Adrian Zandberg at the solidarity demonstration with protesting nurses in Warsaw. Razem photos. Michał Radwański. All rights reserved.Alex Sakalis (AS): Could you start
off by telling us a bit about Razem, what distinguishes it from the other
political parties in Poland and how it came about?
Adrian Zandberg
(AZ): Razem is an attempt to construct a left-wing alternative
in Poland. What has actually never materialized in Poland to date, is a
fully-fledged left-wing political party. The field for years and years was
occupied by the post-communists.
Their economic policies were strictly neo-liberal. When they were in power,
they introduced a flat tax rate for businessmen, cut corporate taxes,
liberalized labor laws. Not to mention that they eagerly supported the Iraq
wars and imperial policies of G. W. Bush. This all functioned under the name of
‘political Left’. And it was extremely frustrating. If someone asked you – what
are your political views? – and you answered “left-wing”, you were associated with
those post-communist, neoliberal, right-wing politicians and policies.
There had been attempts to organize an
independent Left in Poland, mostly on university campuses. Our major challenge
was to expand out of the campus. And we have been successful – we have managed
to organize a viable political party. This is not exactly easy in Poland: you
need to gather 100 thousand supporter signatures just in order to stand in
elections.
In the elections we crossed the 3%
threshold. It means that we have no representation in parliament, but we gained
public funding until the next elections. Passing this hurdle is crucial because
now we can, for instance, organize party offices around Poland with considerable
and efficient tools for campaigning. And, most importantly, with our activity we managed to open the door for left-wing arguments in the
media, gaining a little space to question neo-liberal policies We
managed to open the door for left-wing arguments in the media, gaining a little
space to question neo-liberal policies and the dominant conservative attitudes
held by all the big political parties in the parliament. Of course these are
first baby steps. There is a long way from here to the moment when it will be
possible to implement a progressive agenda in Poland after a victorious
election.
Rosemary Bechler (RB): When you
talk about this achievement, you often emphasize the fact that you are building
the left from the ground up, starting from scratch.
AZ: We simply don’t have much choice. It’s not that there is a
collection of political organizations already existing and we just need to
bring them together to make a political impact, as was the case of the New Left
in various western European countries after 2008. Compare Poland and Spain,
compare our experience and that of Podemos – these are two different worlds.
Podemos was born out of a wave of social mobilization that just needed a
political form to find representation. Poland is also obviously at a different
stage of capitalist development, we have a comparatively low level of
participation in terms of trade union and social activism. Razem cannot
capitalize on pre-existing social movements: we must function as a party and
stir social mobilisation at
the same time.
RB: We have been exploring Podemos’
interesting negotiation with the social movements on openDemocracy. There is so
much ambition on all sides. But you talk about having a particular challenge
with the lack of hope and political aspiration?
AZ: I
don’t think it’s unique for Poland. We share that problem with many European
countries. There is a growing number of voters who do not have any expectations
from the political system, or hope that their votes could really matter, that
the promises made them will materialize, that any political movement will stand
for the issues important to them.
This voters’ cynicism is not something
that “just happened”. It’s a direct consequence of a real lack of choice for
many years, when under the pressure of globalization, centre-left and
centre-right governments implemented very similar policies. If you don't have a
Left that is able to question unjust social relations and give viable
perspectives on changing the world for the better, then politics dies. It just
becomes an administration where faces and symbols change, but the policies
don’t.
This lack of hope is something absolutely
crucial: if people don’t regain their hope for a political change that is
possible through elections, political passivity will further weaken the progressive camp and contribute to the domination
of either neoliberal technocrats, the managers of the currently existing
system, or those who question it, but from the right.
This is what happened in Poland. The transition
of the early 1990s was implemented under the banner of “we are now chasing the
West, and we need to adapt our economy, so there is no alternative”. As there
was no credible Left to serve as alternative option, the authoritarian right
claimed the field. This is of course a problem throughout Europe: social groups
traditionally served by left-wing political parties saw that social democrats
have given up on them.
As a result, they gradually turn to the
far right which is very efficient in translating economic frustrations into
hatred against migrants, against gays, against minority groups of various
kinds. Poland is in no way different in this respect, it’s just that these
processes took place earlier there and were much more acute.
Celebrating the election results during the election night, October 2015. Michał Radwański. All rights reserved.RB: Razem has found quite a
lot of support already. So how did you address that question of hope?
