Book review: From Solidarity to Sell Out: The Restoration of Capitalism in Poland, by Tadeusz Kowalik

Abstract

From Solidarity to Sell Out: The Restoration of Capitalism in Poland, Monthly Review Press: New York, 2012; 270 pp: 9781583672969, 15.95 [pounds sterling] (pbk) The starting point of this review must be to acknowledge the intellectual and political stature of the author--the, respected prolific Polish economist Tadeusz Kowalik, who died in 2012. His lifetime spanned dramatic and panoramic changes in Polish history. He was born in 1926, eight years after the restoration of an independent Polish state; lived through the Great Depression; saw the imposition of communism and the Stalinisation of Poland in the post-Second World War settlement; and was an active participant in the so-called transformation process from 1990 onwards. Kowalik was associated with a group of renowned Polish economists such as Oskar Lange, Wlodzimierz Brus, Edward Lipifiski and Michal Kalecki, who were active in proposing economic reforms for the Polish system in the 1950s and 1960s, and whose theoretical work inspired current neo-Keynesian thinking. Kowalik was a persistent but engaged critic of the communist regime, and from the 1950s onwards, had argued in favour of an economy based on the self-management of workers, which had a long tradition in Poland. As part of a general purge of oppositionist intellectuals in 1968, he was eventually expelled from the Communist Party, and from this point onwards became part of a growing opposition movement. For example, he was a member of the Workers Defence League (KOR) with Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, authors of the pivotal 'Open Letter to the Party' in 1965, which criticised the bureaucratic class and argued in favour of workers' democracy. In the huge upheavals of 1980-1, he supported the demands of the Gdansk shipyard workers, and was an advisor to the Solidarity trade union and political party. The key question posed by the book is evident from its title. Namely, how did a country that in 1980-1 had one of the, if not the largest workers' movements in history, renowned for its widespread factory occupations in support of radical economic and political demands, go on to experience the imposition of the most ferocious 'shock therapy' underpinned by the most extreme form of neoliberalism only a decade later. Kowalik questions the outcomes of transformation, not by the yardstick of conventional economists (competitiveness), but in terms of the misery that was heaped on large sections of the population. He argues that an idealised myth of the market was adopted with the crude formula of 'commercialise, privatise and deregulate' in the shortest possible period, and at great cost to ordinary people. According to Kowalik, the round table negotiations between representatives of the ruling Communist Party and the opposition (February to April 1989) were the critical juncture between two versions of capitalism. The first version was a co-operative social democratic model underpinned by the principle of workers' self-management and full employment, akin to the Swedish model. The second version, which prevailed and underpinned 'shock therapy', was the Anglo-Saxon model of market-based capitalism, where the high human cost in terms of unemployment was deemed to be the medicine necessary for a sclerotic economy. Kowalik argues that the acceptance of the 'leap to the market' model was eased politically by the transformation of Solidarity in the previous decade from a 10-million strong democratic mass workers' movement to a small, unaccountable committee where co-option was the order of the day. Four chapters in the book are dedicated to the question of ownership and privatisation. Accounts of debates during the 1980s are discussed, and the inclusion of the deliberations of the Krakow Congress of Polish Economists of 1987 gives a flavour of the level of detail of the narrative. Further, debates about the political strategy of privatisation are situated in an extensive discussion on property rights theories. …