Solidarity

This book appeared a few months after the declaration of martial law on 13 December 1981, the arrest of thousands of members of Solidarity and the first acts of resistance by Polish workers to the outlawing of their liberation movement. As we wrote it, all those who had worked on it with us, Polish researchers and workers of whom we now had no direct news, were present in our thoughts..

As a mark of friendship and admiration, we should perhaps simply have expressed our disapproval at the destruction of so many hopes and so much courage, our condemnation of martial law. We have instead chosen to maintain the tone and the content which the whole research team. Polish and French, had chosen to give to the book. We must do more than protest at the repression which is now taking place: our task is to promote a better understanding of this movement which the military authorities are trying to destroy.

There are two reasons for this. Firstly, our team is the only one which has been able to conduct an in-depth sociological study of Solidarity with the agreement and active participation of its members. Our method, sociolog ical intervention, makes the actors and interlocutors the analysts of their own action, and our findings therefore have a historical value which makes it essential that we analyse them as thoroughly as possible. Secondly, it is not enough simply to mark one's solidarity with those who are being attacked today; we must do this in full knowledge of what it is that is being attacked, constantly respecting the ideas and feelings of those we seek to defend. We inevitably project our own categories onto others, but this belief in the universality of our actions and opinions leads to conclusions which are at best surprising and, more often than not, simply wrong. Is it possible to support the action of Solidarity if one confuses the Polish national consciousness with the forms which nationalism takes in France, or if one is reluctant to admit that the attachment to Catholicism is an essential component of working-class struggles in Poland? We want this book to make the voice of Solidarity heard, not only in its most solemn declarations. but through an examination of the work of analysis