Polish Socialist Party

The Polish Socialist Party was formed at a founding congress held in Paris on 17–23 November 1892, under the name Union of Polish Socialists Abroad. The Paris programme adopted there set the goal of the proletariat taking power and an independent democratic republic, and demanded direct, universal and secret suffrage, equality of all citizens regardless of sex, nationality or religion, freedom of speech, press and assembly, progressive taxation, the eight-hour day, a minimum wage, equal pay for women and men and a ban on labour by children under 14. In 1893 internationalists opposed to the independence line split off to form the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (later of Poland and Lithuania). The party worked underground in Russian Poland and from 1894 published the paper Robotnik.

According to the English-language source, the 1905 revolution swelled the party from a few hundred activists to about 60,000 members. During the revolution Piłsudski's 'old' faction, which called for independent armed action, clashed with the 'young' faction, which hoped to bring down tsarism together with the revolutionary Russian masses; the Combat Organisation, dominated by the 'old', carried out hundreds of armed actions in 1905–1907. In 1906 the party split into the Revolutionary Faction and the PPS–Left. The Revolutionary Faction took back the party's original name in 1909, while the Left merged with the SDKPiL in 1918 to form the Communist Party of Poland.

In November 1918 the PPS formed the core of the first Polish government, Ignacy Daszyński's Provisional People's Government, and the succeeding government of Jędrzej Moraczewski introduced the eight-hour day by decree. During the Polish–Soviet War the party joined the Government of National Defence and organised workers' units to defend Warsaw. It initially supported Piłsudski's May Coup of 1926 but went into opposition in May 1927, and from 1929 was the largest force in the Centrolew opposition. After parliament was dissolved in 1930 many of its leaders were arrested and tried in the Brest trials, and the party boycotted the elections of 1935 and 1938. It belonged to the Labour and Socialist International from 1923 to 1940.

During the Second World War the party took part in the Polish Underground State as the underground PPS – Freedom, Equality, Independence, whose armed units joined the Home Army and fought in the Warsaw Uprising. Meanwhile activists close to the Polish Workers' Party created the so-called 'Lublin' PPS led by Edward Osóbka-Morawski and Józef Cyrankiewicz, which took part in the governments of 1945–1948 and supplied the prime minister. The Communists exploited divisions within the party to remove Osóbka-Morawski and install Cyrankiewicz as prime minister. According to the Polish-language source, the domestic PPS, with 500,000 members, formally merged with the Polish Workers' Party at the unification congress of December 1948 but was in fact absorbed by it, forming the Polish United Workers' Party.

Opponents of the merger continued the PPS in exile and took part in several cabinets of the government-in-exile. In 1987 Jan Józef Lipski and others re-established a party of the same name in Poland, and according to the Polish-language source the various PPS groups in the country united with the exile PPS in 1990.