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July 21 saw major clashes break out in Warsaw between police, security guards and traders from the KDT bazaar and their supporters. The bazaar, housed in a metal commerical building, is to be torn down and the city ordered the traders out. Many, however, refused to leave. A battle ensued which saw well over a hundred people injured and the main street in downtown Warsaw blocked for hours.

(Films from the clashes can be seen here and here. )

The clashes were interesting for several reasons, not the least being the support and active engagement of many people, which is rather uncommon for protests in Warsaw. There was also the question of the nationalists who tried to play the leading role in the protests from the side of the public and of course the question of whether or not the traders themselves were worth supporting.

Background

KDT bazaar was located in the very heart of Warsaw, beneath the Palace of Culture - the Stalinist Gothic building that dominates the center of the city. Right after the fall of communism, there was a boom in street trading and markets - many selling imported good which were scare during communist times - sprung up all around the city. One of them was in front of the Palace of Culture.

The authorities have traditionally tended to dislike this type of trading and finally managed to close down the market in 1999. The city organized that some of them could erect a metal construction by the Palace. This move of course divided the traders into those who had some capital and were willing and able to set up official businesses in the covered bazaar and those who would have to relocate. The traders invested, set up a company and built the KDT hall. It was a large object, with 700 trading places of various sizes.

Even this "more civilized" form of trading tended to irk the authorities who wanted to get rid of the hall. For years there were problems with this. The current president of the city visited a few bazaars during her election campaign, and, trying to muster support, tended to promise all sorts of cooperation, including ones that the city legal department later said could not be legally implemented. In the end, the city kept telling them they'd have to go, because the president has grand plans for the terrain around the palace, including cutting down the park. Part of the area where KDT stood was slated for an art museum (even though there are currently more art museums in Warsaw than this is art). The traders agreed to a place but were told that, with all the formalities, they wouldn't be ready to have a new hall built and move their until 2012. Thus, the traders wanted to stay where they were until they could move.

The President of the City, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, is known for her arrogant, "let them eat cake" attitude. The traders were treated by the neoliberals running the city (and their yuppie supporters) as some less-than-desirable elements scarring the face of the city which their metal construction. Of course this did not stop the city from proposing that they build something new and rent it to the traders; the city is eager to accomodate anybody who can afford their highway robbery rents which are often more than 100 euros per square meter in the best parts of Warsaw. Once the traders turned down the city's "generous offer", they would definitely have to be evicted.

Public Support for the Traders and Unformed Class Consciousness

Some of the traders left but some refused to go. On July 21, the eviction of the hall took place.

Perhaps surprisingly for the security guards and police, hundreds of people turned out to support the traders, many prepared to confront the cops and start a riot.

Such support is quite unusual in Warsaw so it was interesting to watch. Throughout the day, one felt that there was some element of a class struggle going on, but not in the traditional sense. Throughout the city, there is growing dissatisfaction at the way that things are being run and the attitude of the local government and the city's elite. The system clearly benefits a yuppie class and capitalists, which is by Polish standards rather considerable in Warsaw. However a growing number of people are socially excluded and their dissatisfaction is often heard, although it is rarely accompanied by a clear class consciousness or political analysis of what is really going on.

The socially excluded have been lashing out at the President of the City, a leading member of the uber-liberal Civic Platform. After Warsaw tenants protested at and managed to make their speech at a session of the City Council a few months ago, protests became the norm there; the last city council meeting was totally disrupted by no less than 11 different protest groups. All of them clearly had a problem accepting some policy created by the heartless, elitist politicians.

In this atmosphere, the way of discussing the KDT situation struck a chord with many disaffected people. As the city is gentrified, their is almost no space left for the less-than-wealthy in the downtown. Low-priced "milk bars" and local dives have been driven out by high rents and replaced by chic places and big international chains with 5 dollar coffees. With commercial rents reaching astronomical prices, downtown is becoming more and more unfriendly for average people. Many less-than-wealthy people enjoyed shopping in KDT, which was much cheaper than the overpriced malls nearby. Yet the elites of Warsaw, who seem to be absolutely clueless, announce that the city is "held hostage" by the bazaar and that "such places" need to be removed to the boondocks - sending a message to many that everything in the city which is not associated with the elite must be eliminated. Just as poor people in crumbling houses are removed to make way for luxury flats for the elite, the average person's shops, bars and hangouts are to be replaced by the elites'.

Although few know of concepts such as gentrification of think about its connections with capitalism, there is widespread knowledge and articulation of the fact that "the little guy" is being pushed out of the city.

This may explain why so many "little guys" felt like fighting for KDT. Somehow there was an element of class consciousness present, but not fully formed and at times highly confused.

Unformed Class Consciousness and Perception of Traders

It was quite interesting to observe how many people confronted the police. Many of them directly compared this conflict to the conflicts in Ozarow and in Warsaw earlier in the year when the police attacked shipyard workers. People were yelling at the police that they should be ashamed that they were attacking people like in Ozarow or the shipyard workers.

