When fascism emerged in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, many saw it as a left-wing movement. The Right had originally been associated with the aristocracy, with respect for traditional order and established hierarchies. Under the assault of socialists, capitalism, with its radical and destructive transformation of the old order, also became associated with the Right. Fascists opposed both. They denounced the aristocracy as weak, and hated it for letting the traditional order fall apart. They denounced capitalism for betraying “the nation,” for turning the land and its people into servants of capital. Fascists sought a new order, based on new hierarchies, with their own decidedly non-aristocratic leaders at the top, committed to rewarding—and saving from ruthless capitalist exploitation—those at the bottom. In return, the latter had only to accept the end of political democracy, said to be an obstacle to fighting treacherous elites, and their own subordinate role, so as to give leaders the freedom to properly rebuild “the nation.”
Only the last principle, concerning the subordination of the working class, was contrary to what leftists stood for. Otherwise, fascism could, and did seem to many, to be a variant of left-wing politics.Footnote 1 The left, of course, had also opposed the aristocracy, not because it was weak but because it was reactionary, trying to restore hierarchies that capitalism had already swept away and that socialism would eliminate entirely. As for a modernizing, non-aristocratic anti-capitalism, this was, of course, the foundation around which the Left first emerged. The attack on political democracy might seem to be a key point distinguishing fascism from the Left. But that was not entirely true. Fascists denounced liberalism and parliamentarism as a whole. It wanted democracy violently torn down, replaced by a dictator realizing the interests of a mythical “nation.” Leftists, however, were themselves skeptical of liberalism and parliamentarism. Leninists pushed for their violent overthrow, though they were weak outside of Russia. In the parts of Europe where fascism emerged, left-wing socialists were wary of joining liberal parliamentary governments, believing they would thereby be serving the interests of capitalism. Even more, however, they thought the impending economic crisis would tear liberalism down and usher in a socialist transformation. Few could be mobilized to defend parliamentary democracy. Indeed, when fascists first came to power and then used state power to force big business to follow state priorities, some leftist intellectuals embraced fascism.Footnote 2 Many rank-and-file workers, provided they belonged to the favored “nation,” were also impressed: Someone, at last, was doing something for them. If thwarting market domination had been a long-term aim of the Left, fascists doing just this seemed to link them to the Left.
Why is all this relevant today? Because some new Right parties today, usually called “populist” instead of “fascist,” are again pushing against a new liberal order, usually called “neoliberal,” seeking to eviscerate the institutions of pluralist democracy and to use the state to pursue economic policies beneficial to those that have lost out from neoliberalism.
Nowhere is this truer than in Poland. The Law and Justice Party (PiS) emerged in explicit opposition to the liberalism of the first post-communist decade, calling instead for a revival of “traditional values” and a “strong state” to enforce them. It lamented the fate of workers who had been abandoned by post-communist neoliberal economic policies, but contended that workers were hurting because of the identity of the new leaders, rather than because of the nature of the new capitalist system. If, said PiS, Poland had real Polish leaders and real Polish capitalists following real Polish values like banning abortion, lustrating former communists, and distributing a piece of state property to all citizens, that would somehow make workers’ conditions better. Originally PiS chiefly objected to political liberalism, making it a party firmly on the political Right. During its first governmental tenure from 2005 to 2007, it maintained and even advanced neoliberal economic orthodoxy, such as eliminating the inheritance tax and cutting payroll taxes, creating a deficit in the social security account that led to pressure to raise the retirement age.
