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was composed of state farms, generally in the former German territories, and only 1.3% constituted agricultural collectives. The Gierek regime, committed to improving consumer welfare in which food supply plays the key role, has courted the peasantry in many ways—guaranteeing continued private ownership of land, abolishing compulsory deliveries and, especially important to the highly religious peasantry, moving toward normalization with the Roman Catholic Church. If the peasantry responds by overcoming its past unwillingness to use modern agricultural methods and thereby improves production, it could earn the gratitude of other segments of society and thus somewhat improve its social standing. Working against this, however, are such trends as a continued flight from the countryside by rural youth, thus leaving the farms in the hands of the old and conservative generation.
The industrial proletariat was especially hard hit during World War II. Trade unions and other workers' organizations and their leadership were decimated, and, along with other strata of the urban population, the working class underwent a general pauperization. In the postwar period, however, the relative status of the skilled worker has been enhanced as a result of the movement of unskilled peasants into the lowest levels of urban society through the shift from agricultural to industrial employment. Also, the increasingly sophisticated requirements of a developing industrial economy have resulted in some upward social mobility for the technically skilled members of the industrial working class. During the stifling, later years of the Gomulka era, however, the industrial workers as a whole became increasingly aware of being only theoretically the backbone and the most favored component of Communist society, while in practice their material well-being was eroded by the regime's inept economic policies and their social standing was far below that of a domineering, inflated, and isolated state bureaucracy. This in turn fueled the workers' dissatisfaction which, sparked by the regime's folly of raising food prices and re-instituting harsher work rules just before Christmas 1970, resulted in the riots that swept the Baltic coast and toppled the Gomulka regime.
Gomulka's successor as party leader, Edward Gierek, is by age (60 in January 1973), social class (a former Silesian miner) and inclination (a pragmatist), more in touch with the working class than any of his Communist predecessors. Moreover, it is this class that brought him to power, a debt which in the public eye will have to be repaid. What effect this situation will have on the social status, as distinct from political and economic influence, of the average Polish worker is not yet clear. In addition to his other attributes, Gierek is a prime example of a new generation of administrators and efficient technocrats, less concerned with ideology than with performance. Discipline and hard work by the workers is the other side of the coin of Gierek's concessions to the working class which, still largely composed of former peasants, faces a difficult task in upgrading its social acceptability.
The Gomulka regime, like its predecessors, strove to build a Polish society based on three social classes: workers, peasants, and the "working intelligentsia." It expected that of these the last, which initially was not numerous, would evolve rapidly from the worker and peasant classes and provide a reliable Marxist leadership for the society as a whole. All measures of postwar social development show, however, that although these expectations were fulfilled in their sociological sense, the resulting class of young, educated workers and "intelligentsia"—even more than society as a whole—disregarded the underlying ideological premise. The outlook of the young intellectual class was no closer to the spirit desired by the regime was then that of their older colleagues; in fact, they actively sought alternatives to what they considered anachronistic Marxist concepts, favoring a blend of socialism and individual incentive characteristic of some advanced Western technological societies. The success of the Gomulka government in creating this class, while at the same time failing to imbue it with uncritical acceptance of Communist policies set by a ruling clique, was the main cause of the regime's downfall.
That the dangerous sociopolitical situation which developed during the 1960's did not reach a climax before December 1970 is in part a measure of the persistent class divisions. The political crisis that shook but did not topple the Gomulka regime in 1968 was sparked by the elite intellectual class, whose traditional role as steward of the national culture was illustrated by a writers' revolt in the spring of that year against censorship and arbitrary restrictions. Their cause soon spread to the student milieu, leading to demonstrations initially against academic grievances but soon widening into the political arena. None of the issues, however, were of the economic "bread-and-butter" kind that might have engaged the workers or the peasantry, a fact skillfully exploited by the Gomulka regime to pit the workers against the students and intellectuals.
When in December 1970 the workers of the Baltic coast, many if not most of them belonging to the younger generation, took to the streets in protest
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