LEARNING FROM POLAND.

The article reports of current practical struggles for liberation and democracy throughout the world and learnings from the social movements in Poland. Since all forms of democracy have their own forms of exclusion, only the co-existence of different, even competing forms of democracy can be genuinely democratic. Such seems to be the political theory striven for by the radical left of the Polish movement, important in itself in spite of the minority position of those who would profess it, whose strategic project of general democratization plays more of a regulative than constitutive role for the movement as a whole. If developed, this type of political theory would not be the least contribution of the democratic intellectuals in Poland to movements for emancipation, East and West. After the failures of 1956 and 1968, of revolution and reform we now know that a third alternative-structural reform from below is at the very least possible in the societies of the Soviet type. Given the irrelevance of revolutionary and the exhaustion of étatistic reform alternatives in the West it is worth asking whether such a model could contribute to the self-interpretation of our new social movements as well.