But in the eight years from 2007 to 2015 when it was out of power, PiS changed. These, of course, were the years of economic crisis. Never having adopted the Euro, and never promoting personal debt like elsewhere in the region, Poland did not suffer as much from the outbreak of the debt crisis in 2008. Nevertheless, years of liberalized labor contracts, stagnant wages, and such staggering unequal development that numerous small cities all but sent their entire youth population to work in Britain and Ireland, had made capitalism increasingly unpopular.Footnote 3 At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Poland had become the EU's leader in part-time, insecure contracts. Aside from those lucky enough to secure jobs at foreign-owned manufacturing firms—though they too have grown increasingly restive due to the glaring wage disparity with the West—Poles generally worked with unstable contracts, without union representation, and in an officially approved neoliberal culture best personified by former President Bronisław Komorowski, who famously responded to a question about how someone earning 2,000 złotys a month could rent an apartment by saying the person should “find another job, take out a loan.” (Komorowski said this in the midst of his 2015 reelection campaign while vastly leading in the polls; his comment was a key turning point that led to his defeat and the success of PiS.)
So, since winning power for the second time in 2015, PiS has taken real efforts to tame economic liberalism. It reversed the previous government's hiking of the retirement age, offered new drug benefits for the elderly, and has initiated a broad program for the construction of new affordable housing. It has limited employer use of insecure short-term “junk contracts,” and raised the guaranteed hourly minimum to 13 złotys (nearly $4), a significant increase upon prevailing informal standards. Its hallmark social policy has been a new child-benefit program, with a monthly payment of 500 złotys (about $140) to parents of each second and additional child under eighteen, paid for, in part, by a new surcharge tax imposed on foreign-owned banks and insurance companies. For the many hundreds of thousands of working parents earning only 2,000–2,500 złotys a month, this meant a sudden untaxed pay raise of twenty or even forty percent. Within a year, children living in extreme poverty declined by a third. Single mothers found themselves able to quit overly exploitative jobs and seek other options. Though such individual largesse comes at the expense of long-term projects like improving child-care networks and pre-schools, it is clearly a social policy that has helped many and proved tremendously popular. As one analyst puts it, on cultural issues PiS is “somewhere on the right fringe of the US Republican Party,” while “economically [it is] to the left of most Democrats.”Footnote 4
With such rhetoric and policies, PiS is embracing a project that really deserves the name it is impossible to apply: national socialism. We can call it something else, such as nationalist populism, or national communitarianism. There is no way to understand the support PiS gets from workers without understanding what these concepts imply. The budding pre-war fascist Right was proud of its “national socialism.” This did not (yet) connote concentration camps and the Holocaust, but rather the effort to tame capitalism in the interests of a narrowly-defined nation ruled by an indomitable state in the correct party's hands. It was a way of stealing away workers who might naturally gravitate to the Left, and simultaneously alert employers that profit-seeking could be limited if the state insisted that national interests required it. Upon coming to power, Sheri Berman tells us, fascists made “real efforts to attract a mass base and a cross-class constituency,” by employing “communitarian and nationalist appeals” and embracing “a ‘third way’ in economics.”Footnote 5 As Michael Mann notes, both Italian Fascists and German National Socialists “began more leftist than they later became.”Footnote 6
PiS, of course, does things quite differently from how they were done in the past. For now, it respects market rules, and can afford to. Western firms, after all, still escape into Poland in search of cheaper labor, regardless of the government in power. PiS has not organized public works projects or injected the state into economic decisions made by private firms, though its vague threats have already dramatically improved tax collection. But the state still has significant economic resources to draw from, and PiS does indeed use the existing large state-owned firms, in the energy, financial, weapons, forestry, and maritime sectors, to push its agenda, both economic and political.Footnote 7
Of course, PiS did not shed its opposition to political liberalism in order to fight economic neoliberalism. On the contrary, despite an election campaign stressing only the economic gifts it promised to bestow, once in power, PiS immediately set to work dismantling the institutions of liberal democracy and consolidating all power in its own hands. Eviscerating the Constitutional Court, purging the judiciary, complete politicization of the civil service, turning public media into a government mouthpiece, direct budgetary financing of “Christian media,” defunding liberal NGOs and attempting to starve critical private media of resources, restricting opposition rights in parliament, not just tolerance but official promotion of racism and bigotry, administrative insistence on traditional gender norms, cultural resurrection of pre-war fascists, surveillance without check—these are only some of the policies PiS introduced upon coming to power. Criticism is legal, but government officials and state-run media denounce critics not as critics but as “traitors” and “total oppositionists”—“the worst sort of Poles,” Kaczyński has said, though frequently their very status as “Poles” is denied.
