The Power of the Powerless

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"The Power of the Powerless" (Czech: Moc bezmocných) is a political essay by the Czech dramatist and dissident Václav Havel, dated October 1978. It is dedicated to the memory of Jan Patočka. The essay describes life under what Havel called the "post-totalitarian" system and tells the story of a greengrocer who stops displaying a regime slogan. It became, in Wikipedia's words, "a manifesto for dissidents in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and other communist states." It also names Václav Benda's idea of "parallel structures", the theme of Benda's essay The Parallel Polis.

Publication history

Havel wrote the essay for a planned joint volume of Polish and Czechoslovak essays on freedom and power. Only the Czechoslovak contributors completed their part. Patočka, Havel's philosophical mentor and a co-spokesman of Charter 77, had died in March 1977 after an 11-hour interrogation by the secret police.

Havel was arrested in May 1979 with other members of the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted. The Czechoslovak essays were then circulated as samizdat in 1979, with Havel's essay accompanied by nine written responses.

Paul Wilson's English translation first appeared in the 1983 edition of Cross Currents, published by the University of Michigan's Department of Slavic Languages and Literature. In 1985 Hutchinson in London published it in The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, edited by John Keane with an introduction by Steven Lukes. M. E. Sharpe published the same collection in Armonk, New York. Its contributors included Rudolf Battek, Václav Benda, Jiří Hájek, Ladislav Hejdánek, Miroslav Kusý and Petr Uhl.

In 2022 the Czech journal Filosofický časopis published a special issue, The Dissident: Six Readings of "The Power of the Powerless".

What it argues

Havel describes the system in Czechoslovakia as "post-totalitarian". He writes that he does not mean by the prefix that the system is no longer totalitarian.

The essay's central example is a greengrocer. "The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots", the slogan "Workers of the world, unite!" He does so because not displaying it could be read as disloyalty. Wikipedia describes the sign as "a symbol of both his submission to it and humiliation by it." Havel writes that people in such a system "must live within a lie."

Havel then imagines the greengrocer stopping. "He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce." Havel writes that by stepping out of the ritual, "He has said that the emperor is naked." He adds: "He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth."

The Plastic People trial

Havel calls the appearance of Charter 77 the most important political event in Czechoslovakia under the Communist leadership of Gustáv Husák. He traces the climate around it to a trial of young musicians associated with the rock group The Plastic People of the Universe. In his words, "Their trial was not a confrontation of two differing political forces or conceptions, but two differing conceptions of life."

Havel writes that the musicians had no history of political activity. Groups that had stayed apart until then were "suddenly struck with the powerful realization that freedom is indivisible." He presents the trial as an example of how movements in such a system begin outside politics. The Logos zine LAN, in its first issue, retells the 1976 trial as "a major turning point" that brought separate groups of dissidents together.

Parallel structures

Havel extends this into a case for independent social life. He refers to "what Václav Benda called the development of 'parallel structures.'" Benda had described parallel institutions within society that would be more responsive to human needs.

Havel credits Ivan Jirous with the idea of a "second culture". At first Jirous meant chiefly nonconformist rock music. Havel writes that the term soon covered all independent and repressed culture, including the humanities, the social sciences and philosophy. Havel lists its forms as samizdat books and magazines, private performances and concerts, seminars and exhibitions. He writes: "Culture, therefore, is a sphere in which the parallel structures can be observed in their most highly developed form."

He then summarises the other spheres Benda proposed. These are a parallel information network, private universities, parallel trade unions, parallel foreign contacts and "a kind of hypothesis on a parallel economy". Havel writes that these structures "represent the most articulated expressions so far of living within the truth." He calls supporting and developing them one of the dissident movements' most important tasks. A contributor to the 2022 special issue notes that Havel rejected the view of these parallel structures as a retreat into a ghetto.

Reception

The Solidarity activist Zbigniew Bujak later said: "This essay reached us in the Ursus factory in 1979 at a point when we felt we were at the end of the road." He added: "Reading it gave us the theoretical underpinnings for our activity."

In Logos material

The Logos activist course Building a Parallel Society retells the greengrocer story. It says the regime "ran on everyone pretending together", and the greengrocer gave proof that the pretending could stop. The course presents Benda as answering the next question: what to do after refusing the official lie. See Parallel polis and Parallel society.

LAN uses the greengrocer as a model of a story that people remember. Its second issue, in the piece "From Report to Story", says: "Nobody remembers the statistics on dissent under communism, but everybody who has heard it remembers the greengrocer's window." The same piece prints the report-versus-story example from the Logos storytelling course, described in Circle storytelling. See Issue 2/From Report to Story and Issue 1/Parallel Society.

Where to read it

  • The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, edited by John Keane, Hutchinson, London, 1985. Paul Wilson's translation.
  • The full Paul Wilson translation is online at The Anarchist Library.
  • The Dissident: Six Readings of "The Power of the Powerless", a 2022 special issue of Filosofický časopis, is a free PDF from the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

See also

Sources

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