AZ: For
starters, we all need to swallow the fact that neoliberals
were very good at giving hope, hope for individual success. We all need to swallow the fact that neoliberals were very good at
giving hope, hope for individual success. But after years
and years of waiting around and no success materializing, this results in a lot
of social frustration. And the big political question is who will be able to
respond to this frustration?
For instance, in Poland, you have this
phenomenon of people falsely referred to as ‘self-employed’. In fact, these
people are just workers: they were made to register their own businesses, so
that the corporations that hire them could cut down employment costs. And of
course they very often have false consciousness: they really believe that they are
venturesome self-made-men on their way to becoming millionaires. One of our
tasks is to tell them the truth, which proves them wrong in this, but at the
same time gives them real practical hope of changing their lives: acquiring the
social security, due access to public services and long-term life stability
that they are deprived of at the moment.
In order to fight for these rights they
need to get organized, and leave behind the belief that the only way of getting
lifetime security is to excel as lone actors in competition against each other.
So to give true hope, you need to crash the false hope that neoliberals gave to
these groups, introduce them to reality – and show them a down-to-earth
practical way out.
Razem protests in front of the Prime Minister's office in March 2016. Michał Radwański. All rights reserved.RB: But how
are we to create new agents for change on the requisite scale in our societies?
How do you set about doing this?
AZ: We need
to fill the void. Once, if you were a worker and had a problem at your work
place, you would go to the union and the union would help you. After Poland’s transformation, numerous branches
of the economy don’t have trade unions at all. There are millions of workers
who do not have any kind of trade union experience, any kind of collective
experience in the negotiation of their wages, or over situations at their
workplace. Traditional trade unions can’t break into the sphere of low paid or
precarious work such as that of janitors or cleaners.
So what we try to do is to step into the
gap. For instance, public universities outsource security services to private
businesses which then employ janitors on precarious contracts. What we managed
to do, because we are a political party, was to bring the attention of the
media and public opinion to these situations. We help the janitors to organize
themselves so that their issues become a matter of public debate. We organised
a campaign at the very time that the new heads of universities were elected and
at three different universities we managed to win the day: precarious contracts
were transformed into normal labour contracts. We brought practical change and we
won trust.
When we set up our network of party
offices, we want to make them social centres, places where you can come and
organize into a consumer cooperative or take part in educational activities. We
want to put Razem at the centre of social life. In a way it’s a return to one’s
origins. We want to put Razem at the centre of social
life. In a way it’s a return to one’s origins. How did the
social democrats win over the working classes, and convince labouring people
that they were a class with common interests? If you look at 1900 Germany, you
will see workers’ cooperatives, workers’ sport, workers’ theaters, workers’
self-education – all these spheres of life were politicized. We need to
reinvent this spirit.
What combats apathy towards politics
among the younger generation? It is when politics is no longer what ‘they do’
but what ‘we do’. Neoliberals split the social world into millions of competing
individuals, each of them holding the banner ‘I will do it myself’. It’s not
enough to talk about the alternative, we need to show that cooperation works.
And that already happens. You see considerable numbers of these cooperative
initiatives popping up in many places. I believe this experience is crucial.
RB: The fake self-employed people
you mentioned earlier will, however, be individuals in the first instance,
won’t they? How do you articulate what the bigger thing is that they might
involve themselves in?
AZ: In
order for those individual strategists to survive, they need to organize. It’s
not the first time it happens in history – traditional left wing movements also
tried to bring the dynamics of individual striving into a collective
experience. Artisans, in many countries farmers: these were the worlds where
cooperatives gave people an experience of collective action. Of course it
doesn’t happen overnight. We are perfectly aware that the social changes we
talk about are not going to happen automatically once the Left wins an
election. We do need to construct social actors on an everyday basis. But it is obviously the responsibility of
political parties also to think how to make it easier for those social pockets
to grow and how to use the tools of the state to sustain their development.
RB: It could be a great advantage,
the fact that individuals will have to opt into collective action rather than
society taking it for granted that this is the only thing to do in life.
AZ: What
is promising is this new interest in cooperativism. That became stronger
after 2008 when many people saw how those who organized cooperatively managed
to survive better. I think one of the huge tasks of the European Left is to
work out how the state can be used to support those experiments in collective
activity.
