File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9711, message 53


Date: Mon, 3 Nov 1997 13:15:39 -0800 (PST)
From: Dennis R Redmond <dredmond-AT-gladstone.uoregon.edu>
Subject: M-I: Re: Working class politics in Poland


On Sun, 2 Nov 1997, Stephen E Philion wrote:

> How do you explain that Poland is not going the smart route?  What
> constraints keep it from doing so?

Actually, they are indeed going the smart route, but noone is saying so.
The Poles, after having endured Rightwing and Leftwing authoritarianisms
for most of the 20th century, are past masters of saying what the
authorities want to hear, and then going and doing whatever the hell they
want to do anyway. Sure, the Government pays ritual obeisance to the IMF,
but is the welfare state really being destroyed in Poland? Are enterprises
slashing payrolls, elimininating daycare creches, etc.? The evidence is
mixed at best: yes, housing and fuel subsidies have vanished, prices were
decontrolled and health and education expenditures slashed. But the
Government has also been slapping tariffs on imports, giving soft loans to
state enterprises, ladling out unemployment insurance, boosting pensions
and the like. The noxious goons over at the World Bank fretted in a recent
report that welfare payments in the Visegrad states were still largely
directed to the middle-class, rather than the "truly needy", i.e. people
aren't giving up their Central-European style benefits without a fight.
The Czech unions, for example, won lots of progressive legislation in the
1989-92 period, and unemployment has been kept below 3% via state aid,
training grants etc. Hungary still has its welfare net. And throughout all
of Eastern Europe, the political climate has turned sharply against the
market Stalinism of the global rentiers and their would-be comprador
juniors.   

I suspect the constraints are mostly external: Eastern Europe still has
too much foreign debt, and until the Eurostate starts spending its way out
of the Long Depression of the 1990s and sucking in huge volumes of
imports, Visegrad won't be able to export enough goods to pay for genuine
development.

-- Dennis



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