*Films to While Away The Class Struggle By-"Strike"- A Polish Film

Click on the title to link to a Wikipedia entry for the Polish film, Strike.

Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin


DVD Review

I have posted the information from Netflix's description on this one. I will make a couple of comments below.

Strike(Strajk: Die Heldin von Danzig) 2006 NR 104 minutes

Cast:Katharina Thalbach, Maria Maj, Andrzej Chyra, Andrzej Grabowski, Dominique Horwitz, Joanna Bogacka

Director:Volker Schlondorff

"Inspired by a true story, this powerful drama tells the tale of an ordinary woman who helps spark a revolution in Poland. Single mother Agnieszka (Katharina Thalbach) works as a shipyard welder. Concerned about dangerous working conditions, she speaks up -- to no avail. But after an accident kills several employees, and their families are denied pension benefits, she steps up her activities, laying the foundation for the Solidarity movement."

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Markin comment:

The great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky noted back in the early days of the Communist International in the 1920s that the German Communist Party was the biggest (outside of the Russian Bolsheviks) in that organization, but the Polish party was the best. That party, after all, was the party of Rosa Luxemburg (and Leo Jogiches), and of the three W’s. Some things, some very terrible Stalinist-driven (Moscow and Warsaw versions) things went wrong from the time of that statement to the time of the end of this film in the early 1980s and the solidification of Solidarity to drive the bulk of the historically pro-socialist Polish working class into the waiting arms of the Polish bourgeoisie, the Roman Catholic Church, and their international imperialist allies.

And in its, perhaps, unconscious, unintentional, oddball, eccentric, slice-of-life way this story of a single woman worker at the historic Lenin shipyard in Gdansk (a composite of a couple of real women at that site) this film, Strike, reveals many of the problems that, in the end the Stalinists refused to deal with, or were incapable of dealing with except with the police baton (or total capitulation to the pro-capitalist forces that emerged in the Polish labor movement and elsewhere in Polish society). To, I might add, the great loss of the international working class movement today as we try to come out from under the “death of communism” siege of the past two decades. And to the great loss of Polish workers now, for the most part the sons and daughters of those who renounced a socialist perspective (of some sort, as they understood it through the distorted prism of Stalinism), who find themselves in places like London, Paris, and Brussels providing those economies with low-wage, high-skilled labor for their troubles. But enough of that. This is a film to see, to ponder over, and to try to come to an understanding of the question of where the international left went wrong in its overwhelming support for Solidarity.

Note: Agnieszka Kowalska, the Lenin shipyard worker who is the central character of this film, from the start of the film holds, and holds firmly, to her village-derived Catholicism. Although we do not attack personal religious belief, per se, it is clear that the capitulation of the Stalinists to the Polish church was factor, and not an unimportant factor, in undermining the workers state. A “vanguard” worker, at least that was the way Agnieszka was presented in the film, should have been fought with politically on that religion question. Also, as is the case for the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in defense of what, for Afghanistan, was a progressive government but which the international left overwhelmingly opposed isn’t it time, for those in the international left who supported Solidarity, to think through their support of that outfit. After all if we, as the old philosopher said, do not learn the lessons of history (and I would add reflect on them) we are condemned to relive it.