I’ll give you an example. In Poland,
ideological love of individual entrepreneurship translated into very practical
institutions set up by the neo-liberals. If you are unemployed, you are offered
a chance to start your own business, and you are given money from the state for
your microbusiness start-up. Now why not turn it the other way around? Instead
of supporting individual businesses, why not help to gather 20-30 persons
together, organize democratically, and then you would qualify for receiving
bigger funds Why not turn it the other way around?
Instead of supporting individual businesses, why not help to gather 20-30
persons together, organize democratically, and then you would qualify for
receiving bigger funds to set up a functioning, viable
cooperative? It’s perfectly possible, and practical, and easy to imagine. Such
examples of functioning self-organization could be replicated. And that gives
very practical hope when you see people who organize their labor in a
democratic way, who control their lives, because they do not fight each other
but cooperate.
RB: What are the features of your
party that have somehow worked in addressing such problems?
AZ: We
try to revive what used to be the key strength of the democratic left: the
tension between being very practical in terms of political proposals, and very audacious
in imagining a more just economic system. The audacity helped to push
boundaries of what was possible, the practicality helped to grip people with
your vision. Without that tension, which fuels real-world fights, the democratic
left is dead, as we see today in many European countries. But balancing between
the two poles is tricky. There’s not much use for campus socialists, who just
sit and discuss the ‘revolution’. But we also don’t want to repeat the road of
those who were so practical that it made them supporters of the Washington
Consensus.
Take the Brexit debate. As far as I
understand it, the main problem of the British left in the Remain camp was how
to say, “Well, we want to remain in Europe, but unfortunately not the current
Europe, which is a neo-liberal project.” How do you build a campaign to defend
something you don’t believe can work in the first place without a complete
revamp? The general idea of a “change” was there, but without details the
campaign was completely unconvincing, too hypothetical to organise emotions, to
mobilise people.
And the problem is still there. Many
left-wing movements talk about a democratisation of the EU. And rightly so. But
for the moment what we have is a vague vision which touches the everyday
experience of Europeans not in the slightest. Just now, what we desperately need
are symbolic but practical steps that can conquer mass imagination.
I fully support Varoufakis’ proposals, but I’m afraid that publishing online the
proceedings of the European Central Bank is not quite what we are looking for.
We must find something as down-to-earth as possible, say the European
unconditional basic income, European minimum wage, or any other form of
guaranteed minimum income. Do the sums, discuss it, and name a number, say: 200
euros monthly for every household, coming from European social policies. Make
an emotional campaign around it, and it would definitely win more people to
European integration than (however badly needed) institutional transparency. We don’t want to repeat the road of those who were so practical
that it made them supporters of the Washington Consensus.
If we want to win majorities, we need to
talk to people who are not that much into political debates, people who are not
accustomed to deliberate on trade treaties, people who are living on a week to
week, month to month basis, trying simply to find their way to stability in the
world they live in. Direct transfers are great for this, as we can see from the
example of direct payments to farmers which were the strength of the European
integration process when it still had some social ambitions. For the moment we
are not moving in this direction and it’s one of the reasons why the far-right
arguments are so strong right now. They filled a vacuum. They give false
answers – but these are very practical answers.
March 2016 protests. Michał Radwański. All rights reserved.RB: So many people seem to
experience Europe as an abstraction.
AZ: Yet,
the reason why social elites are so engaged in the debate is that for them
Europe is not an abstraction. It translates directly into their opportunities
to have higher incomes. That also tells us something about how the system is
corrupted. You cannot point to a single European policy after Maastricht that
could easily be identified as standing up for the rights of the common people.
AS: There’s a stereotype about the
former communist countries ever since the transition, that once told that there is no alternative to the
neo-liberal path they have to follow, these have become totally apathetic,
depoliticized societies, despite their very precarious economic situation. But
recently, in places like Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, there seems to be
something of a political awakening among people who were born in the late 80s
and early 90s? Is that true?
AZ: I
think there’s something in it. When you look at the people who come together in
Razem, these are mostly people in their 30s, who already had experience of the
precarious labour market. That contrasted
with what they were taught in school: that markets alone will solve all of our
conceivable problems, and that individual success is possible for everyone –
they have seen with their own eyes that it just doesn’t work. On the other
hand, that’s also a generation that has had a lot of international experience,
due to the free movement of labour. The social systems of western Europe, while
they are in the process of being dismantled and incomparably smaller than they
used to be in 70s and 80s, still contrast starkly with those from countries
like Poland. All this is why groups looking for an alternative are on the
increase.
