{"id":6057,"date":"2020-04-01T13:33:22","date_gmt":"2020-04-01T17:33:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs-test.newschool.edu\/tcds\/?p=6057"},"modified":"2020-04-14T18:42:36","modified_gmt":"2020-04-14T22:42:36","slug":"poland-in-the-shadow-of-marks-and-pandemos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs-test.newschool.edu\/tcds\/2020\/04\/01\/poland-in-the-shadow-of-marks-and-pandemos\/","title":{"rendered":"Poland in the Shadow of Marx and PanDemos"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Leszek Budrewicz<\/strong>, writer and poet, and a long-time friend of TCDS and its D&D Institute in Wroc\u0142aw <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Amazon employees hold a protest over conditions at the company’s Staten Island distribution facility on Monday.<\/em> Getty Images<\/strong> (via marketwatch.com)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

A specter is haunting Europe \u2013 the specter of\u2026. a specter.
In the midst of what is still a liberal democracy \u2013 though eroded by populism \u2013Karl Marx himself is giving us a tip of the hat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Social relations around the virus have revealed\na clear division into three social groupings, perhaps even social classes. At\nthis time all attention is focused on these people, that is, entire professions\nwho are staying at home either because they can work remotely, or because they\nno longer have work. This includes all those from \u201clost jobs\u201d (restaurants,\nhotels) and specialists like dentists, veterinarians, etc. The admonition\n“Stay at home” applies only to those above.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second group is known as “crisis\ncommandos”: health service personnel, firefighters, to some extent the\npolice, maybe part of the Territorial Defense Forces ( WOT). These people are\nat the greatest risk , and the course of further developments depends very much\non them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 In\nthe whole debate, there is no trace of those who work normally, except those\nwho are seen by the consumers (bus drivers, railway workers, store cashiers). These\nare “visible” and supposedly appreciated, but usually deprived of\nbasic protective measures \u2013 because of shortages, because they arrive too late,\nor because among their employers this has not yet come to mind. But it is the\nordinary employees in places where everything still works that turn out to be\nthe real proletariat of compassion, courage, empathy, and common sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do they manage, riding down in their\nminers’ cages with no social distancing, or the rank-and-file Amazon employees whose\nsupervisors, we hear, supervise remotely? \nWhat does even the most automated work on a Polish automobile assembly\nline look like now? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They all have to get to work and return\nhome the same day. All I need is one picture of a bus bringing Amazon employees\nto their work place. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is not always the case that this crisis proletariat<\/em> are those who have\nthe lowest daily wages. Miners, working for the mining and steel industries in\nPoland (KGHM), in fact earn more than teachers. But this is usually how it is. One\ncan hope that this situation will awaken dormant or non-existent trade unions. (In\nthe KGHM they mean something, and at Amazon they are really fighting. But apart\nfrom that?).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These epidemic proletarians constitute\napproximately 30-40 percent of all the employed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do they think when they constantly\nhear in the morning: “Stay at home\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Leszek Budrewicz, writer and poet, and a long-time friend of TCDS and its D&D Institute in Wroc\u0142aw A specter is haunting Europe \u2013 the specter of\u2026. a specter. In…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":289,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50909,18694],"tags":[42049,38310,61850,882],"class_list":["post-6057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fieldnotes","category-events-news","tag-letters-from-the-field","tag-marx","tag-pandemos","tag-poland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-test.newschool.edu\/tcds\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-test.newschool.edu\/tcds\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-test.newschool.edu\/tcds\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-test.newschool.edu\/tcds\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/users\/289"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-test.newschool.edu\/tcds\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6057"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-test.newschool.edu\/tcds\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6092,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-test.newschool.edu\/tcds\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6057\/revisions\/6092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-test.newschool.edu\/tcds\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-test.newschool.edu\/tcds\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-test.newschool.edu\/tcds\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}