Václav Havel and the Power of the Powerless - Part 1: On Dissent
“A spectre is haunting Eastern Europe: the spectre of what in the West is called “dissent” This spectre has not appeared out of thin air. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of the present historical phase of the system it is haunting. It was born at a time when this system, for a thousand reasons, can no longer base itself on the unadulterated, brutal, and arbitrary application of power, eliminating all expressions of nonconformity. What is more, the system has become so ossified politically that there is practically no way for such nonconformity to be implemented within its official structures.” - Václav Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’
Václav Havel, the famed Czech philosopher, playwright, and statesman, is renowned throughout Eastern Europe for his role in the end of communism, reaching its crescendo in the 1989 Velvet Revolution; further, Havel was both the last President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of an independent Czech Republic.
His seminal essay The Power of the Powerless, was published in 1978 shortly before his arrest, and significantly influenced the dissident movements of Eastern Europe by conceptualising the nature of the post-totalitarian soviet society and prefiguring the emergence of dissent within the system.
The essay exercised substantial influence throughout Eastern Europe through its masterfully articulated representation of the magnitude of political dissent within the Soviet system, providing a groundwork platform for the operationalising of dissent.
In Eastern Europe, Havel’s work provided the requisite morale boost that bolstered the dissident movements in Poland, Czechoslovakia and others; this was cardinal given the widespread despondency and self doubt that plagued dissidents trapped under the iron curtain.
Zbygniew Bujak, a Solidarity activist, said of Havel’s essay:
"[I]t gave us the theoretical underpinnings for our activity. It maintained our spirits; we did not give up… it became clear that the party apparatus and the factory management were afraid of us. We mattered. And the rank and file saw us as leaders of the movement. When I look at the victories of Solidarity, and of Charter 77, I see in them an astonishing fulfilment of the prophecies and knowledge contained in Havel's essay."
Havel, though not affiliated with any particular Christian denomination, spoke about spirituality and philosophy in Eastern Europe from the Christian democratic tradition. He wrote about the importance of ethical politics and human dignity. Havel believed in a system which provides a nation with the freedom to improve the talents of its people; a nation supportive of individual ascension in the ladder of national leadership.
For Havel, the power of the powerless lay uniquely in the individual’s capacity to refuse participation in the system; for Havel, one ought to refuse to participate in the system’s lies and the structures underpinning them. Haval argued that only by living in truth and rejecting falsehoods, excuses, and obfuscations of the communist regime, could individuals undermine its legitimacy and contribute to its downfall.
Havel’s thesis sets out to answer several questions regarding the nature of political dissent within the Soviet system, including:
“Who are these so-called dissidents?”
“Where does their point of view come from, and what importance does it have?”
“Can they actually change anything?”
In his discussion of political dissent, Havel seeks to identify the dissident type, and to discern the process by which they come to join such a movement. Havel argues that individuals realise and identify themselves with the label of political dissident long after they have already begun to engage in such activities or beliefs. The individual’s desire to contradict the orthodoxy of the establishment “springs from motivations far different from the desire for titles or fame”. Dissent is a process which people undertake gradually up until the stage they become engaged in an “existential attitude” contra the state.
For Havel, the very act of dissent is inextricable from the desire for truth. The dissident lives in a society where information is falsified, censored, and distorted pursuant to the whims and objectives of the communist system. This omni-obfuscation affects all domains of human life, ranging from economic information and religion to cultural expressions of national identity.
Ideology is a veneer, for Pavel. The system rests on brute force: ‘its power derives ultimately from the numbers and the armed might of its soldiers and police. The principal threat to its existence is felt to be the possibility that someone better equipped in this sense might appear and overthrow it.’
This differs radically from the old form of dictatorship in which the instruments of power are wielded in an open setting. The espionage and subterfuge used in enforcing the system introduces a uniquely anonymous character to the application of political power in the Soviet bloc. Qualifying the nature of the communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia, Havel stresses its radical difference to other dictatorships throughout history. The causal ingredient is the post-totalitarian nature of the Soviet bloc and its vast complex system of interconnecting political power nodes all revolving around their neighbouring Great Power, the U.S.S.R.
“In the first place, our system is not limited in a local, geographical sense; rather, it holds sway over a huge power bloc controlled by one of the two superpowers. And although it quite naturally exhibits a number of local and historical variations, the range of these variations is fundamentally circumscribed by a single, unifying framework throughout the power bloc. Not only is the dictatorship everywhere based on the same principles and structured in the same way (that is, in the way evolved by the ruling super power), but each country has been completely penetrated by a network of manipulatory instruments controlled by the superpower.”
Subsequently, the masquerade of democratic government and justice within the Soviet system, among other lies, became a pervasive social belief within the context of an increasingly isolated society. The mystifications and obfuscation of the system are tolerated by the people in silence for the sake of convenience; for the sake of comfort, they conform. Living within this lie, however, does not mean believing in it, and thus the potential to break through remains. For their complicit role in the system “individuals confirm the system, fulfil the system, make the system, are the system.”
