Hydra-Headed Homo Faber: Cooperation and Disalienation in the Polish Industrial Workplace

• In Event: Left Perspectives on State- and Post-Socialism I: Alienation Theory and Socialist Practice in Postwar Eastern Europe

Abstract

In 1962, the Polish unions representing industry and visual arts signed a Memorandum of Understanding in which they pledged to bridge their respective sectors by bringing artists into the industrial workplace. This paper assesses this campaign as a backchannel method for combatting alienated labor without drawing explicit attention to alienation’s problematic persistence in socialist work. Drawing from archival bureaucratic documents and cultural artifacts, the paper shows how industrial-artistic cooperation in the 1960-70s aimed to disalienate work on a superficial level – by beautifying the workplace to improve workers’ wellbeing – and on a deeper level as well, by activating workers’ inner creative reserves and elevating them as decision-makers primed for self-management.

Author

• Eliza Rose, UNC at Chapel Hill