This article discusses the question, to what extent the late and post- socialist transformation in Poland can be considered a key stage in the decline of industrial modernity. Setting out from the premise that state socialism constituted a paradigmatic version of industrial or high modernity, it addresses the major discursive rupture that preceded the regime change of 1989: While the workers’ mass movement of Solidarity had embraced political and social imagina-ries typical of industrial modernity in 1980/81, these came to be re-placed by new socio-economic and cultural frameworks by the end of the 1980s. By outlining the spectacular rise of informal trading, as well as the Polish and transnational input into the promotion of grassroot capitalism, the article indicates how Poland’s late and post-socialist transformation was intrinsically linked to the down-fall of industrial modernity and reflects on the historiographical po-tential of this approach.

Contemporary Polish historiography tends to focus predominantly on the main actors of the political transformation of 1989 and there are communist and opposition elites considered as such. In that perspective, Polish society remains a community on which the views of the elites are projected, and the myth about the birth of ci-vil society on the ruins of communism as early as 1989 may serve as a perfect example of such process. In reality, however, the Polish society was overwhelmingly apolitical, uninterested in political par-ticipation and to a large extent socially inactive. There are many reasons which caused this situation: starting from the martial law, which in December 1981 broke the backbone of the mass social movement that was the legal ‘Solidarity’, as well as the very 45 years of communism themselves, during which a social initiative was na-tionalized, and citizens were in fact deprived of it. As a result, the interpretations of the events of 1989 should be demythologized, al-so in order to understand the popularity of the slogans about “end-ing the 1989 revolution”, which still tend to appear in the public discourse in Poland.