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Aleksander Smolar - Anti-political politics (66/201)

118 views · Published 18 December 2018 · 2:20 · Indexed 5 October 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2018 · News & Politics

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To listen to more of Aleksander Smolar’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwlxPLurqAOCrabBgGrqLA7

Aleksander Smolar (b. 1940) is a Polish writer, political activist and adviser, vice-president of the Institute for Human Sciences and president of the Stefan Batory Foundation. [Listener: Vitek Tracz]

TRANSCRIPT: Many of the leading people whom we could say came from the democratic opposition weren’t able to think the way the Party did. Jacek Kuroń couldn’t. He had a definite notion of social order and you could say that he was less concerned with the country and more with society and the workers as well as with the issue of how to gain the maximum number of votes for the party so that it could later realise its programme. This wasn’t the thing that absorbed him the most. It was a very specific mentality, way of thinking which in my opinion brought Poland many advantages because that formation and those governments like Tadeusz Mazowiecki’s or the later governments of the democratic opposition – Bielecki’s and then Hanna Suchocka’s – took decisions which were in some sense suicidal, destroying their political background. What I mean is that they didn’t take into account the direct political effects on the party; that group which had its roots in the democratic opposition was in some sense anti-political where politics depends not only on achieving goals but also on looking for a certain compromise with public opinion to have a chance of governing and of fulfilling goals. Well, unfortunately things didn’t go too well with that, but maybe it was the inevitable fate of that political formation, meaning it was a time when everything was in transit, a time of transformation when this political formation fulfilled its function and then disappeared. Later there were parties which didn’t have such exceptional people and which were guided by pragmatism not to say short-term political opportunism.

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