Labour Aristocracy a Thing of the Past

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

 

Labour Day is upon us, so how are workers faring these days? Not all that well.

Exactly a century ago, Vladimir Lenin, soon to become the Communist ruler of Russia, published a treatise designed to explain why workers in industrialized countries were not attracted to left-wing revolution.

In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin theorized that imperialist countries in the developed world, through exploitation of their colonies by access to cheap raw materials and exports of goods, enabled their capitalist classes to make such “super profits” that they could pay high wages to their own employees at home.

This created, in Marxist terms, a “labour aristocracy” that could count on strong trade unions that protected decent wages, job security, and standard of living. The result, wrote Lenin, was “something like an alliance” between the workers of a given nation and their capitalists.

Lenin’s theory of imperialism argued that the “handful of the richest, privileged nations” had turned into “parasites on the body of the rest of mankind.” 

Why is this no longer the case? Why have the ruling classes in so-called imperialist countries seemingly abandoned their own working classes in favour of a borderless international economic system?

A new book by Richard Baldwin, The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization, helps us to understand this process. 

He notes that between 1820 and 1990, the share of world income going to today’s wealthy nations soared from twenty per cent to almost seventy. Since then, however, that share has plummeted. As he explains, this reversal of fortune reflects a new age of globalization that is drastically different from the old.

The “old” globalization, the result of the Industrial Revolution, increased international trade, but goods were produced in the developed home countries and exported. 

Innovation and production remained local, so well-paid jobs in major industries remained in the rich countries. Hence the “labour aristocracy” of yore, where factory workers could live comfortable “middle class” lives.

Baldwin asserts that the new globalization is driven by an information technology which has radically reduced the cost of moving ideas across borders.

Rapidly falling communication and co-ordination costs have made it far less necessary for all stages in a production process to take place in the same factory or even country.

This has made it practical for multinational firms to move labour-intensive work to developing nations. These firms also ship their marketing, managerial, and technical know-how abroad.

It has allowed jobs that were previously sheltered to being sent abroad. Now managers, technicians and clerical staff back home, as well as manual workers, are also in danger.

The historically uneven economic development between advanced industrial metropoles and peripheral colonies, which allowed for a comfortable life for the working class, no longer exists.

Economic globalization has had more and more people join what Guy Standing calls the “precariat.” 

Published in 2011, his book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class describes the economic insecurity that has resulted in a precarious way of life for those who have fallen out of the old working class. 

As stable jobs disappear, the uncertainty of work has become normal. Everyone becomes what used to be called a “temp.” Obviously, they have no unions to protect them. 

The reaction? With little prospects for future well-paid work, they register their alienation and anger via the ballot box, so we see the rise of populist movements across the developed world.

The Centenary of the Birth of a Great Historian

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

 

This year being the centenary of his birth, many articles are appearing about one of the 20^th century’s most eminent historians, Eric Hobsbawm.

The accolades are coming particularly from the left, as Hobsbawm was a lifelong member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and chair of its Historians’ Group.

Unlike many of his intellectual colleagues and comrades, including Christopher Hill, John Saville, and E.P. Thompson, Hobsbawm did not quit the party even after the crimes committed in the name of Communism by Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union were exposed in 1956.

The Historians’ Group also vociferously protested against Moscow's suppression of the Hungarian revolt that year, but Hobsbawm remained a member of the party, to the puzzlement of many of his British friends.

Perhaps his life history provides an answer. First and foremost was the fact that he was a Jew who came of age in the 1930s, when fascism and Nazism were spreading across Europe, spewing vitriolic racial anti-Semitism in their wake.

In his autobiography, Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life, published in 2002, Hobsbawm attributed much of his intellectual development to his unusual life. 

He was born in 1917, to Jewish parents -- a father from the East End of London, and an Austrian mother. After the First World War ended, they settled in Vienna. Before coming to England, Hobsbawm lived briefly in Berlin, appalled by the rise of Adolf Hitler.

He took part in the last legal demonstration of the Communist Party of Germany, days before Hitler became chancellor.

It seemed to him that the Communists were the only ones willing to stop the Nazis. He later explained that he had become a Communist not as a Briton, but as a central European fighting fascism.

“I didn’t want to break with the tradition that was my life,” he remarked in an interview that appeared in the New York Times on Aug. 23, 2003. “I still think it was a great cause, the emancipation of humanity.”

