The Neoliberal Holocaust by Paweł Wargan On 1 May 2009, a few dozen homeless peo- ple gathered in Katowice, Poland, to com- memorate International Workers’ Day. They raised the banner of the socialist Polish Peoples’ Republic—a society where, they said, food was affordable and jobs were abundant. “We want to restore the First of May as a day that defends the interests of the most disadvantaged,” the march’s organizer said. For a few hours, the most ne- glected residents of Poland’s eleventh-largest city lamented a time when their condition not only did not exist, but could not exist. “Your in- difference is our verdict,” they chanted. Why was this march—then ignored, now forgotten—so important? What is the mean- ing behind its appeal to Poland’s socialist past, a legacy that has been sullied and sapped in the decades since capitalist restoration? And why is it relevant in the much larger story of the mor- tality crisis that swept across the former social- ist states of Eastern Europe beginning in the 1990s—a catastrophe, unprecedented in peace- time, that claimed nearly 17 million lives?1 In the process of excavating our history, we often ignore the social relations—specifi- cally, the relations of production—that shape our experiences and, in turn, our perceptions and memories. “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence,” Karl Marx wrote, “but their social existence that deter- mines their consciousness.”