Solidarność: How Human Agency Starts Revolutions

I wrote this paper in 2017 for a Comparative Politics class.

Revolutionary movements are better explained by Kuran’s theory: individuals are what incite change. More specifically, symbolic figures lead movements of people who have built up animosity over extended periods of time. Structural conditions that would motivate social change do not always have to lead to revolution. Change is impossible without the spark created by individual action. However, one person speaking up will not create change unless their words are symbolic of a bigger body of people. General discontent has to have existed and had time to build up. I will prove this by focusing on the Polish Solidarność movement which led to the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. There are two factors that lead to revolutionary movements: widespread private preferences against the current system that have built up over time, and a symbolic and charismatic leader.

In order for a revolutionary movement to take place, structural conditions are necessary. Notably, according to Skocpol’s theory, the state in question must have weakening international relations, and an upset but strong elite capable of uprising. Although these factors are often necessary, they are what Kuran refers to as an availability heuristic, “a mental shortcut we use to compensate for our cognitive limitations” (p.15). In retrospect, structural conditions are easier to study, individuals are much more complex. This makes it easier to validate Skocpol’s theory.

Let’s take the example of Polish Solidarność. Poland most definitely had structural conditions that would have made it prone to revolt. As a communist country in the USSR that had limited foreign relations, its international presence was very weak. Additionally, with a growing intellectual elite after all poles were allowed to pursue a university education (thanks to communism), there was group of critical people ready to stand up for themselves. Poland had never even wanted to be communist, there had never been elections, it was imposed onto them when Stalin marched in after WW2. Poland would logically want to want to claim its independence as a country that gets to choose its own political system.

It would be easy to contradict my thesis by saying that these structural conditions were what caused the social revolution, given that the revolution could not have happened without them. These structural conditions were necessary, but they were not enough. People in Poland were unhappy for over twenty years, and nothing happened. Revolutions do not just “happen”, they stew over time. My mother told me “I don’t remember there ever being products on shelves. We didn’t even have toilet paper. Western culture was censored, like Queen and Pink Floyd albums. Everybody was corrupt because everybody participated in the black market by buying Western products like chocolate and jeans. Nobody liked the system except for those who worked in it. The only product that was always available was cheap vodka and bread, because it allowed people to drink and to forget”.

Kuran mentions the idea of preference falsification, which he refers to as hiding your personal beliefs about your government when you are in public spheres. For the longest time, Polish people did this. Most people living through Stalin’s communism had also lived through WW2; sure, things were not perfect, but it used to be much worse! Over time, WW2 became the past, and animosity began to build up. People’s personal and direct resources were attacked, and everybody was mad for the same reasons. By 1980, Poland had accumulated 16 billion dollars of debt. There was no more money to put anything on shelves, even the little that they had had before. One of the opposition’s goals ended up being to simply bring sugar into households.

This preference falsification continued until the people reached what Kuran calls a revolutionary threshold: “there comes a point where his external cost of joining the opposition falls below his internal cost of preference falsification”. When I asked my mother, who has never read Kuran, about what made people protest, she said “there comes a point when it’s just too much. One trigger, and that’s it. You’ve reached the limit. You have no other choice, because revolt is better than the alternative: compliance”, as if echoing our reading. Everybody reached their revolutionary threshold at the same time in 1980 when Anna Walentynowicz was fired from her government job a few months before her retirement. She was a single mother. This pushed people to strike in Gdansk, and then all over Poland. The country stopped working for an entire month in support. True social revolution had begun.

What Kuran fails to mention is that the revolutionary threshold is not enough to spark revolt and for people to want to join together. People need a figure that symbolizes all of their discontent and frustration. In the case of Solidarność, this figure was Lech Walęsa. Walęsa was nothing but a common electrician, but he reached his revolutionary threshold before anyone else, getting arrested and organizing protests as early as 1968. He was charismatic, he had a strong and forceful mustache, and he spoke the words that were on everybody’s hearts and minds. He was what rallied people together and created a crowd mentality.

People need a leader. He was then able to create was Kuran described as the latent bandwagon, another word for sheep mentality, if everybody else is doing it, so should I.

Without Walęsa, people would not have felt compelled to leave the security and predictability of preference falsification. As a strong political leader, he was able to ultimately make social change possible by pushing people to believe in Solidarność, which not only changed Poland’s fate, but the rest of Eastern Europe’s as well. Today when one asks Polish people what instigated changes in the 80’s, they will always say “Walęsa”, proving that charismatic leaders that speak for people discontent are what ultimately cause social revolution.

In conclusion, Solidarność proves that what sparks social revolution is built up political frustration and powerful political leaders. Although Skocpol’s structural conditions are necessary, they are not enough to ultimately incite revolt. Change is impossible without human agency, showing that individual voices truly matter.