Hobsbawm left behind a prodigious body of work, but is probably best remembered for his three-volume history of what he called the “long nineteenth century”: The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848; The Age of Capital, 1848–1875; and The Age of Empire, 1875–1914. 

He later added to his original trilogy The Age of Extremes, 1914–1991, on the “short” twentieth century. They remain among the standard historical works for the period.

A year before his death Hobsbawm published How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism, a defence of Karl Marx’s continuing relevance in the aftermath of the 2008 recession. 

I met Hobsbawm in 1994, at a conference on the history of British Communism, held at the University of Manchester. My paper, “Sidestepping the Contradictions: The Communist Party, Jewish Communists and Zionism 1935-48,” was on the same panel as one of his.

In the book of the conference proceedings published later that year by Pluto Press, Hobsbawm wrote that my paper, demonstrating the “disproportionately great” role of Communism among British Jews, “can throw light on the history of the lesser components of the multi-ethnic nation-state of Great Britain.” I must say that I was flattered.

When Hobsbawm died in 2012, at the age of 95, an appreciation of his life appeared in the Oct. 1 edition of the Guardian, the left-liberal London newspaper.

“In his later years,” observed columnist Martin Kettle and University of London sociologist Dorothy Wedderburn, “he became arguably Britain's most respected historian of any kind, recognised if not endorsed on the right as well as the left, and one of a tiny handful of historians of any era to enjoy genuine national and world renown.”

Are the ideals he espoused dead? Not according to Joseph Fronczak, a Princeton University historian, in an on-line June 9 article published in the Jacobin, the left-wing quarterly published in New York. 

“Hobsbawm’s vision of humanity-encompassing Enlightenment ideals expressed politically in the form of socialism, seemingly dead at his short century’s end in 1991, now in 2017 suddenly appears once more in surprisingly sturdy shape,” he asserts, “fortified for what looks to be another long century.”

Americans Lost Their Political Civility

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 

An Aug. 12 riot in Charlottesville, Virginia pitted white supremacists and neo-Nazis against their Antifa opponents, leading to the murder, by a neo-Nazi, of one person, with another 19 injured. 

The main organizer of the Charlottesville rally, Jason Kessler, had contended, at a gathering held in Washington on June 27, that the country “would be better off if the South had won the Civil War.”

The mayhem shocked Americans, but maybe it shouldn't have. 
 

The Antifa group, a “diverse collection of anarchists, communists and socialists,” according to an Aug. 17 article in the New York Times, has found common cause in opposing right-wing extremists and white supremacists. 

“The essence of their message is violence,” Jed Holtz, an Antifa organizer in New York, said of his right-wing foes, so Antifa “is just responding.”

The group gained publicity in February when it physically fought alt-right supporters at the University of California, Berkeley, during a speech by alt-right ideologue Milo Yiannopoulos. 

Violence is now considered by some on the left, especially at elite colleges and universities, to be an acceptable response to political differences. In turn, on the right, provocateurs cause riots on campuses.

Democracies require compromise. Elected majorities should act with restraint and reciprocity, and politicians should campaign without disparaging their opponents’ patriotism or loyalty.

This is where things are going wrong. Yascha Mounk, a Harvard University political scientist who writes about democracy, believes that partisanship in the United States today is dangerously deep.

Many Americans have such loyalty to their political tribe that they are willing to go along with deeply undemocratic behaviour.

“American citizens are not just dissatisfied with the performance of particular governments; they are increasingly critical of liberal democracy itself,” Mounk noted in an article co-authored with Roberto Stefan Foa of the University of Melbourne, published in the January issue of the Journal of Democracy.

Furthermore, the generation gap is striking: the proportion of younger citizens who believe it is essential to live in a democracy now stands at only 30 per cent, as opposed to 72 per cent among those born before the Second World War.

So when Trump insisted that there had been “violence on both sides” in Charlottesville, Democrats “heard a dangerous moral equivalence between neo-Nazis and the people who opposed them,” observed New York Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise in an Aug. 19 article.

“But for many Trump supporters, his words appealed to a basic sense of fairness.”

John Zaller, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies public opinion, has suggested that the president’s comments about Charlottesville raise the possibility of creating a two-sided issue out of racial equality.

Nevertheless, since the events in Charlottesville, the roof has, metaphorically speaking, fallen in at the White House, with condemnations of Trump arriving from all directions – including from dozens of Republican lawmakers.

