Collecting Crumbs of Lost Knowledge: Learning from Postindustrial and Postsocialist Disruptions
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This chapter addresses the infrastructural background of major transformations of morality and rationality in Poland after 1989. In the Polish context, Karol Wojtyla as a Polish pope and the Solidarity movement contributed massively to the relegitimization of the Catholic Church, including its conservative wing, allowing for a massive influence in the post-socialist decades. Internationally, the 1960s and 1970s saw a crisis of progressive narratives about the emancipatory role of reason and the possibilities of the democratization of scientific and technical developments. On these planes, the 1980s marked a conservative counter-offensive. This was accelerated by the failure of real socialism as a promoter of the dream of the emancipatory function of reason and science. In ideological struggles, those who wanted to replace real socialism with science-based humanist future-oriented universalism (exemplified by Sakharov) were defeated by past-oriented particularisms (exemplified by Solzhenityn). The chapter describes the techniques of the conservative counter-offensive as FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt), comparing it to PR campaigns of the tobacco industry or the strategies of climate change deniers. The author concludes the Left is weakened by its anti-institutional and anti-statist elements, and needs a focus on the material conditions of production and the promotion of ideas.
Poverty is the consequence of not having sufficient income to sustain lives and ways of life. While there are many papers addressing poverty in today’s Poland, no comprehensive study was done to explain and describe rural poverty also in a historical aspect. Therefore, this article attempts to synthetically identify the patterns and particularities of rural poverty in Poland between the wars, and to present the multifaceted and diverse nature of Polish poverty in the initial years of national independence. The authors’ main objective is to indicate the changes in the scope of Polish poverty and to describe the adaptive mechanisms and the discomfort involved in the depreciation of needs. Before independence, the situation varied across the Polish territory. The relatively worst socio-economic conditions were experienced in Galicia due to absence of non-agricultural activities. The population of Prussian rural areas found themselves in a more advantageous situation because of industrial development and working outside agriculture. The situation of peasants was exacerbated by the destructive and resource-draining First World War, whereas rural misery was made even worse by the combination of unemployment and underdevelopment of the country. In the Second Polish Republic, the situation of the rural population did not improve even though the country made great progress at that time. Note that rural poverty varied across employee groups, with cultural and lifestyle differences, limited competences and passive attitudes playing an important role.
This paper considers some foundational concepts in ecological psychology and in enactivism, and traces their developments from their historical roots to current preoccupations. Important differences stem, we claim, from dissimilarities in how embodied experience has been understood by the ancestors, founders and followers of ecological psychology and enactivism, respectively. Rather than pointing to differences in domains of interest for the respective approaches, and restating possible divisions of labor between them in research in the cognitive and psychological sciences, we call for a deeper analysis of the role of embodiment in agency that we also undertake. Awareness of the differences that exist in the respective frameworks and their consequences, we argue, may lead to overcoming some current divisions of responsibility, and contribute to a more comprehensive and complementary way of dealing with a broader range of theoretical and practical concerns. While providing some examples of domains, such as social cognition and art reception, in which we can observe the relative usefulness and potential integration of the theoretical and methodological resources from the two approaches, we demonstrate that such deeper synergy is not only possible but also beginning to emerge. Such complementarity, as we envisage, conceives of ecological psychology that allows felt experience as a crucial dynamical element in the explanations and models that it produces, and of an enactive approach that takes into consideration the ubiquitous presence of rich directly perceived relations among variables arising from enactments in the social and physical world.
The Embodied Mind provides a unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience. The authors argue that only by having a sense of common ground between mind in Science and mind in experience can our understanding of cognition be more complete. Toward that end, they develop a dialogue between cognitive science and Buddhist meditative psychology and situate it in relation to other traditions such as phenomenology and psychoanalysis.
How the communist revolution failed, presented in a series of catastrophes.
The communist project in the twentieth century grew out of utopian desires to oppose class structures and abolish oppression. The attempts to realize these ideals, however, became a series of colossal failures. In Yesterday's Tomorrow, Bini Adamczak examines these catastrophes, proceeding in reverse chronological order from 1939 to 1917: the Hitler–Stalin Pact, the Great Terror of 1937, the failure of the European Left to prevent National Socialism, Stalin's rise to power, and the bloody defeat of the rebellion at Kronstadt. In the process, she seeks a future that never happened.
If Adamczak framed communism as a fairy tale with the possibility of a happy ending in her earlier book Communism for Kids, here she offers a tragedy for grownups. She describes the deportation of exiled anti-fascists back to Nazi Germany—a betrayal of communists by communists; the initial incredulity of European Communists at the news of the Hitler-Stalin pact; Stalin's state socialist terror plan, with quotas for executions instead of crops; the disappearance of class and the emergence of tactical and economic calculus; the withering into unrecognizability and impossibility of the revolution's successes; and the cheap promise that “next time it will be democratic.” What weighs on the possibility of communist desire, Adamczak writes, is not just the end of history, but first and foremost, the end of the revolution. Not just 1989, but also, even more so, 1939, 1938, and back to 1924, to 1917. Only if we understand this history can we work toward a better future.