CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Marzec, Wiktor Henryk |
|---|---|
| Title | Rising Subjects: Forging the Political During the 1905 Revolution in Russian Poland |
| Summary | The 1905 revolution in the Russian-controlled Kingdom of Poland was one of the few bottom-up political transformations and general democratizations in Polish history, probably paralleled only by the “first” Solidarity movement in the early 1980s. As the political upsurge ultimately brought about defeat of the popular classes that were rising for political recognition and economic alleviation, it is not in direct political or social outcomes where one should look for its major significance. Considering the general issue of polity being established, I argue that it was a watershed of political modernity in Poland. This project corroborates such a hypothesis through an analysis of various discourses comprising a change within the public sphere, militant subjectivities, and political languages. Deftly integrating historical sociology, conceptual history and historical discourse analysis, the dissertation sheds a light on the historically changing realm of the political. The general objective is to explore how spaces and representations of the political have changed through continuous processes of redefinition and re-enactment. In particular, my focus is the presence of certain social groupings in this communicative space, namely the “working class”. I am interested in the transformation of places that workers (both male and female) and work itself may have taken in the political realm and the respective remolding of workers’ selves as political agents. This mirror question concerns the enactment of political participation by “rising subjects” themselves through various, often conflicting, political commitments, from far-left socialism to virulent nationalism. In order to address these questions, in subsequent chapters I investigate workers acting in the public sphere, the evolving entanglement of biography and politics, the changing regime of political speech, and the transformation of political visibility of workers. In the first step, I scrutinize nascent forms of political education within party milieus which finally came to the fore in 1905. In particular, entanglement of social processes was a direct intervention of political struggle which induced the emergence of proletarian publics and the intellectual invigoration of workers. Strikes, factory constituencies, political street performances and new forms of public participation constituted nascent forms of the proletarian public sphere. Subsequently, I investigate workers' intellectual pursuits and the relationship between the work-centered life context, militant biography and making political claims. An analysis of over 100 narratives provides insight into political mobilization, canonized stages of the proletarian biography, and the impact of revolution on working-class lives and writing across political milieus, from far-left internationalist socialism to militant factory nationalism. Afterwards, I examine the changing regime of political speech. Language in action materialized in the political proclamations, leaflets, and party newspapers distributed among workers. Assisted by qualitative data mining performed on the complete corpus of party proclamations (socialist and nationalist alike), it is argued that these languages deployed as performative utterances brought a profound intervention into regimes of subjectification. I also ask about the role antisemitism played as a political device assisting the construction of new political identities. When “nationalism began to hate”, antisemitism appeared to be an extremely effective mobilizing device and the Jews started to be perceived as a negative, constitutive point of reference for the construction of national unity among the Poles. The final part focuses on a transformation of political visibility of both workers and work in the press. After a brief overview on the rise of the “worker question”, I investigate how the rising tension was reflected upon during the revolution. The assumed “place” of workers changed; after initial acceptance if not enthusiasm, but with the demise of revolutionary zeal, counteraction from the industrial bourgeoisie spurred fear of the masses and contempt for their actions. In conclusion, I present the 1905 revolution as a tipping point for a future pathogenesis of the Polish modern public sphere. Instead of co-opting the popular revolt as a factor facilitating – and later solidifying – political balance and civil institutions, the workers’ claims were partially excluded from legitimate public activity. While the revolution spurred the transformation of the political, its results were far from unambiguous. Modern politics is not only about growing popular agency, but also about attempts to control it and the unrestrained reactions against it. |
| Supervisor | Bodnár, Judit; Trencsényi, Balázs |
| Department | Sociology PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/marzec_wiktor.pdf |
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