“I do believe that he messed up in his comments,” Paul Ryan, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, said on Aug. 21. “It sounded like a moral equivocation or at the very least moral ambiguity when we need extreme moral clarity.” 

A few days later, Steve Bannon was forced out of his job as President Trump’s chief strategist and resumed his previous position with Breitbart News. He vowed to continue his crusade against the left on the site.

Violence Flares as Americans Barricaded in Political Ghettos

By Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax, NS] Chronicle Herald

On June 14, a very angry man who hates Donald Trump shot four Republicans at their baseball practice at a field near Washington, D.C., severely injuring one of them.

Something like that was bound to happen sooner or later.

In a Facebook post in March, James Hodgkinson had declared: “Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.” Facebook groups to which he belonged included one called Terminate the Republican Party and another called the Road to Hell Is Paved With Republicans.

Much worse was to come. The recent riot in Charlottesville, Va. pitted white supremacists and neo-Nazis against their left-wing opponents, leading to the murder of one person. As well, two state troopers died.

The mayhem shocked Americans, but maybe it shouldn’t have. The entire culture is growing coarser, and entertainers, in particular, seem to have lost any sense of moderation.

At the Women’s March on Washington, held the day after Trump’s inauguration, Madonna said she had fantasized about blowing up the White House. Kathy Griffin more recently displayed a likeness of Trump’s bloody severed head.

Comedians have been just as vulgar. Stephen Colbert used a crude term to describe Trump as Putin’s sexual boy toy, while Bill Maher suggested that Trump and his daughter Ivanka have engaged in incest. In New York’s Central Park, a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar portrayed the Roman general as a Trump-like character and, as we know, he was stabbed to death.

Some reports have claimed that in the first 12 days of Trump’s presidency, 12,000 tweets called for his assassination. Violence is now considered by some on the left, especially at elite colleges and universities, to be an acceptable response to political differences. On the right, provocateurs in turn cause riots on campuses.

Even former presidential hopeful and populist commentator and author Patrick Buchanan, himself no slouch when it comes to vitriol, has remarked that things have gone too far.

Democracies require compromise. To engage with others, you have to believe that if you lose a contest or a debate, the winner will treat you equitably; that if the other side wins, it will act within the law and not send its opponents off to jail.

Elected majorities should act with restraint and reciprocity, and politicians should campaign without disparaging their opponents’ patriotism or loyalty. You have to assume that institutions will be fair and that leaders will act in the country’s best interest.

This is where things are going wrong. Political scientists Steven Webster and Alan Abramowitz of Emory University in Atlanta have observed that one of the most important trends in American politics over the past several decades has been the rise of negative partisanship in the electorate, that is, preferences driven primarily by intense dislike of the other side.

Americans are now so geographically segregated by class and culture that most communities are either overwhelmingly Republican or Democratic. In 2016, eight out of 10 U.S. counties gave either Trump or Hillary Clinton a landslide victory.

In these increasingly homogenous communities, nobody need bother about compromise and the trust it requires. Majorities can do what they want without dealing with their opposite numbers who live in the next state over or even just a few miles down the road. But on the national level, this becomes gridlock and polarization.

When parties agree on virtually nothing, the result becomes scorched-earth politics. So now, political grievances have escalated into violence.

In Krakow, One of the Righteous Among Nations

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

 

Thanks to the popularity of the 1993 movie Schindler’s List, as well as the success of the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, many people assume that the Kazimierz neighbourhood, where most of the city’s Jews lived prior to the Holocaust, served as the Jewish ghetto during the war. 

Elsewhere in Poland, a Jewish district typically became that city’s Jewish ghetto. But this was not the case in Krakow.

The Nazis considered Krakow a German city, as it had been ruled from Vienna prior to 1918, and made it their headquarters in occupied Poland.

They considered Kazimierz “too close” to the city’s ccnter to be inhabited by Jews. Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of occupied Poland, wanted to make the city “Judenrein.” So the Nazis forced the Jews across the Vistula River to Podgorze.

Overcrowding was an obvious problem, with one apartment allocated for every four families. Windows facing “Aryan” Podgorze were bricked or boarded up to prevent contact with the outside world. Four guarded entrance gates accessed the ghetto. 

While Oskar Schindler succeeded in saving some 1,200 Jews, he was not the only person in Krakow who refused to take part in the savagery of the “Final Solution.” 

It turns out there was one “hole” through which food, information, and medicines could be brought in, and information sent out, in the otherwise hermetically-sealed ghetto.

