Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West Read online

  In the end it is not a matter of geographical snobbery, but a niche in neoliberal Europe, that keeps her there. A niche, that enables fragments of the old-regime’s welfare state in the middle of the ultra-capitalist feast of the City, La Defense or other financial districts, dictating the rules for the rest of us. For the middle class intelligentsia the situation is different. Deprived of the securities of the 90s boom, many of them today are employed only temporarily on so called ‘trash contacts’. If the cold world of London symbolizes the flat desert of the contemporary form of capitalism, its ultimate manifestation, then it must be said the Eastern cities conform variously to this scheme. The biggest barrier is the money, but as the example of Łódź shows perfectly, it is a question of a proper PR and attracting famous names combined with the magic word ‘revitalization’ to basically be allowed to do anything one wants. But as the myth of London – in mass imagery a city of power, vice, bling, fashion and the royals – proves, it is the myth and presence in mass imagery, or lack thereof, that is equally significant as actual money. Warsaw will never be the place where the creatives go, because it was on the wrong side when the points for mythmaking were being distributed.

  The strange silence of liberal Poland

  When Przekroj (“Slant”), a prominent Polish news weekly, after undergoing several erratic makeovers in the 90s and 2000s by several owners was all of a sudden given over to a left-oriented editorial board in winter 2011, there was a sudden breeze of fresh air blown into a public debate devoted to rehearsing the ritual wars between the ex-communists and the right wing. Yet, after several months, with the circulation shrunk by roughly 50%, the editors were sacked, and within a fortnight replaced with well-known specialists in the entertainment and lifestyle press.

  The leftist Przekroj was trying to initiate a debate about capitalism in a country that didn’t dare to use a class language supposedly discredited by its use in the previous system. It interviewed trade unionists and spoke about strikes and opposition against austerity in a committed way. They interviewed critics of America and Israel, wrote on the “rebel cities” of David Harvey, the Occupy movement, Indignados, or 2011’s riots in the UK – and took them seriously, unlike most of the liberal media, including Gazeta Wyborcza, who after ’89 did their best to dismiss the fight for workers’ rights. Wait a minute, you might ask, wasn’t it a union, Solidarity, who were the architects of the great freedom of ’89? What happened to them? You’d be surprised: when recently the union, or rather what’s left of it, protested the raising of the pension threshold by Donald Tusk’s neoliberal government from 65 to 67 years, their previous leader Lech Wałęsa said in an interview that in the PM’s place he’d have sent truncheons to these ungrateful spongers. “Tusk works behind the desk, what does he know about being old and having have to work in the coal mine?”, one of the protesters was quoted, but not in liberal outlets, busy condemning them for greediness, but on ‘Beyond the Transition’, a blog run by an English leftist in Warsaw. Class is on the agenda, but the media refuses to talk about it.

  This protest, as well as recent strikes of nurses, was a rarity, because in the whole ex-Bloc the culture of protest died off with communism. It’s sufficient enough to look at the map depicting the Indignados & Occupy solidarity marches on October 15 2011, which was nearly empty east of the Iron Curtain, with tiny, 100-200 groups in Warsaw, Bucharest or Prague. There was a better turnout in Slovenia or Croatia, but this they owe to a much better-remem-bered tradition of Titoism, where the left was always stronger. Yet Eastern Europe – the Balkans and Baltic states especially – has been hit very hard by the crisis. Latvia has experienced economic collapse on the scale of Greece. But there is no Latvian Syntagma Square or a party like SYRIZA proposing alternatives. Instead, there were harsh cuts and unopposed austerity, which led to the recent praise from the West for Latvia’s economic “growth” and the example it could set up for the rebellious Greece.

  In Poland there are only two kinds of protests that can gather thousands: the old generation of Solidarity, or the post-89 youngsters, protesting against the internet censorship bill ACTA. Yet the only reason the jobless or insecure young took to the streets was the fear of free culture being taken from them. This, in a situation where the state thinks only of liberalizing employment legislation, tax-cuts and privatization. Leszek Balcerowicz, an idol to all “shock therapy” architects across the ex-Bloc, talks today of a “swollen public sector”, while his old comrades in the west, economists Sachs and Stiglitz, admit they were wrong. Nobody writes exposés of the ATOS company, who will soon be taking care of “benefit reform” in Eastern countries, but the UK knows their results very well. Poland, so far masking the crisis’ toll through mass emigration, EU subsidies and manufacturing goods for Germany, doesn’t want to debate capitalism.

  But now, Przekroj’s solution to the jobs crisis is “it’s everywhere, it’s enough to make a move!”, amongst articles about luxurious toasters. Needless to say, after the announcement of the editorial change, the public debate was full of pleased liberals, who otherwise hypocritically argue for “free debate”. If this is how current events are talked about, when the crisis really hits, Poland will be taken unawares.

