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 and dedicated to the memory of Jan Patočka. It describes life under what Havel called the post-totalitarian system and tells the story of a greengrocer who stops displaying a regime slogan. The essay became 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 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 on the essay, The Dissident: Six Readings of "The Power of the Powerless".

What it argues

Havel calls the system in Czechoslovakia post-totalitarian, and makes clear that the prefix does not mean the system has stopped being totalitarian.

The essay's central example is the manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop who places the slogan "Workers of the world, unite!" in his window, among the onions and carrots. He does so because leaving it out could be read as disloyalty. Wikipedia reads the sign as a symbol both of his submission to the system and of his humiliation by it. In Havel's account, people in such a system "must live within a lie."

Havel then imagines the greengrocer stopping. He stops putting up the slogan, and he stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. By stepping out of the ritual, Havel writes, he has said that the emperor is naked and 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. He describes the trial as a confrontation between two differing conceptions of life, and denies that it set two political forces or conceptions against each other.

Havel writes that the musicians had no history of political activity. Groups that had stayed apart until then, in his account, were suddenly struck by the powerful realisation that freedom is indivisible. Havel presents the trial as an example of how movements in such a system begin outside politics. The first issue of the Logos zine LAN 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, citing 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. Jirous at first meant chiefly nonconformist rock music, and the term soon covered all independent and repressed culture, including the humanities, the social sciences and philosophy. Its forms were samizdat books and magazines, private performances and concerts, seminars and exhibitions. Havel sees culture as the sphere in which the parallel structures are most highly developed.

He then summarises the other spheres Benda proposed: a parallel information network, private universities, parallel trade unions, parallel foreign contacts and a kind of hypothesis on a parallel economy. Havel calls these structures the most articulated expressions so far of living within the truth, and counts supporting and developing them among the most important tasks of the dissident movements. 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 the essay reached his group at the Ursus factory in 1979, when they felt they were "at the end of the road". Reading it, he said, gave them the theoretical underpinnings for their activity.

In Logos material

Logos retells the greengrocer story. In its telling, the regime ran on everyone pretending together, and the greengrocer gave proof that the pretending could stop. It presents Benda as answering the next question, which is 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. The piece "From Report to Story", in its second issue, argues that nobody remembers the statistics on dissent under communism, while everybody who has heard the story remembers the greengrocer's window. 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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