Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (41 page)

5.19b Spoof or original. Paulina Olowska playing with the aesthetics of PRL within post-modern painting. Cake, courtesy of Metro Pictures.

In this way the creation of the phantasm called ‘PRL’ becomes just the superficial question of wearing a specific kind of clothes, living in cheesy design or eating retro bad-quality food, without any attempt to dig into the meaning of this time. There’s just a façade, with nothing in terms of actual rethinking of the ideology, apart, of course, from total condemnation. But the dominating nostalgia does say more about us than we want to admit. We do feel traumatized by the transition, we do feel something is missing, but we don’t openly address it. We don’t want the simplistic narrative where Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik save the world, because we feel that this isn’t true. There are many academic dissertations on that period published, but nobody is trying to look at the current financial crisis and the emerging protests and the current fascination with the past as part of the same phenomenon. We may live still among the – now shrinking – architectural decorations of communism, but communism itself still stands somewhere undiscovered in its practical essence.

This book has probably ended up having much more of a ‘local’ perspective than was originally intended. I wanted to render several obsessions of this greatly obscured era, and to rectify the omissions I saw in the literature. Since I began writing this book in 2012, the political and social situation of the countries discussed were (and are) changing every day. I also focused more on Poland and the closer ‘East’ and less on Russia, which right now seems to be facing the greater upheaval. I tried to capture the main currents and motivations of these countries and the perceptions the West (understood mostly as Western Europe and the US), has about it, or perhaps, doesn’t have at all. Living between the constant wish of being ‘more appreciated by the West’ and a curious wounded pride is the current reality, but must it be necessarily the destiny of the East? There are many possible answers to that. There are attempts in today’s scholarship at retrieving the positive out of the position of a ‘Slav’ which so often in history rhymed and combined with that of a ‘slave’. We were the Slaves of Europe and the first real periphery of the capitalist West, and the center cannot live without the periphery.

It is hard to talk about any “specter haunting Europe” yet, but something has happened recently. As austerity measures are taking their toll, we are surrounded by the rhetoric of scarcity. There’s no more money, politicians convince us – the resources have run out. But to demand more, to demand the return of the welfare state, would be more than just childishness on the part of the impoverished – it’d be calling for…communism! Even though according to the world news, we’ve just had two years of constant protests, dissent and revolution, Eastern Springs, riots, Greek and Spanish hot summers, it seems that the only thing we don’t have is a consolidated left. Apart from SYRIZA in Greece, who were the only far-left party in recent decades to come close to forming a government,
leftist parties are in defeat, never recovered since the 1970s. We are on the brink of the biggest crisis of capitalism in history, yet even at the slightest sound of reforms a Democrat like Barack Obama, much more economically conservative than the Republicans of the Roosevelt or even Nixon era, is called a “socialist”. In
The Communist Horizon
, Jodi Dean, a professor in New York from a new generation of American Marxists, gave a full list of the new Red Scare rhetoric in America and elsewhere. The welfare state, free healthcare, free education, equality, feminism, taxation – all this belongs to the great Communist Menace, socialists lingering just round the corner. ‘Communists’ protested against the Iraq war, didn’t vote for Bush Jr., want to tax the rich and regulate the market, support insurance and food stamps. Among the bank bailouts and cuts an unbelievable thing has happened: as we can see in Poland, it’s the capitalists who speak to us in the tone of victims.

How, in the face of the current upheaval, can we regain the positive meaning of communism and use it to the left’s empowerment? There’s an internet meme called “Full Communism”, a half-prank, half-serious critique, mostly from anarchist circles, of the left’s reformism. Dean is significantly more serious than that, but she insists on divorcing the meaning of the word from its previous historical applications. Her major aim is to release the left from the deep sense of shame into which the liberal critique of communism has put it. “The mistake leftists make when we turn into liberals and democrats”, she says, “is thinking that we’re beyond the communist horizon, that democracy replaced communism, when it serves as the contemporary form of communist displacement”, whereas “capitalism always interlinks with conflict, resistance, accommodation and demands. Refusal to engage in these struggles affects the form capitalism takes”. It’s a bit like Bertolt Brecht’s claim in conversations with Walter Benjamin: “It’s not communism but capitalism that’s radical.” Because it’s capitalism that destroys and creates, and goes forward no matter what, and communism that wants to put the brakes onto it, to stop
it and make it think. Conservatives somehow succeeded in presenting themselves as those who come to help, despite destroying the bonds of solidarity and hence not being ‘conservative’ at all, pushing the destructive agenda of shock therapy. The left should stop being afraid of winning and being in the spotlight, says Dean, who wonders ironically why re-using the words “proletariat” or “bourgeoisie” seem ludicrous, while competition, efficiency, stock markets, bonuses and financial success, or the re-branding of feminism don’t. All that serves to prevent us from recognizing and obliterating notions of class, work, division, inequality or privilege.

What, however, about those who remember a quite different ‘communism’? It remains a dirty, bad word for those, including large parts of the left, who invariably associate it with the East, whether the USSR and its satellites, or China, to prove that it’s invariably a failed project - moreover, a murderous one. In Poland, for instance, hatred of ‘communism’ is the only thing that unites our conflicting camps. In many ex-communist countries, especially those which joined the EU, this is a verboten word, that sends us straight back to the Gulag: when
Krytyka Polityczna
put out a selection of Lenin’s works edited by and with a preface by Slavoj Žižek, it faced ostracism, and the right-wing government managed to put a ban on communist ideology equally with Nazism. You can’t publish
The Communist Manifesto
in parts of the ex-Bloc without risking a fine or a ban. Meanwhile, East European representatives in the European Parliament recently tabled an official declaration that communism and fascism were equivalent. Žižek, as a former communist dissident himself, has had a huge role in rehabilitating and restoring the idea of communism as a possibility, beyond its failed realizations from the past. Dean, who does not have a background in Soviet studies, came to the idea via Western Marxism, and prefers to cite Latin American rather than East European Communists, which is admirably internationalist – but it would have been helpful if she had something to say to those for
whom the word is anathema for more reasons than red-baiting.

