Jane Hardy, Poland's New Capitalism.

Kilibarda, Konstantin

Jane Hardy, Poland's New Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2009).

Poland was the only EU country in 2009 that successfully avoided sliding into recession. (2) It thus managed to retain its status as a poster-child of neoliberal transition in postcommunist Europe. Even a recent Lancet study that linked declining life expectancy in the 1990s to rapid and comprehensive privatization programs in Central and Easter Europe found that Poland was one of the few countries to buck the general trend (Stuckler et. al. 2009). Now, twenty years after Solidarity's sweeping and dramatic victory in the Polish elections of 1989--following nearly a decade of mass-struggle--the consolidation of democracy and capitalist social relations in Poland seems as solid as ever.

In this context, Jane Hardy's Poland's New Capitalism (2009) offers a critical and nuanced (neo)Marxist take on Poland's reintegration into an emerging European and international division of labour. Hardy's book complicates the above narrative by incorporating landscapes of poverty, de-industrialization, mass migration, and workplace insecurity that accompanied successive iterations of Poland's experiment with neoliberal 'shock therapy.' The scope of Hardy's analysis--spanning the conceptual and analytical terrains of class-analysis, feminism, political economy, migration and labor studies, new social movement theory, etc. highlights her strength as a scholar. It also highlights a panoply of issues that have largely remained marginalized in post-communist studies.

Poland's New Capitalism (2009) is thus organized around three broad themes, including: (i) Hardy's revisionist account of the Polish economy prior to the institution of neoliberalism; (ii) the impact of Poland's re-integration into the global economy on the worlds of 'work, welfare and everyday life;' and (iii) the importance of recovering resistances to neoliberalism as a central feature of our understanding of Poland's recent transitions. At its most basic, Hardy's thesis is that:

"The experience of neoliberalism in Poland has been similar to that of other countries, with a polarization of income, resulting from a redistribution of income and wealth to those at the top end of society, and the majority of people facing increasing insecurity in the workplace and more precarious access to services as welfare is commodified" (Hardy 2009: 3).

While viewing postcommunist transition as 'combined, uneven and contested' (31), Hardy avoids slipping into nostalgic accounts of the communist past--recovering instead a long legacy of working class resistance to the state-centralism of the PZPR regime (1945-1989)--while also remaining critical of one dimensional accounts of neoliberal reform (by both its champions and critics). In fact, Hardy traces a progression from Edward Gierek's reforms in the early 1970s, which tentatively set Poland on the path to integration within the global economy, with the later wholesale adoption of market reform. As a result, she claims that postcommunism in Poland is best understood: "not [as] a movement from one system--communism--to another capitalism, but .. as a 'leap' to integration with the global economy, the foundations of which were laid in the reforms of the 1970s and 1980s" (5).

In this context, Hardy argues that "the working class, organized or otherwise, have played a central role in patterning economic change" (52). In fact, Hardy's book is at its most engaging when recovering the working class history of both Poland's communist era and its neoliberal present. She opens an important space for scholars wishing to revisit the position of organized labor in contesting, shaping and building alternatives to neoliberal state restructuring. Explicitly conceived as an alternative to what she sees as David Ost's (2006) more pessimistic reading of this legacy, Hardy claims that class has been mistakenly "eviscerated from most accounts of transformation" (48). Instead, by focusing on revived labor militancy in Poland since 2005 (and earlier), she contends that new areas of study are possible. (3)

Hardy's chapter on the dynamics of Poland's integration into the global economy also highlights her ability to balance competing perspectives on the massive inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI) it has experienced. She finds little evidence that Poland has simply become a maquiladora for the rest of Europe as some critics claim. However, she also questions whether FDI in Poland has produced the desired technology transfer with the ability to move Poland further along global value-added chains. Hardy argues instead that in "this sea of peripherality there are islands of innovation in relation to [sectors such as] automobiles, IT and defense," though such developments have been "highly uneven as some parts [of the economy] have been destroyed while others have been upgraded" (93). (4)

