Manufacturing Audio Systems and the Politics of Polish “Consumer Socialism”
The history of Poland in the post-Stalinist era can be divided into three periods, defined by the personalities of the First Secretaries of the Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robonicza (the Polish United Workers’ Party, PZPR) and the worldviews promoted within their circles of political power. The period of Władysław Gomułka (1956-1970) was marked by the continuation of the policy of extensive industrial development, accompanied by small concessions that enabled the production of consumer goods. In Poland in the 1960s, the state policy towards consumption was defined as securing the basic needs of citizens by providing them with foodstuffs, housing, clothing, and basic consumer durables and ensuring they were distributed evenly throughout the whole population.
Edward Gierek, the new First Secretary of the PZPR (1970-1980), significantly changed the economic policy guidelines for the production of consumer goods and sought to build a “consumer socialism” (Porter-Szűcs 2014: 258-284). This term is used by historians to illustrate the core strategy of Gierek’s social and economic policy. Originally it was widely used in both the state media and by economic experts as polityka konsumpcji (Consumption Policy) (Wiszniewski 1979). Gierek’s ruling elite and economic experts responsible for central planning were generally referred to as a circle of technocrats due to the attention they placed on the role of an efficient management strategy and technological modernization in economic development. From the early 1970s, this circle initiated extensive reforms for the modernization of industrial production by shifting resources and investment from heavy industry toward the chemical, automotive, and electronics industries. The development of these industries was presented in public communications as particularly beneficial for the increase of the standard of living. We can interpret such propaganda-laden communications as key features of the “sociotechnical imaginary” (Jasanoff and Kim 2015) of 1970s Polish modernization. When undertaking any theoretically informed investigation of audio technologies under state socialism – and this also applies to other countries with an extensive level of governmental control over industry, such as Japan (Partner 1999) and South Korea – one needs to pay attention to the complex network of dependencies and power relations between social actors engaged in technological innovation next to devoting time to understanding the role of ideological guidelines that dictated the connection between technology and society.
Two core elements of the campaign for technological innovation can be illustrated by two key government investment programs from the early 1970s: the “program for the electronization of the state economy,” the strategy of increasing the production of electronic products, and the “program for increasing market production” (Kotowicz-Jawor 1983: 61). Poland in the 1970s achieved substantial successes in terms of increasing the standard of living and the modernization of the production of consumer technologies. Two flagship projects of this policy were Polkolor, a highly costly manufacturing plant for the production of color kinescopes that were used in the domestic production of color television sets, and a range of innovations in the production of HEAs. These investments even resulted in the successful exporting of these products and led to the coining of the slogan “Poland as the Hong Kong of the Eastern Bloc” (Przegląd Techniczny 1982: 23).
This policy was designed to secure a steady rise in the standard of living and satisfy the rising consumer aspirations of the Polish baby boomer generation, born shortly after World War II, who had easy access to education and were upwardly mobile through careers in the state economy and administration. According to the guidelines that defined consumer socialism, manufacturers needed to produce industrial consumer goods in large quantities to fulfill demand while at the same time paying much more attention to the quality and aesthetics of their products. The author of a report on the consumer electronics market from 1983 shows how an increasing interest in the “Hi-Fi class” of audio systems was presented with vocabulary characteristic of the language of studies of consumption in state socialist Poland:
One can clearly see the rise in the demand for high-class (Hi-Fi) products with good technical parameters […]. There is a demand for expensive or even highly expensive products. Among purchasers are hobbyists, music lovers, those whose interest in music is their profession. This trend is consistent with trends in highly developed countries. (Jędrzejczak 1983: 47, my translation)
The audiophile culture studies based on empirical research from the USA and the UK clearly show that social inequalities were structural elements of these cultures, since only a limited group of consumers could afford high-end stereo systems and only the chosen few had golden ears to appreciate the uncolored reproduction of sound. In state socialism, both policymakers and intermediary actors appropriated this culture into a vision for the development of the whole society. They argued that the high prices of HEAs should be lowered so that these products could be more easily available to all sections of society, as HEAs offered the opportunity for cultural uplift through everyday practices – listening to music and radio at home. In state socialism, according to the official discourse, all citizens in the near future should be ultimately entitled to own HEAs. Furthermore, there were no golden ears since simply listening to music and even non-music radio broadcasts in stereophony and especially in Hi-Fi quality provides cultural uplift. Such sociotechnical imaginary fitted well with the media narratives that a responsively governed state apparatus has the objective of transforming all beneficiaries of state policy of consumer socialism into an egalitarian society of culturally uplifted citizens.
