The idea of “Solidarity” has been killed in Poland after 1989. Law and Justice fills this space only rhetorically

Jarema Piekutowski: You consider yourself a conservative. Yet you have been a member of the Labour Party since 1976, Why such a choice?

Maurice Glasman: First, it’s my family inheritance. My grandfather was born in Poland, in Warszawa. They were Jews who left in 1905, strongly anti-fascist. We were a poor, working class family. My mother went to work in a factory when she was 13 years old. We were also very religious – in contemporary terms we would be considered very conservative in our values. So I was true to my tradition.

The second aspect is that the mainstream Anglo-conservatists from Burke don’t understand that the market is a desecrating force, that it turns human beings into commodities, dissolves the bonds of place, of faith, of affection in favour of a certain manic individualism. Therefore, a great hero of conservatism in England is Margaret Thatcher. And as far as I was concerned, she was a revolutionary and she treated poor people in a very disgusting way.

The kind of tradition that I’m from is truly conservative because it is distrustful of excessive state interference in the lives of people, is committed to liberty and particularly religious liberty and freedom of association. My party has been very good in this regard. But at the same time, it’s sceptical of the market as the exclusive dominant mechanism of distributing resources in society.

What is your conservatism? How would you define it?

The conservatism that I respect is sceptical of excessive rationalism. It has also an affection for what is and what has endured through time, and this is why I’m a very strong supporter of parliament and the constitutional monarchy. It’s anti-messianic, which means not believing in revolution or any absolute radical change. It’s honouring of the internal traditions that uphold forms of association in society. It’s a very conservative socialism that I that I advocate.

What does it mean to be sceptical of excessive rationalism in the times of such a deep crisis of reason?

There’s a distinction between rationality and reason. Change happens all the time. Technological change is a reality. It can’t be denied. But as there is a scepticism about reason, which I don’t share, there is also an excessive reliance in many ways on the ability of the state to act in rational ways in the ordering of society. That is very far from reasonable. We’ve seen this now with the very strange discussion around sexual rights and trans rights, that suddenly this is viewed as a scientific position, but it won’t open itself up to reasonable discussion. If you try to discuss it, you’re called a bigot. To put the question back at you, there’s many people who are disputing reason. But they usually take a form of hyper-rationalism in the kind of policies they wish to pursue. I would say that my target is excessive reliance on rationality in terms of how to execute power in a society.

If our state policy is not based on scientific proofs, on data – what else can it be based on?

There should be more regard for tradition and particularly the varied kinds of human relationships that sustain society. The crucial thing is to sustain bonds of association. Chesterton’s fence, for example, springs to my mind regarding how I approach my politics. Don’t immediately seek to knock down the fence. Ask the reason why it was there.

A very important alternative or complement to grounding policy in data is to look at national traditions of self-government and how they work. There’s a very rich tradition in Poland because of the very specific nature of not having a state for quite a long period of time, where Polish national culture was preserved within communities in very brilliant and diverse ways. In the east of the country, the west, the north, the south, there’s loads of different ways in which the Polish language was preserved, in which the distinctive features of Polish agriculture were preserved. Poland had also a very distinctive tradition of worker and labour movement politics as well. This movement was mad for liberty. All of this was smashed by the trauma of the Nazi occupation and then the disgusting nature of the politics of communism, which destroyed all the internal legitimacy of what authentic Polish traditions were. I’m Aristotelian, not Platonic. You begin with where the people are, and you build up from there.

How does it differ from populism?

“Populism” is a very important word that is used a huge amount now. I will give my very controversial view of populism: people are called populist whenever they try to defy global capitalism. Resistance to global capitalism is immediately labelled populist. We had this here in Britain with the Brexit referendum. As far as I was concerned, we were trying to reassert our national traditions of democratic self-government. It was called “populist”. Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn were both called populist.

The tragedy of Poland for me is that ever since 1980, when the “Solidarność” movement first expressed itself in its sublime form, we have been ruled by an international consensus upheld by the European Union, by the World Bank, by the United States, by the International Monetary Fund, by every single Western international agency – that anything that resisted unmediated capitalism was populist. But it wasn’t. It was trying to preserve forms of life, ways of living that were meaningful to people and gave them some continuity and stability in their life.

