In the Spirit of 89

                November 1989. Prague. The Berlin Wall came down just a few short weeks prior and a few hundred students are marching from the top of Vysehrad hill toward Wenceslas Square. At some point the group is seen to diverge from its set path. The theory is that a plain clothes secret police officer had ingratiated himself in the front of the group and with the explicit order to lead the students into a narrow corridor where the police, suited up in riot gear, was waiting. Blindsighted, the students marched, believing that in a just a few hours they will be home in their beds after making their voices heard. What followed was a televised spectacle of violence as the riot police in white helmets corralled the crowd into a narrow pedestrian underpassage where each protester could be individually beaten in a kind of a medieval gauntlet. Busted heads and knocked out teeth. Dubbed the Velvet Revolution, the 1989 uprising against the oppressive government was anything but. It was perhaps mild by other standards set by Romania and Yugoslavia, but the image of a disembodied hand holding a flower up to an armored policeman from a crowd of protesters, belies the reality of what actually happened during the days and weeks that followed, when the crowds swelled to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people. The government fell rather quickly, giving rise to conspiracy theories about who was behind the supposed handover of power, who said or did what and when. But it was the television broadcast that seared itself into the subconscious of the nation and those who watched from abroad.

                The story doesn’t end with a happy end. It doesn’t really end, because the ramifications of 89 are still with us, palpable everywhere, just as the Iranian Revolution of 79 is present in the subconscious of its people and the Arab Spring is indelibly etched into the memories of everyone who witnessed it. What followed 1989, which is different from the other revolutions, is that we were told this was the moment of the ‘end of history’ when capitalism finally beat communism and established itself as the hegemonic system by which each sovereign nation was to self-actualize. In other words, in 1989 people believed in an alternative to the way they’ve lived until then. Other than that the program and set up was fairly similar to the other revolutions. Just as in 1917 the Russians believed in an alternative to their way of life, a window opened up in 1989, as it might have, but didn’t, during the Prague Spring in 1968. But in 1968 the uprising was meant to save communism, not end it, through a set of prescriptions and changes to the system and the constitution.  The ‘radical’ change was to come from within and that is why it failed. 1968 was a failure on many fronts. Soviet Russia was too powerful and was able to crush the uprising by a tactical push of its army into Czechoslovakia during Operation Danube. But mainly the failure was in its lack of imagining an alternative and how things would ultimately work after the reformers got what they wanted. What their alternative was, was in their words ‘communism with a human face.’ In other words, communism was to become less of a cold bureaucratic inhuman meat grinder and move to the slightly more utopian version of democratic socialism of one party rule. What would’ve happened in reality is purely speculative, because the Soviet answer was swift and brutal as it was in Hungary twelve years before.

                1989 is so intricate and twisted that it is impossible to give it a full account and summarize it for the purposes of a short article such as this. Every revolution is like that. We are finding out today, three weeks into the growing, now global protests against oppression and police brutality, that the standing order is tough to crack and that the story is getting and will get twisted up as the protests continue. There are certain parallels to 1989 and one may suppose, to other revolutionary moments. First is the brutal response from the state, deploying massive amounts of riot police and national guard against unarmed civilians. Second, the numbers of people, cities and countries grew in response to the brutality of the response by the state. Third, in 1989 it wasn’t so much that people wanted an end to communism as much as they wanted ‘freedom.’  I placed freedom in air quotes because the notion of freedom is more ambiguous than what is typically a universal sign of all revolutionary movements. Though many wished to bring an end to communism in 89, there were many that thought that the alternative was not much better if the systems of oppression and unfreedom remained in place. Fourth, 1980s Czechoslovakia was an economically ambiguous country. Life wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t great either. Travel was restricted, secret police and informants regularly spied and reported on their neighbors, economic stagnation, while at the same time the film industry and the arts were experiencing a sort of golden age, cities were growing as was the middle class, while in the countryside a renaissance of cottagers established itself as one of the growing subcultures of dissenters as large swaths of the population were exiting public life into the privacy of their own homes.

                It is this last point that bears more attention. Hannah Arendt once wrote that what identifies totalitarianism is the way that it erases the differences between public and private life. What does this mean to our present moment? The subcultures of the 1970s and 1980s Czechoslovakia were essentially private networks, where face to face interaction mattered more than mass media and spectacle. We know now that the ideals of the dissenters were not so much wrong-headed but misguided by Western propaganda. There was a fashion, for example, of wearing US Army insignia and clothing as a form of protest. But whatever the optics or the political leanings, which were mostly center right, of the dissenters, they understood that it was the retreat into private life that actualized their goals of relieving themselves from the oppression of the state. By the time Vaclav Havel became president in 1990, the vastly occluded and private network of dissenters, who had been working in hiding for over two decades from their city flats and country cabins, had come up with a complete political program. It was perhaps the forced isolation that produced these results, but we must understand that the move toward the private and away from the public was a political move as much as a tactical move. A very public political movement has a greater chance of becoming coopted by outside and unfriendly forces, which is what we are seeing happening today. There are simply too many and much more powerful voices for the status quo that can and will drown out the radical voices of the protesters, or worse they will ignore the protests entirely.

