Poland’s New Capitalism, by Jane Hardy

Abstract

Jane Hardy Poland's New Capitalism, Pluto Press: London, 2009, 258 pp: 9780745324579, 60 [pounds sterling] (hbk); 9780745324562 17.09 [pounds sterling] (pbk) In a crisis-stricken world, the mainstream media continues to set Poland up as an example of a successful transformation and a model of prosperous neoliberal development. But 'the only economy in the EU not to plunge into recession' and 'the future economic powerhouse of Europe' are not the images that Jane Hardy draws in her book. Poland's New Capitalism successfully calls into question a number of popular myths that have been perpetrated about Poland since the EU enlargement, and arguably since the collapse of communism. Hardy looks at a putative 'tiger economy' of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) from a different angle, and through her extensive interviews with activists, managers, workers and others, she manages to capture the sense of disillusionment, exclusion and indifference felt by many Poles, who live alongside the prosperous and well-established elite. The first two chapters provide the reader with the historical context necessary to grasp Poland's new capitalism and its integration into the global political economy. Hardy begins with a short account of the postwar history of Poland. She manages to briefly present the installation of the crisis-prone Soviet-style economy and investigates a series of crises and major rebellions that fostered a process of gradual and unsuccessful reforms, which only pushed the country towards a prolonged stagnation and greater integration with global capitalism. In her examination of the final years of market socialism, Hardy discusses the roots and origins of opposition and devotes special attention to the rise of Solidarity. The main focus here is given to economic and labour-related issues, but the author's analysis oversees both historic and cultural aspects regarding the issue of resistance. Hardy divorces Solidarity from a struggle for national liberation and sees it as mainly a social-democratic trade union that by the late-1980s, due to martial law and repression, 'came to be represented by a small number of individuals ... who were proponents of the free market' (p. 28). Depicting the workers' rebellions as mainly a response to ever-decreasing working conditions and falling standards of living, and ignoring the patriotic dimension of the movement, is, however, somewhat misleading. It ignores the fact that apart from defending workers' rights, Solidarity was also fuelled by very deeply rooted anti-Soviet, pro-Catholic, and national-liberation sentiments. This aspect can by no means be ignored, for many Solidarity activists regarded their actions as a continuation of the fight for independence, and viewed socialism as an unwanted system imposed by the Soviet occupiers. This, in turn, goes towards an explanation of why the post-communist Solidarity-led governments, along with many governments across CEE, willingly turned to market-oriented policies and remained hostile to anything remotely socialist. In the next chapter, the book scrutinises the rapid liberalisation of trade and the disintegration of the state-planned economy, and contrasts the neoliberal and institutionalist accounts of the transformation with historical-materialist arguments that draw from Antonio Gramsci. In regard to the latter, Hardy offers an interesting theoretical analysis. The use of uneven and combined development accurately captures the overnight introduction of neoliberal policies, which she rightly views as a 'leap' rather than a gradual process, while her notion of creative destruction also encapsulates the nature of mass privatisation of state assets and the collapse of the state-directed economy. In her analysis of the new ruling class, Hardy accurately notices that it was 'the cliques of the old nomenklatura and Solidarity', accompanied by foreign capital, that really emerged victorious in the new reality, while the Solidarity-mobilised masses were frequently marginalised, facing unemployment and poverty (pp. …