Since 1989, Polish historiography has gone in a number of new directions. At the same time, the traditional field of labor history has been largely neglected, even scorned as old-fashioned and overly ideological. Wiktor Marzec's new book demonstrates that labor history remains important and can integrated cutting-edge theoretical models. A frequent contributor to Praktyka Teoretyczna and author of numerous articles in English as well as Polish, Marzec wants to take recent approaches in philosophy and cultural studies and apply them to the revolution of 1905 in the Kingdom of Poland, most particularly (though not exclusively) in Łódź. The result is a fresh look at the revolution that Lenin called a “dress rehearsal” for the Great October. This is definitely not your grand/father's 1905 revolution!

Marzec, it should be said immediately, is not by training a historian, but a sociologist. He is less interested in ascertaining what happened than interpreting the meanings—both contemporary and subsequent—of events. In particular, he aims to illuminate the meaning of this revolution for the development of what he calls “plebeian consciousness.” That is, how did different parties conceive the process of creating class consciousness among workers and how were these conceptions taken up (or not) by actual industrial laborers in Russian Poland during this era of revolt and revolution. Marzec examines in some depth not only party platforms, leaflets, press, and other such sources from socialist parties such as the PPS (and then its fractions after the split) and SDKPiL, but also from the right-wing National Democrats, and in particular their organization for workers, NZR (Narodowy Związek Robotniczy, National Workers' Union). In the case of the NZR, Marzec is primarily interested in the anti-discourse, as it were, aimed at convincing Polish workers that both PPS and SDKPiL represented not the interests of Polish labor, but of Jews and Moscow.

While conversing with the general line of both socialist and nationalist propaganda during the 1905 revolution, Marzec's contribution is to delve deeply into this political and even moral discourse that developed precisely during the years of disruption and revolution, more or less 1904–1907. Marzec divides his books into three large sections: Rebelia, Rewolucja, Reakcja. It is indicative of his interests that by far the shortest of these is the section focusing specifically on “revolution” and by far the longest is the first, which sets up the “rebellion” that burst onto the public stage during the revolutionary years. This rebellion, Marzec argues, was not merely anti-capitalist and anti-tsarist: it more broadly developed the vision of a new society in which workers will at last be the subject, and not merely the object, of historical processes.

In a profound sense Marzec's story is a tragedy. He describes processes leading toward a more humane and progressive society (and state) which are stymied—partly by tsarist intervention but possibly even more by nationalist counter-revolution—in 1906 and subsequent years. Even more tragically, when “socialism” comes to Poland, it comes not through the effort of Polish workers, but as a foreign and from the start despised import from the east. In this sense, Marzec's book certainly also has something to say about present-day political discourse in Poland, its edges and its limitations.

This book is excellent in presenting a sophisticated analysis of a variety of political texts, both socialist and nationalist. But what about the reception of these texts? How did workers actually perceive, act on, or reject these words? Here the analysis is on rather shakier ground. To be sure, Marzec incorporates as much as possible evidence from the archives and from workers' memoirs, but—probably inevitably—after reading this book we know much more about what political parties said to workers but not so much about what workers heard or understood. It may well be, alas, that the mentality of Polish workers during the years 1904–1907 is in the nature of things beyond our grasp. With this small caveat, anyone interested in a fresh, scintillating look at the effect of the 1905 Revolution on worker culture in Poland should definitely read Wiktor Marzec's Rebelia i reakcja.