Poland: The State and Markets
Lipski, Jan Josef
In our thinking about the economic changes underway in Poland, we seem overly impressed by the wealth of the United States and Western Europe, where market forces rule (though not exclusively)....
...The Polish "antisocialists" have not thought much about this arbitrariness...
...Some have objected that this will amount to doling out gifts rather than being a business proposition (there have already been instances of "enfranchisement of the nomenklatura" [party bureaucrats...
...It is their property that will be sold off, because it is entirely the product of their labor...
...This is not a situation that developed organically, in an evolution over decades or centuries...
...It is the displacement of one decision, imposed some forty years ago, with another top-down dictum...
...This choice among such fundamental decisions has to be based on more than economic criteria...
...If the economic reform is not accompanied by the enfranchisement of working people, they will have little reason to give it their support...
...Clearly, neither economy nor politics should be confused with morality, but they should not be held completely separate either...
...Where did the FSO [large automobile plant in Warsaw] come from...
...Until this changes, the PPS will have to limit itself to the role of a people's advocate...
...SUMMER • 1990 • 339...
...11, August 11, 1989, and reprinted in Across Frontiers, Fall-Winter 1989...
...It was not appropriated from anyone, and in a real sense we built it together, paying for it through a lowered standard of living for all...
...I am afraid that this will not be easy...
...Both politics and the economic system can have criminal effects—in which case they ought to be challenged and changed...
...Somehow, the dictatorship of the market (for this is what the extreme laissez-faire position amounts to) functions one way in the highly developed countries of the northern hemisphere, another way among the poor of the southern hemisphere, and in yet another in the countries of Southeast Asia...
...Such decisions ought to be based not only on purely economic criteria but on moral ones as well...
...Yet in virtually every corner of the earth the state interferes in the economy: it imposes taxes, collects custom duties, subsidizes certain sectors of production, e.g., agriculture, maintains price levels (such as the artificial reduction of farm production in the United States), sets monetary policy, undertakes welfare programs that entail economic consequences, and so on...
...Poland needs not only Solidarnosc but a strong social democratic party in order to defend the interests of the most endangered groups in society by the means available to a political party...
...After years of politics insulated from moral criticism, what might lie ahead is an analogous situation in which economic practices are exempt from moral criteria...
...This is made possible by the world's cheapest labor force, with its miserable standards of nutrition, clothing, and housing...
...These latter are now making a great leap in development, producing goods competitive on world markets...
...But above all, we must concentrate our efforts on halting the rapidly widening polarization that is dividing our society into the well-off and the destitute...
...Despite the laissez-fairists, Poland needs to make decisions, arbitrary ones, that determine key features of the changing economic system...
...Sold it will be, or leased (to whom...
...The state will make them—who else...
...for our own good, conveniently overlooking that what is being sold factually and morally belongs to someone...
...This, too, is a rule of the market...
...And that ought to influence the direction of our economic proposals...
...They will, inevitably, take on either a leftist or a rightist hue...
...Box 2382, Berkeley, Calif...
...Let's now turn to the proposals for the reprivatization of Polish industry...
...Translated by FRANEK MICHALSKI from Tygodnik Solidarnosc, no...
...There are people in Poland who say we need an "antisocialist" party...
...I believe the former is more realistic...
...Whatever this party might look like, it would unquestionably push an extreme laissez-faire program...
...But there is more at stake...
...Our Polish laissez-faire advocates, therefore, are simply demanding that we become the first country in the world to radically reject state intervention...
...Everywhere social polarization grows wider...
...Consider, for instance, Brazil and many countries of Southeast Asia...
...If someone were to propose (without any assurance of long-term benefit) to throw millions of people into a poverty and homelessness much worse than may be already the case, in order to create a glorious future—then that person should be told that that future ought to be slightly less glorious, or that it should be put 338 • DISSENT European Revolutions off altogether, rather than to have it realized at the enormous price of today's suffering people hoping for distant future rewards...
...This is a minimalized "egalitarian" program...
...Specifically, they will be the business of the executive bodies of a government installed, as we all know, by a process that can be called neither free, nor universal, nor equal...
...We tend to forget that there are other countries in the world governed by the market, whose situation does not nearly approximate the United States or West Germany or France...
...This, as is well known, is the rallying cry of opposition to state intervention in the economy...
...A few years from now, will we be more similar to Brazil and Malaysia or to West Germany...
...94702...
...And let us not forget that such proposals are for the most part floated by people not themselves in danger of poverty, people who, on the contrary, often stand to make immediate profits...
...Across Frontiers is available for $10 a year from P.O...
...This constitutes a dangerous experiment, especially so for a country undergoing a protracted economic crisis in a context of deeper and deeper poverty...
...Every worker, indeed, every Pole, has a right to say that in large part this will not be a "reprivatization," but a privatization of that which, for better or worse (the latter, as a rule), had been built through the effort and sacrifice of working people...
...The PPS (Polish Socialist party) is unfortunately still too weak for the task...
...Socialists can never accept such a condition, and in this I believe that they will win strong social support...
Vol. 37 • July 1990 • No. 3
