The Power of the Powerless
"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 best known passage concerns 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."
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. A contributor to the 2022 special issue notes that Havel rejected the view of these parallel structures as a retreat into a ghetto.
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."
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.
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
- Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless, translated by Paul Wilson, The Anarchist Library
- The Power of the Powerless, Wikipedia
- The Power of the Powerless, John Keane
- Niklas Forsberg and Ulrika Björk (eds.), The Dissident: Six Readings of "The Power of the Powerless" by Václav Havel, Filosofický časopis special issue 1, Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences, 2022
- Building a Parallel Society, Logos activist course, 2026