On Barriers to Pluralism in Pluralist Poland

Abstract

Having crushed the Solidarity movement’s unprecedented attempt to pluralize postwar Polish society, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the first secretary of the Polish United Workers’ party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza or PZPR) ordered a special commission of the party’s Central Committee to study the causes of the political crises that have repeatedly convulsed Poland during forty years of Communist rule and have resulted in the downfall of successive first secretaries and their principal associates. After several months of labor, the commission declared that one of the main causes was that the authorities ignored popular opinion and discouraged local initiatives for independent action and reforms. To show that it had learned its lesson, the PZPR adopted “socialist pluralism” as one of the principal points of its program for “normalization” and “renewal” soon after martial law was lifted in 1982.