Dystopia's Provocateurs: Peasants, State, and Informality in the Polish-German Borderlands
248
Dystopia's Provocateurs: Peasants, State, and Informality in the Polish-German Borderlands
248eBook
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Overview
Toward the end of the Second World War, Poland’s annexation of eastern German lands precipitated one of the largest demographic upheavals in European history. Edyta Materka travels to her native village in these “Recovered Territories,” where she listens carefully to rich oral histories told by original postwar Slavic settlers and remaining ethnic Germans who witnessed the metamorphosis of eastern Germany into western Poland. She discovers that peasants, workers, and elites adapted war-honed informal strategies they called “kombinacja” to preserve a modicum of local agency while surviving the vicissitudes of policy formulated elsewhere, from Stalinist collectivization to the shock doctrine of neoliberalism. Informality has taken many forms: as a way of life, a world view, an alternate historical text, a border memory, and a means of magical transformation during times of crisis. Materka ventures beyond conventional ethnography to trace the diverse historical, literary, and psychological dimensions of kombinacja. Grappling with the legacies of informality in her own transnational family, Materka searches for the “kombinator within” on the borderlands and shares her own memories of how the Polish diaspora found new uses for kombinacja in America.
“Rare and exceptionally well-researched analysis of an invisible practice.” —Alena Ledeneva, University College London
“Materka has produced an eloquently written, exciting, and meticulously analyzed ethnographic history that marks an alternative to the vast majority of strictly archival-based historical literature on the German-Polish borderlands. Within the field of Polish history, this book is also an important contribution as the first extensive work on the critical role of informality in the politics, society, and economy of People’s Poland.” —H-Poland
“By concentrating on the local strategies of combination in the areas of uprootedness, Materka has made an interesting and valuable contribution to our knowledge of human behavior. References and the use of Polish words for important concepts are exemplary. . . . [H]er collection of narratives provides food for thought on the relation between formal regulation and human ingenuity.” —Baltic Worlds
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253029096 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Edyta Materka received her PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science and is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
History's Ghosts
I was born in the age of Solidarity, when our Soviet world was falling apart. My family lived on a worker-peasant (robotnik-chlop) farm in the village of Bursztyn, along the Baltic coast of northern Poland. Just sixty miles east in Gdansk — the epicenter of the Solidarity movement — Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa, the Lenin Shipyard workers, and thousands of other Poles were protesting communist rule. Pink leaflets rained down from the sky, telling us to unite and join the movement, that a better world was just beyond the horizon. Even Communist Party officials experienced epiphanies that lift ed the veil of communism from their eyes and revealed the light of capitalism. Then, boom! The Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded in Ukraine, sending gigantic, radioactive black clouds over the Baltic Sea. My parents rushed me to the hospital, where children were fed liquid iodine to protect us from the radiation, but there was not enough for the adults. For the West, the collapse of the Soviet Union was a celebration, but for us, behind the Iron Curtain, it was an explosion of nuclear confetti.
While revolution raged on in the cities, Polish villagers struggled to feed their families in the shortage economy. Soviet class divisions among peasants, workers, and nomenklatura became blurred. Survival was based on the innovative ability to shift class and political identities to acquire resources. Worker-peasant farm families like ours had one foot in agriculture and one foot in industry. Everyone split their time between working in the fields, growing food to meet the agricultural quotas legally mandated by the state, and earning wages in a state job. My father was a manager and my grandfather was a tractor operator in the agricultural circle (a type of cooperative), my grandmother was a seasonal laborer in the collective farm and circle, my mother was an accountant in the state tannery, both of my uncles worked on and off in the state mechanical enterprise and state forestry, and my aunt was a biology teacher who belonged to the Communist Party in a different village. Peasants, workers, and nomenklatura alike lived as one family and, in many cases, under one roof. Throughout each village, every household — depending on where its members worked — secured different resources, rations, entitlements, wages, bonuses, and access to state knowledge through the distribution of household members across different sectors of the command economy.
In the late socialist period, a practice we called kombinacja was critical to finding innovative solutions to the constant instability wrought by scarcity. Kombinacja is the practice of manipulating legal, political, or cultural rules in order to access a resource like food, commodities, labor, information, or power. Although extraordinary inflation devalued the Polish currency and chronic shortages of goods in stores rendered it worthless, it was important to keep one's day job to wykombinowac any workplace perks. Working in state stores helped secure extra food rations, working in the factories or mechanical enterprises helped secure car parts or carpentry and building materials for the farm, being an office worker helped secure stationery, being in the nomenklatura class helped secure higher education for one's children, and so on. Peasants, workers, and nomenklatura in the family all relied on kombinacja and pooled those resources for domestic use or traded them for other necessary goods in the second economy, which had overpowered the collapsing command economy.
