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Solidarność. A New Perspective on the Workers’ Revolution and the Intellectual Opposition

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Published Apr 2026

Michał Siermiński

Author: Michał Siermiński
Translator: Maciej Zurowski
This high-profile and award-winning work shows the organic working-class character of the Polish Solidarność revolution of 1980–81 and thus debunks the canonical idea that the movement was orchestrated primarily by intellectuals from the democratic opposition, who brought consciousness to the workers ‘from the outside’. Siermiński traces the origins of the Polish revolution to the self-activity and self-organisation developed by the Polish working class during earlier protests, strikes, and occupations. The author convincingly demonstrates that Solidarność was driven by the working class’s own aims, experiences and revolutionary instinct—often in direct opposition to the efforts of intellectuals to contain its radicalism.

Biographical Note

Michał Siermiński, Ph.D. (1989) is a research fellow at the Institute for the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Gabriel Narutowicz Institute of Political Thought. He works mainly on the history of the People’s Republic of Poland and other countries of the Soviet bloc.

Readership

This book is especially relevant to those interested in labor history, grassroots activism, Eastern European politics, and working-class studies.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue: On the ‘Exogenous’ Sections in What Is To Be Done?
1 The Russian Revolution of 1905

Introduction: The Polish Revolution of 1980–81
1 ‘The Opposition Brought Consciousness to the Spontaneous Workers’ Movement’
2 Workers’ Autonomy

1 March 1968 – The End of Marxist Revisionism and the Mythical Birth of the Democratic Opposition
1 Introduction
2 Kuroń, Modzelewski and the komandosi
3 The March Shock
4 A Pogrom-like Atmosphere
5 The Great Disillusionment
6 An Overlooked Rebellion
7 Birth of a Myth

2 The Turn to National Tradition and the Internalisation of the Ethos of the ‘Classical’ Polish Intelligentsia
1 Introduction
2 The ‘Classical’ Polish Intelligentsia
3 New Ideological Lineages
4 Guardians and Defenders of Values
5 ‘The Psychology of Servitude’

3 The Period from December 1970 to August 1980
1 Introduction
2 The Winter Breakthrough
3 ‘A Characteristic Silence from the Polish Intelligentsia’
4 June 1976 and the Birth of KOR
5 The Concept of Civil Society
6 Taking the Programme to the Workers
7 Containing the ‘Explosion’ of Public Anger

4 The Solidarność Revolution: Problematic Comradeship
1 Introduction
2 August 1980
3 Delight, Hopes, Expectations
4 ‘Self-Limiting Revolution’
5 The Bydgoszcz Confrontation
6 The Struggle for Self-Management
7 The Concept of National Government

Conclusion
1 National-Civic Solidarność
2 Workers’ Solidarność

Afterword – Workers and Bureaucrats: How Exploitative Relations Emerged and Functioned in the Soviet Bloc
Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski (translated by Maciej Zurowski)
1 The Irreversible Fracturing of the Workers’ State
2 From Workers’ Bureaucracy to Thermidorian Bureaucracy
3 The Construction of the Stalinist Bureaucracy and the Consolidation of the Mode of Exploitation
4 The Stalinist Structural Assimilation of the East European Periphery
5 The Soviet Bloc: The Question of the Mode of Production and Modes of Exploitation
6 The Struggle for Surplus Product and for Control over Labour Processes
7 Conclusion: There Was a Way out of the Vicious Circle
References

Bibliography
Index