|
Poland Agricultural Workers
Although the communist leadership's economic agenda was
the
immediate cause of large-scale shifts from agriculture to
industry, prewar conditions also contributed to this
trend.
Contrary to the nineteenth-century romanticization of the
Polish
peasant class as a homogeneous repository of national
virtue,
agricultural workers in the interwar period were
stratified
economically. A few peasants had large farms, many more
farmed
small plots, and fully 20 percent of peasants did not own
the
land they farmed. In 1921 only 43 percent of peasants
owned their
own house. The depression of the 1930s hit the peasants
especially hard because much of their income depended on
world
commodity prices. By the late 1930s, Poland had several
million
superfluous agricultural workers, but industry had not
developed
sufficiently to offer alternative employment.
At the close of World War II, little had changed in the
society of rural Poland. At that time, Poland's peasants
made up
60 percent of the population. Although many villages were
wrecked
or diminished and 500,000 farms were destroyed, war dead
included
a much higher proportion of urban Poles. After the war,
the large
estates owned by former noblemen and rich peasants and
worked by
rural proletarians still dominated the rural social
structures.
The first step of the postwar communist regime was
confiscation
of the largest estates. Those lands were redistributed to
private
owners, although to avoid alienating the peasants, plots
smaller
than fifty hectares were allowed to remain with their
original
owners. At this point, rapidly expanding local industry
began to
offer peasants supplementary income, and industrial
expansion in
urban centers relieved prewar overpopulation and
starvation in
many rural areas. After the war, rural life increasingly
was
transformed by electrification, improved roads, and statesupplied equipment and materials. Nevertheless, on most
Polish
farms the fundamental relationship of the peasant to the
land
remained as it was before World War II.
Although Soviet-style collectivization remained a
nominal
state goal until 1956, early attempts caused precipitous
declines
in production and an estimated 1 million farmers to leave
the
land. As a result of the decollectivization program of the
late
1950s, only 6 percent of farms remained collectivized. In
the
long term, the state's attempts at collectivization
fostered a
permanent resistance among peasants to direct state
interference.
In the next thirty years, the peasant family farm, whose
value
system made distribution of farm products to the rest of
society
clearly subordinate to immediate household needs,
continued to be
the dominant form of agricultural organization. Improved
communications and agricultural education programs
gradually
broke the isolation of rural existence, however; as more
contact
with the outside world brought new values, it weakened the
family
cohesion and the inherited patterns of life that were the
foundations of the purely domestic farm.
Immediately after the collectivization drive ended in
1956,
mid-sized farms (those between five and fifteen hectares)
predominated in the private sector, but in the next
decades farms
of that size were split repeatedly. By 1986 nearly 60
percent of
private farms were smaller than five hectares.
Furthermore, the
holdings of individual farmers often were scattered across
considerable distances. In the late 1980s, state efforts
to
stimulate reconcentration were stalled by peasant
suspicion and
by ideological disagreements among communist policy makers
over
the solution to agricultural problems. Prevented by
government
inertia and distribution policies from obtaining tractors
and
other equipment, many small landowners used horses for
cultivation or simply ignored portions of their land.
Frequent
reliance on nonagricultural employment for a livelihood
further
reduced peasants' concentration on improving the use of
their
rural plots.
In the mid-1980s, only 50 percent of Poland's rural
population was involved in agriculture. The other 50
percent
commuted to jobs in towns. Of the private farmers in the
first
group, 33 percent were full-time farmers, 34 percent
earned most
of their income from agricultural employment, and more
than 21
percent earned most of their income from nonagricultural
sources.
The remaining 11 percent worked for institutions with land
allotments smaller than 0.5 hectare. The large group of
landless
rural laborers of the interwar years had virtually
disappeared by
1980.
In the postcommunist era, experts projected large
numbers of
peasants would continue their split lifestyles unless
major
investments were made to upgrade Poland's rural
infrastructure.
In the late 1980s, new housing units and water mains were
still
extremely rare and sewage lines virtually nonexistent in
rural
areas. Only half of Polish villages were accessible by
paved
roads, and many poorer villages lacked a retail store of
any
type. An important failure of the collectivization effort
had
been the exclusion of peasants from the broad social
welfare
benefits instituted by the socialist state for urban
workers.
Although the peasantry received nominal coverage under the
state
medical system beginning in 1972, rural education and
health
services remained far behind those in the cities for the
next
twenty years.
The lack of rural amenities caused the most promising
young
Poles from rural families to move to the cities. As the
traditional rural extended family began to collapse, the
aging
population that remained behind further strained the
inadequate
rural social services. The communist state modified its
pension
and inheritance policies in the 1970s to encourage older
peasants
to pass their rural plots to the next generation, but the
overall
disparity in allocation of benefits continued through the
1980s.
In the early postcommunist era, however, urban
unemployment and
housing shortages began to drive workers back to rural
areas.
Experts predicted that as many as 1 million people might
return
to rural areas if urban employment continued to fall.
Data as of October 1992
|
