A giant of the Polish left, Karol Modzelewski died on April 28 at the age of eighty-one. He is best-known in the West as the co-author (with Jacek Kuron) of the 1964 manifesto “An Open Letter to the Party,” which denounced Poland’s bureaucratic dictatorship and called for a revolution to bring about a genuine socialism based on workers’ democracy. But in Poland he is equally renowned for his subsequent fifty-five years as a principled critic and socialist thinker, and as the most vocal and consistent opponent of capitalism since the collapse of state socialism in 1989.

For those familiar only with contemporary political choices, Modzelewski’s life might seem a contradiction. How could he be the most steadfast opponent of Communist Party rule and simultaneously the most consistent critic of the capitalist onslaught that followed? How could he work so hard to topple state socialism, maintaining his resolve despite three spells in prison, and then tell his former Solidarność comrades that he “didn’t sit eight and a half years in jail to build capitalism”?

Modzelewski saw no contradiction here at all. He was a fighter for a socialism that empowered workers and saw both bureaucratic dictatorship and liberal capitalist democracy as fundamentally hostile to working-class interests. That is the spirit that he hands down to the Polish left today.