The Power of the Powerless

"This is absolutely a human rights book, and it contains one of the most magical essays in political philosophy ever written, which pays tribute to the importance of what Havel calls ‘living in truth’. Imagine yourself back in 1978, ten years after Soviet tanks had entered Prague, when it seemed that nothing could change. Havel’s argument in The Power of the Powerless, roughly speaking, was that if everyone stood together at a certain point, and decided to live in truth, to say, ‘That’s not the case – this is the case’, then everything could change, even in the most repressive of contexts. Havel imagined a greengrocer, rearranging his potatoes and carrots on International Workers’ Day, and refusing to put an official, empty slogan in his window saying ‘Workers of the World Unite’. The tiny act of just saying ‘I don’t really want to go along with this’ could have disproportionate consequences. The greengrocer would risk losing his holiday, perhaps suffering much greater punishments. But if lots of people were to do that together, asked Havel, how much else could they change? ‘The moment someone breaks through in one place, when one person cries out, “The emperor is naked!” – when a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game – everything suddenly appears in another light.’ As Havel himself points out in the preface to Small Acts of Resistance, many were dismissive of the idea that ordinary people could make a difference. As he put it, he was seen as ‘a Don Quixote, tilting against unassailable windmills’. But what Havel proposed in 1978 was fundamentally what happened in 1989. For many people, memories of 1989 are organised around the fall of the Berlin Wall. According to that version, along came Gorbachev, and people were free. The real story was incredibly different. It began with pressure from the grassroots up, a decade before, in Poland. In Prague everything crumbled in the space of barely a week. People who had barely a fortnight earlier been saying, ‘There’s no point’ – they began to believe."

"In the end I think Havel will be remembered as the outstanding East European dissident writer, and he will be remembered as such above all for this essay. Its central point is that even a communist regime that controls the media and exercises a great deal of power depends ultimately on an almost visible collaboration with society – society meaning individual decisions taken by individuals, which accumulate to have a universal appearance. The famous example which Havel uses is of a greengrocer, who puts a sign up in his window saying “Workers of the World Unite”. The essay is a kind of semiotic analysis of this sign. What does it mean? It’s not that the greengrocer wants the workers of the world to unite – he probably doesn’t have views about that one way or the other. What the sign allows him to do is express his support of the regime in a way which is not directly humiliating to himself. It doesn’t say “I Support the Regime”, simply “Workers of the World Unite”. He’s able to display it without feeling embarrassed or degraded. But everyone who passes his window takes the message in, and this collectively creates the impression that we’re all in it together and there’s nothing we can really do about it. Havel then asks, what happens if the greengrocer takes the sign down? The answer is that for an individual there would be very nasty consequences. But the open question of the essay is, what if everyone took all of the signs down? Havel is suggesting that if possible one ought to try to live authentically. That authenticity – not lying to oneself, even little lies such as the sign on the window – is the first step towards individual freedom. He said that this might have good political consequences in the future, but in the meantime we ought simply to be concerned with living authentically ourselves, and so freeing ourselves. This notion has been described as anti-politics. Havel says that one has to almost ignore the political reality around oneself and build oneself up as an individual. But in fact, of course, it is quite evidently a kind of politics, and a manifesto for individualistic politics. Thank you for making that connection, it’s one I wanted to make myself. Havel, like Orwell, says that words are never innocent and never wasted. Every word expresses a purpose and you want to make sure that the purpose is yours and not someone else’s. He understands it. There is this Christ-like patience, and he’s not programmatic. Havel doesn’t call for everyone to do what’s beyond them. He asks them to do what they can, and then – like Michnik – he leads by example, does things his own way and pays the price for it. Michnik and Havel are among the dissidents who have spent the longest time in prison. I don’t think Havel believed that everybody in society was going to follow his example. The point was whether, in the time being, he could set the kind of example that he wanted to set. That has a self-sufficient moral power, because you can’t say that Havel was making a calculation or bet. At the end of the day you have to accept that trying to behave well in a situation is a goal in and of itself, regardless of the consequences. One of the reasons why we keep reading The Power of the Powerless and find it powerful is that even for those of us living in societies where the cost of setting yourself apart is much smaller, we’re also powerless. We also do what everyone else is doing. In America, for example, newscasters and politicians are literally unable to take the ridiculous American flag lapels off their suit jackets, more than a decade after 9/11. Yes it is. And it’s amazing that 10 years on it’s still the case. It is unfortunate that people persist in being so boring and risk-averse in societies like the United States, where the cost of being just a tiny bit reasonable and individualistic is so small. We are the greengrocer no matter what, whether the system is good or bad. The question is whether we want to keep putting signs up in the window or not. The particular value of Havel is that he was in a situation which seemed like it was durable, yet he was articulating an opinion that would protect individual integrity and allow for the expression of an authentic humanity over time. Although he was propelled to power, he wasn’t really a revolutionary and he wasn’t really a politician. And when he was thrown into the wider world of politics, he had real limitations. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So rather than pointing to one of our current revolutionary situations, I would rather say two things. One, that where Havels are needed now are places a little like Czechoslovakia in the seventies. Places like Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, which have the appearance of durability but in fact are I think internally quite fragile. Then more broadly – without it sounding too superficial or pious – that Havel’s argument for individualism is strong enough to speak to us however good our situation might be. It has the capacity to reach into worlds which are completely free, but which nevertheless might be a bit better if people did not side with the powerful every time. Havel’s legacy is permanent in that way."