‘The big transformative questions have generally been forgotten”, said the late Eric Hobsbawm, displaced by “fanzine history, which groups write in order to feel better about themselves”. Despite for the last three decades critiquing the Soviet Union, until the end Hobsbawm’s ‘unrepentant communism’ was still hugely controversial. There’s a good reason why the word instills fear during a capitalist meltdown. One of the toughest questions for any leftist is the political legacy of the Soviet Bloc. While many of us, their former residents, constantly refer to the socialist past as deeply flawed, we seem strangely possessive of the term, one that today, perhaps, has a completely different meaning and regains it in the time of crisis. Liberals in Poland routinely equate Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez, but their example couldn’t be more different. Socialist ideas of some sort are still vital in the parts of the world that are unified by the fact they’re not and never will be the ‘center’ – Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and others are now struggling to came up with new economic policies that claim to be socialist, while the former East of Europe only ever considered a singular, and Western, option. East-West binarisms haunt us still, though, because for five decades the Cold War provided the framework and a mutual narrative, which shaped people’s lives. Being from the East, and its consequences, was and is real.

I intended this book to be a counter also against another current way of treating the recent past, especially post-1945. On the liberal left we have currently a renaissance of the ‘spirit of ’45’, to name it after the recent film by Ken Loach. From the last writings of the late Tony Judt, to the engaged intelligentsia, we experience a renewal of popularity of the post-war consensus as a reaction to the current rampant neoliberalism. This call for the social democratic spirit has its good sides, e.g. its defence of the welfare state, but it ignores completely the fact that the spirit of ’45 also included Cold War imperialism, often involving the repression of (often communist)
liberation movements through colonial wars in Indochina, Malaysia and elsewhere. With the exception of neutral Sweden and Finland, Western European countries were colonial empires and were all very pro-American, which all involved the isolation of Eastern Europe. At the core of this thinking there’s a rejection and condemnation of what was happening on the other side of the Curtain and their post-war modernity. Modernity is good, but only that represented by the ‘enlightened’ part of Europe. Needless to say it’s a narrative in which people from Eastern Europe cannot find themselves, nor find a positive proposition for the future.

The other approach is that of the hard left under the slogan of ‘full communism’. In the works of Dean, Badiou, Negri and to an extent Slavoj Žižek, there is a radical vision of a new communism - yet, similar to their soft-left counterparts, they also don’t see the communist East as a source of inspiration. They can only embrace the Cold War past of ‘real socialism’ through a disavowal. Removing Eastern Europe from the ‘communist horizon’ can result only in its marginalization. Somehow, we ourselves already did this work for the West. We so strongly believe we don’t deserve the normal conditions of a social democracy that we hardly fight for it. Eastern Europe may continue to be the ‘wild man of Europe’, but it could use this position to remind the West of its errors and duties. Writing this book I realized how privileged we were as a part of the world which despite its tininess, could dictate and impose its ideals on the vast rest. Closeness to the Western world, especially the European Union, still is a massive advantage - it’s sufficient to look at Poland and compare it to Belarus or Russia.

Because of that, what remains of the years ’45-’90 east of the Elbe is mostly melancholia or nostalgia. The melancholic approach is visible everywhere: I described it in the chapter on Berlin, where there’s either a restitution of the pre-war past at all cost, or the obsessive study over trauma. The ‘traumatic studies’ of communism occupy several books, where the work of ‘mourning’ replaces action in the present, from Charity Scribner’s
Requiem for
Communism
, to Susan Buck-Morss’s
Dreamworld and Catastrophe
, or the architectural activity of Daniel Libeskind, whose most prominent projects, like the Jewish Museum in Berlin, or the Military Museum in Dresden, are done in the high-class kitsch poetics of buildings incarnating ‘the wounds of old Europe’.

In contrast to that, we could be addressing the contemporary history of the former East countries, and speaking about its notorious past, but in a dialectical way, where the reshaping of the past by the present and the present by the past can become visible. The world of thought, the political world, all are in great need of ideas. From time to time there’s an excitation, as if there was a great new idea on the horizon, yet most often it turns out to be just another demand for an idea. One of the ideas in this book is: “why the periphery must stay the periphery”, but maybe it should be: “how can the center learn from the periphery?” In a recent interview, Russian Marxist dissident Boris Kagarlitsky recounts an anecdote about a meeting with some young Swedish revolutionaries. During the intellectual dispute it was pretty boring, but after the lecture the youth wanted to drink bottled beer in the park. Yet there was no bottle opener. Suddenly there was a fright in the eyes of the students: how are we going to open the bottles? Kagarlitsky then opened the bottles using the table and then explained there’s at least half dozen of other ways. “This is the difference between the Russian intellectual and Swedish revolutionary. They know that a bottle is opened with a special tool, a bottle opener.” The East of Europe, culturally a part of the West, was pushed into a parallel reality for 45 years and some of its countries are still paying the price for it today, especially compared to the affluent West. But maybe we still can come up with ways to open things that you don’t and didn’t have to know about.