Capitalism with a human face?

On New Year's Day, 1990, Vaclav Havel, the playwright and human, rights activist who had served time in jail under the previous communist regime, delivered his first major public address as president of Czechoslovakia:

My dear fellow citizens:

For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations on the same theme: how our country flourished, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us.

I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.

Later in that speech, Havel made reference to Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, a great founder of the Czechoslovak nation, and also to the long tradition of Czech religious humanism:

Our first president wrote: "Jesus, not Caesar" In this he followed our philosophers Chelcicky and Comenius. I dare to say that we may even have an opportunity to spread this idea further and introduce a new element into European and global politics. Our country, if that is what we want, can now permanently radiate love, understanding, the power of spirit and ideas. It is precisely this glow that we can offer as our specific contribution to international politics.

Both passages are characteristic of Havel's style and sensibility. The first expresses (as Havel wrote elsewhere) a distinctive Central European skepticism," a disillusioned and satirical stance toward state power and utopian programs; and the second, a kind of Christmas-morning idealism - which is, after all, akin to utopianism. Havel has by now gained worldwide fame by championing "anti-political politics," by "living in the truth," and by giving a strong affirmative answer to his own question: "Is it possible in today's complex world for people who are guided by their consciences sciences or the basic ethical categories of the everyday world to take an active part in politics?"

He certainly stands out as one of the most decent and literate heads of state anywhere in the world. Havel gets away with sentiments which are hypocritical or merely banal in the mouths of more partisan creatures, precisely because he has the true instincts and intelligence of a public citizen. Two recent collections of his writings, Open Letters and Summer Meditations (both published by Vintage), do not really add anything new to the critique of communism advanced earlier in works such as Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind or Milovan Djilas' The New Class. Nothing in Havel's essays matches the tragic, phantasmagoric quality of Milosz nor the thorough analytic spirit of Djilas; but what does shine through is his famous civility - indeed, his deep commitment to "civil society" in every sense.

Havel's essays are written in the plainest possible style, to be of use to the widest circle of literate citizens. And at least one of his essays, "The Power of the Powerless," written in 1978, will remain one of the most important historical documents of this century, since it had such a profound influence on independent citizen initiatives and dissent throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Like Thomas Paine's Common Sense or The Communist Manifesto, Havel's work was both a historical summary and a call to action. Action of a special kind: "living in the truth" in such a way that, even if the number of witnesses were few at first, the fight cast on a whole structure of falsehood would be sure to grow. In this way, "parallel structures" would multiply, prefigure the future, and bring about nonviolent change. His words (often published and circulated samizdat-style) and his work with reform groups such as Charter 77 and the Committee to Defend the Unjustly Prosecuted brought him the honor of serving time in prison from 1979 to 1983.

In Czechoslovakia, the parallel structures" included more or less underground cultural and musical scenes. A crucial catalyst for citizen dissent was the trial in 1976 of the Plastic People of the Universe, a rock band which fell afoul of the authorities. Havel's sentiments, expressed in his essay "The Trial," were shared by many: "Suddenly, I felt disgusted with a whole world, in which - as I realized then - I still have one foot: the world of emergency exits." Furthermore, "a world that I no longer wish to have anything to do with - and Mr. Public Prosecutor Kovarik, pay attention, because here comes a vulgar word - I mean the world of cunning shits." If you read Havel carefully, you'll find some charming passages of incivility in this very civil writer. He shares with fellow Czech writer Milan Kundera a witty and deadly antipathy to the petit bourgeois spirit of communist officialdom. Havel's own class background had been solid high bourgeois.

"Thanks to the apparent disadvantage of coming from a bourgeois background," Havel wrote, "and growing up in a communist state, I had the opportunity, right from the start, of seeing the world 'from below,' that is, as it really is." Havel was 20 years old in 1956 - the year in which Khruschev initiated a wider reckoning with the crimes of Stalin within communist ranks. Alternating thaws and frosts accompanied a "peculiar dialectical dance of truth and lies," in Havel's words. The "Prague Spring" was one such thaw in which culture flourished and the head of state, Alexander Dubcek, promoted "socialism with a human face." Then came the Soviet tanks in August 1968. In this unpredictable climate, the young play, wright was naturally drawn to

one of the basic themes of modern art: the theme of human identity and existential schizophrenia.... Equipped with my view "from below," the experience of Franz Kafka and the French theatre of the absurd ... I found in those remarkable social conditions ... a wonderful horizon for my writing.

In 1968, Havel took pains to link the strong and specific Czechoslovak democratic and humanistic tradition" with what he hoped could become "the creation of democratic socialism." In an interview in 1975, Havel could still say, "I consider myself a socialist." But in 1991, he wrote "What I Believe" and exercised his right of self-revision:

I once said that I considered myself a socialist. I was not identifying with any economic theory .... I merely wanted to suggest that my heart was, as they say, slightly left of center. Rather than expressing, any specific convictions, I was trying to describe a temperament, a nonconformist state of the spirit, an anti-establishment orientation, an aversion to philistines, and an interest in the wretched and humiliated.

Having "abandoned the word 'socialism' because of its semantic ambiguity," Havel happily uses the phrase free market to mean

the only natural economy, the only kind that makes sense, the only one that can lead to prosperity, because it is the only one that reflect the nature of life itself. The essence of life is infinitely and mysteriously multiform, and therefore it cannot be contained or planned for, in its fullness and variability, by any central intelligence.

