ABSTRACT
In the past, the crisis-ridden post-war Polish economy had relied, reasonably successfully, on the mechanism of ‘regulation through crisis’ to bring temporary stabilization and reproduction of state socialism through political concessions, reduction of investment tension and reallocation of resources favouring consumption. The interaction of factors emerging at the second half of the 1980s, such as the changing configuration of domestic political forces, Gorbachev’s perestroika, the decomposition of state socialism and the exhaustion of economic and political reserves, however, had undermined substantially the curative effects of ‘regulation through crisis’. The emerging political breakthrough offered new opportunities and solutions to the deepening Polish crises of the late 1980s which lay beyond state socialism and made a transition to a market economy feasible. The reproduction of state socialism was replaced by a collapse of the regime.