The manufacturing of HEAs was carried out by several state enterprises from the electronics industry. They were gathered together under the auspices of the Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering Industry Association (UNITRA), established in 1961, a compulsory product-based industrial association that aimed to efficiently coordinate the production of consumer electronics and the pursuit of technological innovation (Woodall 1982; UNITRA-Klub website). UNITRA included several major audio electronics manufacturers such as Diora (radios, stacking systems), Radmor (radios, amplifiers), Zakłady Radiowe Kasprzaka (Kasprzak Radio Works, radios, audio-cassette players), Tonsil (loudspeakers), and Fonica (record players). My research into the comprehensive online catalogs of vintage Polish electronics for collectors shows that virtually all the aforementioned manufacturers in the first half of the 1970s started to manufacture several products with stereophonic sound and products labeled as “Hi-Fi class” (Stare Radio website; UNITRA-Klub website). The introduction of such products on the domestic market was widely communicated in the technical and popular press as a significant technological achievement that sought to reduce the technological gap between Poland and the West.
In the same period, an influential lobby for the electronic engineering community was formed in Poland, including managers and engineers from UNITRA and electronics manufacturers, the SEP (Stowarzyszenie Elektryków Polskich, the Association of Polish Electricians), and two influential periodicals: Przegląd Techniczny (Technological Review) and Radioelektronik. These bodies lobbied for an increase in government investment in consumer electronics through official and unofficial channels and, through public communications, broadly promoted electronics as the technology of the future. The influence of this lobby group on the development of HEAs can be illustrated by a large conference on the development of Hi-Fi radio broadcasting and the production of Hi-Fi class audio systems that was hosted in 1977 by the SEP and prominent electronics research institutes (Radioelektronik 1978: 81).
The modernization of the electronics industry was stimulated by the extensive purchases of Western technological licenses. Polish manufacturers were supposed to appropriate the necessary knowledge base for making modern industrial goods by manufacturing licensed products without the necessity for extensive R&D (Poznanski 1996: 3-12). Typically, the first models of audio electronics introduced in the 1970s were built as licensed products in partnership between Polish manufacturers and Western European or Japanese companies seeking partners fororiginal equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in countries with cheap labor and low production costs. The manufacturing of modern and complex audio electronics and the establishment of such partnerships as part of a broader policy increased the production of high-value-added export products that could be exported outside of the COMECON area, such as audio-cassette players (Poznanski 1996: 56).[2] Going back to the aforementioned quote from Die Hard, Poland attempted to follow Japan with tape decks as a flagship export product that would contribute to the popularization of a “made in Poland” national brand.
The most important products from that time included the radio receiver Elizabeth Stereo (manufactured by Diora), a product manufactured on license from 1973 from Sanyo. Further models that were manufactured from 1976 were labeled as Hi-Fi (Stare Radio website; UNITRA-Klub website). Fonica started manufacturing the Mister Hit record player with its premium Hi-Fi version named WG-417 Stereo Lux. Radmor started manufacturing the highly regarded Radmor 5100 radio receiver in 1977, supplemented by the 5102 model, which is now considered by Polish vintage electronics collectors as the peak of domestic HEA production. The official description of the Radmor 5102 in the manual informs us that it is a “stereo hi fi quasi Quadro” class product and a “luxury radio receiver of the Hi-Fi class” (Zakłady Radiowe Radmor 1977: 3). In the late 1970s, Diora was named as an “innovator in the manufacturing of stereos of hi-fi class,” and it developed a plan to introduce the first Hi-Fi class stacking system described as “a highly fashionable innovation in the West” (Waglewski 1982: 45). It is worth noting the practice of naming such products with English-sounding names (Elizabeth) in the era of establishing cultural and economic connections to the West as well as the vocabulary that explicitly highlights the connection between sound quality and social prestige (Stereo-Lux). HEA-related language practices (Ng and Skotnicki 2016) help to reveal how this technology is situated in a broader context of governmental economic and social policies.
