4 - 1980: causes and results

Summary

The unrest of 1980 was caused by a number of factors: blocked channels of political communication and lack of representative institutions; frustrated economic expectations; the annoyance over privileges and inequality; and the problems caused by the economic crisis. Many of these issues were addressed in Chapter 3, as aspects of the value systems in Poland. Here these issues will be related more directly to the events of 1980.

BLOCKED CHANNELS OF COMMUNICATION

Every political system, democratic or authoritarian, needs to maintain a system of communication between the leaders and the led. These communications need to operate both ways: the population needs to know what the government requires of them; and the government needs some measure of public actions and attitudes, even if it does not always act on the basis of this knowledge. In Poland, the Party, the trade unions, youth organizations, etc. have acted as ‘transmission belts’ for this two-way process. But by 1980, these institutions were increasingly ineffectual. They were largely unrepresentative of the population, especially of blue collar workers, impairing the ‘upward’ transmission of information. Partially because of this, they were even weak in transmitting information about the goals and policies of the regime to the population.

As a Solidarity leader in Wroclaw said in September, ‘it could no longer go on as it was; in essence nobody represented us, nobody stood for the interests of the workers’.