Is it safe to rely on people? Often, they prefer short-term gains to the long-term development.

The people who prefer short-term gains to the long-term development of legitimate institutions that uphold democracy and liberty are precisely bankers and politicians. Politicians are completely committed to short-term electoral gains. Let me remind you something about capitalism: maximum returns in the quickest possible time. It dissolves whole industries and institutions that existed for a very long time. The short-term gains are absolutely enforced by the existing globalization consensus: that’s what we’ve got to work our way through politically. What is required is the long-term development of democratic, place-based institutions that can mediate the demands of the rich and the powerful. The existing system is quite nihilistic. Maximum profits, maximum returns, immediate results. Whereas a proper, enduring transformational change is rooted in the affections of people and where they are. If you really believe in this “populist” stuff, you should ask why all of Europe is going “populist”. Italy’s gone populist, Poland’s gone populist, Hungary’s gone populist, Britain’s gone populist. People are trying to find some way to make politics meaningful when they’re told continuously that they can’t do anything – because it’s populist.

What is required is the long-term development of democratic, place-based institutions that can mediate the demands of the rich and the powerful

What is your opinion about the contemporary condition of the of the right-wing and conservatism in the Western world? Are we moving towards a kind of leftist-liberal woke utopia, to societies that are increasingly open in the Popperian sense, or is a conservative turn or a kind of counter-revolution on the way?

I think you’re exaggerating the internal coherence of European conservatism. European conservatism is very disappointing intellectually. A contradiction which characterizes contemporary conservatism is that it tries to uphold some forms of traditional values while pursuing an economic policy that destroys them. If you are committed to global free markets, then what are you doing talking about national borders? What are you doing talking about genuine democracy? This whole culture war is a result of both left and right abandoning their critique of the market.

The European Union, particularly after Maastricht and Lisbon, is completely committed to the free movement of capital, labour, goods, and services. It denies the government any capacity for any industrial or agricultural strategy that is not coherent and complementary with the further integration of the European community. In other words, when it comes to national politics, you can’t do anything significant. You can’t act. So that’s the dilemma for European conservatism, is that in its popular rhetoric, it gathers significant working-class sympathies, but in its actions, it doesn’t do anything. We saw that completely with Trump in the United States: a whole ragbag of rhetoric and absolutely no change in the action.

EU the government any capacity for any industrial or agricultural strategy that is not coherent and complementary with the further integration of the European community

The “Blue Labour”, regarded as a current of thought, not as a faction, Is presented in your book as an alternative to global liberalism. What are the basic assumptions of the Blue Labour?

If you really want to find the basic assumptions laid out in detail, look at the “Solidarność” movement and their publications between roughly 1981 and 1984. I say that because I wish to express my gratitude to Polish people for what they did.

But, in detail: the first assumption is that we are not profit-maximizing beings. We are not beings who wish for individual power above all things. We’re social beings. What we long for is love and meaningful work and some sense of place, some sense of association with people. Thus, the first assumption is very straightforwardly Aristotelian and Catholic in that sense.

The second assumption: Blue Labour assumes that capitalism unmediated by a democratic politics is a very exploitative system. The third one is that the is that the state without an active society to preserve internal traditions is an extremely oppressive and authoritarian agency. The fourth is that the place where you live is very important. And there is a need for a democratic organization of society in those places. The fifth assumption is that it’s better to make mistakes than not have the power to make any mistakes, because you’re completely subordinated to an all-powerful central market state.

Blue Labour is very consistent with Catholic social thought in its theological and philosophical assumptions about the social nature of the person, the incredible importance of a decentralised democracy, about the dignity of labour. It is also a very patriotic politics that each country should find its own way to organize itself and not be subject to these tremendous forces of homogenization.

In your book, “Blue Labour. Politics of the Common Good” you criticise globalisation in its current form. What are your main objections to it? Didn’t it raise the quality of life in in the whole world?

