Name clash, Marx meets the West cigarettes in Kharkov, Ukraine

  The problem with the access to the desired goods of course wasn’t solved by the sheer accession to capitalism. This made it more problematic, because suddenly we were very unequal in how much we could have of the freshly available goods. Out of that not-yet-availability, a new kind of ‘brand’ started to emerge in Poland, fake brands that were like-but-not-quite the mega-brands. In the 90s and sometimes today still you can see on the Polish streets working class folk parading with the plastic bags branded as BOSS, but be not deceived they ever purchased anything in the luxurious BOSS boutique. We grew up with a lack of means, saturated by goods often made in China, but also in other cheap workforce parts of the world, supported by the familial fake brands, various Abibas-es, Diar-s, Polo-Cocta’s. It was as in the communist era, when we had always chocolate-like products not made of real chocolate, pseudo coca-cola and fake hamburgers. In the photographic reportage from this era, you see the poverty of the shop window dressings, which can often boast only loaves of bread.

  The new middle classes and their Bible

  Gazeta Wyborcza was the publishing phenomenon of the Polish 90s, just like Przekroj was of the 50s and 60s. As the mission of the latter (which will be discussed in the last chapter) was to lead the new socialist classes through the maelstrom of the Polish People’s Republic (Polska Republika Ludowa, ‘PRL’ for short) while carrying some of the system’s values, so Wyborcza was the real carrier of the intelligentsia ethos, when, though nobody at the time saw it as such, all the previous natural ethos-maintaining forces disappeared. The cultural formation of the PRL middle classes (liking similar things, from literary canon to TV programmes), mutual values (only if they were built of the anti-communist resentment) – they were all replaced with the new ethos of the free market economy, in which it wasn’t your education, as in PRL, that was your distinguishing feature. With all the previous certainties of life disappearing, it was Wyborcza’s responsibility to carry us towards an enlightened middle-classness. Founded by the ex-opposition, most prominently Adam Michnik, as an ‘Electoral Gazette’ for the first semi-free elections in 1989, it was an organ of the Solidarity union, i.e. the architects of the new freedoms, in which many of the editors were involved as members of the Worker’s Defence Committee (Komitet Obrony Robotników, KOR). To this they owed their mission as the conscience of the nation, even if they had increasingly less to do with actual workers. While capitalizing on the legend of Solidarity, Wyborcza started to represent the interest of the entrepreneurial class and did nothing to stop the development of neoliberalism, or the creation of a nationalistic populism in Poland, passively observing the ever-increasing toll of unemployment. People involved in the initiative of the ‘Round Table’, the talks between the Opposition’s inner circle and the Communist Party that effectively ended Communist rule, let the increasingly bigoted Lech Wałęsa take the reins, reacting way too late after the right wing had already spread. Increasingly it started echoing Margaret Thatcher and later Tony Blair, as they were patiently teaching the Poles how they should think to really become a middle class. Soon, the free public debate in free Poland became a strange unison. If you had not founded a little enterprise (at least, on time, early in the 90s), you could always be an educated member of the previous intelligentsia. But if you asked whether this meant that someone had been implicated in the previous system, you were carefully silenced. Now we all knew who to vote for - libertarian Union of Freedom and Leszek Balcerowicz, whose policies as minister of finance put Poland into the worst recession in its history in the early 90s, then ‘Solidarity’ Electoral Action, which grew out of the right wing mutation of the union. Today it’s Civic Platform, neoliberal and at the same time, ‘progressive’ enough to look good cast against the far-right nationalism and ‘populism’ of Law & Justice, another post-Solidarity party. Interestingly, our whole political scene since ’89 always was and remains to this day nearly wholly dominated by people involved very closely with Solidarity, as its legend of liberators clearly still has a strong clout among the society. Yet the union itself is today attacked by them on the very premise of exclusively defending worker’s rights.

  Suddenly it turned out that if you had different opinions on the financial reforms, if you wanted to support workers rights and the unions, you were blocking Polish entrepreneurs. Wyborcza also ‘civilized’ its readership in its weekend supplement with essays from leading European intellectuals, with Vaclav Havel, Timothy Garton Ash and Norman Davies as its intellectual and political guides, Wyborcza spread liberalism as the leading “thought of the West”, with ritual attacks on the red past and habitual essays on the qualities of the liberal/libertarian approach to the economy. It was obvious where there was ‘us’ and where there was ‘them’, especially, since from the early 2000s there entered onto the Polish scene a far-right, purporting to represent the frustrated, deprived part of Polish society. Similar was the mainstream take on “feminism”, which in the the supplement Wysokie Obcasy (“High Heels”) professes mostly entrepreneurialism and portrays “strong women” excelling in business and politics, with a relatively liberal take on sexuality. A single more ‘radical’ article on, for example, women’s rights at work or abortion is usually far outnumbered by articles on cosmetics and a good portion of “life wisdom” from psychologists. Its predominant middle classness goes without saying.

  Within post-communist Europe, Poland is in the so called Visehrad group, the ‘Central European’ core of the New Europe, along with the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary.

