The “Battle over Street Trade”

Bazaars, street trading, and secondhand car marts accompanied the implosion of the communist economies throughout Central and Eastern Europe during the early 1990s. In Poland, due to the longtime agony of the country’s economy under late socialism, informal markets spread earlier than elsewhere in the region. While acknowledging the crucial role of this homegrown market economy in shaping vernacular imaginaries of capitalism in the transformation period, this article argues for caution with romanticizing it in retrospect. Contemporaneously, the extraordinary expansion of informal markets continued to be contested on various grounds. The emergent spirit of capitalism did not blend easily with the social fabric of the time, and it was left to municipal governments to regulate what was seen as chaotic and unwelcome proliferation by many—not least because it introduced a tangible transnational dimension into post-socialist lifeworlds. Based on empirical case studies from Warsaw and the industrial town of Starachowice in southeastern Poland, this article analyzes the struggles over liberalizing and then regulating informal markets. Considering them as tangible expressions of ongoing renegotiations of economic and social imaginaries during the early transformation years, the article complicates linear narratives on the impact of grassroots capitalism on post-socialist transformation.