The greengrocer’s awakening signifies a direct, unmistakable challenge to the system. Post-totalitarianism is based on the generalization of hypocrisy. Again, everybody knows that the system is rooted in a blatant, routinized lie, but saying so publicly is considered sheer madness. The greengrocer’s gesture defies the taboos of the city; it institutes a different form of behavior that allows the individual to live in truth, which, for all intents and purposes, should simply mean to live. Because living within the lie means to mutilate life, to force oneself constantly to be at odds with one’s own conscience, to be perpetually ashamed of one’s self-deprecation.
The greengrocer’s revolt represents, therefore, a seditious act. It undermines the most important pillar of the established order, its confidence that its subjects would be forced to lie forever:
In the post-totalitarian system, therefore, living within the truth has more than a mere existential dimension (returning humanity to its inherent nature), or a noetic dimension (revealing reality as it is), or a moral dimension (setting an example for others). It also has an unambiguous political dimension. If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth. This is why it must be suppressed more severely than anything else.”32
The decision by an individual to break the enchanted circle of complicity with the powers-that-be and to utter his own truth is the premise for the civil society to resurrect itself. Every single individual who takes that path adds to the possibility for the independent life of society to reorganize, to take shape in various forms and modalities. The system will of course try to slander him, to convince others that such behavior cannot be dictated by noble motives but is rather the expression of either a deranged mind or unfulfilled ambitions. The conflict between the repressive machine and the individual is of course unequal, and not many people are able to endure the hardships associated with the dissident’s condition. The signatories of Charter 77, for instance, spent long years in prison, were assigned to menial jobs, and were systematically smeared and abused in the official media. But becoming politically active, being member of an unofficial civic initiative, is a further step that involves the crystallization of a political option. Although Charter 77 from the very outset made a point of its pluralist nature and refused to endorse a particular political philosophy, by its very existence it represented a political gesture. At the same time, as Havel insisted, living within the truth does not necessarily mean direct political commitment. The social impact of individual refusals to cooperate with the regime cannot be exaggerated. The starting point for such a divorce from the logic of conformity is the decision to stop lying. Expressing one’s vision of reality, refusing to glorify the status quo and its mythological justification, and asserting one’s spiritual freedom are forms of living within the truth that eventually collide with the monopolistic thrust of the system. Living within the truth does not have to be spectacular and does not necessarily include the dimension of martyrdom. Havel points out:
When I speak of living within the truth, I naturally do not have in mind only products of conceptual thought, such as a protest or a letter written by a group of intellectuals. It can be any means by which a person or a group revolts against manipulation: anything from a letter by intellectuals to a workers’ strike, from a rock concert to a student demonstration, from refusing to vote in the farcical elections, to making an open speech at some official congress, or even a hunger strike, for instance. If the suppression of the aims of life is a complex process, and if it is based on the multifaceted manipulation of all expressions of life, then, by the same token, every free expression of life indirectly threatens the post-totalitarian system politically, including forms of expression to which, in other social systems, no one would attribute any potential political significance, not to mention explosive power.33
The authorities’ response to the challenges of the burgeoning civil societies in the 1970s and 1980s differed from country to country. The chances for grassroots initiatives to develop were greater in Janos Kadar’s Hungary or in Edward Gierek’s Poland than in Gustav Husak’s Czechoslovakia or Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania. Furthermore, after Gorbachev started his policies of glasnost and perestroika, civic activists in the Warsaw Pact countries saw the Soviet renewal movement as a great chance to advance change in their own countries. When the Soviet leader visited the GDR in 1987, young East Germans acclaimed him not only because they happened to admire his politics but also as a way of expressing their discontent with the conservative line followed by Erich Honecker and his comrades in the SED leadership. In Romania, where Ceausescu made being different from the Soviets a mark of honor, Gorbachev’s reforms were officially criticized and the communist party tightened its grip on all strata of society. Opposition in that country had to be individual because of the ubiquitous security police presence and Ceausescu’s morbid reaction to the slightest form of criticism. But even in such a country living within the truth was not impossible. Activists like Radu Filipescu (a young engineer in Bucharest who disseminated anti-Ceausescu leaflets) and Doina Cornea (a university lecturer in Cluj who sent Ceausescu countless memoranda protesting his disastrous course) showed that even in the most unfavorable circumstances one could still act like a human being. Those who engaged in such defiant acts in Romania or Bulgaria were of course subjected to harsher treatment than their peers in more tolerant Soviet-style regimes. The absence in Romania of organic movements like Solidarity or even of intellectual initiatives like Charter 77 should not lead to the conclusion that the independent life of society had been completely suppressed. Such an absolute destruction is, after all, impossible. Even in Albania, the most secluded Stalinist fortress in Eastern Europe, once the totalitarian terror subsided in 1989-90, student protests and other forms of activism exploded.
