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The free-market group, unlike oppositionists who favored a
struggle against the totalitarian system, believe that one can
move forward in Poland without challenging its current rulers,
who, they argue, also favor political reform and a new market
economy. Their concentration is on using the available political
space in civil society, through creation of independent small
businesses, opposition publications, and cultural organizations of
an independent nature, such as a musical group we heard per–
form, The Lute Guild. This group of accomplished musicians
uses music as a mechanism to make Poles aware of their status
as a nation with a cultural past, including that of the suppressed
and largely unknown (to contemporary Poles) Jewish culture of
old Poland. Ostensibly purely cultural, the Guild uses music as a
way to foster both an oppositional stance as well as an apprecia-
tion of what it means to be Polish, to create a national identity of a
pluralistic multi-ethnic country, which they feel is a prerequisite
for breaking out of the mold created by Communism.
Although aligned with the Church, as Adam Szostikiewicz
put it, they have many difficulties with the official Church. The
liberals clearly feel that the Church and the Pope, too committed
to economic collectivism for their taste, are out of touch with
Poland's reality in the economic doctrines they espouse. They
argue that Pope John Paul's Encyclical,
Laborem Exercens,
yielded
too much to socialism at a historical moment when capitalist re–
birth was needed in Eastern Europe. Hence
it
is Cracow, as
Walicki writes, that has become the center "of what might be
called enlightened conservatism in Poland." And the ancient
Jagiellonian University, where our conference was held, has be–
come an autonomous center of independent thought and politics,
distinct from that of the mass left of the Solidarity underground.
Unlike the left, which the Cracow intellectuals see favoring de–
mocratization and wider participation in power, they favor limit–
ing the very scope of political power through liberalization based
on the spontaneous force of the market.
What these reformers advocate is a nonsocialist revolution
from above, in which Poland's Communist rulers do away with
socialism, enabling the population to buy and sell, produce and
travel, instead of a utopian revolution that achieves socialist prin–
ciples through democratization. And those within Solidarity, in–
cluding its two major leaders in Cracow, Zbigniew Romaszewski
