Authors

Łukasz Bertram¹;  ¹ Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland

Discussion

Having gained power after World War II, Polish and other Central European communists faced a serious dilemma. The recent revolutionary subversives, who had socialized to fight the state, had to transform themselves into revolutionary creators to govern it. Their movement, dominated by uneducated and ideologically unformed representatives of the popular classes, desperately needed loyal and operative cadres. The crucial agendas to make this possible were the party political schools. They provided accelerated ideological formation, allowed for the selection of cadres, but for their students they were also often the first space of encounter with education at a higher than basic level. In this paper, I will look at the central and provincial schools of the Polish Workers' Party and the Polish United Workers' Party precisely from the side of their students. Analyzing institutional documentation and ego-documents with both historical and sociological approach, I will ask questions about who those people were and with what baggage did they enter these institutions. How did they understand the reality they were being told to control, and to what extent did they try to negotiate this understanding? What were their aspirations, and to what extent did they suffer from uncertainty about their own changing status? Thus, I will present the patterns and tensions of the process of transformation of plebeians into political white-collar workers, a mass social advancement through politics.