## Marian Kostecki's Views on Collectives

Marian J. Kostecki was a Polish organizational sociologist who wrote extensively about the 1980 Solidarity uprising and Polish society under communism. His key works include "Revolt of the Incapacitated" (1981/1982) and "Collective Solidarity in Poland's Powdered Society" (1984, co-authored with Krzysztof Mrela).

**The "Powdered Society" concept**: Kostecki analyzed how the communist state deliberately fragmented Polish society—reducing it to atomized individuals ("powdered") who were expected to be pliable and at the disposition of the authorities. Those who resisted, like intellectuals depicted in Wajda's film *Rough Treatment*, suffered disfavor and rejection.

**Etatism and organizational monopolization**: Kostecki's main thesis was that the 1980 strikes represented society's opposition against the etatist formula of social life forced by the authorities. He analyzed how the organizational pillars of this system—the Party, central and local administration, business organizations, cooperatives, trade unions, youth organizations, and mass media—had undergone accelerating concentration and monopolization throughout the 1970s.

**From non-cooperation to self-organization**: Kostecki traced the process of society's refusal of etatism, moving from non-cooperation to active resistance, and then examined both changes within state-controlled organizations and the process of society's self-organization.

**Civil demands at Gdańsk**: Kostecki interpreted the Gdańsk Shipyard protests not merely as labor disputes but as a list of civil demands—a collective reassertion of rights against atomization.

His work essentially argued that Solidarity represented the re-emergence of authentic collective action after decades of deliberate social fragmentation by the state. The regime had "powdered" society to prevent collective resistance; the 1980 movement was society reconstituting itself through horizontal self-organization rather than vertical state control.