In 2005, the Plac Zgody square in Podgorze was renamed Plac Bohaterow Getta (Ghetto Heroes Square) to commemorate the memory of the inhabitants and victims of the ghetto.

The square has 64 empty chairs scattered about, representing the 64,000 Krakow Jews murdered by the Nazis. 

It also houses the Apteka pod Orlem (Under the Eagle Pharmacy) which is now a museum documenting the life-saving activities of the pharmacy’s owner, Tadeusz Pankiewicz, during the war. This was the one non-Jewish business left inside the ghetto. 

Despite a few books written about him, Pankiewicz remains relatively unknown, even after having been designated by Israel in 1983 a “Righteous Among the Nations,” a term that describes non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews from extermination.

Born in 1908 in Sambor, Poland, he went to university in Krakow and took over the pharmacy in 1933 that his father had founded in 1910. Before the Second World War, both Jewish and non-Jewish patients used it.

In March 1941, when the Nazis established the ghetto, the pharmacy by chance found itself enclosed there. Thanks to Pankiewicz’s endeavours, the Nazis allowed it to continue to operate.

Three other prewar pharmacies owned by non-Jews in the area relocated to the non-Jewish side of the city.

Pankiewicz and his associates, Irena Drozdzikowska, Helena Krywaniuk, and Aurelia Danek-Czort, all Catholics, provided aid and support to the ghetto’s inhabitants.

They risked their lives to undertake numerous clandestine operations, smuggling food and information, and offering shelter on the premises for Jews facing deportation to the camps.

The pharmacy helped people maintain contact with the outside world, and it enabled Polish doctors to visit the pharmacy, providing medical attention.

Under the Eagle kept residents alive by distributing tranquilizers to help keep hidden children quiet during Gestapo raids. As well, the pharmacy provided medical care and hair dye to help disguise escapees. 

It also became a hiding place for Jews and a clearing house for information about possible escape routes.

The museum re-creates the interior as it looked in the 1940s, based on photographs from the period. The space features replicas of furniture and pharmaceutical supplies. 

Visitors can see the prescription room, where “recipes for survival” were dispensed to Jews trying to cope with the trying circumstances of their existence. 

The duty room includes Pankiewicz’s own eyewitness accounts of day-to-day life in the ghetto, which were preserved and later published. 

Films feature scenes from the ghetto deportations of May, June, and October 1942 to the Belzec death camp, and the ghetto’s final bloody liquidation in March 1943, with the remaining Jews sent either to Auschwitz or the new Plaszow concentration camp in Podgorze itself.

Following the war, the new Communist government nationalized the Under the Eagle Pharmacy, and it eventually was turned into a bar.

But in post-Communist Poland, the indifference to the Holocaust has been reversed, and since 2003 the pharmacy has become a branch of the Historical Museum of the City of Krakow.

After the war, Pankiewicz returned to work as a pharmacist; he died in 1993. No one should leave Krakow without paying homage to this remarkable man.

The Saudi Vision of a Diversified Economy

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

 

This past June 21 King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia named his son Mohammed bin Salman, 31 years old, as the new crown prince, as well as deputy prime minister.

He replaced 57-year-old Mohammed bin Nayef, the king’s nephew. Unlike his siblings, the new crown prince did not go abroad to study, instead choosing to be beside his father. He studied in Riyadh schools and later pursued law from King Saud University.

Prince Mohammed, as chair of the Council for Economic and Development Affairs, is also the chief architect behind “Vision 2030,” an ambitious economic and social development plan which seeks to recalibrate the economy to end the country’s near-total dependence on oil revenue, which has been declining in recent years, while making the country a “trade hub” and “investment powerhouse.”

The Saudi economy has faltered, yielding an annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth of only 0.8 per cent between 2003 and 2013, less than most emerging economies. 

The proposal, unveiled in April 2016, calls for the creation of a huge sovereign wealth fund to be funded by an unprecedented initial public offering (IPO) of a 5 per cent stake in the state energy behemoth Saudi Aramco.

Traditionally, the Saudi royal family largely left the operation of the energy industry to technocrats, but Prince Mohammed has taken a more direct role. He has also made pronouncements on oil production policy that sometimes seemed to undercut more experienced Saudi energy officials.

“The problem is that he is unpredictable, and it is not clear who he is relying on for advice,” said Paul Stevens, a Middle East oil analyst at Chatham House, a research group based in London.

