Tadeusz Kowalik

Tadeusz Kowalik (19 November 1926 – 30 July 2012) was a Polish economist, public intellectual and political and social activist. As a prolific publicist in the area of political economy, he is notable for his dissenting leftist views expressed during the Polish systemic transformation (in 1989 and later).

Biography

Tadeusz Kowalik was born in Kajetanówka near Lublin in what at that time was central-eastern Poland. As a youngster he became radicalized by the economic backwardness of his region under the prewar Sanation regime and then by the Nazi German occupation. In 1946 he joined the youth wing of the communist Polish Workers' Party and in 1951 graduated from the University of Warsaw.

At the height of his career Kowalik was Poland's leading political economist, professor of economics and humanities, specialist in comparative analysis of economic systems and historian of economic thought. He worked from 1960 at subunits of the Polish Academy of Sciences, from 1993 at the Institute of Economics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, taught at Warsaw's higher education institutions (the social science school of the communist party and later at schools of economy and business), and at foreign universities and scholarly institutions, namely Cambridge, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., Oxford, York University in Toronto and New York's New School for Social Research. Kowalik completed all these foreign assignments before being granted a full professorship in Poland (1989).

For nearly half a century Kowalik remained at the forefront of the economic debate in Poland. He was particularly influenced by the Polish economists Rosa Luxemburg, Michał Kalecki and Oskar R. Lange, of whom the latter two were his mentors, older colleagues and co-workers (Kowalik co-authored works with Kalecki). He also worked with other pro-dissident academics, including the philosopher Leszek Kołakowski and the economist Włodzimierz Brus. Despite the restrictions the communist authorities imposed on him, Kowalik was the most published economist of his generation in Poland (because of the official prohibitions, many of his works appeared under the names of the senior economist Edward Lipiński and other Kowalik associates). From 1970, Kowalik supervised Jerzy Osiatyński's editing of Kalecki's collected works. during the 1968 purge. In 1956–62 Kowalik was involved in the revisionist-dissident Crooked Circle Club. In 1956–57 he was chief editor of Życie Gospodarcze ('The Economic Life') weekly, fired for the allegedly revisionist views he espoused (he wanted to reform the overly centralized state socialist system).

Revision of Keynesian political economy

Tadeusz Kowalik, like Kazimierz Łaski, was an important student of Michał Kalecki, whose ideas Kowalik developed in his mature years in practical terms, as an activist and publicist of the Polish political transformation (around 1990 and later). argued that the newly dominant Polish reformers chose and pursued the least favorable, in terms of societal interests, of the three economic scenarios possible. Kowalik wrote in 1996: "In Europe of the second half of the 20th century, one of the most unjust socioeconomic systems came into being in Poland". He argued that Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki (Poland's first non-communist chief of government) and his circle could have chosen a different course and he spoke of "Mazowiecki's ideological failure". Social inequities, Kowalik claimed, destabilize the foundations of political institutions in liberal democracy.

Books

Róża Luksemburg. Teoria akumulacji i imperializmu ('Rosa Luxemburg: theory of accumulation and imperialism'). Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, Wrocław 1971. Also Książka i Prasa, Warszawa 2012. Rosa Luxemburg: Theory of Accumulation and Imperialism. Palgrave Macmillan, London 2014. From Solidarity to Sellout: The Restoration of Capitalism in Poland. Monthly Review Press, New York 2011. O lepszy ład społeczno-ekonomiczny ('For a better socioeconomic order'). Polskie Towarzystwo Ekonomiczne, Warszawa 2013.