Activities and affiliations

Social movements and organizing Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) 1934–2004 ○ Natural causes

A dissident socialist who linked workers’ self-management to civic solidarity

When the strikes began in 1980, he declared that the stranglehold on workers’ organisation and free information had finally been broken.

Jacek Kuroń was a Polish historian and organiser who tried to separate socialist ideals from the rule of party bureaucracy. His Open Letter to the Party, written with Karol Modzelewski, argued that the bureaucracy dominated workers and proposed workers’ councils and democratic pluralism. A co-founder of the Workers’ Defence Committee in 1976, he connected intellectuals with workers and became a leading adviser to Solidarity in 1980, advocating a programme of self-management. Interned on the first night of martial law in December 1981, he continued to support the underground union and later served as labour and social policy minister during Poland’s post-1989 transition.

Social movements and organizing Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) 1946–

The dissident strategist who negotiated a peaceful transition with communist power

A revolution for a constitution, not a paradise. An anti-utopian revolution. Because utopias lead to the guillotine and the gulag.

Raised in a communist family in Warsaw, he became a dissident after his imprisonment in the 1968 political crisis. As a strategist for the Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) and Solidarity, he participated in the 1989 Round Table talks, then as the founding editor of Gazeta Wyborcza led the election campaign and proposed the 'Your President, Our Prime Minister' formula that enabled a peaceful division of power with the communists. He later withdrew from politics to remain an influential journalist and liberal democratic voice.