I dispute this in the same way that I dispute the argument that communism led to a raising of living standards across the Eastern Bloc. Because guess what? We also got electricity. We also raised our living standards. Changes happen. But I’ll give you one statistic about the United States that summarizes my position on globalization in the last 50 years. In real terms, the wages have risen 1%. And corporate profits have risen 185%. There was no common good in this development. This was purely done in terms of capital, I would say that even within Poland, where people are industrious, they work hard and they’re brave, many people are still very poor. There is a significant number of “losers” and that will tend to intensify. What we’ve had is an unmediated freedom of capital. To extract the greatest degree of profits in the greatest conceivable rate at the expense of essentially workers, farmers, people outside the big cities. It’s essential to build an alternative to that.

We transferred all our capital, all of our inherited wealth to invest in China, where there were precisely no free and independent trade unions, no strikes, no democracy, no liberty. There was an absolute unity of interest between capital and the most ferocious, wicked, and nasty form of authoritarianism we’ve ever seen. The Soviet rule was really lame and confused compared to the Chinese communism. And now we hear: “Oh, my God, China is not a liberal democracy. Oh, my God, it’s not conforming to what we wanted”. And yet it is a very, very big power in the world now. And it is hostile to our interests. What we’re reckoning with right now are the delusions of this form of globalization.

In practical terms, where should we – in your opinion – limit the globalisation or withdraw from it?

Let’s start with the difficult areas. The immigration policy is a matter of politics, not of human rights. But it is something that should be subject to a national conversation and voting. Because ultimately the free movement is really only in favour of the rich and the powerful. I’m in favour of immigration. I argue very much in favour of it, but it must be with the consent of the people. Otherwise, it just functions as a way of creating divisions and of pushing down wages.

Second: what became completely clear to me during the Covid period was that to depend on extended supply chains for the satisfaction of needs is a fantasy. And it came back with our inability to make medicines, even to make face masks when the Covid struck. Therefore, I think it’s a fundamental matter of statecraft to have a national industrial strategy for the provision of needs.

The third: it’s a horrible word, but it’s the only word I know that could do the work – commodification under globalization. Water is a commodity. Nature is a commodity. Human being is a commodity? No, no, no. These are not commodities. They’re an inheritance that that that we receive that we should care for. The solution is an industrial strategy combined with a vocational economy where workers are respected and trained in the same way as we train and respect professionals like lawyers, doctors, and dentists. We should have the same attitude to plumbers and electricians. I know that in Poland this language is difficult because of the legacy of communism, which pretended to elevate the workers, but in fact gave them no freedom and dignity at all. But I’m sticking with that.

The immigration policy is a matter of politics, not of human rights. But it is something that should be subject to a national conversation and voting

The fourth area which is of vital importance is democratic sovereignty. That is: a national, political community should have the power to make decisions about how it lives together and how it organizes itself.

You supported Brexit and you criticize the EU strongly. What are your objections against it?

There’s something rotten in the European Union. And deep down it is dominated by German and French interests. And what we are seeing now is that those actors an impediment to the development of a new politics that’s very strong in defence of national sovereignty. I think the battle in Ukraine is about national sovereignty.

Poland has gained a lot from accessing the EU.

In my book “Unnecessary Suffering” I expressed a huge respect for the post-war German system and its subsidies for small farmers. It had representation of workers on the boards of companies with over 50 people. You weren’t allowed to enter the labour market unless you had a vocation. However, I wish that Poland could understand that Germany did not extend its system to Poland but denied you that system and required that you undergo shock therapy – the Balcerowicz plan and the disintegration of huge parts of your agriculture and your industry and its subjection to market forces.

The counterargument is that there was no alternative for Poland in those times.

That’s exactly what hegemonic powers always do. That’s their trick. “There is no alternative”. The reality of politics is that there is always an alternative.

In terms of your integration into NATO and Western European structures, I completely understand the constraints that you were in. However, now things are on the move, America is talking about industrial strategy of onshoring or bringing industries back in terms of its global struggle with China. Poland has is in a more powerful position to negotiate its autonomy. There are cracks appearing in the international regime. And these need to be filled skilfully and negotiated skilfully. What I found very interesting is the unity of interest between Poland and Britain in relation to the Russian invasion and the military response. We’re on the turn now, and it’s the responsibility of my country to have an internationalist position. I would love to see a confederation of free European states bound together by peace, by free trade in real commodities, but with the ability to pursue their national interests in terms of industrial strategy. I think that Britain and Poland have emerged as natural allies in the response to the Russian invasion, immediately understanding its nature.

