Józef Biniszkiewicz (1875-1940) : biografia polityczna

Abstract

This monograph is a political biography of Józef Biniszkiewicz, for many years leader of the Polish socialists in Upper Silesia. This exceptional leader made an indelible mark on the organisation of the Polish Socialist Party in the Prussian sector of the partitioned Polish lands, and later of the Upper Silesian party organisation in the independent Poland. This was the result of the charismatic influence he exerted on the majority of his neatest co-workers. After his childhood in the Great Poland (Poznań area) lands and time spent in Berlin at the turn of the XIX—XX century which shaped his political views and where he was able to acquaint himself with the activities of the German social democrats, from the moment of his arrival in Katowice he became the head of the socialist organisation in the Prussian partition sector. He was always an advocate of a national, and not class, nature of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). After World War I circumstances showed that the national programme, of which J. Biniszkiewicz was a co-author at the congress in Oświęcim in 1913, became the only programme with a genuine chance of approval by the majority of the Polish workers in Upper Silesia. His name was the guarantee of this line of action in the reformed Upper Silesian PPS. During the time of the Silesian Insurrections and the subsequent plebiscite J. Biniszkiewicz, as plebiscite Vice-Commissioner and party leader, exhibited all the characteristics that predestined him to direct the PPS activities: organisational skills, a talent for oratory, the essential pragmatism making it possible to reject personal animosities and to seek political compromise. Neverhteless, in the independent Poland it turned out that he was not able to take advantage of the prestige he had gained during the fight for Polish Upper Silesia. The reasons for this were: undermining of this authority due to becoming involved in political and economic double dealing, lack of a clearly defined strategy for the whole socialist movement in the renascent Poland, a certain ineradicable provincialism which hindered him in playing a significant role among the ruling authorities of the PPS. As a defender of the economic interests of the working class he proved himself to be an unconvincing leader. It was only when the matter at stake was the priority of the defence of democracy that he managed to unite under his leadership the whole Upper Silesian organisation; more often, however, he found himself fighting a solitary battle which with ever younger party activists, for whom the legend of the co-author of socialism in Upper Silesia was no longer of any great importance. This loss of influence in the Upper Silesian PPS organisation together with his admiration for the actions of Józef Pilsudski, dating back to time of their cooperation in PPS before World War I, was the reason for the split he caused in the party, leading to the formation of the Silesian Socialist Party, which in 1928 became part of the Polish Socialist Party, formerly the Revolutionary Fraction. This sudden change in political orientation proved to be the cause of J. Biniszkiewicz’s defeat. The new party gained no support in the elections and at the beginning of the nineteen thirties he was forced to resign from the party, and with that from active political life. The tragic epilogue to his biography came with his arrest by the Germans in 1939, together with many Upper Silesian independence activists, and his subsequent death in the Buchenwald concentration camp.