There’s really not a lot of literature on this in English from a leftist perspective. But I’ve read “From Solidarity to Sellout: The Restoration of Capitalism in Poland” by Tadeusz Kowalik and it’s pretty good. Kowalik argues that Solidarity did initially begin as a worker controlled union that was acting in protest to Polish austerity measures at first, but was co-opted by foreign interests and capital by the 90s.
The funny part about reading that book is I remember thinking that what happened to Poland is what liberals accuse socialists of doing. As in, the accusation that a communist party acts as a new capitalist class and everything stays the same but gets worse. A lot of former party officials and Solidarity leaders just swapped places to become the new elite capitalist class in the new Poland.
There’s really not a lot of literature on this in English from a leftist perspective. But I’ve read “From Solidarity to Sellout: The Restoration of Capitalism in Poland” by Tadeusz Kowalik and it’s pretty good. Kowalik argues that Solidarity did initially begin as a worker controlled union that was acting in protest to Polish austerity measures at first, but was co-opted by foreign interests and capital by the 90s.
The funny part about reading that book is I remember thinking that what happened to Poland is what liberals accuse socialists of doing. As in, the accusation that a communist party acts as a new capitalist class and everything stays the same but gets worse. A lot of former party officials and Solidarity leaders just swapped places to become the new elite capitalist class in the new Poland.