The introduction of technological innovations – stereophonic sound in the early 1970s and Hi-Fi class products in the second half of that decade – were widely covered in the state media and employed as propaganda symbols of technological and economic progress. This policy coincided with the introduction of the DIN Hi-Fi norm in 1973 (DIN 45500). The defining of Hi-Fi as a specific technological norm created the opportunity to claim concrete success: this “Western” standard could be achieved by the domestic electronics industry, supporting the assertion that Poland had reduced the size of the technology gap in electronics.
One of the intrinsic elements of the political rituals of state socialism were the public “production declarations” decided by the work crews of state enterprises and announced publicly at communist party congresses, the most important events of that political system at the time. Such declarations were especially popular in heavy industry. For instance, a work crew of a steel plant could declare that it would double the yearly production quota of steel to honor the hard work of the party leaders. But there were also production declarations of a different kind. In 1975, Fonica released an official press photograph with a block of propaganda text that was to be reproduced in the mass media stating that:
Before the Seventh Congress of the PZPR the work crew of Łódź Radio Works Fonica declared that, to commemorate the seventh Party Gathering, it will design and start manufacturing a record player to the world-class standard for Hi-Fi. (Centralna Agencja Fotograficzna archive, photograph no. 321662/11, National Digital Archive, Warsaw, my translation)
This specific phrasing, with the claim of achieving a world-class standard, was one of the key slogans in the propaganda of the 1970s. It is an instance of how an application of new technological standards (Busch 2011) is a result of a specific political course of modernization and establishing international connections. Here we can see how the DIN 45500 standard, a representation of technological knowledge, has been incorporated into a sociotechnical system. A reader of that message was informed that the Polish electronics industry has moved from the backwaters to join the main currents of manufacturers from the West. This achievement means that Polish consumers no longer need to jealously look toward the West as they will be able to experience the same “world-class” sound quality as do affluent Western audiophiles.
Another press source highlights that such successes are achieved despite limited resources. A press review of a new stacking system from Diora released in 1980 states: “Unitra mini stacking system is said to fill the requirements of Hi-Fi class. And it achieves all of this while being built/assembled from virtually only domestically manufactured components!” (Wyrzykowski 1980: 4, my translation). This short review presents a narrative typical of the 1970s socialist modernity, one that emphasizes the successes of achieving world-class technological standards while using only domestically made components and avoiding the prohibitive cost of imported counterparts that must be paid for in hard currency. Here we can see how a HEA-related national label is built by mentioning the country of origin of the components of audio electronics, both drawing upon and fueling the pride that comes from achieving self-sufficiency (Ng and Skotnicki 2016).
The successes of the Polish modernization project were made possible with the money eagerly lent by Western bankers to fund the modernization policies of Edward Gierek, First Secretary of the PZPR throughout the 1970s, who promised to strengthen Poland’s economic connections with the West. We need to remember that Western convertible currencies played a pivotal role in the sociotechnical system of Polish modernity in the 1970s. The need to repay such loans led to the emergence of an acute economic, social, and, finally, political crisis that culminated in the military coup d'état by general Wojciech Jaruzelski in 1980 and the crackdown on the Solidarity movement in 1981. The 1980s was a decade of acute economic crisis, symbolized by press photographs of empty shelves and never-ending shopping queues. Despite this crisis and the economic and technological stagnation, both governmental agencies and manufacturers continued to prioritize the electronics industry to some extent. However, after the 1980-81 crisis, the goal of making HEAs affordable and available to a wide segment of the society was gone. Developments in this sector continued, albeit on a more limited scale, until 1989. Following the transition to a market economy, virtually all Polish audio manufacturers went bankrupt as a result of their inability to compete with cheaper imported Western products.