The problem we have in Poland, and I
think not just there, is that while this neo-liberal consensus is cracking open
and caving in, the Left is not yet an adequate political force to build on this
disappointment, unfortunately. There are conservative nationalist forces who
quite efficiently capitalized on the crisis of neo-liberal capitalism. These
are two fronts on which we have to confront our political enemies: the
neo-liberal camp defending the status quo and the nationalists who are trying
to become the force challenging Poland’s current model which developed
over the last two decades. Tough as it is, to confront them means to address
parts of their constituencies with our message, in order to attract them to our
new left-wing project.
Polish Razem Party calling the Polish Prime minister to publish Constitutional Tribunal verdict, PM's Office in Warsaw, March 11, 2016. Czarek Sokolowski /Press Association . All rights reserved.RB: Can you explain how the main
political parties and Poland’s social movement fit into that dual trajectory?
AZ: The division is often inside institutions. Take
the governing party, Law and Justice. It is a right-wing conservative party,
with a former Santander Bank CEO serving as minister of development, and with a
certain authoritarian streak. But it is now trying to sell itself as a party
that will expand social policy. And one should say here that they have
implemented one important policy change: £100 (500 zloty) benefits for every
child, for families that have two or more kids. According to data gathered by
the World Bank this will have a really huge impact on childhood poverty, and
poverty in general.
RB: Do Law and Justice do this to
differentiate themselves from the Civic Platform and show that they do fulfil
their promises?
AZ: That’s
one thing. But they do it because they want to keep pro-social voters. When you
look at what enabled them to win the elections, they did more than just mobilizing
social conservatives and national Catholics, the traditional camps that stood
behind the party. First, they capitalized on the fact that people were tired of
the corruption and political inertia. But crucially, they also sold themselves
as exponents of social change, those who will make a turn in social policy, and
managed to drag into their camp an important body of pro-social voters. And
this is the group we need to fight back for the Left.
It is feasible. Law and Justice sells a
package: a certain, quite incoherent pro-social turn, bound together with
authoritarian attitudes towards democratic institutions. This includes anti-gay
sentiments and attempts to introduce harsh anti-abortion laws. If it were to
materialize, it would be a complete disaster. And many people who voted for Law
and Justice will simply stop supporting them when they start putting women in
jail for abortion.
The main opposition camp around Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska) and
.Modern (.Nowoczesna) is simply a 100% neo-liberal throwback to the world of
the 1990s. They believe that our economic transformation was a great success:
Nowoczesna wants to introduce a flat rate of taxation; they want to change
taxes in a way that would privilege the richest 10% and take this money from
the rest. The huge street protests against the government are organized around
these political powers, but on the other hand, huge groups of people
participate in them not out of attachment to regressive taxation or out of love
of the compromised Civic Platform politicians, but simply because they’re angry
at what Law and Justice does. And the Left can win them over, too.
RB: Even if they are middle class?
AZ: Some
of them are middle class indeed. But the middle class in central and eastern
Europe is very different from western Europe. Is a teacher who earns £400-500
per month a middle class person or not? I’d rather say they’re remnants of what
used to be intelligentsia. And many of them, I believe, are future voters for
the Left. We want to win them over – but not at any price. One thing that we at
Razem will not do – and this frustrates Polish media pundits a lot – we will
not stand on the same platform as the neo-liberals and say: “The only problem
we have is Kaczyński. If we just get together and oust him, everything will be
cool”. No, it won’t be cool. Returning to the world order before the last
election is not a solution. Kaczyński is a symptom showing that these policies
simply did not work.
March 2016. Michał Radwański. All rights reserved.RB: Yesterday you were talking
about the socialists in Poland’s history who inspire you.