On the other hand, we must look at Germany and France and how they have behaved after Russia’s invasion. Germany is incredibly reluctant to let go of the Moscow-Berlin access-based industrial economy, based on low-cost energy and the subordination, really, of democracy in the spaces between Germany and Moscow in the interests of Germany and Russia. I think that France is still committed to a vision of European military autonomy that ultimately includes Russia and it wishes to see a common European military strategy. In both cases, Germany and France have not acted with sufficient force and speed in response to the Russian invasion and still wish to see a political and negotiated outcome that would return to the status quo before last year. This means that countries with very vital interests in that: Poland, the Baltic States, the Scandinavian states wish to see a much more robust response within the framework of NATO, but also within the framework of a common European action.

Let’s look at Poland. The main idea of the Law and Justice Party is a mix of conservatism and return to the old order, strongly influenced by Catholicism with left-wing solutions in social policy. As far as this description goes, it might look a bit like your worldview, but Law and Justice is destroying the state, its institutions, the judiciary, the rule of law. It has turned the public media into a propaganda tube like in the communist era. I was wondering what your opinion is about the Polish government in the light of those contradictions?

In rough summary, the tragedy of Poland is that it achieved its independence within an era where it could not assert its sovereignty or independence. But it had to conform to the demands of the international Western community. And that meant it had to become aggressively capitalist and corporatist. Poland led the way in developing a politics that was all about culture war and not about economic strategy, and, particularly, industrial, and agricultural strategy. It led to mass immigration, to the depletion of whole areas, to a politics of resentment that is still battling over the legacy of communism. In that sense, the emergence of Law and Justice and various liberal parties makes complete sense, because the European Union denied Poland the ability to develop a genuine sovereign nation state. And that was necessary because it was necessary to integrate into the West. I completely understand the constraints of that. All I’m saying is that now that Britain has left the European Union, at least there can be some form of space for the development of political parties that are genuinely tied to popular interests, the interests of workers, farmers, and to be able to express the particular politics associated with various places in Poland. What you’ve got recently is a is a politics that could never be born. Law and Justice rhetorically fill the space. But they can’t defy the European Union when it comes to Maastricht and Lisbon. So it’s the same old story.

I completely agree that Law and Justice destroys the rule of law. But the idea that the law is not bound within a political community, that it stands outside it and can’t be affected is completely contrary to the historic experience. There must be a conversation about the legitimacy of law.

Can you see any meaningful alternatives for the Polish politics?

A meaningful politics in Poland would be something that can act through democracy, to change and temper the direction the society is going in in the economy as well as through the welfare state. I don’t see, though, that there are many meaningful alternatives before you. Because of the nature of the international consensus and the forms of the institutions that Poland integrated into it has never been able to develop a serious national politics about state building industry, food, water, energy, those issues of national autonomy that are so central to the formation of sovereignty. Therefore, Law and Justice is not alone in Polish political parties, in shadow wars, in fighting, shadow wars against demons and illusory enemies, when in fact the problem is powerlessness.

There is a fierce political struggle in the UK. Yet, as far as I can see, the social polarization does not seem to seem to be as acute as in Poland, where the warring forces, the government and the opposition regard each other as criminals, traitors, and invaders. They will be putting each other to jail after the election and so on. The late Parliament Marshall Ludwik Dorn told me in an interview that in Poland there is no such thing as a state doctrine, understood as a set of common principles and goals to which all sides of the political scene agree. As far as I can see, there is such a doctrine in the UK. And how is it that in the UK this doctrine can be maintained?

