Stuck in the Past and the Future: Class Analysis in Postcommunist Poland
Stuck in the Past and the Future: Class Analysis in Postcommunist Poland

Summary/Abstract: Class became virtually a taboo topic in Poland after the fall of the communist system, and a discourse of “normality” took hold. Social scientists and journalists considered new market institutions natural and inescapable and urged people to adapt. Sociologists were more interested in the identity of the new elites than the social consequences of the new capitalism, and a cult of a not-yet-existing “middle class” quickly grew. Inequality and poverty, previously understood as systemic, were now presented as due to individual pathology. That class talk became so marginalized despite the historical robustness of Polish sociology as a discipline is explained by the dominance of a functionalist stratification paradigm, which kept questions relevant to the new system, about emerging class relations and power, from even being raised. Polish sociology thus appeared stuck in the past and in the future—thinking about stratification without power, and imagining an individualist meritocracy as already in effect—but not ready to ask about the class formation and new economic relations of the present. The paucity of class analysis allowed illiberal populist nationalism to grow, blaming economic problems on internal “anti-Polish” enemies. New kinds of class thinking has revived in the new millennium, promoted by a new generation raised in a capitalist society and trained in western universities, and legitimized in part by class analyses of postcommunism by scholars from abroad. Though hobbled, class analysis is making a modest comeback.

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