Is PiS fascist? This—along with its counterparts referring to “Trumpism,” Fidesz, Alternative for Germany, etc.—is the question plaguing everyone trying to make sense of the new right-wing “populists” now populating much of the international political scene. It is a question that cannot be answered. If fascism means promoting hyper-nationalism, denouncing supposed affronts from exaggerated enemies, and accepting the idea that a single party representing the nation should run the country with a strict hand in the name of traditional values, then the answer is yes. If it means eliminating rivals, depriving the opposition of any viable platform, and establishing an unadorned dictatorship, the answer is no. PiS plays with fascism. Its messages continually suggest that life would be better for all if the opposition just accepted the rule of the one correct party. (Similarities to state socialism are not accidental.)Footnote 8 It is not likely in the very near future to pass the repressive legislation associated with fascism. Yet, that may well change. The party's insistence that real democracy (the kind they say they like) is incompatible with liberalism (which they associate with communism on the grounds that both favor humanism and internationalism, while they follow God and the nation)Footnote 9—this view might eventually lead them to enact the open repression seen by most as a sine qua non for a movement to be called fascist. For now, however, these are what Federico Finchelstein calls populist movements, or “attempts to reform and retune the fascist legacy to a democratic key.”Footnote 10 They emerged out of the fascist tradition and seek to revive many of its legacies. Whether they “are” fascist or not is not the question to focus on.
Why Did Workers Turn to the Right?
It is not surprising, then, that lots of workers would embrace PiS. Nor does doing so make them dupes of fascism. PiS does have much in common with the fascist tradition, and saying that it gets labor support only despite its fascist elements would clearly be wrong. But that is because classic fascism, especially in its early phases, is typically pro-worker. It is, of course, pro-worker only to those workers who are accepted as part of “the nation.” In Poland, though, without significant ethnic differences, PiS potentially accepts everyone living there as part of the nation, thus making it easier even for Left-leaning workers to support PiS. (This is quite different than in Hungary, where the ruling Fidesz party, in many ways the model for PiS, does not consider the significant Roma population part of the treasured nation, thus keeping it from introducing much anti-poverty legislation, and thus limiting working-class support for Fidesz.)Footnote 11
PiS's strategy so far has been to reap the benefits it can accrue from embracing fascist styles—benefits such as winning support both from workers dissatisfied with economic liberalism and from ideological nationalists and Catholics opposed to political liberalism—while denying any connections with fascism. It is not clear whether it can continue this feint. Clearly, PiS policies have strengthened the openly fascist elements in Poland, which in turn are pushing PiS further to the Right. Just as happened in the United States when Donald Trump became president, so in Poland the victory of PiS has emboldened open fascists and white supremacists, who take the racism and nationalism promoted by the governing party and place it front and center in their program. Kaczyński declared during the 2015 election campaign that his government would not accept a single refugee, because they carry dangerous “parasites and protozoa” and turn white European cities into zones of Sharia law. So, classic fascist organizations who say foreigners should be harassed, or that Civic Platform “traitors” should be hung, or that feminism and gay rights organizations should be outlawed—these groups have grown markedly, and can plausibly present themselves as now in the political mainstream. Since one of PiS's aims is not to allow the growth of any significant party to its Right—to avoid what happened with the radical nationalist Fidesz party in Hungary, which has faced significant opposition from the more openly fascist party Jobbik—PiS makes sure never to denounce the extreme Right, organized in groups like the National Camp, the All-Polish Youth, or the rapidly growing National-Radical Camp. The supporters of such groups might beat up foreigners, prevent liberals from speaking, or organize aggressive street demonstrations, such as the November 2017 Independence Day march that brought sixty thousand people to Warsaw chanting slogans like “Death to the Enemies of the Fatherland.” No matter what they do, however, PiS almost never says a word against them.