The plan also aims to slash unemployment by 2030 and help Saudi women reach 30 per cent of the workforce by that year. (He said the driving ban for women could be changed in coming months.)

It seeks to reduce the role of the public sector and bureaucracy while simultaneously empowering the private sector to become the main employer and vehicle for economic growth.

The plan identifies eight sectors that, if properly utilized, would generate at least 60 per cent of Saudi economic growth. These include mining and metals, petrochemicals, manufacturing, retail and wholesale trade, tourism and hospitality, healthcare, finance, and construction. 

The contribution of the private sector to the GDP would rise from 40 per cent to 60 per cent, thus lowering unemployment from 11 per cent to 7.6 per cent. 

“Investors had doubts that Vision 2030 is real or that the man behind it would actually be the ruler of Saudi Arabia. Those doubts will largely evaporate after this,” according to Ayham Kamel, director for the Middle East and North Africa at the Eurasia Group, in London. 

But Mohammed’s far-reaching proposals require altering the social contract that has kept the family in power since his grandfather founded the kingdom. “Vision 2030” will create a more competitive economy that may cause hardship among those less talented and entrepreneurial.

Also, low wages in labour-intensive manufacturing industries do not appeal to Saudis accustomed to high-paying jobs in the public sector, which employs about 70 per cent of the indigenous workforce. 

What the country needs is heavy investment in vocational education, which the vast majority of Saudis reject and consider beneath them.

So there are, not surprisingly, complaints from a society that has become accustomed to cradle-to-grave largesse from the Saudi state. 

Also, privatizing the economy and the subsequent influx of foreign investors and technicians, along with their families, are bound to strain the conservative rules of Saudi society, still based on tribalism, absolutism, and opposition to religious heterodoxy.

For the plan to succeed, Saudi society would have to loosen the restrictions that the religious establishment has imposed on society and adopt the values of moderation, tolerance, discipline, equity, and transparency – which would undermine the very basis of the state.

Stalin's Warsaw 'Wedding Cake' Tallest Building in Poland

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Some Varsovians call it, caustically, “Stalin’s wedding cake.” Others have wanted it razed to the ground.

It sits plopped in the middle of the city, looking like a 1930s-era building, and is now surrounded by modern office towers.

It was Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s “gift to the Polish people” when the country was under the heel of Soviet oppression.

It’s full name was “the Palace of Culture and Science in the name of Joseph Stalin.”  But Stalin’s name was dropped after de-Stalinization in the Soviet bloc in 1956.

Started in 1952 and completed in 1955, the Palac Kultury i Nauki, or PKiN, was constructed by 3,500 Soviet workmen, who were housed in a special estate in Jelonki during their time here. Another 4,000 Poles helped in building it.

Working at breakneck speed -- with 16 workers losing their lives -- It took jurt three years to complete the building.

Much of Warsaw at the time still lay in ruins from having been virtually destroyed by the Nazis during the Warsaw uprising of 1944.

The Palace, located at Plac. Defilad, is a 42-story skyscraper which, at 231 metres tall, including its spire, is still the highest building in Poland.

However, work has now started on the 53-story 310 metre Varso Tower, on a site next to the Warszawa Centralna railway station, with completion slated for 2020, and it will surpass the Palace in height.

The PKiN was built in a mixture of the then-compulsory socialist realism style with elements of American art deco and historic Polish cultural flourishes.

Stalin had reportedly secretly sent architects and planners to New York to study the Empire State Building as a model for his skyscraper.

The final design was by the Soviet architect Lev Rudnev, a leading practitioner of Stalinist architecture in the Soviet Union, responsible for many Moscow buildings.

The Palace was meant to be a cornerstone of the Warsaw to come, planned together with a majestic Parade Square.

Built using an estimated 40 million bricks and housing 3,288 rooms, its purpose was to serve as not just  Communist Party headquarters but also as a place for the masses, with invitations to the annual New Year’s Eve Ball issued to the best workers in socialist Poland.

It is surrounded by dozens of sculptures of famous Polish figures, including astronomer and mathematician Copernicus, poet Adam Mickiewicz, and physicist Marie Sklodowska Curie, as well as model workers holding works of Marxist writers.

With its marble floors and endless staircases and corridors with their weighty glass chandeliers and gilded finishings, the PKiN was meant to dazzle the masses and provide a foretaste of a future socialist paradise.

