Wizje nowoczesnej gospodarki w Polsce Ludowej

Abstract

Socialist economy was to be a modern economy. The paper attempts to answer the question of how modernity was conceived at different times of the existence of the Polish People’s Republic. The author draws attention to these patterns of modernity, changing over the four decades after the war, and the evolving attitude to economic contacts with the Western world. Modernity in the socialist version was expressed by submission of the economy to the rigors of the plan, releasing it from the chaos of the market and controlling its development by the state in such a way as to eliminate negative phenomena associated with the emergence of industrial civilization in the West. The author argues that such a conception of modernity was conditioned not only by ideological considerations but also by long memory of the experience of the Great Depression of the thirties and by the postwar Polish political elite’s perception of the causes and consequences of Poland’s economic underdevelopment in the past.