Authors

Bartłomiej Błesznowski¹;  ¹ University of Warsaw, Poland

Discussion

Over the recent years, Polish historiography has experienced a noteworthy “people’s turn.” This shift can be understood as a response to prevailing global historiographical trends, including the people’s history and resistance studies. Regrettably, this perspective tends to depict the peasant class as primarily resorting to violent uprisings or, in more favorable circumstances, adopting weak manifestations of a moral economy to endure their conditions. The objective of this paper is to challenge this portrayal of the Polish peasantry as a largely passive majority lacking effective means of contestation. To achieve this, I delve into a thorough analysis of self-organization among the peasants during the early twentieth century in Galicia and the Kingdom of Poland – Polish regions remains at that time on the periphery of global modernization processes. My investigation is based on a micro-historical approach, drawing upon autobiographies authored by activists engaged in rural cooperatives written int he initial decades after the World War II.

Through the juxtaposing of the political perspectives of modern institutions with the vernacular categories of actors within specific historical circumstances, I aim to ground theoretical conclusions in an asynchronous and subversive vision of modernity – seen from the perspective of local practices rather than global narratives, and created by the subalterns without political mandate, “in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands”.