Social Justice Movement

The party was founded as a political extension of Social Justice Chancellery (Polish: Kancelaria Sprawiedliwości Społecznej), abbreviated as KSS, which was registered as a social association and movement in 2010; the movement provided legal and economic assistance to "people at risk of or affected by social exclusion". In addition, the movement also engaged in political actions, becoming known for slogans such as "Stop the War!" and "Housing a right not a commodity!". The KSS stated its intention to integrate itself into "the radical left and anarchist circles", and campaigned against installing nuclear missile shields in Poland. The party also protected tenants from eviction. According to the party's leader, KSS activists concluded that evictions will never stop without a radical change, which inspired them to transform the movement into a political party in 2014.[2]

In the 2014 Polish local elections, RSS fielded for mayor of Warsaw Agata Nosal-Ikonowicz (wife of the party leader), who received 1.11% of the vote, coming 9th out of 11 candidates.[8] In the elections in Wrocław, RSS co-founded a local committee, which fielded Konrad Rychlewski for mayor.,[9] who received 0.8% of the votes, taking the last place.[10] In the elections to the Lubusz Voivodeship Sejmik, RSS ran together with the Green Party as the Green New Deal committee, which won 0.62% of the popular vote.[11] Before the 2015 Polish presidential election, the party supported Green candidate Anna Grodzka,[12] who, however, failed to collect the required number of signatures required to register her candidacy. On 11 July 2015, the RSS joined the Social Movement of the Republic of Poland. In the 2015 Polish parliamentary election, RSS activists manned almost the entire Warsaw electoral list for the Sejm (opened by Piotr Ikonowicz). An RSS activist also ran as a candidate from the party list in Lublin.

In January 2017, Piotr Guział[13] joined the RSS. In the 2018 Polish local elections, Piotr Ikonowicz, running with KWW Sprawiedliwości Społecznej Piotra Ikonowicza, came 9th among 14 candidates for the office of mayor of Warsaw, receiving 7271 votes (0.82% of valid votes).[14] In the city council elections his committee received 1.19% of the popular vote.[15] In the Gdańsk local election, RSS co-founded (among others, together with the Greens, Feminist Initiative and the Polish Initiative association) the Jolanta Banach Lepszy Gdańsk committee, which fielded IF leader Elżbieta Jachlewska for mayor.[16] In the city council elections, it crossed the electoral threshold but failed to win any seats,[17] and the mayoral candidate came fourth out of seven candidates, with less than two percent support.[18] Piotr Guział ran for the Warsaw council in this election on behalf of a rival committee, and did not support Piotr Ikonowicz in the mayoral election.

In the 2019 European Parliament election in Poland RSS ran as part of the Lewica Razem coalition, together with Left Together and Labour Union. Piotr Ikonowicz opened the LR list in the Łódź constituency and Elżbieta Wisz in the Podkarpackie constituency. There were 11 RSS members on the coalition's lists.[19] LR did not reach the electoral threshold. In the 2019 Polish parliamentary election, although the RSS did not join the Left coalition, party member Anna Wilk-Baran ran for the Sejm from the Piła list of the SLD, and she received 995 votes.[20]

After the failure to submit the party's financial report for 2019 (according to Piotr Ikonowicz, caused by the illness of one of the activists), the procedure for the deletion of the Social Justice Movement from the register of political parties began, but the RSS chairman then announced an application to re-register the grouping.[21] On 6 February 2023, the District Court in Warsaw struck RSS off the register.[22] The group's leader Piotr Ikonowicz and Anna Wilk-Baran ran for the Sejm from the lists of Nowa Lewica,[23] formed earlier as a result of the merger of the SLD and Spring.

The Social Justice Movement presented itself as "the party of the working man", and aimed to be a party that would represent poor and working-class people in local governments, as well as the Sejm and the European Parliament. Striking a populist tone, the party denounced current Polish political system as one dominated by "almost exclusively businessmen, civil servants and professional politicians" and stated its belief that the situation of Polish workers had been particularly miserable ever since 1991, as the significance of the trade union movement faded into irrelevance. The party aimed to protect the workers who "have to agree to poor working and pay conditions, to degrading treatment" and sustain violations of labour laws and non-payment of their wages.[3]

Main aim of the party was to fight for social justice in Poland, by fighting evictions, promoting trade unions and fighting for workers' rights. The party wanted to make solidarity action legal again and endorsed it as the most effective way of securing more rights for the workers. Social Justice Movements pointed to the Polish trade union protests of 1956 and 1980 as its roots, and wanted to continue their goals, which it defined as workers' self-government, workers' ownership of their workplace and redistribution of profits. The party was particularly critical of Leszek Balcerowicz and his neoliberal Balcerowicz Plan, which transitioned Polish centrally-planned economy to a capitalist market one. The party accuses the Polish government of the 1990s of exploiting dissatisfaction with Communist Poland in order to introduce capitalism of privatisation; according to the party, striking workers fought for more democracy within the communist system, rather than for its abolition.[3]

The party also defined itself as an anti-system and anti-establishment party that opposes "the prevailing system of exploitation and domination". As an alternative, the party promoted a political and economic system based on social justice and "true equality", as opposed to what partly consider 'formal equaltiy' where "the rich minority rules over the millions of people who contribute to its wealth with their daily hard work". According to the party program, Social Justice Movement strived for a system based on local communities, empathy and mutual aid, a system which would replace "the relentless struggle for existence and competition with cooperation". The party also opposed Polish participation in wars, describing them as serving the interests of global corporations and "world's crooks", to the disadvantage and death of the poor.[3]

In its program, the party stated: "The Social Justice Movement is an anti-capitalist party. We believe that the prevailing system in the world, capitalism, is leading to the disaster of our civilisation and even the planet." The main critique of capitalism involved its elitism, which the party described as "the accumulation of more and more capital in the hands of fewer and fewer people"; it also warned of incompatibility of capitalism with looming automatisation, as replacing hitherto man-operated jobs with machines under capitalism means displacing people from their jobs and causing further poverty and homelessness. Ultimately, the RSS believed that capitalism is a self-destructive and temporary system, writing: "It is therefore a system that will sooner or later destroy itself, because it cannot exist without consumers".[3]

Along with anti-capitalism, the Social Justice Movement also espoused socialism, praising it as "a just system without exploitation and privileges, based on cooperation between equal producers of common wealth". However, the party stressed that it promotes a 'patriotic', nationalist type of socialism as opposed to Soviet communism. The RSS praised Soviet communism and argued that while it is important to recognise numerous advantages and upsides of the Soviet system, it is impossible to return to Soviet communism and Poland should look back to its pre-WW2 roots instead, naming the WWI-era Polish Socialist Party and its fight for Polish independence as the ideal of the Social Justice Movement.[3]

• Polish Communist Party (2002)
• Polish Socialist Party
• Self-Defence of the Republic of Poland
• Polish Left
• Labour Union (Poland)

• Social Justice Movement website