From Solidarity to Sellout: The Restoration of Capitalism in Poland, by Tadeusz Kowalik. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011. Paper, $17.95. Pp. 366.
Michael Munk
Critical insider examinations in English of the actual process of restoring capitalism from the “really existing” East European socialist economies are too rare. We have hindsight on the consequences of that restoration in several specific areas as, for example, on the weakness of their trade unions, and theoretical work by Janos Kornai and others. But now we have a genuine “insider” analysis by the prominent Polish political economist Tadeuz Kowalik (1926–2012) of how in his country an old economic system was created from the ashes of the new.
A student of Oscar Lange and adviser to the early Solidarity union movement, Kowalik accepts that with the debilitating stagnation of the “really existing” socialist economy and the consequent political fragility of the People’s Republic of Poland, the old system had to be replaced. His criticism is rather against the “shock therapy” through which capitalism was imposed and the devastation it visited on the Polish working and agricultural classes. He holds responsible an unlikely coalition of corrupt Communist politicians and victorious Solidarity leaders mesmerized by American free market advisers. With barely controlled anger, he insists that a “Scandinavian” version of capitalism, grown gradually under socialist standards of justice and equality, would have put “really existing socialism” to bed with far less suffering and dislocation than did “primitive Anglo-Saxon” capitalism…
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