  To the majority in the post communist countries, a class discourse died together with the previous regime. The biggest paradox is that the hatred of the unions happens in the country of “Solidarność”, the mass trade union that was the main agent of the collapse of communism. But Solidarity members themselves didn’t care about private ownership, which was never the part of their programme, they wanted to reform socialism. No country had as significant a grass roots oppositional movement as Polish Solidarity in the 70s and 80s, none was more legendary, more mythologized afterwards and also, more betrayed. The crash of the Solidarność legacy is best visible in the decline of its former leader, our biggest success story of the Twentieth Century, electrician turned president, Lech Wałęsa, whose public pronouncements now are reduced to advocating police beating up strikers and excluding homosexuals from parliament.

  Solidarity was not an organisation speaking with one voice, but there were many currents and factions, right and left-wing, in what was never a monolithic organization. What united them was the mutual enemy. In the new Poland, when this enemy, already seriously crippled in the 1980s, disappeared, it was the intelligentsia, the more market-oriented ex-members of KOR, that convinced the Solidarity union leaders to accept the shock therapy. The existing, incredibly harsh class divisions that exist in Polish society are the consequence of this. Poland is divided into two groups, those successful and unsuccessful after the transition.

  While the destiny of workers was so radically neglected, the right wing currents started to largely re-emerge and established a reign over the souls of the remaining union members. The social costs of transition were high, and what was there for the workers was the Church, which during communism especially played an enormous role as the opposition to the system, with the election of Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II as its peak. At this time, those currents within the church that were the domain of the intelligentsia and the democratic opposition, after ’89 wanted to win over the new bourgeoisie and often lost a general, more popular influence. What filled its place was the untamed, fanatical church, which cynically used the social quietude and turmoil produced when Poland was pervaded by strikes. This new church proposed the narrative of victimology, which was taken up especially after 2010, when a plane with the president and over 90 other government officials crashed in Smolensk during a journey to that typical space of memory, the site of the Soviet mass murder of Polish officers, Katyń.

  In this way, Poland is now divided between the “victims”, who, on that wave, have become also anti-progress, anti-modernity, antiliberal laws, and the liberals, who, though economically neoliberal, when cast against the background of the right wingers, look so good it makes them win the election. This are false political alternatives, ritual wars, that with a slight
margin of error and a different display of political accents, most post-communist societies are subjugated to. Poland because of its history has a strong martyrological streak, the counter-modernist narrative of a victim, allowing it to locate the blame for the negative elements of the transition in the ‘external enemies’. These were, though, people abandoned by the left – the left understood as a Labour Party that has never existed in Poland since the war, and it didn’t happen either in the key moment of us mentally and economically leaving communism - too busy trying to get rich fast.

  Communist Ghosts in the Closet

  In the post communist reality there are still deep influences from the pre-89 divisions, and our political scenes are still determined by the pre-democratic order. The rule that made us condemn universally everything pre-89 made us live in a schizophrenic reality, in which both ex-communists and the previous opposition are given every credit in following the neoliberal rules. Poland is one of the most red-witch-hunt pervaded country of the ex Bloc, yet, to believe the paranoid far right wing press, we have to still beware, as not only commies, LGBT and various other ‘lewaks’, known also as “the red motley’, but practically everybody who benefited from PRL and the transition, so including also the neoliberals such as Civic Platform and Gazeta Wyborcza, are threatening us.

  If we have communism at all, it managed to survive as a zombie, as an un-dead monster we’re supposed to be afraid of. We can’t, for example, let the Berlin Wall die – like a remnants of a dead organism, loose body parts - it must be left scattered around the city for the excitement of the tourists. Tourists also don’t want this myth to die: one of the attractions of the Mini-Europe theme park in Brussels, where each EU country is symbolized by animatronic architectural models, is the mechanized Berlin Wall, which – after being overthrown by bulldozers, is a few seconds of strange mourning later magically resurrected, only to be overthrown again and again, as if we’re stuck in the traumatic repetition of the primal scene, capable only of an endless repetition, but not an understanding.

  In this process, the memory begins to be manipulated. Berlin has become a House of Fear at the fun fair, where we pay to be led through a set of nightmares of history, with the premise that the monsters are our good friends, we know them very well and we know that the nightmare is not actually for real. The reason we must keep the monster alive is crucial for us to not to change anything about the present and to exist in this morbid clutching onto the past. The past is used to scare, so that anything we do now cannot be put into question. And when what we do now visibly fails, we can again and again reach for our little scare bot: See what will happen if we allow this ever again?

  This is not the full picture. The unknown secret of the recent post-communist societies is how often, especially right after the collapse, they voted for communists. Poland twice elected the Democratic Left Alliance, the renamed and ‘reformed’ Communist Party – similar parties were elected in Hungary, Slovakia, Lithuania, Romania and Bulgaria. People not only gave the ex-communists a chance, they did so repeatedly, and did so not only because of the communist nostalgia, but because the ‘good guys’, the former Oppositionists in right wing anti-communist governments had made these weakened economies collapse completely. Because of this the political landscape is that of ritual battles between the ex-communists and the ex-opposition, both basically neoliberal but replacing one another every four years in the government, when a society disgusted by one in the meantime manages to forget the faults of the other, but both eventually erasing the welfare state and dragging the economy to the drain.