                At the start of the riots the spirit of 89 was palpable. The parallels were there, though obviously this was different. It is anybody’s guess where we will be next week, or next month as the states and the economy ‘opens.’ In a world that is emptied of a future and an alternative we have nothing else to do but wait and see.

                So what is the major problem with the current protests? Yes, there are many many problems, but let’s highlight the biggest ones. One, protests almost always fail because they are never able to effectively change the status quo. The status quo is not what the government says rather the government always tends to implement that which is effectively the standing dogma and interests of the ruling class. Second, revolutions almost always fail because same as above. Even the revolutions that are seemingly ‘successful’ as the Velvet Revolution seemed to be in 1989, actually failed because it did not deliver what it promised, namely the freedoms and self-determination of every citizen, but rather power was shifted from one ruling elite to another, who then systematically oversaw the plunder of whatever meager wealth was left in the country after the previous systematic plunder by the Communist regime. One finds that this is almost always the case in every major revolution in every major country or region. It was true for Occupy, it was true for the Arab Spring, it was true for the revolutions of 89, it was true for 1968, the Russian Revolution, and so on and so on.  Third, and this is unique to our current moment, which was palpable in the Occupy movement, but seems to be more entrenched in today’s protest movements, and that is the problem of the self. No longer are mass movements about the determination of the masses, but rather about the determination of a vast sea of individuals coming together collectively. The problem of the self is what can be termed as the reversal of the dictum ‘nothing is true, everything is permitted’ into ‘everything is true, nothing is permitted.’ It is almost impossible for today’s individuals to get lost in the social politics of the groups they represent and this is almost certainly the problem of the liberal left which bases it politics around identity. The major problem with identity politics is that more than a hundred years ago identity politics is what kept social hierarchies in place by a process of determining who gets to rule and who gets to serve based on the arbitrary notion of birth. Such systems were used and abused by the aristocracy for hundreds of years and were ultimately disposed of in the early 20^th Century by way of ‘universalist’ revolutions. The problem of universalism is also a big issue, so much so that it was throughout the long 20^th century the object of endless debate among leftist philosophers and sociologists. But universalism was briefly used as a powerful tool for the many worker movements and revolutions, whether they were the coal mining strikes throughout West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Appalachia that more or less gave us the eight hour work day, or the Civil Rights movement that produced solidarity among people of color around the US and the entire world. Today, universalism can possibly be only attributable to the notion of defunding the police, the ACAB slogans tagged along innumerable buildings and the use of the name of a dead man George Floyd for a disparate set of ‘ideas’ rather than concrete demands for a change in the standing system. Our ‘individual truths’ trump any real demands of the collective and this is also why it is so difficult to produce change at the political level. The Democratic party of the US had adopted the dogma of the Republican party which demands absolute loyalty that is beyond the ethics of the individuals within them. This was always rule number one among the Communist elite and it is rule number one among all right wing dictatorships.

                We have truly arrived in a place where the lack of alternatives is on full display, so much so that the ruling elite is happy, elated even to join with the protests in a placating moment of playing optics with the slogans and the emotions of the protesters, who I do truly believe are not so stupid as to actually believe in their sincerity, by taking a knee. But, the problem of the self remains. If there is to be a meaningful change in the system, beyond optics, it will be at the expense of the self, not the other way around. Monolithic systems will have to be set up to deal effectively with the problems of the individual and that will be something that is going to be difficult for a generation of people who have grown up within very specific and curated worlds meant only for themselves. The revolution of 1989 was initially meant to be the opposite of this very notion. The self was to be radically reasserted in the system that had forgotten that individuals do indeed exist within the vast central planning bureaucracy that ran everything from the factories to the cafeterias. In those days, the self was represented in the black market and the subcultures that formed on the peripheries of society. The revolution, at least as imagined by the idealists and the artists, was to reassert just this type of the self into the social structure and to make the alternative of western capital available to it. The many selves would then come together, almost by accident, to produce a better, more humane system, based on the individual. While not complete failures, the revolutions of 1989, saw a rise in inequality, of a rapacious oligarchy, radical right wing quasi-dictatorships, unemployment and uncertainty at the same time as radical freedoms were being granted to the population. You get some you lose some.

                Right now we can at least bask in the glory of the masses coming together as one to oppose the brutal oppressive power of the ruling class. The movement is spreading and growing each and every day and each and every week. And it should continue to grow. The spirit of 89 is in the zeitgeist of the moment where everyone all of a sudden knew that something is happening but may not have known what or for what reason. Understanding this is a step closer to understanding the delicate balance of the moment and the way forward.