AZ: The
strength of the Polish Right is in large part a result of the fact that they
managed to sell their symbols and their narratives of history and it has made them
so popular that it went mainstream before they capitalized on that in
elections. I think one of the biggest mistakes on the left in Poland, was that
it did not engage in creating a historical counter-narrative. We rarely tried
to retell the history of Poland, show off our good guys and how they were
right. The Polish Socialist Party (PPS), I was suggesting, is a perfect example
of this neglected tradition that could be used to form a leftwing narrative. It
was a democratic socialist party, born in the late nineteenth century, created
a mode of patriotism that was inclusive and anti-nationalist in so far as it
was multicultural, multi-ethnic, based on the common good. If the Left had not
vacated this terrain, the Right would never have been able to colonize it and
claim patriotism as “theirs”. If the Left had not vacated
this terrain, the Right would never have been able to colonize it and claim
patriotism as “theirs”. And this is an emotionally important
sphere: people are attached to the place they live and think about this attachment
as something very important.
RB: Particularly, perhaps, your
chosen target constituency?
AZ: Yes.
Imagined community is often the only community that many of them have. Now the
problem is that nationalists have coopted this symbolic sphere to turn it into
a hate-mongering, anti-minorities political project. We need to take it back.
The last chap who really attempted such a
revival was Jan Jozef Lipski in the late
1980s and early 1990s. He tried to rebuild the Polish Socialist Party.
Unfortunately he died at the beginning of the Polish transition. And for many
years I’d say that the independent Left neglected this episode. We try to make
it obvious that this is the tradition that Razem is a part of. Indeed, we are
probably the first attempt on the Left to implement this historical policy on a
wider scale.
RB: Another history of Poland is
possible?
AZ: It’s
badly needed.
AS: I’d be interested to know how
you approach the issue of the Catholic Church, such a dominant institution in
Polish life. They have a huge amount of power, even over legislation. Do you
engage with them, oppose them or ignore them?
AZ: We
need to distinguish two things: on the one hand we have the hierarchy of the
church, the bishops, on the other hand we have people who describe themselves
as Catholics. Of course the hierarchy, the top tier of the Catholic church is
very right wing. They support policies that are lunatic, we say that openly. But
if you look at the opinion polls, you will see that the majority of Polish
Catholics do not agree with what the hierarchy teaches about sex, abortion,
contraceptives. The influence of bishops over Polish society is overestimated
and much weaker than it used to be ten or fifteen years ago. The Polish
Catholics are internally differentiated: mostly traditional and conservative,
but rarely very dogmatic, and you can easily find among them groups that
discuss gay marriage and women’s rights, and which are open for dialogues with
the Left.
Just to name a recent example: When recently
the church hierarchy and Law and Justice leaders supported a law to totally ban
abortions, we organized big street demonstrations in twenty cities in Poland. Some
Catholics of course supported the new law. But at the same time, there were very
numerous voices from within the Catholic community saying that this proposal is
an error, that it should not be implemented in state law, that those Catholics
who want to promote sexual ethics and their attitudes towards abortion should not
use the state to exert pressure on those who are not members of the church.
There have been calls on Razem to “fight
the Church”, to become an “anti-Catholic force”, on the grounds that otherwise
Razem would never be able to realize its programme. I don’t buy that. My answer
is: we are as clear as we can be on the policies that we promote, on gender
equality, on minority rights, on a secular state, but the confrontation about
this takes place in the sphere of politics. Razem will not let itself be put in
the position of blanket opposition to the church. Our main political opponent
is on the Right, and our allies are often progressive groups within the
Catholic Church who are themselves critical about the unholy alliance between
clergymen and the right wing. We want a secular state where both those who are
Catholics and those who are not, feel at home. That type of proposal will, I
believe, gain more and more support among active Catholics. It is visible
already now: there are active Catholics who are openly saying that they don’t
see Razem’s programme for the secularization of the state as a threat, but
rather as a chance to revive their mission. These voices are still minorities,
that’s clear, but very interesting minorities and ones deserving a mention.
Protests against the proposed total ban of abortions. Hangers were symbols of the protest action. Michał Radwański. All rights reserved.RB: Can we return to Razem and ask you about the kind of leadership that the leaders of Razem seek
to provide?
AZ: We
try not to build the party around a leader. This is the political model that
quickly kills democracy within an organization. If an organization is centered
around one person and that one person is a real ruler, as often happens in
Polish political parties, it erodes. If you look at the level of participation,
the level of intellectual debate within the organisation, it is surprisingly
non-existent. This is a consequence of the one person leadership model that
many parties adopted 10 – 12 years ago.
