This is how most Poles see it (especially those in the West): I don't gotta choose to eat, dress or pay for the energy, I can go to the pub, and even for holidays enough, so I'm mediate class! Yes, Carrington!
In Poland, the mediate class is widely regarded as employed people, and in peculiar those pushed into the precarriage, confused by the apparent possession of their means of production. We don't have, in company, or class awareness, or worse, even self-understanding of your own poverty. Even if it's yet driving us out for a pay emigration...
Survivors
Polish poorness is simply a fact to which, after nearly 34 years of alleged systemic transformation, we inactive cannot admit ourselves. In 1990s, which was displaced from consciousness as an acceptable margin only affecting any post-Sovietic pathologies, in the second decade of the 21st century it was covered with the appearance of growth and already, the almost attainable stabilisation of the "Polish green island", which is actually an influx of money, not from mythical "Western investors", but from parents and relatives in the West who run on dishwashers and constructions behind the minimum. Indeed, it remained so much from it that it was possible to feed the dying home consumption (of course mainly goods derived from imports, and thus almost closed in circulation). However, in order to sustain it a small bit, it took a further step, namely the emergence of a substitute for redistribution, in the form of chaotic and inconsistent, but at least any social programs introduced by the PiS governments. Of course, without any lasting basis for growth, with besides advanced costs of constant and average party-state waste and theft, and now in the face of the inevitable possible of recession – these were only means of survival, which did not even give a chance for basic life-saving security.
Why We Don't Save
The alleged deficiency of propensity of Poles to save is the on-call boy to beat for all those avenging for social transfers as specified and criticizing symptoms of the disease, however, gold weapons, without touching its actual causes. However, it is not so that the “Polish onion” ino would eat another people's hard-paid taxes, alternatively of even putting something aside, and in a guess in time most likely and invest. This is not possible and is not happening anywhere in the world, due to the fact that reasoning about savings in general allows only to accomplish a certain level of income, without which specified a possible is not only unthinkable, but besides completely unrealistic. This is not a secret cognition or a conspiracy of communistism, but a easy noticeable phenomenon, measured by 2 values: a marginal tendency to consume and a marginal propensity to save, whose neat designs, and even graphic representations, can be found in any chief textbook of economics, as right, due to Keynesian economics:
Collective Individuals
So should not the fact that our situation differs so importantly depending on whether we choose (?) to work in or out of the country besides affect our political choices in any way, both leading to a simplification in these inequalities and disparities in Poland, which we actually escape, and by activating our migration? As it turns out – not necessarily... Especially in the second case, compared to the increasing engagement of another immigrant / number groups, increasingly visible within Western societies, Polish passiveness is rather obvious. And this is not an accidental omission, but on the contrary – it is based on a number of mechanisms established in Polish consciousness.
First of all, I dare say that a crucial part of our countrymen on economical emigration is not considered to be... immigrants. The immigrant's the 1 on the boat, you know who! She comes in illegally, takes her occupation and lives off benefits! It is besides a consciousness barrier, and although seemingly grotesque, it does not let itself to be found in the social aspect of emigration. It is not accidental for any researchers, especially Polish commercial movements of the population, to see them as a immense sum of individual decisions, even despite common experiences. This view seems to be wrong, but it responds to the attitude of the stakeholders themselves, who, erstwhile escaping from work from 1 town (e.g. from the model erstwhile in this respect Sokółka) and building their fresh future precisely on networks of family, friendly and neighbouring ties from the old country, inactive see in themselves their own fate, no substance what happened to others, almost precisely in the same situation.
Alienation, declassification, self-deception
Secondly, even after respective years, any have not truly left. Not only due to the fact that all purchases are made in “Polish stores”, not only by a constantly expanding home in Poland, in which no 1 lives, but which the full environment is expected to amaze with its magnificence. Alienation makes us neither here nor there. Not at home on a barbecue on a Polish sentimental visit, nor unchangeable against Gefüllter Kohlkopf and haggisu. At the same time, we do not vote in Poland, due to the fact that they are all thieves and abroad, due to the fact that these are not our matters. And then there's a flyer to effort to read, and you know it...
Thirdly, many Polish expatriates have a sense of declassification, and at the same time they make easy and frequently apparent class recognition upwards with professional promotion. Polish managers returning as part of corporate transfers to the country frequently provide, unfortunately, natural facilities for the composition of the III Polish Republic. besides abroad, however, the promotion to something called a lower mediate class comfort creates an army of fierce capo liberalism. Finally, ideological events. In the West we are all actually refugees from the neoliberal paradigm, inactive celebrating the belief that we are fleeing from the "remains of the commune" and "socialism". Even paying higher taxes in welfare countries, we insist that... it is in Poland that is the highest! With fanaticism, we defend all the pulpit of liberalism and easily, very easy if at all we are drawn into local politics, it is mostly on the side... of the utmost anti-immigrant racist right. Of course, it is besides not easy to conduct political activity in modern Poland, but it is besides worth noticing that the political inertia of the Polish diaspora is simply a crucial example of the waste of existing social capital.
Poland inactivity
Poland's poorness is passive, like in times of serfdom, erstwhile alternatively of the peasant rebellions known from another parts of Europe, our ancestors, led to the eventual check whether the heir in the neighbouring farm was any better, and the full maximum was the escape to chaotic Fields. In the 3rd Poland we are not rebelling either, our emigration is simply a symptom of resignation alternatively than resistance, achieving a certain level of income first, and then frequently besides social capital (advances at work, buying a house, educating children, feeling of self-esteem and even prestige in the environment remaining in the country) are as unchangeable as it is demobilizing, due to the fact that nothing else is about the self-proclaimed mediate class from promotion. And accordingly – especially if social capital is not decently rebuilt and secured on emigration, if the sense of alienation and declassification is increasing, then the answer is another change of the farm, or return to Poland, almost always surrounded by self-consolation, that it has surely improved here...
As we inactive do not see Polish poverty, so we do not want to accept our own intellectual and social limitations, which do not let us to leave our old drawer. In fact, it is not from Poland that we escape, but from the limitations of peripherality that make it uncomfortable. Our challenge is so not to keep packing suitcases in the endless journey of Polish poorness – to emigration, emigration, further emigration, etc. It is the full of Poland that we must pack with us and bring out beyond the paradigm of neoliberalism, in which it is stuck with us. And our country and abroad.
Konrad Hand
