Issue 1/Parallel Society
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Vaclav Benda's academic career ended when he refused to join the Communist Party. Philosophy had become a dangerous subject after the 1968 invasion by the Warsaw Pact countries, which had bolstered the authoritarian wing of the government and ended the attempt to liberalize Czechoslovakia through looser restrictions on travel, media, free speech and an end to secret police surveillance.
In this new climate, dissidents like Benda suffered continuous harassment from the state. He lost his assistant lectureship in philosophy, and although he finished his degree in mathematics and computer programming, he was forced into all kinds of jobs to survive, including as a cowherd and an assistant arts editor.
Fellow dissident Vaclav Havel had a similar fate. A successful playwright in the years prior to the invasion, he was banned from the theatre and forced underground, forcing him to publish his plays and political ideas through the network of makeshift samizdat publications. His work was staged in Vienna, London and New York and nowhere in his own country. By 1974 he had taken work rolling barrels in a brewery.
Throughout the 1970s, the state had progressively taken over all official social organizations, culture, education, and economic life. Behaviour and speech outside the norm were systematically punished. This had forced ordinary people to internalize the regime's logic, living within the lie of the official truths out of fear.
In this climate of hopelessness, apathy and fear, a major turning point came from the unlikely trial of a psychedelic rock group in 1966. As Havel remarked later, the trial was unique in that it was not a confrontation of political forces. The musicians were being persecuted simply for not conforming to the status quo, wearing their hair long and living their truth. This simple fact created a strong wave of support, leading to solidarity among previously disconnected groups of dissidents. When Benda went to the courthouse for the trial he joined writers, Catholics, evangelicals, musicians, expelled communists and regular people who showed up to support. The group was eventually sentenced to jail.
The publishing of the Charter 77 in January 1977 was a direct effect of this new solidarity. It was only a few pages long and it demanded nothing revolutionary. It merely observed that Czechoslovakia was not obeying its own law regarding civil rights. Two hundred and forty-two people of different ages, occupations and political backgrounds signed it under their own names, with Havel as a spokesperson.
The price was likely known in advance and it arrived swiftly. What initially started as a public harassment campaign quickly became "acts of strangulation in the dark", as Benda put it. Signatories lost their jobs. Their children were refused university places. Some were driven into exile and stripped of citizenship, some were tried and imprisoned, and many were worked on by State Security until they agreed to inform or died from harsh interrogations. This lasted well into the 1980s, even while signatories grew.
However, while the Charter 77 was an important step forward, it was, as Benda wrote later, only a "naive statement of principles". What it had in moral grounding it lacked in a positively framed strategy, one that could organize the common sentiment and chip away at the regime's oppression. This led him to hastily put together the foundational essay "The Parallel Polis", originally published and circulated as samizdat.
In it, he made a simple argument: the only way forward was to create parallel civil structures that could supplement the harmful and unfair ones under which they lived. From this idea, he described the specific arenas in which these structures already existed or needed to be built, including law, culture, education, information networks, the economy, and foreign policy. All together they would constitute the parallel polis.
The parallel polis was not merely a cultural sphere or a political movement — it was an alternative way of life. It was not opposed to the official system so much as it existed beside it, in "parallel." Yet over time, Benda suggested, these parallel structures could become so substantial that they would effectively displace the official order — not through confrontation but through attrition, by demonstrating a more humane and functional way of living.
Eventually as the movement grew in strength, in 1979 the regime had no other option but to throw both Benda and Havel in jail, where they were held until 1983.
In December 1989 Vaclav Havel was elected President of Czechoslovakia.
Full copy of the Parallel Society essay in English: https://github.com/markqvist/Parallel_Polis?tab=readme-ov-file
Václav Havel, writing in the same volume, described "these informal, non-bureaucratic, dynamic and open communities [comprising the parallel polis]" as "a sort of embryonic prototype or symbolic micro-model of future political structures."