From Industrial Democracy to Political Democracy in Poland: on The Rise and Fall of Solidarity

This paper has the following objectives. First, to trace the evolution of the institutions of industrial democracy in Poland. Initially, they were completely subordinated to the authorities (the Leninist model). They then made adjustments to the industrial decision-making system. In the 1980s they would substitute the institutions of political democracy, thus becoming the main internal factor contributing to the decomposition of the party state. After 1989, those anti-system institutions became an important building block of the post-Communist order, and a post-Solidarity one between 2005-2007 and from 2015The global experience in this respect is different.