The Struggle over Punk in Communist Poland: Notes on Deconstructing "The Alternative"

On December 13, 1981, General Jaruzelski, Secretary of the Polish Communist Party, declared martial law – closing the presses, banning the Solidarity labor movement, initiating stricter censorship, and suspending the right to assemble. Yet, in the following months, a vibrant punk scene developed in Poland’s houses of culture, on the radio, in Socialist student clubs, and even in national song festivals.

My presentation examines the struggle to define punk in Poland. While punk has become intertwined in Polish national memory with the anticommunist resistance movement, its meaning in the 1980s was fiercely contested. I begin by examining the avant-garde circle that introduced punk to Poland and upheld its authenticity as alternative culture in self-produced underground publications. As punk popularized, the debate spilled from this “subculture” over to the state-sanctioned youth press, where any Poles who self-identified as punks could have their ideas published. Meanwhile, Communist Party committees debated whether punk should be tolerated as a form of amateur youth culture, harnessed as a financial asset, or suppressed as a threat to socialism and the Polish nation. The debate over punk grew into a high-profile struggle that defied the conventional political spectrum (communists versus anti-communists) by dividing traditionalists from progressives in the opposition and hardliners from reformers in the Party – setting the context for compromise at the roundtable accords in 1989.

My presentation speaks to the transnational dimension of punk, showing how meaning adapted to the Polish context as it travelled east. It suggests the vast – but finite – range of meanings that could be associated with punk. Finally, it offers a solution to the challenge of accounting for the politics of culture without resorting to a binary model of “resistance” or “complicity” by showing how punk’s political power was contingent upon the struggle to shape its meaning.