So, why did it happen? Why did so many workers, who displayed such militancy in the 1980s, come to see the political Right as their home? Why did even the historic Solidarity trade union, once so revered by the non-Stalinist Left elsewhere, become so closely aligned with PiS? Why did they not move to the Left? To answer these questions, I first try to explain the early sources of labor's turn to the Right, then look at PiS's links with the labor movement as a whole, and finally explore PiS's relationship to three different groups of workers today: full-time industrial workers, “care” workers such as teachers and nurses, and precarious workers with little job stability and few prospects for the future.
Why did labor turn to the Right? Let me recount here the argument of a book I wrote in 2005 that anticipated exactly this development. In that work, I predicted that workers in post-communist Poland would turn to the Right because no other movement was going to defend them against capitalism.Footnote 12 Polish workers did not initially think they needed any defense against capitalism. They supported it, as the “enemy of their [communist] enemy,” and thought they would benefit from it. When it turned out, as it must, that capitalism is not run with workers in mind, they grew dissatisfied, and angry. But suddenly they had no allies. The Solidarity trade union had accepted the transformation to a market economy. Its intellectual leadership had spearheaded it. The former communists, trying to prove their democratic bona fides (and, like most people at the time, conflating democracy with capitalism), went along. A decade after 1989, the capitalist honeymoon had worn off. A new generation, which never went on any honeymoon, began looking for answers. Far Right ideologies, speaking of the “betrayal of the nation,” began to provide them.
A new Left began to emerge, too. But it was hobbled at the outset by the virtual disappearance of the key category necessary for any Left alternative: class. Class talk was dead. The former communists had discredited it, by using it to justify dictatorship, and the communist-era opposition's mobilizing framework rejected class in favor of civil society. So, when civil society turned out to mean capitalism, and “class” as a mobilizing concept was absent, “nation” had a free hand. The irony was tragic. The end of state socialism, after all, meant the emergence of classes: Instead of a state-run economy that eliminated the ability of one social group to secure institutionalized privileges over another, a private economy encouraging the accumulation of capital in order to build a class with such privileges emerged in its place. Yet just at the moment class analysis was most needed, “class” as a concept was unavailable for thinking about what had happened.Footnote 13 Even the new Left that began to emerge underplayed class in favor of progressive, “post-materialist” cultural politics, just like the western Left was doing at the time. I still remember the left-wing labor activist in 2008 who complained that he was not going to be able to win over his co-workers to a movement that talked so much about gay rights. “Western socialists built up their parties for decades before tackling these questions, and we're doing it at the moment we're just trying to get started!”
In the capitalist West, where unions fighting against capitalism had brought about the now-declining welfare states, class still had some resonance, at least. In most of eastern Europe, it had none at all. This led to a vacuum: Polish workers were experiencing capitalism as a system of class exploitation, but lacked any class-based ways to express their dissatisfaction. And the Right began to fill that vacuum. More and more it began to speak about the harms inflicted by the capitalist transformation. It did not say “workers” were suffering, however, but rather “the nation.” If only a party promoting “the nation” came to power, things would be better for workers, because then they would be governed by “real Poles.” And that was their main complaint against their political rivals: that they were not “real Poles.” Without any class discourse or party to organize their anger, workers thus turned to the Right, who alone promised something could be done for them.
PiS and the Labor Movement
What did PiS promise? PiS did not form in close alliance with the workers movement. It was founded in 2001 by the Kaczyński twins Jarosław and Lech, bringing together right-wing activists from a previous coalition that was just breaking apart. It initially set itself up as a law-and-order party committed to removing former communist officials from public and economic life (thus its name). But it always claimed that such policies were the way to help workers hurting from post-communist capitalism. In this it echoed the claims of Solidarity leaders from the mid-1990s, who did not want to oppose capitalism (still popular as the putative enemy of communism) but needed to present some explanation and solutions for the economic calamities facing their members. As noted, however, when workers became more critical of capitalist reality by the mid-2000s, PiS adapted. It framed the 2005 elections as a choice between a “solidaristic” Poland and a “liberal” one, though didn't follow through when it won. After PiS decisively lost the snap elections of 2007, however, its appeal to workers, and to the disaffected and disgruntled, began to take center stage.
