State of Emergency and Everyday Life in Żoliborz

Abstract

World War II, the Germans invasion of Poland and the occupation of Warsaw was a time labelled by anthropologists as a liminal situation, and philosophers (e.g. Giorgio Agamben) as a state of exception/emergency. The existing institutions and standards collapse. Social life takes on new forms. So I ask the following question: was the Warsaw Housing Cooperative, which developed its own social life institutions (legal, cultural, and economic)—alternative to the state ones, in such a liminal state, in the state of crisis? The cooperative organisational structures tested before the war proved to be efficient and effective under occupation, and the residents proved that ‘Żoliborz socialism’ was not only an idea, but a social practice of siding with those who suffer. The briefly described post-war period ends this narrative, because the WHC was taken over by the state and centralised power. From a residents’ bottom-up, self-governing initiative, it evolved into a state-controlled housing enterprise. There was nothing left from the idea of cooperativism.