In the absence of a charismatic leader or a cult of personality, the nature of power and its transition from leader to leader, group to group, becomes in essence anonymous as the system is seen merely as fact of life and creates a façade of democratic society.
The principles of the society permeate wholly and totally through the consent of the people. The inherent nature of humanity to desire truth, for Havel, meant that communist system was a unique contradiction whose vast ideological constructs anonymised the people; it stripped them of desire and will.
Though the dissenters are not the masses, individuals within the masses retain the latent potential to dissent, and to join a wider current of political activity whose far-reaching consequence create a feedback loop of sorts with the intention of bleeding the system dry.
The archetypal example given by Havel is that of the Greengrocer, who, amongst his produce, places a sign in his shop window carrying that infamous slogan ‘Workers of the world, unite!’
In his study of political dissent, Havel asks the question: “Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment’s thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?”
Under the system whose ideology permeates, these beliefs are normalised and imbedded as a social convention through decades of conditioning. The sign, rather than an ideological possession and conviction of the grocer, was sent to his shop along with the produce by the communist supply chain.
The sign was placed in the window because that’s the way his colleagues and predecessors had done so, and was a normal thing to do at the time. If everyone does it, he wouldn’t want to stand out by breaking such a social expectation. To not put up the sign could cause himself or his family personal troubles at the hand of the state for disloyalty.
The average citizen follows these things because it’s the easiest path to a peaceful existence; it’s necessarily non-confrontational and minimises contact with hostile actors who possess state and institutional backing.
The real meaning of the slogan’s placement may be understood to mean: “‘I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.’ This message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocers superior, and at the same time it is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers.”
The sign is upheld to maintain the interests and safety of the citizen. However, the slogan itself masks another meaning: the humiliation of human dignity through ideological masking of his real motivation.
“Let us take note: if the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan ‘I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient’; he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the truth. The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity.”
And thus that sign provides the shopkeeper with the necessary ego to cope and say “What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?”. The sign provides the greengrocer with concealment from state hostility in such a way that his personality and character is not directly embarrassed or effaced.
“We have seen that the real meaning of the greengrocers slogan has nothing to do with what the text of the slogan actually says. Even so, this real meaning is quite clear and generally comprehensible because the code is so familiar: the greengrocer declares his loyalty … by accepting the prescribed ritual, by accepting appearances as reality, by accepting the given rules of the game. In doing so, however, he has himself become a player in the game, thus making it possible for the game to go on, for it to exist in the first place. If ideology was originally a bridge between the system and the individual as an individual, then the moment he steps on to this bridge it becomes at the same time a bridge between the system and the individual as a component of the system.”
Furthering his psychological profiling of the average citizen working in the communist system, Havel’s analogy expands to the question: “Why in fact did our greengrocer have to put his loyalty on display in the shop window? Had he not already displayed it sufficiently in various internal or semi-public ways? At trade-union meetings, after all, he had always voted as he should … Why, on top of all that, should he have to declare his loyalty publicly?”
Customers looking into the shop window could tell you the produce in stock that day, but the sign itself, through social normalisation, does not register in the minds of those customers who walk past, as all other shops have the same slogan. It becomes a social convention; an empty signifier.
But what if one day the greengrocer were to snap? He decides to no longer places the sign in his shop window, he ceases to participate in farcical forms replicating democratic governance, he begins the speak his mind, and starts to identify himself with political prisoners and the persecuted dissenters.
Through revolt, the greengrocer exits the lie, he attempts to live within the truth in spite of knowing he may lose his job and his rights. He will become a social pariah among those still attempting to live within the lie. Thus the system itself feeds his rebellion: as he is social ostracised, his convictions and activism strengthen.
“By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted façade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power.”
The potential consequences of the green grocer’s rebellion may encourage him to pursue “something that goes beyond an immediately personal self-defensive reaction against manipulation…” by which his vital interests are better represented. He may organise his colleagues and co-workers “to act together in defence of their interests. He may write letters to various institutions, drawing their attention to instances of disorder and injustice around him. He may seek out unofficial literature, copy it and lend it to his friends.”
The gradual development of rebellious activities furthers someone’s position and self-identification with dissent and is an important pathway to further political organisation. Though deprived of political power in the official sense, the powerless masses are able to exercise influence only by breaking from social conformity and utilising their individual capacities to affront the lies of the system through a policy of conscientious objection and civil disobedience.
One sees in Havel’s essay many parallels between dissident movements in the Soviet bloc and the quandary faced by contemporary European rightists. Rather than leviathan-state guided by the rationale of fossilised Marxist-Leninism, nationalists in Europe resist the pervasive spectre of liberalism and its de-nationalising ethos.
Havel provides an important lesson to be kept in mind with respect to the uniformity of progressive liberal doctrine today: it cannot last.
It is a profound irony that the very liberal order Havel aimed to instantiate has produced the same circumstances throughout the West as the communist system he rejected.