The following article analyzes participation of the Polish Socialists in the constitutional debate conducted in the parliament between 1928 and 1930. In the first section, the political context of the debate and main constitutional demands of the Nonpartisan Bloc for Cooperation with the Government are presented. Further, the article discusses role of the constitutional debate in the Polish Socialist Party’s (PPS) political strategy of that time. Leaders of the PPS were arguing that the Nonpartisan Bloc’s constitutional draft was synonymous with the institutionalization of the dictatorial rule in Poland. Socialists criticism of the draft is reconstructed in details in the next few paragraphs. Special attention is given to the discussion about constitutional role of the president and the parliament as well as the connections between class conflicts and political system – main themes in the socialist’s analyzes, presented in the press, mass meetings as well as during parliamentary sessions. In the last part of the article the strategies of argumentation (especially main strategy – discourse polarization) used by socialists leaders, commentators and party’s propagandists are presented and elaborated.
The following article discusses Polish Socialists’ participation in the constitutional debate conducted in the Sejm (1928–1930). In the first part, main motives of the criticism formulated by Socialists against constitutional project presented by the Nonpartisan Bloc for Cooperation with the Government (BBWR) are reconstructed. The role played by the constitutional debate in Socialists’ tactic is also presented in this section. Subsequently, on the basis of Socialists’ statements on constitutional issues, I discuss their class-oriented interpretation of parliamentary democracy. I argue that their perception of the modern state and democracy was coherent with the theory of social change and class struggle established in the Polish socialist thought of that time. I notice roots of this theory in specific “optimist historiosophy”, distinctive for the European socialist movement in the 1920s. The beginning of the 1930s started a decline of this optimism and initiated an ideological crisis in the Polish socialist movement.