One gigantic room, the Congress Hall, with seating for 3,000 people, for years held the Communist Party’s annual meetings.

All that is in the past. That same room more recently hosted concerts by, among others, the Rolling Stones and Leonard Cohen.

The Palace is today home to the Museum of Evolution, the Museum of Technology, four theatres, a multiplex cinema, and bars. Most of the building now houses offices and commercial spaces.

The terrace on the 30th floor is a well-known tourist attraction with a panoramic view of the city. I was there on a very hot day, so it was quite refreshing.

Given the system of government it was meant to symbolize, no building in Poland has proved more divisive and controversial.

For many years, whenever the people of Warsaw stared up at the giant monolith, they were reminded of their all-powerful neighbour to the east. It became an object of hatred and a symbol of Russian hegemony.

Indeed, on Aug. 1, the day I visited the Palace, there were commemorations all over Warsaw, complete with a ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Saxon Garden, to mark the 73rd anniversary of the Warsaw uprising.

As all Poles know, Stalin’s failure to intervene doomed the Home Army’s battle against the Nazis.

Yet, despite all that, the Palace has become an international symbol of Warsaw, and even, with Communism becoming a distant memory, an icon.

The Polish City Where Communism Died

by Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The left-wing American journalist Lincoln Steffens, after a three-week visit to the new Soviet state in March 1919, famously proclaimed, “I have seen the future and it works.”

However, on my recent visit to the model Polish Communist city of Nowa Huta, created after the Second World War, I can confidently declare that I have seen the city where, in eastern Europe, Communism died.

Funded by the Soviet Union, Nowa Huta, located some six miles east of Krakow, was meant to become the antithesis of the former royal capital, with its medieval and bourgeois past.

It would be designed in the style known as socialist realism, and its architecture would become one of which the new proletarian Poland would be proud. It would provide a showcase to the world. 

Construction was part of the six-year plan, from1950 to1955, which stated that the condition for “building the foundation of socialism” was primarily the rapid industrialisation of the country.

Therefore, metallurgy and machine industry were to be expanded, which in turn allowed the development of the armaments industry, essential in case of war.

Work on the city began in 1949. Built in the shape of a semi-circle, alongside the stupendous steel works where its citizens would work, it was the pride of the new Communist Poland.

In time, the socialist town centre was surrounded by more estates which reflected the country’s evolving socialist architecture. 

The steel mill, named for Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, accounted for about half of the nation’s iron and steel output, and the dormitory suburb grew to house more than 200,000 people.

It began operations in 1954 and in its heyday in the 1970s the plant employed almost 40,000 people and annually produced almost seven million tons of steel. The city lived in the shadow of the plant.

In the 1980s, it was one of the most important centres of anticommunist resistance, with numerous strikes and street demonstrations taking place in Nowa Huta under the auspices of the Solidarnosc trade union movement.

The steelworks would be scaled back after the fall of Communism, and in 2005 it was sold to the multinational company ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel producer. Today it employs just 3,000 people.

A short streetcar ride from Krakow takes a visitor to Nowa Huta’s Plac Centralny. From 1973 to 1989 an enormous statue of Lenin, erected to commemorate the centenary of his birth, towered over it. 

It was often vandalized, even including an attempt to blow it up in 1979, and it was finally dismantled and sold to a Swedish buyer following the end of Communist rule in Poland.

But, to heap irony upon irony, the square over which Lenin once ideologically presided was renamed for the late U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 2004. 

The Poles have not forgotten that when the Communist government declared martial law and outlawed Solidarnosc in October 1982, Reagan responded with a speech to the American people that ended with the words “Let Poland be Poland.”

Streets formerly named after Lenin and the Cuban Revolution have also been renamed, to honor Pope John Paul II and the Polish general Wladyslaw Anders, among others.

On Al. Jana Pawla II, the former Kino Swiatowid cinema, another exemplar of the socialist style, today houses the Museum of Poland Under the Communist Regime, opened in 2008. 

Its main originators and creators were Krystyna Zachwatowicz, chair of the Programme Board, and the film director Andrzej Wajda.

At the entrance is a sculpture called “Stalin’s Boots,” a replica of the boots from a 26-foot-tall statue of Stalin that was torn down during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Dedicated to Polish history between 1944 and 1989, the museum recounts the story of everyday life in the former Polish People’s Republic. 

The “Nuclear Threat: Shelters of Nowa Huta” exhibit is fascinating, as a visitor learns about the intricate plans the city, and the rest of Poland, had for dealing with a potential nuclear attack during the Cold War years.