  Of course, the political situation of the respective countries differed greatly. Ex-Yugoslavia drowned in the horrible war, and some of the countries had to live permanently on international help, like Albania, which had practically no industry or jobs at all in the first half of the 90s.

  There’s a lot of post-colonial trauma to post-communism, but the level of barbarism that came after caused people to miss the past. Yet the erecting of a new statue of Stalin in Ukraine (as happened a few years ago in Dniepropetrovsk), and the city of Volgograd’s regular petitions to rename itself Stalingrad have more to do with the memory of the World War Two, in which 25 million Russians died, not necessarily the love for despotism. But what is the value now the Russian Communist Party, by all accounts reactionary, from whom the Russian ‘new left’ want to disassociate? Large, unreformed Communist Parties remain also in the Czech Republic, and Ukraine, where both had big increases in their votes in elections in 2012; the Communists have regularly been elected as the governing party in Moldova. To me, there’s little appeal to these organisations, as they are often socially reactionary. In rich countries, like Germany, Die Linke, formed out of the former Communists and a left-wing split from the Social Democrats, feel more of a modern alternative to the careless neoliberal newspeak of the Social Democrats, who remain so only nominally, while Germany is holding the rest of the continent to ransom during the Eurozone crisis.

  This leads us to the notorious ‘lustration’ cases, where the names of public figures who ever testified or appear in the communist Secret Services files were publicly disclosed. That often meant civil death. Something which in principle was supposed to lead to punishing people who once could’ve beaten people to death (during the repression of mass strikes in 1970 and 1981, or the anti-Semitic repression of student protests in 1968), transformed into a regular witch-hunt consciously set up by the right wing to get rid of their political opponents. The mood of conspiracy never left us, and the Smolensk catastrophe was obviously an eruption of this. From the belief that Russians caused it wilfully to the view that it happened from their negligence, it was all to the benefit of the far right in Poland. Still, lustration appealed to the large part of the society who felt they were wronged somehow in 1989, by the opposition elites who had made a cushy deal with the communists at the Round Table. Thus, we landed again with the unbearable threat of ‘populism’, that is supposed to wipe out all the blame from the neoliberals. The ‘populist’ right are often public defenders of the remnants of the welfare state, helping the spread of negative propaganda about the ‘politics of welfare’.

  A quite opposite phenomenon is Russia’s nostalgia towards communism. There are several modes of it. The contemporary Russian left is rejecting the legacy of communism after the first ten years of the revolutionary period, until Stalinism. But the nostalgia of the ordinary man in Russia, as many post-Soviet liberal intellectuals believe, the one that makes people vote for Putin, is a nostalgia for Stalin, and the ‘glorious’ empire he represents. But this isn’t just confined to the impoverished workers and peasants of Russia. When you listen to most popular music in contemporary Russia, (like the mega-popular counter-tenor singer Vitas) or read aspirational magazines, like Snob (the title of the popular magazine of the liberal intelligentsia!), or look at contemporary art, the prevailing feeling is that of imperialism. The residual love for splendor and bling was necessary after the demise of Soviet blankness. At the same time, Russia is a country with some of the biggest inequalities in the world. Older people may feel in a need of a tsar-like, strong leader, but their existence is shrinking.

  Post-politics of nostalgia

  After ’89 we observed the waning of and even the hostility towards any politicized thinking that would, especially in the former East, be called ‘ideological’, labelled as belonging to the previous system and so on. It is funny how when the leading liberal-leftist association, Krytyka Polityczna, published a book on post-1989 documentary film, where authors wrote on the ‘ideologies of Polish capitalism’, there was a sacred outrage all over the liberal press, a shock at calling capitalism too an ‘ideology’, as if this word was necessarily reserved for the fearful ‘Komuna’ (a derogatory term for communism used universally in Poland). Just as everywhere else, the 1990s meant for the ex-Bloc the end of politics as we knew it: end of politics practised with the help of political programs, political differences, with everything landi
ng in a undifferentiated mass. Political parties lost their original meaning – in the recent election in Poland it was hard to say what any candidate associated himself with. This is the world of postpolitics, as we know it from the last decades of elections in Italy, Russia and, increasingly, the rest of the Bloc.

  These manipulations of history and memory are a direct revenge on the communist system, in which it isn’t a mystery why uncomfortable, inconvenient facts from history were erased from the books and not put in the public domain. As the PRL was silencing the memory of the Independence Day (as it was connected with the inter-war, bourgeois Poland), the wartime Home Army or the Warsaw Uprising, in contemporary Poland history is nothing but the remembrance of those three facts. In this vein, the religious right wing part of the Polish political scene founded the National Remembrance Institute, established as an organ to ‘pursue the crimes against the Polish state’, which given our history, were many, but transformed with time into basically a way to persecute anyone who had anything to do with the old system, in a witch-hunt not dissimilar from McCarthyism, touching many leading figures. This led to the absurd situation where it aimed to discredit people like Ryszard Kapuścinski, the Polish star reporter, who was a believer in socialism and later a supporter of Solidarity, but somehow started to be a liability in the new system. Many of our artistic and moral authorities had to pretend they didn’t live under communism, or had to quickly erase their engagement with the system to remain in the government’s good books.