From Solidarity to Sellout: The Restoration of Capitalism in Poland

The rise of Solidarity, a working class movement of protest at the austerity policies of the Polish Government in the 1970s and 1980s, shook the Communist world. At the center of that movement’s policy and ideological discussions from 1980s was Tadeusz Kowalik, Poland’s leading political economist. In this book he relates how the Solidarity initiative and the political transformation that it wrought was taken over by free-market enthusiasts who have condemned Poland to a quarter of a century of economic stagnation, mass unemployment, and poverty. His scholarly book is an authoritative account of how the Polish transformation betrayed the Polish working class and its aspirations.

—Jan Toporowski, professor of economics and finance, SOAS, University of London

Finally, a true picture of what Polish workers struck and struggled for and what they got ten years later when the first Solidarity government was hijacked by American advice and pressure for capitalism. This is a crucial look at what people lost in the transition and why Poles voted out those first ‘reformers’ and Poland shifted from the radical right to reformed communists and back again for the next almost two decades. Only with this vision of one of Solidarity’s first key economic advisors can we understand what has happened in East and West Europe when building capitalism trumps providing even minimal social welfare.

—Jane Curry, professor of political science, Santa Clara University

This is a dramatic and excellent book. It reflects the bitter disappointment of the author, a hero of the Solidarity Revolution in Poland, and a superb economist. He is deeply disappointed by the ‘perverse result of the Solidarity Revolution,’ the rise of an unjust socio-economic regime. This factually and theoretically rich, highly critical work is also strongly personal and a cry for a liberal-democratic, socially just Poland. Anybody who is interested in Central Europe and the post-communist transformation has to read it.

—Ivan Berend, distinguished professor of history, UCLA; former president, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

The meandering (and still unfinished) itinerary of the East-European transformation from planned to market economy has never been told with such detail, sobriety and clarity. This study by Tadeusz Kowalik, the most prominent among the close observers and acute analysts of the most seminal episode of recent European history, is bound to become the standard reference for all future inquiries into the manifest and latent alternatives of the on-going and perhaps unfinishable search for good society and its workable economic model.

—Zygmunt Bauman, professor of sociology, The University of Leeds, England

Now we have a genuine ‘insider’ analysis by the prominent Polish political economist Tadeusz Kowalik (1926–2012) of how in his country an old economic system was created from the ashes of the new.

—Science & Society