No doubt if you read the mainstream press, you will all of a sudden start
hearing about what a nightmare country Poland is with its current
politicians. All of a sudden, some people started to notice that abortion is
illegal, there are extreme right people in the Parliament and civil rights
are being flouted.

Worse yet, the upstart Finance Minister made absolutely unbelievable
statements regarding Tesco supermarkets, saying that they are not really
building the economy but ultimately taking away jobs, etc.. The whole
neo-liberal establishment went up in arms.

Of course, it is true that we have this horrible extreme right League of
Polish Families who organize anti-abortion exhibits in the EuroParliament.
(Only it's also true that fewer or them were elected than 4 years earlier.
The leader of the party, Roman Giertych, actually almost did not get
re-elected this time.) And it's true that we have a large right-wing
population, a lot of intolerant Catholics and problems with demonstrations.
And I know it's true because I read about it in Gazeta Wyborcza*. (* main
liberal and neo-liberal paper started by Adam Michnik with very strong
opinions. Usually total crap - ie recent editorial by Michnik comparing
Guantanamo Bay to a holiday resort!)

Gazeta Wyborcza builds the opinions of a certain portion of society, but
also influences journalists in other countries. The political formula is
very simple = Civic Platform is good, Law and Justice, Self-Defense and the
League are bad. And a good deal of the articles written represent exactly
that slant.

Recently a whole page was devoted to how badly anarchists and leftists are
repressed. Funny thing: when there was a different government, (the one that
actually DID all the repressing), they largely didn't want to know about it
or mention it. When people were arrested in April in Warsaw, the papers
portrayed everyone as criminals; now we are victims of human rights abuses.
It shouldn't take much thinking for people to see how we are simply
convenient for the paper now; despite the fact that all these repressions
took place under the leftist government, or are the responsibility of some
local authorities, it all can be tallied up to the fatalistic scenario that
they'd like us all to believe: that because people voted for Law and Justice
Party, they created a disaster for the economy and for human rights in this
country.

Not that I want to justify Law and Justice in any way, but I just don't buy
what the liberals and neo-liberals (who are, let's face it, the economic
right) are trying to tell us: that only the party (parties) of their choice
are any good. For us, they are also complete shit.

You can see how these false dichotomies work around the world. What gets me
is how otherwise intelligent people fall for them.

Now all of a sudden, a certain group of liberals in Poland woke up that "the
government is bad". Duh. Like we didn't know that. All of a sudden, some of
them try to step up their "anti-government" protests, and even think that
anarchists are a good natural ally for them. Only it turns out that they're
just against THIS government, and sometimes just because they don't like
populism, or think it's not pro-EU or free market enough. In the best case
scenario, they just don't like religion being mixed with politics. This last
reason we can support. The first ones - well, let's just say that those
positions are not the most troubling for us.

Should we be troubled that the Finance Minister, Teresa Lubinska, has a
history of fighting against hypermarket development in Szczecin? Of course
the whole lot of them are capitalists, but how many capitalists (including
fake socialists) in this country have said anything at all about the nature
of exploitation and the investments made in Poland by big international
concerns?

We're just not going to buy the neo-liberal propaganda that we're in for an
economic catastrophe if anything other than the most draconian pro-market,
anti-labour economic measures are implemented. Not that Law and Justice
won't prove to be total bastards against workers; I'm sure they will. It's
just that during the whole election period, we heard a lot of fear coming
from the liberal population about gay rights, etc., but we didn't hear any
of them, for example, criticize Civil Platforms horrendous proposals for a
flat tax which would have given a tax break of 25-35% for the richest
people, and pratically no break for the mass working poor and would have
been accompanied by mass budget cuts and privatizations efforts in areas
such as health care and higher education. In other words, for this narrow
group of people (who often come from a small economic or social elite), some
set of social policies took precedence over another set of economic
policies; they panicked at one but didn't blink an eye about the other. And,
quite significantly, they proved that they were quite insensitive to the
growing dissatisfaction of the working poor with hard capitalism.

"Hard capitalism" means the strictest neo-liberalism which totally
disregards the condition of the poor, as opposed to "soft capitalism", which
is crappy all the same, but at least it maintains some token services,
mechanisms to protect labour, progressive taxes, etc.. All capitalism has
got to go, but as far as the real material conditions of the working poor is
concerned, hard capitalism is quantatively worse, which is why although we
don't agree with the protective role of the state, we prefer to see the
authorities who rob us use our taxes for health care and social benefits
than F-16s and perks for the rich.

No matter what the outcome of the election was, we are fucked. If we are not
fucked in one way, we are fucked in another. No matter who's in office, we
hate the whole system and are going to continue to fight against it. To
maintain an anti-capitalist and anti-state perspective, we have to ignore
these false dichotomies.