Soon before the presidential elections of May 2015 (parliamentary elections took place in October), Solidarity signed an agreement with PiS candidate Andrzej Duda, where in return for the union's support, Duda committed himself to rolling back the retirement age, supporting families with children, increasing the minimum wage, strengthening tripartite social dialogue, and fighting the twin labor market pathologies of pervasive short-term “junk contracts” and the widespread abuse of “self-employment” (employees forced to pose as independent contractors). When Duda won, PiS as a whole accepted these terms. In its first two years in power, as already noted, PiS essentially delivered on each of the promises.
And yet, committed as they are to monopolizing power in party hands alone, PiS has made sure to introduce these pro-labor policies in a way that only it takes credit for them, not the unions. For example, minimum wage negotiation has always been within the purview of the Social Dialogue Commission. So, the unions and the employers’ organizations began bargaining, and after a couple of tough weeks of negotiation, they came to an agreement on a new minimum wage. The problem in the past was that liberal governments frequently refused to implement what the tripartite commission had decided. The problem in this case was not that PiS rejected what the “social partners” had negotiated, but that it improved on it. Asserting that the agreed-upon figure was too low, PiS set the new minimum wage slightly higher. It was a small increase, largely symbolic, but the symbolism of the entire transaction was precisely the point: Kaczyński was making clear that anyone satisfied with the economic improvements would be beholden to PiS, not to any trade unions. The unions had fought for a higher wage and they got the employers to agree. But instead of unions taking credit for anything, PiS rushed in to show that it, and not any organizations of civil society, was responsible for good outcomes. The Party is to be the only organization defending workers; every other plays only a subordinate role.
This is true for other types of legislation as well. Long-term parliamentary rules require that any bill proposed by one of the parties goes through a period of official public discussion, during which unions, employers, NGOs, and other civic organizations can comment and propose amendments. Those rules, however, include an exception for so-called “individual” bills proposed by a specific parliamentarian. Such bills can go straight to parliament for a vote, without any public consultation. Fidesz in Hungary first began using such a tactic: putting forth dramatic, system-changing legislation as “individual” bills not subject to public discussion. PiS has followed suit. In this way, PiS has passed sweeping bills taking over the civil service, public media, and the courts without any official opportunity for unions or anyone else to respond. Again, PiS takes responsibility for everything.
This is not quite the classic “state corporatism” so beloved by the radical Right and the fascists, where unions and employer organizations are under the control of the ruling party. Bit by bit, however, PiS aims to persuade the class organizations of labor and capital to accept the party as the final arbiter in all key economic policy decisions.
PiS's Working Class Supporters—and Opponents
PiS's base consists of three groups. Two are guided by ideology. The first of these are the traditional conservative Catholics, thrilled to see PiS empower the Church and embrace anti-progressive old social norms. They seek cultural counterrevolution, and see that PiS is delivering. The second consists of secular intellectuals, committed to “Polishness” and an enhanced place for Poland in the world. They want a state and a government that pushes back against a European Union they see as a tool for Western domination. They seek an active Poland aggressively pushing conservative values against a wayward world. They, too, will stay with PiS. The third group supports PiS for its economic promises and policies, its efforts at fighting the insecurity and inequality of Poland's peripheral capitalism. Many workers belong to this group, but not all.
