Authors

Discussion

Bazaars, street trading, and second-hand car marts accompanied the implosion of the communist economies throughout Central and Eastern Europe. In Poland, due to the long-time agony of the country’s economy under late socialism, informal markets spread earlier than elsewhere in the region. This pioneering role gave them a formative impact on popular imaginaries of capitalism in the transformation period. Yet, the extraordinary expansion of informal markets certainly was an interim phenomenon that continued to be contested on various grounds – and disappeared when transnational capitalism came to Poland in the guise of large-scale shopping malls and foreign takeovers from the second half of the 1990s. Focussing on case studies from Warsaw and the industrial town of Starachowice in South-East Poland, this paper analyses public struggles over liberalising and then regulating informal markets. Considering them as tangible expressions of the sweeping shifts of economic and social imaginaries of the time, the paper addresses the question whether bottom-up capitalism was merely a ephemeral phenomenon of transition, or whether it had lasting impacts on vernacular attitudes towards the new order.