PRESENT AND FUTURE

JAN TUROWSKI

There are three kinds of reintegration of the rural communities in Poland and three big problems connected with their redevelopment. The first concerns rebuilding common activities of the inhabitants of the villages as a local community. The second is the formation of communes as self-governing socio-economic and administrative organisms. The third problem is connected with the rise of industrial and agricultural regions. Let us discuss these forms, as well as three problems of reintegration of the rural communities in Poland.

THE VILLAGE

The problem of the reintegration of the common activities of the inhabitants of a village is bound up with changes within the village as a local community. The Polish village is undergoing a process of disintegration of its traditional structure and organization on the one hand, and a process of creation of elements of a new organization, on the other. The rural population in Poland has undergone a number of changes. In the period between the wars the rural areas were inhabited by 72.3 percent of the whole national population; in 1986 it had only 39.5 percent. Before World War II, 60 percent of professionally active people in Poland were employed in agriculture or worked on farms, while at present only 25 percent are employed in agriculture. This means that individual villages in Poland were inhabited by a peasant population and constituted an homogeneous local group. At present the peasant families working exclusively on their farms constitute about 50 percent of the rural population, the rest being made up of part-time farmers' families or industrial works' families, and so on. Each village has become a heterogenous unit. The population of suburban villages in industrial regions presents an especially differentiated professional structure. Thus, for instance, in Southern Poland (the Rzeszow, Cracow and Silesia regions) there are so-called workers' villages where only a small percent of the families and their grown-up children work solely on their farms.

It is estimated that of about 2.5 million individual farms, half are worked by people who find employment also outside their farm. The social-professional structure of the inhabitants of the village is greatly differentiated, the class structure of the rural population having changed radically. The so-called localized class structure of the peasant population has broken up. Formerly, in each village rich peasants' families lived side by side with landless people, small farmers and agricultural workers. All were connected with work in agriculture and needed one another in spite of the disparity of their interests. Nowadays, different socio-professional groups and social strata of the village inhabitants have different interests. This situation influences their involvement in the problems of the village. Especially part-time farmers' and industrial workers' families who want to emigrate to the towns and cities have neither the time nor the interest to work for the local community.

In the traditional village the social bond was based on neighborly and very extended kinship relations. These two kinds of dependencies constituted the source of the need for mutual aid and cooperation between villages. The village was a group of people who were close to each other as neighbors or relatives. Now, the continuity of the generations in the village has been broken. In the post-war period about 6 to 8 million people emigrated from the villages. Each year, 120 to 200 thousand people emigrate from villages to towns. The range and frequency of the contacts of village inhabitants, including the agricultural population--not only commuters--have vastly increased. Several neighbourhoods are changing into selective and limited ones.

The village as a traditional community either is losing or finds reduced its economic character and administrative functions. The function of social control by way of social opinion also is becoming smaller due to the diversity in the system of values and the attitudes of the villagers: the village has undergone a shift from a closed local community to an open territorial unit.

The disintegration of traditional village communities is neither complete nor uniform. Some limited elements of traditional organization have remained until today in rural life. Neighborhood relations exist in smaller circles of families: kinship, affinity relations and some forms of informal cooperation, customs, etc. Many factors supporting identification with one's village are still effective, including: 1) residence by families in a village over several generations, 2) emotional attachment to the land, 3) frequent contacts among the villagers, 4) some common traditions and heritage, and 5) the possibility of identifying readily with each other and the community afforded by the pattern of farm location along a given road and fields.

These factors provide for the existence of some remnants of the informal, traditional organization of social life which makes up the informal elements in the new local territorial groups. But what are these new forms?

Parallel to the process of disintegration of the traditional, informal structure and organizations of the village as a local community at the end of the 19th century, different associations and unions began to form in the rural area. They grouped the farmers from particular villages or a few neighboring villages with a view to joint activity. These were savings and loan societies, machine companies, dairy products cooperatives, cooperatives of supply and outlet, etc. All the important community activities began to be based in these associations, organizations and formal institutions and their coordinated actions. In the period between the two wars, these associations and unions were greatly developed. A broad and important activity was pursued, especially by the so-called "Rural Circles." Enlightened professional farmers who enjoyed authority among the village inhabitants headed these circles. In this way reintegration of the villages as local communities took place, since the formal organization of the village overlapped (though not without obstacles) the existing elements of the former informal structure.

After World War II the policy of the socialist state was directly or indirectly aimed at the collectivization of individual farming. The centralistic mono-party system of governing which was introduced reached to the lowest levels of organizational structures. All social organizations, unions and socio-economic associations in rural areas were dissolved; they were merged or formed anew by executive order and their management was imposed always by higher party leadership. With time, a few bureaucratic and centrally managed organizations of socio-economic character became fixed and even were called cooperative associations. Affiliation in these structures, being imposed economically, was obligatory, though participation in their activity was a fiction. Consequently, opposition against that anti-democratic and imposed system of management became common among the rural population. Apathy and passivity overcame public life.

