ABSTRACT
The categories of civil society do not represent a conceptual scheme brought into the Polish events from the outside. The participants themselves and their Western collaborators have declared their struggle as that of society against the state. "The state has not been able to successfully dissolve civil society," writes Alexander Smolar in his preface to a 1978 volume coming from the Polish opposition, "the texts ... are manifestations of the existence and vitality of civil society in a country ruled by a communist party." 1 "Society organizes itself in the form of a democratic movement and becomes active outside the limits of the institutions of the totalitarian state," 2 states Jacek Kuroń. KOR (worker's defense committee) is renamed KSS-"KOR" (social self-defense committee-"KOR") to indicate the goal of the self-organization of all parts of society, pioneered by industrial workers, and the support of all (worker, peasant, student, intellectual) initiatives for both interest representation and the defense of civil rights. In one form or other, the idea of the reconstitution or reemergence of civil society involving variously a struggle for the rule of law and the guarantee of civil rights, for a free public sphere and for a plurality of independent, self-organized, democratic forms of associations, is present in all the documents of the opposition. For KOR, their ensemble is definitive. According to Adam Michnik, the state can today desire a minimum of legitimacy only if it rigorously carries out three implications of the August 21 Gdansk agreements, which would then begin to function as a genuine "new social contract": protection of the civil rights of citizens, toleration of an actual plurality of public opinion, and the acceptance of a structure of compromise "crossing the totalitarian power structure with a democratic mechanism of corporate representation." 3