PiS has different relationships with different groups of workers. It is closest to industrial workers employed full-time in manufacturing firms. These are the large, old unionized firms—virtually all of which are now private, but where classic labor traditions are strongest. This is the center of private-sector unionism in Poland. About half to two-thirds of the workforce in most of the large manufacturing firms in the steel, auto, energy, and transport sectors belong to trade unions. Non-members are covered under any contract that is negotiated (the “open shop” has been the rule ever since the rise of Solidarity in the early 1980s). This sector's clout comes in large part from being the base of the Solidarity union, which arose as a vast social movement in 1980 and survived subsequent repression to become the key organizing force behind the fall of state socialism in 1989, occurring months before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It was with Solidarity alone that Andrzej Duda and PiS made their electoral covenant of 2015. The reduction of the retirement age, the increases in the minimum and hourly wage, the fight against “junk contracts,” the commitment to do battle with the EU in order to subsidize national industrial champions, the greater respect accorded to unions: All of this has made full-time manufacturing employees PiS's most loyal working-class constituency. This group is far from being dominated by hot-heads. Many understand the importance of close ties with Europe, while simultaneously wishing to expand Polish influence. Although most tend to be culturally conservative, some openly acknowledge an indebtedness to socialist unionists from western Europe, for helping to teach them about international capitalism. Indeed, when I visited Solidarity's bureau chief for International Affairs, Andrzej Adamczyk, in his Gdansk office in 2013, I was struck by the large poster on the wall behind his desk. It was a poster of Karl Marx. “Now I'm no Marxist,” he quickly told me, but when some union colleagues from the West gave the poster to him, he put it up. It served as a sign of solidarity with Western trade unionists who were so supportive of Polish organized labor, and as a coy way of raising class issues with his own union comrades at home. (Adamczyk told me he relished the irony that the former “communist” union organization would not be able to hang such a poster, since doing so would expose them to the charge of really being Marxists, whereas a Solidarity official could use it to remind visitors of the need for a militant labor organization, without the risk of anyone taking it literally.)
While PiS has its strongest support among industrial workers with stable employment, it has been less successful with employees in the professional service sectors, such as teachers and healthcare workers. Its weakness is due to three factors: the skill-based bargaining power of these employees, their adversarial relationship with any government due to state finance of health and education, and their typically greater concern for non-economic matters like the preservation of basic democratic governance. PiS largely treats these workers as part of the privileged classes deserving of status cut-down. It introduced a major school reform shutting down all middle-school gymnazje, and continues to underfund the health sector. The biggest labor actions against PiS so far have been organized by teachers, nurses, and interns.
Exacerbating the adversarial relationship with PiS is the organizational autonomy of the professional unions. As a single national union, Solidarity had always been comparatively weakest among higher-educated professional employees. Most teachers belong to the Union of Polish Teachers, a key member of the Polish Trade Union Federation (OPZZ), the successor of the communist-era trade union organization. Nurses too have their own large union, also affiliated with OPZZ. Yet it is not chiefly the OPZZ affiliation that makes these unions wary of PiS. Indeed, when I asked the leader of OPZZ in 2013 what government had so far worked best with unions, he acknowledged, albeit with a grimace, “probably PiS.” More important is their legacy as independent unions, and their consequent fear of PiS's attempts to subordinate the labor movement to itself. Moreover, as key stakeholders in two key areas that PiS has promised but not yet carried out a complete structural overhaul, PiS seems committed to weakening them so they cannot block eventual PiS designs. All this, together with PiS's distrust of groups professionally committed to social care, accounts for PiS's failure to build a base in this sector of the working class.
If industrial and blue-collar labor has been most closely aligned with PiS, and professional white-collar labor most resistant to the appeals of the Right, the big change in the last few years has been the entry of more marginal and precarious labor into the political fray, increasingly on the side of the extremist far Right. These are the workers from small towns and cities, or from the fringes of the large cities: places where liberal prosperity never really reached. Unions here are virtually non-existent. Workers have few prospects for stable employment. That Solidarity supports PiS, or that teachers oppose it, is largely irrelevant to those just struggling to find some security. To this group PiS has appealed via nationalism. Instead of giving up home and family to be treated as second-class citizens in Manchester or Dublin, PiS promises, together we can build a strong Poland where you can stay home and thrive. For this group, nationalism is not just identity with a swagger, but a concrete economic appeal: We will build industry at home, we will renovate the places liberalism bypassed, and we will not allow Poles to be treated as neocolonial subjects.