The present political changes and economic reforms in Poland are directed toward rebuilding local rural communities as authentic and self-governing. To be so, the following conditions must be met: 1) to introduce full and real freedom to form socio-economic, political and cultural organizations and to develop the competition between them needed to rebuild the formal organization of the village; and 2) to reintroduce the institutions of self-government in individual villages in the form of self-governing organs like the office of village administrator (soltys) elected by the villagers, a council for this office and a general rural assembly. They must be given the proper material means and competence to act on the matters in their area.

THE COMMUNE-MUNICIPALITY

The second kind of reintegration of the rural community is the commune (Gemeinde), which existed in Poland in the period between the two world wars and even earlier. The essential feature of the commune is that it unites a certain number of neighboring villages linked by economic ties to form one self-governing administrative unit. In 1986 2,122 communes existed in rural areas, each of them embracing about twenty localities with the central town or village connecting them through its economic, communal and trade facilities and relations. A commune serves not only as an administrative unit, but as a means of coordination for all single-purpose frameworks and associations, as well as an institution of self-government and administrative power for the inhabitants. Within the commune framework and by participation in its councils or commissions, the formal and informal groups and their leaders were able to be in touch and to combine their forces. When the localities or villages of the commune form a complete socio-economic entity, it develops as a local community. If the commune hopes to fulfill the social functions of coordination, direction and inspiration of cooperation and social activities, it must be more than an artificially created administrative unit.

In the post-war period in Poland the idea of the commune was distorted through a process which continued until recently. A commune was not a self-governing local community. The head of the commune was not chosen by the population, but was appointed by the voivode, that is, by a higher organ of state administration. The elections of the councilors to the Communal National Council as a legislative and controlling party was maintained. Important decisions lying in the competence of the organs of the commune were made by higher levels of state administration, and so on. The commune was viewed as the lowest organ of state authority, not as a self-governing community of villages associated functionally with each other.

Between 1955 and 1972, the communes were suppressed and their place was artificially assumed by the district consisting of three or four villages. Beginning with 1972, the communes began to return again as larger administrative units, but again certain definite villages often were included artificially in a given commune without the agreement of the inhabitants, and so on. Hence, the centralized system of administration imposed from above hampered the development of self-governing communities.

The rebuilding and adequate development of communes as local or territorial communities will take place only when at least the following conditions are satisfied:

1) the organs of commune authorities regain their self-governing character;

2) the commune becomes a self-governing whole within its territory and within the sphere of its own problems and population;

3) the communes have the possibility of forming and of having at their disposal commune property; and

4) organizations, institutions and associations working within the area of the commune develop horizontal coordination.

THE RURAL-URBAN REGION

A third kind of new local community revealed by regional studies of the structure of settlements and industrializing areas in Poland may be called a socio-economic region or rural-urban formation. Usually the center of such a region is located in a new industrial town or an old, industrializing one. Joining many villages and small towns, such a town functions as a local market, a center for social and cultural life for many localities, a place of immigration, and a point to which many people regularly travel to work. The formation of these socio-economic regions became known from studies of the Milejow region in the Lublin district and the new industrial regions, Pulawy, Konin, Plock, and Tarnobrzeg. On the basis of about five thousand diaries written by the rural youth, J. Chalasinski has pointed out that these new rural-urban formations are rooted in the consciousness of the leaders who help create them and are engaged in public activities.

As a new entity, these rural-urban regions are characterized by numerous regionally coordinated organizations and institutions, such as the professional association of farmers or so-called "Rural Circles," political groups, youth associations, public schools, adult and vocational schools, the so-called "Houses of Culture," etc. According to Chalasinski, the most important and difficult task for scientific research will be to work out a modern model for these rural-urban regions, for till now no precise patterns or models for rural relations have been established in Poland or elsewhere in the world.

In Poland we can speak then of three kinds of rural communities: the small rural communities embracing the elements of the old informal organization of the village but supported by local units of associations, organizations and institutions; the communes; and rural-urban regions.

CONCLUSION

1. The revival of authentic local self-government in villages, municipalities, communes and rural-urban regions is the fundamental factor of the matrix development of agricultural and rural life.

2. The economic and social life of the country must be thought through beginning from the state and cooperative monopolies; freedom in the formation of social organizations and associations, as well as of economic enterprises, must be restored.

3. Rather than heavy industry, development must center in agriculture and food industries, and in industries producing the means of production as well as services for agriculture.

The Catholic University of Lublin

Lublin, Poland

1. Roczniki Socjologii Wsi (The Annals of Rural Sociology), (Warszawa: Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, The Polish Academy of Sciences), Vols. 1-20.

2. Rural Social Change in Poland, Jan Turowski and Lili Maria Szwengrub, eds. (Wroclaw: Ossolineum-The Polish Academy of Sciences Press, 1976-1977).

3. Rural Sociology in Poland (IVth World Congress for Rural Sociology. Boguslaw Galeski, ed.; Warszawa: Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of The Polish Academy of Sciences, 1976).