But this situation was not exactly the same. First of all, there is the complicated question of the class composition of the bazaar itself. Secondly, although the aforementioned clashes between workers and the police are almost legendary, very few if any normal residents came out to support either. (Here I don't count political activists as "normal residents".) There may have been some locals along with the groups of anarchists and other politicos throwing rocks at police in Ozarow, but nothing near the scale of confrontation as seen with KDT. Large worker demonstrations go on without much public involvement at all in Poland's capital. Yet here hundreds of average people were screaming to the police about how they are attacking working people - ordinary people like themselves, whom they seemed to identify with.

For months the question of the class identification of traders has been a controversial issue amongst Warsaw anarchists and leftists as one group made a demonstration in support of a bazaar which was in turn criticized by other members of the group and many others. (In my opinion, it would have been less controversial if that particular group of people were actually involved in the class struggle in some concrete way. Being it was one of the rare actions they made, and being that they saw it as part of this struggle, some leftists claimed it was proof of their petit bourgeois nature.)

Some opponents of the traders' actions claim that traders are a bunch of petit bourgeois capitalists and even bosses, therefore any support of them is highly misplaced.

There is some truth to this, although the situation is not universal.

There is no one "trader class". We have cooperated with some traders in various campaigns and we know quite a number of immigrant traders. We are able to therefore get some idea of the working situation of traders.

It turns out that immigrants are more likely to be "employed" at bazaars than Poles, although plenty of Poles are also working for some boss. It is the dream of many immigrants to save enough money to get their own stall. Some immigrants work in some types of loose informal cooperatives. Many people have their own small business and don't employ anybody. Many work with friends or relatives. Some people employ a relative. Some people employ dozens.

Working conditions at the bazaars are not good - they tend to be informal, with no benefits at all. On the other hand, employees at bazaars are often people who would be otherwise excluded from employment. The largest group of such people are immigrants. Other large groups of employees are the urban poor, seniors and single mothers. It should be noted that on the day the KDT was stormed, dozens and dozens of small children were in the hall - because their mothers took them to work everyday and were not expecting such an attack. The youngest victim of police violence on July 21 was only a year and a half old.

It is hard then to claim, as some dogmatic leftists tend to do, that this is the petit-bourgeois capitalist class. On the other hand, to not recognize and to address the question of wage labour and exploitation at the bazaars is a terrible mistake.

It is curious then that so many people from the public, including the above-mentioned anarchists, had such a strong perception of a rather mixed struggle as a workers' struggle. It is even more curious that so many people felt compelled to take action in these cases than with other struggles which had a more more clearly defined class element.

Any one explanation for this would be bound to be an overgeneralization and oversimplification. However I am convinced that many have simply chosen to identify with traders because they identify with the self-run or family-run small business model which they see under attack. Many surely believe that bazaars work on that model - and surely this is still the dominant model at least among Poles. It seems that many identify this model with some old-fashioned pride, with the idea that people work hard, invest money and support themselves. This model seems to hold out a more attractive prospect for average people than a wage-slave job, hence there seems to be some subconscious attraction to it. Of course trading is a profession which traditionally is based on mark-ups and often counts on gross exploitation and inequity to make bigger and better profits. If any segments of the anarchist movement have become less than critical about vending, this is probably because in the local punk/alternative culture scene, a lot of people are actually engaged in it themselves, some of them for a living. The identification with the traders, by extension, could be an identification with themselves or some of their friends.

Nationalists Try to Take Leading Role

A rather strange and disturbing development was the role the nationalists tried to play in this protests. In particular, our arch-nemises from the Movement for Polish Sovreignity and other fascists scum, showed up and started calling everything a Jewish-communist conspiracy.

The fact that these people are complete wing-nuts and see the world in a very specific way is nothing new for us, but besides them, the ugly spectre of antisemitism raised its head from the crowd more than once. (Fascists also spoke at the other bazaar which some anarchists were defending.)

Of course the problem had nothing to do with either Jews or communists. The anti-semites called the President of the City a Jew, although she is a quite religious Catholic. The police were also "Jews" and "communists" - definitely not Poles.

What can explain this other than complete idiocy?

Although this surely played no major role, the opportunism of a small group of traders may have played a small part. Sometimes they would identify KDT as a local business, with 100% local capital. But what does that mean? Dozens of foreigners worked there and many were shareholders. The overwhelming majority of the goods for sale? Made in China. The idea of KDT as a "Polish" business probably was started as a marketing ploy. Selling KDT as "Polish" no doubt appealed to some, especially those uncomfortable with the growing number of international chains all around them.

How this then got warped into calling the cops Jews and screaming that the police are "beating Poles" would be hard to explain to anybody who has never been exposed to such nonsence on a more everyday basis.

The nationalists ultimately played a very negative role in that many people heard such comments and attributed them to a much wider group. There were a few arguments about it during the main action, but as clashed went on, few people concentrated on the political message. The next day though, when a demonstration was held and the nationalists tried to dominate the rally and make speeches, people were able to react. Some people from ZSP who went to counterbalance the nationalists confronted them and one grabbed the microphone from their leader as we started to make a speech and called on people to denounce this type of idiocy. I am happy to report that people were very supportive of this intervention.

Some more photos are here.