"Free market, enslaved people"

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, June 12, 2002

As Poland Endures Hard Times, Capitalism Comes Under Attack
By IAN FISHER


SZCZECIN, Poland ? In Communist times, no one was louder than Poland's
famously feisty shipyard workers about the state's inability to provide a
decent standard of living. So now it seems a cruel joke that, as the
sparkle fades from the market economy, it is private enterprise that has
failed them.
 
Since March, the Szczecin shipyard has been closed, and 6,000 workers have
not been paid. When violence loomed, the government stepped in, announcing
a plan in May that would, for the first time, renationalize a Polish company.

"It is certainly very abnormal," said Bogoslaw Rydzenski, 48, a worker. "No
one could have predicted this."

These are hard times in Poland, which grew for nearly 10 straight years
into a country of stocked shelves, giant malls and impressive
self-confidence ? a 40-million-strong symbol of Central Europe's
post-Communist hopes.

Now, the will to continue privatization and other reforms, and even the
desire to join the European Union, have flagged. The story is much the same
around the region, as the transformation from gangly state economies has
brought material comfort, but also insecurity and a new set of
inequalities. In Poland, indeed, the very notion that Western-style
capitalism will work in the eastern nation that embraced it perhaps most
heartily is under attack.

"There is an apropos graffiti," Krzysztof Bledowski, an economist, said as
he sat in a cafe in downtown Warsaw. He pointed across the street to a car
parts shop, where someone had scrawled on a wall: "Free market, enslaved
people."

Full: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/12/international/europe/12POLA.html

Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org



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