Oskar Lange and Tadeusz Kowalik on the Bourgeois Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Poland: A Note on Two Papers

The aim of this chapter is to compare the content of two essays: Oskar Lange's 1931 ‘Crisis of Socialism’ and Tadeusz Kowalik's 1996 ‘August – the Bourgeois Revolution of the Epigones’ in order to try to determine the extent to which Lange's paper influenced Kowalik's ideas. We find that Lange's article was possibly Kowalik's only source of theoretical knowledge about bourgeois revolutions and their course when he wrote his 1996 piece. What probably struck Kowalik most in ‘Crisis of Socialism’ in the context of Polish transformations was the similarity (real or apparent) between the situation in Poland in 1905–1918 and that in 1980–1989 (or even 1980–1992), that is, the possibility of constructing a ‘bourgeois class state’ only through a workers revolution immediately preceding such a construction. On the basis of this analogy, in ‘August…’ Kowalik, as we argue, introduced a novelty into his reflections: he fortified his earlier, more lax analyses with the concept of ‘bourgeois revolution.’