  Until today, progressive magazines of that region, like Visehrad Focus, discuss the recent events, crisis, strikes and protests rather in the fashion of “what are the chances of the middle classes” rather than “how can we change the class system”. Basically, it turned out that the best thing was to consume, read Wyborcza and shut up. Today, anyone trying to discuss any solutions to the current crisis other than accepting austerity measures is dismissed.

  Similarly, the rights to welfare, sexual equality and reproductive rights in most post-communist countries have circled the square. As the 90s were to reject everything belonging to the communist past, together with the erasure of the ideology, we had in Poland a total rejection of liberal social rights, such as mass availability of contraception and abortion. Now, those countries that once enjoyed some social liberalism, have the strongest anti-abortion law in Europe, together with recurring rejection of civil partnerships and intolerance towards LGBT people (with a ban on adoption/reproductive rights for gays) and a serious anti-feminist backlash. It is curious, that in Romania, which had a draconian anti-abortion law under Ceauşescu, this led of course to the liberalisation of the law after 1989.

  One of the most ground-breaking films from the post-communist East of the last few years, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, dealt with the outcomes of the anti-abortion laws in Romania for the lives of ordinary people, presenting in all its harshness the conditions in which women underwent illegal terminations. In Poland it provoked a discussion rejecting abortion as ‘horrible’, rather than rethinking the ways women could obtain legal help so that they wouldn’t have to go through the same as the girls on the screen.

  It is this optic/epistemic schizophrenia that pervades post-communist Europe. With the negative memories still remaining, the later governments almost universally used the communist red rag to force through reactionary laws. What a weird combination: a low-tax free market laissez-faire economy, with religious obscurantism, anti-feminist and homophobic laws, and a massively conservative society. This is precisely what makes us so attractive for the foreign investors, for whom at the same time our country seems so obviously secondary, lesser, that it begged to be exploited, with little regards to its economy or citizens. Yet the reasons for the profound role of the church within the contemporary, and officially secular countries of the ex-Bloc differ enormously. In Russia, the church is an element of the pro-Putin lobby –
as the recent case of anarcho-punk group Pussy Riot makes clear. In Poland, it takes advantage of the previous anti-communism to influence restrictive civil and reproductive rights.

  A Tale of Two Cities, or On The Real Meaning of Borders

  How does the West react to this? Let’s focus on the UK. In the European Parliament, the Conservative Party is in the same camp as the nationalists and exotic right from the former East, forming the so called European Conservatives and Reformists, because the previous center-right coalition of Christian Democrats had turned out too liberal for them. So interestingly, when on the international arena, this right-wing nationalism very rarely meets any real opposition. This was felt greatly in Hungary, which met with criticism from the EU not when its human rights were abused, not when Fidesz gained power two years ago and basically abolished opposition. It happened when Victor Orban’s government threatened the EU with a ban on imports. The message is clear – we won’t mess or take interest in your politics, even if it clearly abuses any notions of “democracy”. But we will interfere, if our financial fluidity through Europe is put in danger.

  With the present crisis in the UK, watching Tory politicians attempting to make Britain, with its current unemployment, a “competitive”, low cost economy, we can see Britain in a ‘transitional phase’, similar to the early 90s Eastern Europe. If they force down wages enough, maybe Britain will be as successful as Poland. Of course, the privatisation and asset stripping we learned from Britain’s blatant 80s.

  The period since EU accession has seen completely new patterns of trans-European migration – but today it’s economic criteria, that decide about who leaves the country, not political. When Poles left the country in late communism, it was dictated by Martial Law, and often there was no hope of return for them. Today, there’s no problem with obtaining a passport and all borders have disappeared, except for the economic ones. These seem to be more important though, given that more people have left Poland in recent years than even during the darkest years of Stalinism or the late PRL. At the moment, around 1.5 million to 2 million Poles are on an over-a-year emigration. They get married, have children. Only last year 100,000 people left Poland and numbers are growing. All this in a situation when in their own country the young are bombarded with culpability for the low birth-rate.

  What is linking us together now, despite the still enormous differences in our economy, is the landscape of post-Fordism. In his under-appreciated film It’s a Free World (2006), Ken Loach tells the other story of the “New Europeans”. Now coming legally, Poles have a better situation than illegal political refugees from Iran, or the migrants from Ukraine. A young working class woman runs a company that hires (mostly Polish) migrants for building and factory jobs. But raised in a completely neoliberal world, she completely internalizes its methods and mentality: if you won’t do it, it will be done to you. If you won’t exploit, you’ll be exploited. Sacked after being sexually harassed in her job with an Anglo-Polish employment agency, she next, with a help of a friend, organizes groups of workers to work for almost nothing (and frequently not getting their wages anyway, as, under pressure she regularly cheats them and takes their part of the money). If for a moment we believe she begins to understand, as when she helps falsifying a passport for an Iranian refugee, when unpaid workers attack her, she reacts sharply. In the last scene, we see her going one step further, continuing the same ‘colonization’ east of the EU’s border, in Ukraine - now in the illegal business, giving them false papers. Loach perfectly describes how the weird circuit of capital in the modern world subjugates individuals.

