ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a warning concerning the political consequences of historicizing the emergence of modern Eastern Central Europe (ECE) under the motif of the development of under-development. It outlines a critical engagement with Antonio Gramsci's notion of passive revolution discussing how 'restoration becomes the first policy whereby social struggles find sufficiently elastic frameworks to allow the bourgeoisie to gain power without dramatic upheavals'. The chapter explains phases of state socialist development when the dialectical interplay between strategies of accumulation and hegemony intensified, signifying the beginnings of passive revolution, during the Gomulka period. It focuses on the period associated with the Gierek regime's 'Great Plan' to solve the problems of the Polish economy through direct reintegration into transnationalized circuits of capital through foreign debt. The significant point to emphasize here is that no political economy concept, whether it is ECE, or post-communist transition, is somehow external to language, history, and politics.
