Abstract
After serving as an organizer for the independent labor union Solidarity (“Solidarność”) during Poland's 1980–81 upsurge, Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski was elected to the union's regional leadership in Łódź in 1981. Poland's most populous city after Warsaw, Łódź grew rapidly in the late nineteenth century after a torrent of foreign capital investment. Known as the “Manchester of Poland” because of its concentration of textile manufacturing, the city and its mills were the setting for The Promised Land, the story of a German, a Jew, and a Pole seeking to make their fortune in the brutal new world of industrial capitalism, as told in the 1899 realist novel by Władysław Reymont and the 1975 film by director Andrzej Wajda. The Łódź working class has a militant history dating to the strikes of May 1892, when, as Tamara Deutscher writes, “more than two hundred rioting textile workers were cut down by Cossacks.”
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