The privatization of state workplaces cut villagers off from these resources and flung them into poverty. When my uncle Kuba lost his job in the state mechanical enterprise, he searched the village for bottles to cash in to buy food for his four children. When the agricultural circle closed in the late 1980s, my family moved to the nearby city of Slupsk, where my father got a job as a manager in the transportation authority that was still state owned. We leased a plot of land on the city outskirts, where we harvested strawberries that we sold along the highway. In contrast, members of the nomenklatura class that had sustained state socialism became the new entrepreneurs; they privatized state workplaces, sold off assets, and pocketed profits. The capitalist transition in the 1990s did not regulate privatization, so the nomenklatura were left to their own devices and could use kombinacja to satisfy the new capitalist plan. Kombinacja did not die with socialism; rather, coupled with privatization, it compounded the class inequality that under socialism had already existed between the nomenklatura and the rest. The nomenklatura's kombinacja became critical to the formation of capitalism and the new Polish state.
The 1990s were hard times for a rural family in provincial Poland. The American dream beckoned to us with Michael Jackson videos, the ALF television series, colorful Coca-Cola soda cans, plastic bags at supermarkets, Mentos commercials, "refrigerators in windows" (air conditioners), sneakers, white teeth, and highways filled with cars that we could only fantasize about. In 1990 the US Department of State introduced a green card lottery. My paternal uncle, who had received asylum in America through my Jewish great-aunt during the anti-Semitic purges in Poland in the 1970s, entered my mother's name into the lottery. Her number was chosen! We packed into a large van like migrant workers for an overnight trip to Warsaw to make our case to the American embassy. In 1992 we flew into Newark International Airport, where we were met by my paternal aunt, who helped us find a home in a Polish immigrant community near Trenton, New Jersey. My father joined a Polish construction firm, my mother joined a cleaning service, and my siblings and I were sent to a new school.
In Ameryka, as we called our new country, we rediscovered the collective that we had lost through privatization. Central European and Russian families from different regions in the former Soviet bloc lived in our apartment complex. As people adjusted their languages and dialects to a less regionalized form, we were able to communicate with Czechs, Ukrainians, and Russians using a shared Slavicized language. Regardless of former lives in the military, nomenklatura, village, hospital, or university, women became cleaning maids and men became construction workers. At dawn construction vans revved their engines and groups of maids boarded minivans aft er dropping their children offat the apartment of an elderly woman in the complex who provided day care. We all shopped at the same stores and attended the same Catholic church in Trenton. Some tenants called the neighborhood a panstwowe gospodarstwo rolne (state agricultural farm) because it recalled the collective way of life, and aesthetically it resembled the 1970s block buildings on the state farms. An elderly neighbor even had an ominous Nazi flag hanging on his wall that was visible through his lit window at night. Memories of the Old World were very much alive in our New World neighborhood.
Many immigrants that came in our wave quickly realized that the American dream was a mirage. It was difficult to adjust to a completely new world when one did not understand the language and lacked the financial literacy needed to navigate the capitalist system. Without inherited wealth, well-established family networks, or formal employment, many immigrant families struggled to get by. To subsidize their low pay in the unregulated and informal cleaning and construction businesses, many engaged in various kombinacja activities that they had adapted to the New World.
In Trenton, this included shuttling undocumented Polish immigrants from Canada to the United States for pay; overstaying student visas; buying fake green cards, passports, and social security numbers; going to special tax accountants who filled out taxes in a way that helped secure welfare checks and other state benefits; having babies and then filing family reunification claims; pilfering construction materials or food while on the job; selling scrap metal obtained from a workplace; "renting out" one's legal immigrant identity to undocumented immigrants so that they could acquire a driver's license, start a construction business, or buy a house; marrying a documented or undocumented immigrant for pay or other benefits; subletting rooms to undocumented immigrants to reduce rent costs; moonlighting at "no-show jobs" to earn double income; finding legal loopholes to qualify for free medical treatments before Obamacare; carving out cleaning service territories in various suburban communities and then "selling" those homes or streets to other cleaners for profit; selling car insurance to undocumented immigrants; using the gift and favor economy to get someone to translate a document, make a phone call in English, look up information on the internet, secure cheap housing in Trenton, or obtain the contact information of people in Brooklyn who sell powders with healing properties.
Because it can involve breaking the law, kombinacja can be divisive in the diaspora. It can create unhealthy competition among documented and undocumented immigrants over the limited pool of state resources available to poor families. It breeds class resentment between those who are more upwardly mobile and those who are not. It creates tensions between those who have permanently emigrated to the United States versus those who stay temporarily za chlebem ("for bread") with the intention of earning money and living off the welfare system before retiring to a better life in Poland. It can divide families. When someone miraculously scores a two-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment or receives free cancer treatment, everyone else wants the same. Parents who speak no English pressure their children — who oft en serve as their de facto caseworkers — to secure those same miracles, forcing them to choose between being upright citizens and being "good" children. Its networks keep the Polish diaspora clustered together to ensure the flow of resources and people. It marries youth to the construction and cleaning services rather than encouraging them to find opportunities at university and beyond. Ultimately, it creates a climate of fear and suspicion vis-à-vis the state. While the Polish landlords participated in and benefited from various shady housing enterprises, such as providing housing for undocumented immigrants and taking bribes for repairs that they were legally required to provide for their tenants, police cars were a fixture in our complex. In the wake of September 11, 2001, there were nightly police raids and an increasing number of deportations in the neighborhood. Overall, only a handful of individuals were jailed or deported, but the fear of the state cracking down on everyone was always in the air.