It’s obvious in the media-dominated
political landscapes in which we now operate, that you do need some
recognizable figure who can play the role of a symbolic anchor for people
asking, “who are those guys and what do they want?” But this does not mean that
this phenomenon should be automatically reflected in the structure of the
party. So we don't have one person leadership on any level. We have collegiate
organs. On a central level, we have a 9 person executive group in charge, and
that’s similar at the regional level. Another mechanism we use to secure us
from this strong leader model is to say that no one can hold one party position
for longer than a single parliamentary term, that is 4 years. That ensures that
people are replaced, so that we have change internally.
RB: How do you stop the middle
class elite from rising to the top nevertheless?
AZ:
That’s a huge problem, the typical domination of a movement by the
intelligentsia. That’s because it’s the intelligentsia who have acquired all
the cultural capital, they have time on their side and all those tiny elements
that contribute to their domination of movements. And it’s not easy to control.
To be honest, we have thought about organizational forms that might restrict
this, but we haven’t come up with any good technical solutions.
There are some tiny tricks we try to use
to mitigate this domination, though. During national council meetings, where
all the major political decisions are made, we have a rule that no contribution
to the discussion can be longer than three minutes. This is important in terms
of making politics a bit more equal because the people who have middle class
backgrounds have enormous power as a result of their eloquence. Plus,
restricting the time also forces you to go straight to the point.
Voting during a general meeting of the Warsaw branch of Razem. Michał Radwański.All rights reserved.RB: It must make it a considerably
more pluralist organization?
AZ: Less
than we would like. But it gives a bit more space to more people who will have
a chance to have their say, rather than just listen. Another tool we sometimes
use is a quota on the basis of gender for a discussion.
That makes some kind of compensation for those inequalities that confront
society at large, while impacting on how we function internally. We experiment
with these mechanisms.
RB: Why do you have ‘party
sympathizers’?
AZ:
There is always the question, do you want to have an activist organization or a
mass political party? There is always the
question, do you want to have an activist organization or a mass political
party? Mass political parties were very efficient in promoting
social change over the twentieth century, but they have their own problems,
mainly with the passivity of the base. And we all know how that ends. On the
other hand, the sense of commitment is extremely important. It is often
neglected, but the political strength of democratic left movements in the
twentieth century was mostly due to its ability to attach communities to the
political project. This was lost after the wave of deindustrialization – and we
need to rebuild this mechanism.
The two forms of membership reflect this
complex situation, but they arose not from some highly theoretical thinking,
but for a very practical reason. We saw people who wanted to help, who wanted
to pay fees, but who openly said they would not be able to participate in the
decision-making processes. Many other people simply can’t be official members
of a political party because it would threaten their jobs: in Poland it’s not
unusual to be sacked for your activism. Being a sympathizer, if they are asked
whether they are a member of any political party, they can say, “No, I’m not”.
RB: And your regional
representation?
AZ: We want to ensure that the organization is not dominated by middle
class people living in Warsaw, so we have this regional mechanism that does not
allow one part of the country to dominate the national board and the national
executive. Much of the mass political strength the
current governing party was able to gain traded on this strong sentiment of people living outside big cities that they were not represented.
This is important for us too. Last month, every week practically, I spent
two or three days in smaller towns, in those areas where politicians rarely
show up unless there is an election in the next thirty days. Then they arrive
by coach, spend ten to fifteen minutes shaking any available hands and move on. So what we do is to regularly organize
open meetings in those places. We meet with groups of people who sympathize
with Razem, who may have voted for Razem or who are just curious about what we
do. We talk for an hour or two and by the time we leave, it’s not unusual to have a new branch of
Razem in that town. Often that’s the only branch of any political party in this
small town.
A few
weeks ago in Małopolska region I was in a town where there is this local
mayor who has ruled it
literally for the last
twenty-five years. In the last elections there was no opposition candidate,
because everyone
was too afraid to set one up – the mayor openly threatened them saying, anyone who tried would know soon
enough why they shouldn’t. So that’s the kind of political life we have outside big cities: the interconnections
between local political elites, local business elites, also the local church
simply dominate the governing set-up and make it impossible to have any
political debate on budgets, on what should or shouldn’t be
supported by the public fund and so on.
This is the kind of world
where we try to make an intervention.
If you look at the Polish GDP, you might really believe that we are a
solitary green island in the sea of countries that saw their economies shrink.
