The Ethics of Capitalism - Social Europe Journal

of industrial greatness conflicted with
its inability to regularly provide basic
consumer goods.
And so anyone who resists the forces
of free-market capitalism is a conservative
relic from the past. Those that
defend their workplaces, industries,
pensions or welfare services are
restricting society’s newly gained freedoms
and opportunities. All these collectives
are dying embers from the
past, while the future belongs to the
new ‘free individual’.
This first version of history remained
dominant throughout the 1990s and
continued into the new millennium.
All the main political parties, whether
from the right or left, post-communist
or ex-Solidarity, were subsumed into
this overarching hegemony. And so it
remained, right up until the centre-left
government steered Poland into the
European Union in 2004. But the transition
had taken its toll. Poland had
been the first post-communist country
to recover from the post-transition economic
collapse, inflicted upon all the
countries in the region, and the first to
return to its pre-1989 level of GDP.
However, unemployment soared (rising
above 20% by the end of 1990s),
huge social divisions appeared and
public services crumbled. Those living
in the countryside or declining industrial
towns found themselves stuck in a
cycle of poverty and despair, in total
contrast to the growth that continued
in the urban oases of globalisation. The
slogan of the opposition – ‘There is no
Freedom without Solidarity’ (Nie ma
Wolnosci bez Solidarnosci) – had truly
been forgotten.
It was in these conditions that the
second story of Poland’s road from
communism gained prominence. The
political consensus had been based
upon an alliance between elements of
the previous elite (now reincarnated as
social democrats) with a section of the
Solidarity liberal intelligentsia. The latter
had largely been defeated and marginalised
in the early 1990s, due to the
role they had played in introducing the
shock-therapy economic reforms, with
the ‘post-communists’ becoming the
most coherent and stable force in
Polish politics.
However, the social effects of the
reforms connected to taking Poland
into the EU, along with numerous corruption
scandals, reduced this party to
a minor political player. The disillusionment
and anger felt by the ‘losers
of transition’ were directed against the
elite. Rather than the post-communist
transition being one of freedom and
opportunity, it became a story of corruption,
nepotism and conspiracy. The
elites of the opposition were seen to
have conspired with those from the
former system to create a new network
of interests (uklad) and secure positions
in the upper echelons of government
and business. Anti-communist
sentiment mingled with social conservatism
and xenophobia to create a conspiratorial
description of post-communist
deceit.
The centre of political power had
shifted back from Warsaw to Gdansk.
Not to the mass workers movement,
that had attracted the attention of the
world in the early 1980s, but to parties
grouped around two conflicting factions
who had been minor players in
the Solidarity movement. Both were
building their support through opposing
the arrogant liberal elite in Warsaw
and espoused replacing the young
Third Republic with a new Fourth
Republic. On the one hand, Citizens’
Platform (PO) combined a radical freemarket
ideology with social conservatism;
on the other, the Law and
Justice Party (PiS) proposed a radical
anti-communist policy, which supported
rooting out those from positions of
power who had ‘collaborated’ with the
communist state.
In 2005 PiS won the Presidential
election and emerged as the largest
party in the parliamentary elections. It
subsequently formed a government
with the populist agrarian and nation-
38 Social Europe Journal Summer 2009