The monarchy plays an important role. I think it’s very important that our head of state is not a politician and. I’m a very unusual socialist in being a monarchist. A constitutional monarchy is, I think, a very beautiful arrangement, so that the people can have affections for the head of state without that being a party-political matter. The second is the blessing of our geography. We are an island. we have not been conquered since 1066, and we still have not forgiven the French, as you probably are aware, for all of that. And we have developed a very flexible law system. We don’t have a written constitution, so we can incorporate big changes to the democratic system. One of the unrecognized qualities of our unwritten constitution is that it has led to greater stability and ability to change. There was a very, very big schism over Brexit. But it was decided democratically. There was the referendum and then the conservatives won in 2019. And my party, which was very pro-remain, said: “Okay, we accept the verdict of the people, and we will work within this framework”.

We’ve also had a very long democratic history, and there were conventions that emerged. For example, Boris Johnson lied to Parliament – and he had to go. The members of his own party said: “You’ve got to go; you cannot lie to parliament”. We value our democracy, and we value our liberty. That’s why we left the European Union. When there are no significant values and in fact the stakes are very low, that’s where the hate comes in. That’s where you just accuse each others of being traitors and criminals and liars and thieves – because the truth is, ultimately it really doesn’t matter hugely who wins the next election in Poland, because you’re going to be bound by the same laws that you have no control over. I’m not a big fan of Henry Kissinger, but he had a good quote. He said that academic arguments are so bitter because the stakes are so low.

Do you think it’s possible to develop such a stable political culture in Poland, or is it already too late in the times of post-politics, the Twitter politics and so on?

It’s not too late at all. You’ve got to understand that you are in the very early days of state-building. You made certain decisions about integration into the EU and to NATO, into the Western world, which were very emphatic decisions, and they brought big consequences in terms of the lack of development of the institutions of the state and of society for self-government. But the road ahead is not as constrained. Poland is like my country. It’s eternal. You’re not going to go. It’s the work of many centuries ahead of you.

G.K. Chesterton, which is an important author for you, emphasized that not only the big business, but also the state might be a threat to freedom. I think that the idea of a well-understood liberty is also close to you. In Poland, we had the traumatic experience of real socialism behind us. How can socialist parties betting on the common good protect themselves from the temptation of building a Leviathan state that controls everything through bureaucracy?

The fundamental issue is that socialist parties throughout Eastern Europe – and Poland is no exception. – absolutely lost their legitimacy. Even in Poland where social democracy was a very vital part of the Polish national tradition. Where in the interwar period, the self-organized workers’ movement was an absolute bedrock of the resistance to communism. It’s time for a new story. Now you’ve had the experiences of the last over 30 years of the free market. I’m hoping that those who care for the well-being of working people could begin to organize their politics. A politics that is going to have to be radically different to anything that you’ve had for a hundred years. You had the “Solidarność” movement. I just want to remind you that the Solidarity Party won well over 90% of the vote in the first free elections and then went on to dismantle every single policy that it stood for. I remember this famous quote from Lech Wałęsa: ”If I do what Solidarity said, I will block the reform process”. The Western capitalism absolutely demanded your compliance to a system that negated your first expression of democratic wishes.

Poland made certain decisions about integration into the EU and to NATO, into the Western world, which were very emphatic decisions, and they brought big consequences in terms of the lack of development of the institutions of the state and of society for self-government

What’s important about the “Solidarność” movement was that it was patriotic and internationalist. It had solidarity with other countries fighting Soviet totalitarianism at that time. It was conservative and radical. It drew inspiration from the church and from the labour movement. It trusted the people. Can you believe it? It trusted people to make their decisions,  and that decisions had power. This is the politics that I’m the friend of in Poland. To go back to the “Solidarność” movement. Do you think that’s outdated? Think again. This is the idea of subsidiarity, of decentralization, of self-governing cities, of autonomous universities and of workers on boards. Of Poland as a leader of the free world. All of these are completely relevant to the contemporary world. You were trapped – and your choice was between Russia and Germany, or Russia and the United States. Now you are a much more equal partner to the Scandinavian states, to the Baltic states and to Britain. You can assert your autonomy in new ways. The demand, as far as I’m concerned, is for a new political constellation that loves liberty. But liberty not just understood in terms of rights. Liberty understood in terms of self-governing institutions without interference from the state. The problem with Law and Justice is they don’t get that.

Maurice Glasman, (born 8 March 1961 in London) – political theorist, commentator and academic, senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University. Labour life peer in the House of Lords.

Photo: members.parliament.uk