ABSTRACT
Support for the Polish democratic movement should have been easy for all those supposedly opposed to the totalitarian status quo in Eastern Europe. All Marxists should have been convinced by the overwhelming working-class character of the Polish opposition (one of the rare proletarian revolutions in history). Remnants of the libertarian New Left should have seen its stress on an alternative public sphere and on direct democracy as one of the few authentic continuations of their own efforts. New Western social movements should have been very sympathetic to the rebuilding of whole domains of autonomy and the democratic utilization of counterexpertise. 1 Unfortunately, such has not been the case.
