Complaints and Their Researchers

Abstract

“Reading newspapers, watching television, taking part in public meetings, and also listening to the ‘popular voice,’ one can have an impression that Poland is a country full of frustrated, manipulated, ignored people who have been pushed to the margin and deprived of the respect they deserve,” claim the authors of the book Cudze problemy (Problems of Others) in 1991. From this perspective, it is impossible to overestimate the role played in the system of “popular democracy” by institutions of social control, worker/peasant inspections, bureaus of letters and complaints, and also by books of complaints and requests, which were supposed to act as substitutes for nonexistent democratic institutions. This article, based on a historical Old Polish tradition of laments and supplications, will contextualize the articulation of injustice in the trade discourse popularized in the period of the Polish People’s Republic through books of complaints and requests.