Naturalising dispossessions as a condition for modernisation: Interpreting Marcin Piątkowski’s vision of the “Polish Golden Age” from the perspective of dependency theory

Abstract

The text is a critical analysis of Marcin Piątkowski’s book Europe’s growth champion: Insights from the economic rise of Poland [2018], which is considered as a representative sample of the dominant apologetic discourse on the so-called post-communist transformation. The book is viewed as an instance of a discursive form of legitimisation of the processes taking place at that time, in particular the ownership transformation, which involved a massive transfer of property to foreign owners. The interpretative framework adopted in the text is dependency theory and David Harvey’s critical theory of capitalism. In the latter, one of the key elements is the notion of dispossession, which appears as an important driving force behind the expansion of global capitalism. As argued in the text, it is in such categories of dispossession that not only the processes of ownership transformations in the period after the collapse of the People’s Republic of Poland can be examined, but also earlier cycles of ownership changes, in particular those after 1918 and 1945. It was also pointed out that the processes and discourses in question indirectly legitimise Poland’s semi-peripheral status in the world system and structurally privileged intelligentsia elites, among others, at the expense of the domestic bourgeoisie.