When discussing the odyssey of civil society in Eastern Europe, it is important to consider the concrete political circumstances under which those efforts to create independent communities had to be undertaken: from a Kadar-like “enlightened despotism” to a Ceausescu-like ethnocentric and paranoid dictatorship. Havel correctly points out that in dealing with the development of civil society in different countries, two criteria must be kept in mind. First, when assessing the impact of the independent activities, do not approach them in a strictly comparative way (how one country fares compared to another one) but in light of the existing conditions in the given country:
What may appear, from another country, as a very modest, limited, and cautious kind of independence may not necessarily seem that way on the spot. An example: if a Romanian publicly criticizes conditions in his country, the measure of his independence may appear rather low and insignificant from the point of view of the Hungarian situation and its possibilities, whereas in Romania it may be endowed with an almost explosive power. Thus an expression of activity that in one country or at a given moment in time could easily go unnoticed among many analogous and more thoroughgoing expressions or actions, may in another country and at another moment practically shake society at its roots.34
Second, the social significance of such activities is not necessarily reflected in the numbers of people involved in them:
The point is that around these activities there always exists a field of hidden influence, the potential significance of which cannot always necessarily flow from the size of the phenomenon that produced it. It is true that there are not many Chartists, but a large part of society knows about their work (or at least a large part of that part of society that continues to be interested in public affairs and which may therefore be said to “make history”, at the very least they know about it from foreign radio broadcasts.)35
Commitment to the cause of moral regeneration of society is not motivated by expectations of immediate effects. On the contrary, the idea of social self-organization involves a long-term strategy, the “long march” against the official structures, the building of parallel ones, first at low l
evels of informal communication, and later through the increasing expansion of these initiatives from below into a genuine social movement. That has happened in Poland, for instance, where the KOR initially comprised a tiny group of civic-minded activists who managed to capture the expectations, hopes, and aspirations of society at large.
When the social explosion of August 1980 occurred, KOR, with its moral authority, could provide the Solidarity movement with strategic concepts and political expertise. One cannot underestimate the pedagogical value of such nuclei of people who decide to live within the truth. It is not that they are absolutely independent from official society. As long as the state is the only employer and all forms of social behavior, from shopping to education, are state-controlled, it is impossible to be absolutely independent. But what is possible is to fight for the expansion of the margin of autonomy for the individual, or, better said, the reduction of his or her subservience to the state. As Havel put it:
[I]t is probably not true that there is a small enclave of “completely independent” people here in an ocean of “completely dependent people” with no interaction between them. There is an enclave of “relatively independent” ones who persistently, gradually and inconspicuously enrich their “relatively dependent” surroundings through the spiritually liberating and morally challenging meaning of their own independence, thus strengthening in those surroundings that small sphere of independence that remains or that it has been able to preserve.36
Indeed, when the political situation of 1989 evolved in Czechoslovakia and the power elite started increasingly to show signs of disarray, Charter 77 became the magnet for those individuals who had postponed their break with the system.
The existence of Charter 77 was more important in Czechoslovakia’s “velvet revolution” than the reformist dreams of the former leaders of the Prague Spring. After all, the ultimate limit upon Dubcekism (and of Gorbachevism, for that matter) was the failure to abandon the rusty Leninist paradigm and to transfer power from the party elite to society. After more than forty years of fanaticism and indoctrination, when people had been saturated with ideological lies, there is a general distrust in the entire region regarding any Salvationist creed. In Czechoslovakia in 1989 it became clear that there was no social pressure for the resumption of the experiment with socialism with a human face and that the direction of the revolution had to transcend the mere desire for liberalization. Through its transideological nature, Charter 77 anticipated a new form of politics, characteristic of the postcommunist order: the civil society. If nothing else, Charter 77 embodied the idea of tolerance, and it was this opening to the spirit of dialogue, so salient in Havel’s writings and public activities, that made Charter 77 both credible and instrumental in the peaceful transition to pluralism. Like KOR in Poland, the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights in the GDR (a movement that developed in the mid-1980s), the Moscow Trust Group in the Soviet Union, or the Democratic Opposition in Hungary, Charter 77 symbolized the politics of trust, hope, and human solidarity. Elevating the defense of human rights to their chief concern, those movements subverted the system at its weakest spot. They showed that it was possible to hold the rulers accountable for their misdeeds and that such monitoring could have an impact on the government’s behavior (if for no other reason, because of international pressure).