The Communist authorities heightened these fears of nuclear war as it allowed them to justify the actions of the secret police and other repressive organs of the state.

Due north of the Ronald Reagan Plac Centralny, on Os. Sloneczne, off the wide Al. Roz, sits the small but very informative Museum of Nowa Huta, created in 2005.  

The museum is located on the ground floor of a four-story apartment building. Rotating exhibits explore the area’s history and contemporary development. 

The utopian dream of the “new Man in the new City” never worked, and it turned out to be not the future, but rather the past, in a Poland now energetically pursuing the capitalist dream.

Poland Strengthens Trade Relations with China

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

During a visit to Poland in July I was walking in Warsaw's Lazienki Royal Baths Park, which occupies over 76 hectares of the city centre.

While I was there, a large Chinese trade delegation arrived for meetings with Polish officials at the Lazienki Palace, once a home of Poland's kings. It is situated in the park.

This did not come as a surprise. China views Poland as an important partner for cooperation in central and eastern Europe and within the European Union.

It is all part of China's project to recreate the ancient Silk Road that served as an avenue of trade between China and Europe.

The new Belt and Road Initiative, an ambitious rail and maritime network, will encompass some 60 countries, in a drive by China to become a bigger player in global trade.

But it cannot be fully implemented without Poland. So perhaps for the first time in China’s long history, entering Poland lies in China's strategic interests.

"Spanning thousands of miles and years, the ancient silk routes embody the spirit of peace and cooperation, openness and inclusiveness, mutual learning and mutual benefit," Chinese President Xi Jinping told the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, which met May 14-15 in Beijing.

Poland's Amber Road rail project, which will cover countries in the Baltic region, is a major component of the Chinese plan in this part of Europe, remarked Xi .

Meeting with Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo, who was in Beijing to attend the Forum, Xi highlighted environmental protection, finance, high-tech industries, infrastructure and logistics as areas where China and Poland could step up collaboration.

"I am counting on further close cooperation in the political sphere within the framework of comprehensive strategic partnership and that it results in mutually beneficial, measurable economic ties," Szydlo said after her face-to-face meetings with Xi ahead of the summit.

"We want to cooperate with China in the fields of infrastructure, environment, tourism and cultural exchange," she added while in Beijing.

"The Belt and Road is perceived as a realization of the strategic partnership that has been connecting the two countries since 2011," stated Krzysztof Senger, Vice President of PAIH, the Polish Agency for Investment and Trade.

During a visit to Warsaw June 19-21, 2016, President Xi reached agreements with Polish President Andrzej Duda to promote economic ties within China's Belt and Road and Poland's Amber Road frameworks.

Some 40 deals and memoranda of understanding were signed, mostly related to construction, raw materials, energy, new technologies, finance and science.

"I am convinced that Poland can continue to have a very important role in building ties between China and Europe," Xi told a news conference.

In his talks with Xi, Duda said that "Poland stands ready to become a portal to Europe for the world's second largest economy."

Addressing the Polish-Chinese international conference in Opole, in southwest Poland, on April 25 of this year, Duda reminded the delegates that the evolving Belt and Road Initiative is "proof that Poland appreciates the meaning of this project and is very interested in it."

Concrete examples of common initiatives could already be seen, such as the Lodz-Chengdu rail cargo connection and partnerships between various academic and research centers.

Xu Jian, the Chinese ambassador to Poland, asserted that Poland, as a big and important country, was an important partner for China.

Poland is a "gate to Europe" as far as the Belt and Road Initiative is concerned," Xu said, adding between 2013 and 2016, Chinese-Polish trade volume rose from 14.8 billion U.S. dollars to 17.6 billion U.S. dollars, with a six per cent average annual growth rate.

Poland has seen numerous Chinese banks open branches throughout the country. They promote further Sino-Polish cooperation in energy, resources, transportation, infrastructure and manufacturing. They also seek to enlist overseas financial advisors to help Chinese enterprises expand abroad.

The Bank of China branch in Warsaw, opened in 2012,is fully integrated into the Polish financial market and provides comprehensive services to Chinese and Polish entities and individuals.

It has been involved in a number of important projects. For example, it provided 140 million U.S. dollars in refinancing credit support to Capital Park Group, invested in the Eurocentrum Office Complex, and participated in a real estate project with the Polish Blue City Group.