  There are few things more unpleasant than crossing the UK border. Since I really began to travel here regularly in late 2009, Poland was already in the EU and it would be really cheeky to complain, knowing what people from non-EU Europe, the Americas and rest of the world have to go through to be able to get into this country. We are the Wizzair generation: beneficiaries of the accession of the lesser Europe to the First World, who rushed there as soon as they could leave their jobless and miserable countries. A typical traveller to London from Eastern Europe is a working class unskilled person, who hopes to earn some money in care or cleaning business, along with skilled workers with families and more rarely, specialists, like doctors. In this way Polish has become the third most spoken language in the UK after English and Welsh.

  Queuing with dozens of my compatriots, who feed the financial power of all the Wizzairs, Ryanairs and Easyjets of this world every single day, I’m not strictly one of them, I’m a fake: a middle class overeducated Polish girl, who is there seduced by the cultural lure of the West, rather than led by material necessity. The gigantic rent-a-car companies sponsor billboards telling us “Welcome to London”, but we couldn’t be further from our Western dream here: we are, of course, in Luton, the biggest transit space for Eastern Europe’s migrants, travellers, small-time businessmen, British working class youths in flip flops going to Ibiza and, as the posters everywhere are suspecting/informing us, we might be human traffickers and all sorts of frauds, crooks and cheats, who, as the posters suggest, speak with thick Eastern European accents. As British Airways is well beyond my league, I travelled, travel and will be travelling with my compatriots on those crying-children-ridden cattle cars, until there’s any job they can possibly take.

  One look at my birth date – 1983 – will tell you the whole story of my getting around the world. Born when borders were still a serious business indeed, I didn’t really experience the incapability of travelling, especially as my parents were small entrepreneurs typical for the early 90s era of “transition”.

  The trip back can be quite different. If any academic/culture-worker friends from London are travelling in the opposite direction, it’ll be only for one reason: they are international conference guests, part of the growing industry of “studies on Eastern Europe”, festivals of architecture, design, Jewish culture, post-communism, Walter Benjamin or Alina Szapocznikow, warehouses where tolerance, mutual understanding and curiosity for the changes between us are supposed to be built. The fact that the vast and fascinating world of EU financing encompasses not only our agriculture, but our culture, is what enables this world of wonderful, newly established friendship. I travelled first to the UK, because a certain cultural worker lured me by romantic visions of concrete buildings and council estates. Being seduced by a vision in which the Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog estate in which I spent my childhood could be romantic, instead of a horror of boredom, a Warsaw girl, I embarked on my first, self-financed trip to the Smoke, to interview him for a progressive art magazine by a city-theory-inspired NGO. Then the aforementioned romantic culture worker went the way back to Warsaw, as a guest of a major artistic institution to speak there on a politics of urban renewal. Then I went back to the better world to pursue my knowledge on political aspects of the ruination of the city where I lived. Since then, there were many travels back and forth between the City that was being stripped down of its old, post-war regime buildings and the City which already got rid of a pretty large amount of buildings of this regime. Together, we also travelled on Wizzair lines to other culture workers Eastern European destinations: Kiev, Ukraine; Zagreb, Croatia, Belgrade, Serbia, Budapest, Hungary, Bratislava, Slovakia.

  1.3 Jacek Kuroń makes a little speech on the opening of the first ever McDonalds restaurant in Poland

  The periphery, as we were repeatedly told by post-modern thinkers, is more interesting than the center. Neoliberal reality would agree with this only if you were to look for its dark places. The dark spaces of status quo are placed irregularly: it is both Pristina and Moscow; both Luton and London, both Łódź, “Polish Manchester”, now in the turmoil of becoming a ‘creative city’, while most of its population is vegetating. It is yet unknown, what the authorities plan to do with the impoverished population, when their task, which in among other things included an investment from David Lynch, in revitalizing an old power plant, will be completed.

  We
live both at the margins of Europe and, as we like to see it, in the spotlight, especially when we either disrupt the international congresses for climate change with our big CO2 emissions, or the debates of the European Parliament with our irrepressible right wing populists. A mutual relation between Eastern and Western Europe I’d describe as a bad love affair. Not unrequited love, which it has been mostly in travelogues or memoirs, especially of Eastern migrant intellectuals, writing up their tormented history exiled to one of the big, capital(ist) cities. This perspective is over, because, unlike in the past, this seductive West wants something from us, it needs us. Needs our bodies for working for less, for filling places for skilled workers or, last but not least, needs us for self-assurance and reassurance. We need the West for too many reasons: we need its money, but we also need its elegance, class and consumption patterns. As in every bad love affair, after a while and saving some money, we learn we don’t really need them, we are ready to live a life on our own. Nothing better highlights the way capital works than a young woman from a small Eastern European town, who went to hypothetical big Western European capital to work temporarily and raise funds who decides to stay as long as she can, rather than come back. What is at stake is not only the monetary relation, but the whole set of Western social gains: a welfare state which she won’t have in her collapsing country; feminism, multiculturalism. Everything is better than coming back to the rough-hewn conditions of unemployment, patriarchy and frustration in her native city.