Hardy is also successful at shedding light on the adverse impacts of transition on the position of Polish women. According to Hardy: "cuts in public spending and welfare provision...have both pushed women out of work and pulled them back into the home" (163). Again, Hardy is critical of both the communist past and the neoliberal present here, critiquing the communist system's failure to secure full equality and the subsequent rollback of many welfare and workplace rights that contributed to greater reproductive freedom. Statistics on women's current over representation within the ranks of the unemployed and among labour migrants, as well as anecdotal evidence of intensified gender-based discrimination in the workplace, reinforce the image of rollback. In this context, Hardy discusses both the impact of right-wing social movements in attempting to reassert conservative and patriarchal values in Polish society as well as new forms of feminist resistance seeking to address discrimination on the grounds of both sexuality and gender (163-183).

One shortcoming of Hardy's study is that she often relies on assertions without providing any data to back her claims--e.g. when claiming that "migrant workers are central to British and Irish capitalism" or when discussing the increasingly proactive nature of labor organizing in Poland (while failing to produce recent figures on the frequency or concrete successes of industrial action). At other times, Hardy allows broad concepts familiar in Marxist literature to do some of the heavy-theoretical lifting in her account and thereby skim over important contradictions (for instance, the term 'ruling class' litters Hardy's account, in contrast to her own contention at other points that Poland's communist nomenklatura and its postcommunist elite should be conceptually disaggregated). (5)

Nevertheless, Hardy's study is still worth reading for those interested in exploring the dominant tensions and contradictions likely to continue animating Poland's political economy in the coming years. It is also useful for those interested in movements across the region that are, "starting to reclaim the language of emancipation, workers' democracy and women's liberation, which was brutally distorted by the Stalinist regimes" (11). While Hardy's account remains unfortunately thin in its discussion of these movements, Poland's New Capitalism nevertheless remains a rich, nuanced and layered attempt to capture the divergent landscapes and life-worlds of Polish capitalism within which such movements have emerged following two-decades of neoliberal reform.

Konstantin Kilibarda

York University

(2) The Polish economy benefited from a weak zloty that encouraged exports and was further boosted by rising demand for its automotive production lines in light of Western European car-replacement schemes. Poland has also benefited from a strong internal market, sustained consumer demand, the securing a $20.6-billion IMF reserve credit line and a range of EU funded construction projects. With the looming threat of budgetary cuts in 2010--spurred by constitutionally mandated provisions triggering cutbacks if public debt mounts to 55% of GDP--Donald Tusk's Civic Platform (PO) government has announced a new round of privatizations valued at some 37-billion zlotys (including the selling off of minority shares in energy producers PGE and Tauron, copper miner KGHM, oil refiner Lotos, Polish national airline LOT, and the Warsaw Stock Exchange).

(3) Some examples include: the shift by labor from defensive to more proactive demands; the adoption of new recruiting methods; creative forms of industrial action; attempts to organize emerging sectors of the economy; the development of transnational links with other unions; the need to organize migrant workers entering Poland from North Korea, India, Belarus and Ukraine as well as Polish migrant workers employed in the UK, Ireland and in other parts of the EU; and, the willingness to raise novel issues such as mobbing (bullying) and discrimination in the workplace.

(4) In class terms this has translated into an emerging core of increasingly wealthy white-collar professionals clustered around key sectors of the knowledge economy, including business and financial services, with an increasing mass of workers thrown into increasingly precarious service sector jobs. It also suggests the need to pay greater attention to new management techniques and forms of labour discipline introduced into Polish workplaces (Hardy provides a highly insightful account of such practices in the sixth chapter of her book).

(5) While Hardy's book provides a broad set of interesting starting points for further research and inquiry, it fails to take into consideration some other potential points of departure for an alternative research agenda, including: a more detailed discussion of the legal and constitutional constraints imposed on successive Polish governments that limit the range of policy options; the role and nature of popular culture as a contested space in Poland for articulating various forms of working class consciousness, mass-culture, etc.; as well as the environmental impact of Poland's disproportionate reliance on a policy of using coal to fuel its current development model.