China Everbright International recently acquired Poland’s largest waste disposal company, Novago, with financial support from the Polish branch of the Bank of China. Worth about 141million U.S. dollars, this deal is the largest project ever undertaken in Poland by a Chinese enterprise.

Chinese-Polish economic relations are growing, as the Belt and Road Initiative takes shape.

Cultural Appropriation in Krakow?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The last few months have seen major debates across Canada regarding the cultural appropriation of indigenous art and literature by non-natives.

The same issue has also emerged in Poland, especially in the southern city of Krakow, which I visited in July.

Krakow is an incredibly beautiful and well-preserved medieval city, and the most popular tourist destination in Poland. The Stare Miasto (Old City), with its famous Rynek Glovny (Main Square), overflows with thousands of visitors day after day.

In the city’s old Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, one finds many renowned synagogues, the Galicia Jewish Museum, the Jewish Cultural Centre, and other sites of Jewish interest.

For the past 27 years, it has been the site of an extremely popular Jewish Culture Festival. This year, the music and arts extravaganza, which ran from June 24 to July 2, attracted an estimated 30,000 visitors and residents.

Before the Holocaust, Krakow was home to 65,000 Jews, who comprised about one-quarter of the city’s population. After the genocide, less than 4,300 remained.

Today, approximately 1,000 Jews live in Krakow, but only about 200 identify themselves as members of the Jewish community.

The festival has introduced Jewish culture to a generation of Poles who have grown up without Poland’s historic Jewish presence.

At the time Janusz Makuch launched the festival, many Jews thought of Poland only through the lens of the Holocaust and the Nazi death camps such as Auschwitz, some 65 kilometres from Krakow.

Makuch, who is not Jewish, wanted to counter that prevailing perspective through music and the arts that reflected the seven centuries of Jewish life in Poland rather than its absence.

It was a way, he said, both of honouring the dead and cdlebrating Jewish culture by bringing it back to life.

The festival’s unexpected success has raised the question of who speaks for Jewish culture.

As Jonathan Ornstein, executive director of the Jewish Community Centre of Krakow, remarked, it was non-Jews who have created and led an event that helped rekindle Jewish life in Krakow.

“One of the reasons Krakow is such a welcoming place for the Jewish community today is the work the festival has done,” Ornstein said.

But does such philo-Semitism sometimes itself morph into anti-Semitism? Alongside the official festival, a series of artistic and theatrical programs known as Festivalt was created by several Krakow-based international artists and performers.

In one such event, an actor playing the character of the “Lucky Jew” sat at a desk laden with an accounting ledger, an old-fashioned inkwell and a quill pen, offering good fortune in exchange for a few Polish zlotys.

The performance poked fun at the stereotypical trope of Jews as money handlers by bringing mythical images to life. But is this anti-Semitic or, as some Poles see it, a form of respect for Jews?

Confronting those complex questions through the arts is precisely the reason behind Festivalt, according to Michael Rubenfeld, one of the performers. Still, many Jews are uncomfortable with it.

“Lucky Jew” figurines, called zydki, can sometimes be found in Krakow and elsewhere. They are wooden or clay statuettes of old Jewish men dressed like Hasidic rabbis, often with long beards and huge noses.

Scholars have traced their presence in Polish art back to the late 1800s.

 Many Poles see them as innocent -- or even positive.

In any case, as tourism increased in post-Communist Poland, Polish artisans discovered there was a market for these figures, as likely to be bought by Jewish as non-Jewish visitors.

In conversation with Polish artisans, Jewish visitors began to explain what they found offensive, and what nostalgic, so the market shifted to reflect these preferences.

So while some of these figurines remain clearly stereotypical, others are more marketable, as they romanticize Poland’s Jewish past.

In many places, not a trace is left of the Jewish community that once lived there. So that blank space is filled today with images of Jews -- figurines, pictures, magnets, postcards, and more.

Are these images positive or negative? Do they express affection, ridicule, fascination, or mourning? Do they divide Poles and Jews or do they tie them together? It probably can be either, depending on the viewer.

“They’re different things to different people,” according to Erica Lehrer, an anthropologist at Concordia University in Montreal.

She curated an exhibition at Krakow’s Ethnographic Museum in 2013 which sought to open a dialogue between these points of view, with interesting results.

In any case, they do seem less visible these days, or so I found after spending more than three weeks in Poland this summer. They were on sale in souvenir shops in Krakow, though.