Immigrants use kombinacja to manipulate legal loopholes to alleviate the everyday effects of broken systems of immigration, health care, and welfare. "Illegal" immigration reunites families and builds the diaspora even as Polish citizens remain excluded from the US Department of State's Visa Waiver Program. Housing undocumented immigrants more immediately relieves the difficulty of paying rent than does spending years on waiting lists for low-income housing. If we look closer at the problems kombinacja fixes — job security, access to housing and medical care, immigration rights, family reunification, education, access to technology — it reveals a progressive platform, one supported by those with limited representation in the American political system. Kombinacja is a way for those with little political voice to exercise agency.
In the early twentieth century, William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki wrote in The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918) that "assimilation" into American society for the Polish diaspora was an "entirely secondary and unimportant issue" relative to the "formation of a new Polish-American society out of the fragments separated from Polish society and embedded in American society." Assimilation is a patronizing term, suggesting that immigrants do not already share American values. "Getting around" the system requires an entrepreneurial spirit, resourcefulness, and self-reliance to carve out new economic spaces, new possibilities — what could be more American? In a more recent study of the Polish diaspora in Chicago, Jason Schneider documents kombinacja (e.g., illegally marrying for green cards to become "more" American) as an "informed navigation of the state's symbols" that allows diaspora members to position themselves vis-à-vis the state. Yet, according to Schneider, kombinacja is "premised on an antagonistic relationship with the state," which disqualifies it from being an effective form of political rhetoric. It does not have to be, however. Kombinacja in the previously mentioned cases is a response to marginalization and an expression of agency through nontraditional political expressions. Rather than waiting for Poles or other diasporic communities to organize, studies of kombinacja can help inform legislation, target state programs, and support those falling through the cracks, those who are trying to realize an American dream in economic and political spaces between the formal economy and the political system.
While my family experienced kombinacja in an established Polish diaspora in Trenton, my uncle Kuba's family has practiced the art of transnational kombinacja between Poland and Norway. Since the Schengen Agreement opened up Europe's borders to Poland in 1997, Poles from villages like Bursztyn have sought construction and cleaning jobs in Western and Northern European countries. My uncle stays in Norway for most of the year working in construction and agriculture while my aunt returns to Poland monthly to touch base with their daughter, who is finishing high school in the village when she is not working in the fields with them in Norway. When I traveled with my aunt, she fried chicken cutlets in the morning in Bursztyn, packed them, and served them that evening to my uncle in Norway. Every month, she packs suitcases with Polish meat from Bursztyn. She buys cigarettes and vodka at the airport in Norway. All of this is legal, but it is still kombinacja because it is an innovative way of cutting living costs to optimize earnings.
Migrant workers adapt kombinacja to negotiate their border identities and life in the diaspora. Many live for free in a Norwegian farmer's guesthouse or basement, cleaning his house and working his land to pay off their "rent." They also siphon construction materials during road construction to sell on the side, eat food produced on the farm (when I observed my uncle Kuba "taking" cabbage from his owner's farm, he laughed and declared, "Kombinacja!"), and employ various theatrical negotiating tactics like giving owners the silent treatment to scare them into settling on wages. It is also used as a way to keep jobs away from newly arriving migrant workers like the Sikhs and Vietnamese. Tight-knit migrant worker groups that "pull in" (sciagaja) their own from their villages in rural Poland act as a wage negotiation group, blocking the Norwegian farmers from creating wage competition between Poles. Sharing surplus Polish meat, vodka, and cigarettes shuttled from the village is a way to reproduce those socialist-era kombinacja networks and act as an informal guild. Migrant workers are concerned that the Polish government will not provide for the financial security of retirement, so they are creating their own private retirement funds. Rather than organizing and pressuring the state to strengthen its retirement infrastructure for future generations, they domesticate that burden to secure their own futures. They are exercising agency, but in a way that does not challenge the Polish government to reform its laws. Nonetheless, my uncle told me he is living out his socialist utopia — which Poland failed to deliver — in Norway. To him, kombinacja is like a superpower that allows him to operate in an economic dimension that Westerners — accustomed to formal systems and transactions — cannot detect. With kombinacja as his cloak of invisibility and invincibility, he inhabits multiple identities and crosses borders, associating fully with neither nation-state. And he no longer hunts for bottles on the streets of Bursztyn.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Dystopia's Provocateurs"
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Copyright © 2017 Edyta Materka.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Note on Pronunciation and Translation
Acronyms
Introduction
1. History's Ghosts
2. Kombinacja's Histories
3. Recovering Territories
4. Magical Stalinism
5. Proletarian Memories
6. Kombinacja's Ghosts
7. Border Memories
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
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Rare and exceptionally well-researched analysis of an invisible practice.
"Rare and exceptionally well-researched analysis of an invisible practice.
Rare and exceptionally well-researched analysis of an invisible practice.