The Ethics of Capitalism - Social Europe Journal

eginning to tighten its grip.
For two decades Warsaw had continued
to develop, even while other parts
of the country floundered. The city
continued along its path of modernity,
work remained generally plentiful and
the benefits and rewards of globalisation
became evermore available.
However, this time it could be different.
One result of the global credit
crunch is that there is now a lack of
capital moving around the international
economy, with this scarce resource
flowing back from the peripheries
towards the centre.
The post-communist countries in
central-eastern Europe are particularly
exposed to this trend. Alongside industrial
workers and agricultural producers,
the jobs of the urban middle class,
usually employed in the international
companies that swept into the country,
are now under threat. At present this
reality is approaching anecdotally: stories
of friends who have lost their jobs,
companies that are cutting back,
salaries that are being reduced. Its
extent and depth is unknown – we sit
tight and hope for the best.
Despite the pleas for unity, the twentieth
anniversary of the fall of communism
has exposed the divisions that
run through Polish society. Virtually no
one will question the historic role of
Solidarity, the importance of John Paul
II, the gains of living in a democratic
system or the benefits of being part of
an expanded European Union. The
main beneficiaries of the transition to
capitalism repeat these ad nauseum
and present them as reasons for national
unity. They try to remind society
how it had stood together against a
common enemy and at how this unity,
this solidarity, had helped not just to
transform Poland but the world.
Yet this is an exaggerated story,
despite the elements of truth that it
contains. By 1989 Solidarity was a
shadow of the mass social movement
of the early 1980s that had claimed 10
million members. The role of
Solidarity was an important factor in
the end of communism, but it was not
decisive. The system was collapsing
from within, unable to compete with a
global capitalist economy or keep up
with the arms race instigated by
Reagan. The Solidarity movement had
arisen with such strength and force,
precisely because the economic contradictions
of this system were felt so
acutely in Poland.
In face of these hardships a unity
was found not through romanticist
notions of the Polish nation but via a
social force that could exert its own
demands as the general will. For
Solidarity was first and foremost a
trade union, an organ of the working
class. The tragedy of the past twenty
years is that while everyone has wanted
to climb upon the bandwagon of
Solidarity, they have also attempted to
dilute the real force and meaning of
this movement. All attempts to replicate
the unity of Solidarity, whilst
excluding and marginalising the very
social class that brought it together, are
inevitably futile and dishonest. As one
trade union banner read in Katowice:
‘We won your freedom, who’s going to
win ours’
40 Social Europe Journal Summer 2009