But the problem is that much of this growth
happened in big cities only. It’s
not just about
the impoverishment of the world beyond, it’s about the total lack of
opportunity to render your life stable. This is a world where having the
minimum wage is the ceiling of your aspirations on the labour market, where a ‘trash
contract’ (a Polish version of
zero-hours contract) is the typical form of employment. Our task is to bring some hope to places where there
isn’t any.
March 2016 protest. Michał Radwański. All rights reserved.RB: Who do you look to as allies in the international
movement?
AZ: We see ourselves as a part of the wider movement
against austerity that emerges after 2008. Some, like Podemos, attempt to build new parties,
others – like Corbyn – try to win over traditional left-wing organizations. Some, like
Podemos,
attempt to build new parties, others – like Corbyn – try to win over
traditional left-wing organizations. Noteworthy things have started to happen in central and eastern Europe too. I’d say Združena Levica in Slovenia is
a very encouraging phenomenon. Things that are happening now in Serbia and in
Macedonia are very interesting. And you can see a pattern in those movements – political mobilization of
people who are in their thirties. Had you asked them five or six years ago –
will you be active in politics or do you have leftwing inclinations, many would
say “nah”. But today precarity, the crisis of neoliberalism, the threat of the far right
turn them into activists. These new movements differ dramatically from the political behemoths that occupied the
centre-left and that we have watched one by one fall into deep
crisis. This has a special flavour in our region, with the bankruptcy of the post-communist parties.
The new
movements often share a similar desire to reform the EU. When you look from the Polish
perspective, for years we
heard just two narratives about Europe. Liberals say: “We are modernized by the EU and this is our ultimate aim, so we’ll accept
everything Brussels says to prove that we are worth it”. And the right wing
believes Europe is a threat for national Catholic Poland which shouldn’t have entered this horrible progressive thing in the first place.
The problem is that the European Union unfortunately bears no resemblance
to a “horrible progressive thing”. The EU today is to a large extent an
organisation dominated by business interests. There is no vision of future
among European elites, let alone a progressive project. What we see is just a
never-ending crisis management. Good
things about the EU do exist, but these have been
created by previous generations. Since Maastricht it’s a downhill ride on an inclined plane. But
those on the Left who eagerly applaud
the disintegration of the Union ignore that for any left-wing project to be
viable we need a
united Europe in
order to exert influence on the global economy. Most nation-states are simply
too weak to efficiently counter the corporate
interests. In particular that’s the case of central and eastern Europe. Hence the dream of
sovereignty that the current governing party peddles in practice ends up with
them supporting TTIP. The
dream of sovereignty that the current governing party peddles in practice ends
up with them supporting TTIP.
RB: Doesn’t European solidarity have a crucial role to
play in avoiding creating a left
patriotism which is simply voluntaristic?
AZ: I don’t think there is any contradiction between left patriotism
and internationalism. Quite the contrary, I think in order to have a viable
European project, we need exactly this kind of internationalism that mobilizes
the energies that local patriotisms have and transforms them into something
larger. And sure, such a Europe is badly needed. The EU may last without tax harmonization,
without a common social
policy,
without a common investment policy
countering the negative effects of the Eurozone – but we will see
more and more cracks, and the EU
might slowly evolve into an inert organism that no longer influences
reality.
This also
has its geo-political
consequences, very bad for countries like Poland. We are quite afraid that
Brexit might trigger what is sometimes called a multi-speed Europe. That means a zombie EU, and a strong integration of
the western European core that
would simply
unlink central and eastern European member states. For our
countries that would be a major setback. All that has been lost due to European
integration – markets wide open, practical inability to implement industrial
policy, hardly regulated capital flows – would remain, but all the benefits,
like structural funds, would
probably gradually disappear.
And in the long run it also means an end of the big promise of Europe as a
continent-wide peace project, guaranteeing us stability. Once again we would become a part of the
world suspended somewhere between the West and Russia. That’s definitely the
last position we want to be in and the problem with the current government is
that they absolutely do not understand that. They see themselves as an ally of forces pushing towards the disintegration of
Europe. They
are not aware of the long-term
consequences of a
coalition with
Euro-skeptical conservatives from Britain or Orban’s Hungary that are actually
blinking with one eye to Putin. I think some of them believe that Poland might
benefit from this
new, disintegrated world – just like the
anti-European
Tories’ project for Britain. But
I doubt if Britain will be
strong enough to play this game, and I’m rather sure that Poland wouldn’t.