The Birth of Hauntology

Essay-film, 2022

This essay-film was made in Gdańsk, Poland, in June 2022. It was shaped by a visit to the Gdańsk shipyards and by the author’s own memories of British television news coverage in the early 1980s. The central proposition is that, without Solidarity, hauntology would not have become a concept; more precisely, that the word itself would not exist.

The events at the Gdańsk shipyard in 1980 unfolded against a backdrop of multiple strikes across the United Kingdom, high inflation, rising energy costs, an accelerating housing crisis, and the sustained erosion of workers’ rights. That two such distinct political contexts should produce such closely related pressures is not coincidental; the film treats this convergence as part of its subject matter.

The gentrification of the shipyard site in Poland’s post-communist period gave the film a further dimension. At the end of the communist era, the shipyard employed 20,000 workers; today that figure stands at approximately 2,000. The political struggle that dismantled the communist government contributed, in later decades, to the dismantling of the very workplace the workers had originally fought to defend.

The demand for a free trade union in 1980 marked the beginning of the end of communism in Europe, and the consequences were neither immediate nor contained. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet empire produced the conditions in which Francis Fukuyama could declare the end of history, and in which Jacques Derrida, responding directly to that declaration, first coined the term ‘hauntology’.

Several forces gave the Gdańsk workers’ struggle its broader agency: the Catholic Church, the international press, and the Polish-born Pope John Paul II, whose influence extended well beyond theological authority. That his attempted assassination in 1981 was connected to his support for Solidarity has been asserted in some quarters, though the claim remains contested.

The British press covered events in Gdańsk largely from a pro-Solidarity position, and by and large aligned itself with the Thatcher government’s broader political outlook. Yet the same press was sharply critical of domestic trade union activity, particularly during the miners’ strikes, and the government’s posture was identical. A government that supported striking workers abroad whilst opposing them at home invites a particular reading: that backing Solidarity was a calculation against communism rather than a commitment to labour, and that once communism had been defeated, trade unionism itself could be contained or dismantled through market-based means.

Anna Walentynowicz catalysed the strike that became Solidarity, yet history has largely displaced her from that role. Whether gender, politics, or personality accounts for this displacement is not easily settled. She died in 2010 when the plane carrying the Polish president’s delegation crashed in Russia; the investigation, led by Vladimir Putin, found nothing suspicious. What a fallen empire might retain, beyond its grievances, the film leaves open.