Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Solidarność: 40 years ago and now The writer calls the former communist-party-led regimes of eastern Europe “state socialists.” There is no left consensus on the character of those regimes. I wouldn’t call them state socialists though. They were dictatorial, bureaucratic regimes that controlled most of the economy. “ Today, the union [Solidarity] is almost entirely allied with PiS, and thus with all the illiberal, anti-democratic, anti-immigrant, homophobic, protofascist policies and practices that the party has been promoting.” The Triumph and Tragedy of Poland’s Solidarity Movement

Thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Block "Capitalism’s triumph did not arise from a mass desire, but a choice made by the communist nomenklatura: to transform its privileges of function into privileges of ownership. Although the elites’ ‘grand conversion’ has been analysed  there are few studies on the social base of the old single party, which, though it became restive, did not demand privatisations." In the name of the communist ideal

Poland He fought within Solidarność for a peaceful transformation of the system, where strong workers’ organizations and widespread civic participation would lead to a democratic socialism, based either on continued state ownership or extensive social democratic-type economic intervention. (There were plenty of hothead activists in the movement, Modzelewski later recalled, “but nobody called for the privatization of the economy, or reprivatization of property confiscated by the state in 1945. Nobody.”) "I Didn't Sit Eight and a Half Years in Jail to Build Capitalism"