With the benefit of hindsight, activities like those of KOR and Charter 77 appear strategically coherent and historically effective. They led to extraordinary transformations in those societies and created the embryo of the counterpower that was to replace the crumbling communist regimes during the 1989 upheaval. For in its strategy, the civil society rejects the communist party’s claim to a leading role and aims to promote genuine pluralism. But at the beginnings of the civil society saga in Eastern Europe, at the moment people like Havel and Michnik started their activities, there was very little reason to expect those regimes to collapse in the foreseeable future. Even such an astute observer of the East European situation as Timothy Garton Ash supposed that the most likely scenario for the future of the region would be further decay and decomposition of the regimes in the form of “Ottomanization.” Others, like Milan Kundera, had completely written off the historical significance of Eastern Europe for the world. Yet civic activists in the region understood that their gestures were bound to irritate the power and that by simply rejecting the official form of politics, by denouncing it as a fraud, they were embarking on a new form of politics. Their moral protest had an explosive political implication, in that it articulated the strategy of nonviolent resistance to the system’s attempt to reduce the individual to a submissive, totally pliable entity.
Charter 77 demonstrated that the issues to be advocated by the new movements did not necessarily have to be political. It is not the goal of an informal association of people who have decided to live within the truth to challenge a dictatorship directly. Their opposition is first and foremost moral: They expose the immorality of the government, the discrepancy between its rhetoric and the reality of everyday life. The first act of Charter 77 was to protest the trial organized by the Husak regime against a group of young rock musicians called “The Plastic People of the Universe.” It became clear that defending the young musicians who simply wanted to live within their own truth (which was of course different from the officially dictated truth) was already a politically charged action. Taking the side of the rock musicians had nothing to do with any aesthetic preference. It was a way of denying the system its right to determine the limits of human freedom. In sending people to jail simply because of artistic heresy, the system proclaimed its right to interfere at any time and without any hesitation in individuals’ lives. It was a public declaration of war against human freedom. Consequently, defending the young rock musicians meant defending the very idea of human freedom and dignity. The same can be said about the defense of pacifists or ecological activists persecuted because of their opposition to official militarism and irrational destruction of the environment. As Havel said, the revolt of the powerless does not have an explicit political dimension. The politics of antipolitics consists precisely in this discreet, unobtrustive attempt to restore the dignity of the individual:
[I]n the post-totalitarian system, the real background of the movements that gradually assume political significance does not usually consist of overtly political events of confrontations between different forces or concepts that are openly political. These movements for the most part originate elsewhere, in the far broader area of the “pre-political,” where “living within a lie” confronts “living within the truth,” that is, where the demands of the post-totalitarian system conflict with the real aims of life …. Such a conflict acquires a political character, then, not because of the elementary political nature of the aims demanding to be heard but simply because, given the complex system of manipulation on which the post-totalitarian system is founded and on which it is also dependent, every free human act or expression, every attempt to live within the truth, must necessarily appear as a threat to the system and, thus, as something which is political par excellence.37
The ritualization of politics in the official sphere, its bastardization through the continuous deformation of facts, and the imposition of pseudo-elites whose rise to prominence is guaranteed by criteria linked to docility, conformity, and obedience rather than to imagination, intelligence, and honor contribute to the fall into disrepute of the very term politics.
In post-totalitarian systems politics is widely seen as as the profession for lackeys. Those who value human freedoms would engage in any other activity, from music to occultism, from Zen Budhism to ikebana, from jazz to transcendental meditation. The general sentiment seems to be that politics has been forever annexed by evil forces, that there is nothing good to be expected from professional politicians, while the leaders of the dissident movement are writers, poets, physicists, or philosophers. The reinvention of politics must therefore take place outside the officially drawn boundaries
of politics. This ethical insurrection takes place in what Havel calls “the real sphere of potential politics in the post-totalitarian system.” It is outside the perverse and perverting circle of power that politics acquires its new figures, stripped of ideological blinders.
The antipolitics advocated by East European dissidents repudiates the dominant principle of reality as a mere mystification. In the words of the Hungarian writer György Konrad, author of a number of excellent novels including The Loser and The Case Worker and a provocative essay significantly entitled Antipolitics:
Antipolitics is the political activity of those who don’t want to be politicians and who refuse to share in power. Antipolitics is the emergence of independent forums that can be appealed to against political power; it is a counterpower that cannot take power and does not wish to. Power it has already, here and now, by reason of its moral and cultural weight …. Antipolitics and government work in two different dimensions, two separate spheres. Antipolitics neither supports nor opposes the government; it is something different. Its people are fine right where they are; they form a network that keeps watch on political power, exerting pressure on the basis of their cultural and moral stature alone, not through an electoral legitimacy. That is their right and their obligation, but above all it is their self-defense.38
Reinventing Politics Page 21
