Postkomunistyczna lewica, to znaczy jaka?

Abstract

The first part of the article includes an analysis of the term: post-communist parties (postcommunists), used in political discourse in the 1990s and in the present decade as a pejorative designatum of the opponent, i.e. the parties: the Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland (Socjaldemokracja Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej, SdRP) and the Democratic Left Alliance (Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej, SLD). More diverse were the intentions of the authors of the scientific and journalistic texts. The latter part of the present article indicates some of the indirect manifestations of the "post-communist" continuation of the Polish United Workers' Party in the analysis of the members and staff of the SLD. Discontinuity was pronounced in the erosion of ideology and programme evolution towards social liberalism until mid-200S. The "historical policy" of the Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc, PiS) in the middle of the current decade was also an ideological offensive in the area of the memory of the communist regime, in the face of which the SLD turned out to be defensive and ineffective. The final part of the text reports the manifestations of maintaining the historical traditions by the Democratic Left Alliance: the people, ideas, cutting-edge events. The conclusions highlight the political rivalry for control over the codes of historical memory. The memory of the past is seen as a viable segment of the policy in the present time, and part of the vision of the future in the medium and long term perspective. The term 'post-communist', as used in the title, has in this context been an instrument effectively used by the right wing in order to delegitimize the SLD in the last two decades.