By regularly charging that previous governments turned Poland into a subordinate colony doing the hard labor for Western exploiters, PiS often sounds like old-school Latin American dependency theorists. But their right-wing message is never disguised: PiS makes robust nationalist appeals promising the precariat a better life on the grounds that they are Poles, the salt of the earth, and not on the grounds that workers deserve better or that trade unions should become stronger. And with such nationalist appeals to groups who, aside from child benefits and higher minimum wages, have not benefited much from the PiS revolution so far, PiS has been responsible for driving many of them into the arms of the open fascists, who already claim PiS has betrayed its promises.
PiS first directed its attentions to the marginalized precariat when it began to mobilize legions of rowdy football fan clubs. In 2010 and 2011, as Poland was preparing to host the 2012 European Championship, a series of violent clashes between football clubs using increasingly sophisticated pyrotechnics led the Civic Platform government to decide to crack down. Some stadiums were temporarily closed, and club members found themselves threatened with criminal charges. Despite having faced some similar problems when it was in power, PiS reached out to the clubs, calling them true representatives of the people unfairly targeted by treacherous liberals. Extremist behavior suddenly found a mainstream imprimatur. PiS legitimized a sense of righteous anger, and while it won a lot of votes from club members and others in the precariat, it split those votes with the upstart anti-systemic party “Kukiz ‘15,” led by the rock star Paweł Kukiz, on whose electoral lists explicit National Movement fascists were present, and thanks to whom several now find themselves in parliament. Starting in 2011, football fan clubs have joined with the National Movement, All-Polish Youth, and the National-Radical Camp to stage massive disruptive marches in Warsaw each Independence Day, replete with violence against “enemies of the fatherland” and a prominent display of extremist party symbols. For years in a row they torched a rainbow installation symbolizing gay pride, and once almost lynched a group of anarchist squatters. For all this, PiS stood by and applauded. When the 2017 edition brought together a record number of marchers chanting nationalist and racist slogans, PiS's Minister of Internal Affairs called it a “beautiful sight.” It is the effort to keep the more precarious and insecure part of the workforce within its ranks that has led to a situation where PiS not only does not denounce fascists, but facilitates their rise.
Today, fascism seeps into the organized labor movement through young activists from the explicitly fascist groups, trying to find a place in Solidarity. In the Pomorskie region in 2015, for example, a member of All-Polish Youth became president of the youth section of Solidarity. In Lower Silesia, Solidarity co-organized a celebration of war-time anti-communist fighters together with the National-Radical Camp.Footnote 14 So far, such cooperation is sporadic and entirely local, based on personal contacts between specific activists. Given PiS's rhetoric and Solidarity's support for PiS, it is not surprising that some local unionists see nothing wrong with working together with extremists. As we've seen, PiS rhetoric on issues such as refugees and protection of “the nation” is itself extremist; card-carrying fascists could hardly state things better. Occasionally, Solidarity has even threatened the kind of physical action that a radical group might threaten, such as when, in December 2016, Solidarity's leader volunteered to send a group of union toughs to eject opposition deputies occupying the parliamentary podium in a protest against PiS efforts to restrict media access to parliamentary activities.
It is unlikely Solidarity will go further in becoming a component of a genuine fascist movement. Independent unions, after all, are always wary of self-proclaimed masters, however sincere their oratory sounds. Still, the right-wing challenge to the labor movement, and to all of society, will not go away soon. Perhaps only a significant Left alternative will be able to stop it. In 2015, a new, Left party (not a “new left” party, in that it focuses on classic economic issues related to labor conditions) called Razem (Together), was founded, and quickly won 3.6 percent of the votes. It hopes to be like Syriza or Podemos, and it does have a chance. Of course, Greece and Spain have both had relatively recent experiences with radical right quasi-fascist regimes, which gives Left radicalism more opportunities than in Poland, where it is the radical Left that is still associated with dictatorship. Still, the fact that PiS's right-wing surge does owe some of its success to its willingness to introduce economic policies hitherto identified with the Left, indicates that the battle is far from over. Labor and laborers will play a large part in determining the future.
