The Principles of the Common: Towards a Political Philosophy of Polish Cooperativism

Abstract

The aim of the article is twofold. First, it is to interpret the main philosophical ideas of the Polish cooperative movement from the first part of the twentieth century and how they were applied in practice, by using the conceptual vocabulary of post-structuralist and post-Operaist political philosophy; and, second, to further develop the notion of -institutions of the common‖ that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri introduced -during debates about alternatives to both capitalism and the state-form -with their formulation of -principles of the common‖, which is to say, general principles for creating democratic and popular institutions around the ideas of inclusion and solidarity, an ethos of mutual help and democratic governance over production and exchange of material wealth.

Ethical Resistance: Modernity, Revisionism, and the Warsaw School of the History of Ideas

“…24 Thus, Leszek grew up in an atmosphere of socialist and patriotic activism at whose core was cooperative ideology-cooperativism, 25 a concept that traversed the ideological divisions of the left at that time and constituted a model for a comprehensive modernization of Poland. 26 Jerzy Kołakowski was once classified by Jan Józef Lipski as being part of the "generation of rebels" 27 -the socially engaged intelligentsia from the turn of the nineteenth century. Despite the turmoil of both world wars, historical continuity with the rebels' ideas is one of the paths through which Polish cooperativism reached the Polish People's Republic (PRL), 28 becoming part of the ethos of the anti-communist opposition.…”

The self as a multitude: Edward Abramowski’s social philosophy and the politics of cooperativism in Poland at the turn of the 20th century

“…Consequently, need is a category that is primal in relation to the subject, or – as a constitutive deficiency – envisioning the subject as the practice of filling this void in a collective act of will. In this sense, need – a dynamic category, defining humans’ relation to the world – signifies the symmetrical opposite of ownership (Abramowski, 1965b: 412), an abstract attribute that endows the subject with a static, ahistorical and non-social existence, thereby legitimizing the accumulation of the labour of individualized beings, harnessed into the process of management (Błesznowski and Ratajczak, 2018). A need is an expression of the subject’s aspiration to change the conditions of existence, a category of dissent from the existing rules in the realization of one’s own existential-social needs.…”

“…The political theory resulting from Abramowski’s social ontology posits that the proper form of fulfilling the creative nature of the human species is the transformation of the very nature of the subject; it is a process accomplished by free associations that establishes the principles (universal) for applying (historical) social rules. The politics of pure socialization is about the creation and implementation of principles for applying rules (Abramowski, 2018a; Błesznowski and Ratajczak, 2018).…”