The "free market," in short, has sufficient semantic ambiguity to mean any, thing Havel wishes it to mean, including "the only natural economy."

Capitalism with a human face? But capitalism is another word Havel prefers to sweep out with the ancient regime; this word, too, is redolent of dogma for him. Nevertheless, he is frankly nervous about a trend which is already well-established in the Czech Republic: "The cult of 'systematically pure' market economies can be as dangerous as Marxist ideology ... There is no such thing as a |pure system,' anywhere."

Quite right. Yet the "semantic ambiguity" of the free market left the door wide open for the entrance of still another troop of ideological puritans. Vaclav Klaus, the first post-communist finance minister and prime minister of the Czech Republic since 1992, is a conservative economist who was profiled in the February 25, 1994, issue of the New York Times. As the 1993 Czech constitution "scaled back the position of president to one of moral arbiter and standard-bearer," Klaus now "holds most of the power." Klaus is imposing an austerity program upon Czech workers - whose wages already rank among the lowest in the region - and his Civil Democratic Party is under the tutelage of Thatcherite Tories. The International Monetary Fund has congratulated Klaus for keeping the inflation rate the lowest in the region as well.

According to Havel's credo:

The marketplace can work only if it has its own morality - a morality generally enshrined in laws, regulations, traditions, experiences, customs - in the rules of the game, to put it simply. No game can be played without rules.

Given his evident courage and decency in the past, we may hope that Havel exerts at least a moderating influence upon his fellow politicians and capitalists - or else the game will become yet another version of Monopoly. Havel himself is doing very nicely under the new rules. According to the September 2, 1993, issue of USA Today:

Havel, 56, the Czech dissident, turned-president, disclosed extensive holdings that make him a multi-millionaire.... Among his holdings: two restaurants, the Lucerna shopping arcade in central Prague, an apartment building, a villa housing the Argentine embassy, several building lots, and rare art.

More seriously, Havel's stated concern for the restoration of the land and water - terribly devastated and polluted under the old regime - is not shared by Vaclav Klaus, who dismisses the issue as utopian. Also, Czechoslovakia was the seventh-largest arms exporter in the world during the 1980s, and Havel's moral influence has also waned in this matter, according to the New York Times of February 13, 1994:

After the fall of Communism, the Government of Vaclav Havel banned or restricted arms sales to more than 50 countries at one point. Today the conservative Government of Vaclav Klaus has no such list, and the business is growing.

"We live in the very centre of Central Europe," Havel wrote recently, "in a place that from the beginning of time has been the main European crossroads of every possible interest, invasion, and influence of a political, military, ethnic, religious, or cultural nature" He added, "Our historical experience has even made us somewhat prescient: many admonitory visions of the future - Kafkas and Capek's, for instance - have come from here ..." in this spirit, Havel warned Europe and America that the appeasement of the ultra-nationalist forces carving up Bosnia would only embolden them further; now, at long last, some concerted, effective action has been taken to stop the slaughter.

Central Europe indeed remains a historic crucible, but even a writer and citizen as savvy as Havel is taking refuge in a utopia of his own creation:

Our great, specific experience of recent times is the collapse of an ideology.... I think that the world of ideologies and doctrines is on the way out for good - along with the entire modern age. We are on the threshold of an era of globality, an era of open society, an era in which ideologies will be replaced by ideas.

Ideology, utopia, totalitarianism - words are nearly synonymous for Havel and have corrupted "the entire modern age." In his 1960 Letter to the New Left, C. Wright Mills wrote:

Ultimately, the end-of-ideology is based upon a disillusionment with any real commitment to socialism in any recognizable form. That is the only "ideology" that has really ended for these writers. But with its ending, all ideology, they think, has ended. That ideology they talk about; their own ideological assumptions, they do not.

(Havel, unlike many other end-of-ideology ideologists, would at least appreciate the sly satire Mills also directed at the "socialist realism" of his time: "In Uzbekistan and Georgia as well as in Russia I kept writing notes to myself, at the end of recorded interviews: 'This man talks in a style just like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr....")

Some readers will be alarmed when they find Havel mentioning Ortega y Gassett, Heidegger, and Solzhenitsyn in close and honored company in his essay "The Power of the Powerless." Havel is concerned in those passages with the crisis of technological society as a whole, the crisis that Heidegger describes as the ineptitude of humanity face to face with the planetary power of technology. Technology - that child of modern science, which in turn is a child of metaphysics - is out of humanity's control.... "Only a God can save us now," Heidegger says.

Havel refers in another essay to the fact that Heidegger himself was mesmerized for a time by one of the crudest ideologies of the century, but the Heideggerian categories of Sein, Dasein, and Existenz remain for Havel the closest form of believable theology. Havel often calls upon the order of being" to justify free-market economics, all consistent (he believes) with a mystical and multiform vitalism. So Havel is not only an ideologist; he is almost a theologian! Havel, of course, always distinguishes "true ideas" very strictly from ideology; without examining this polemical strategy too carefully and straying too far afield, it's simply worth observing here how thoroughly certain ideas saturate Havel's own work. Sometimes they crystallize very beautifully, as in this passage from an open letter to Czechoslovakia's last grand old man of Stalinism, Gustav Husak:

Life rebels against all uniformity and leveling; its aim is not sameness, but variety, the restlessness of transcendence, the adventure of novelty and rebellion against the status quo. An essential condition for its enhancement is the secret constantly made manifest.

Those last five words are the quintessence of Havel's metaphysics and politics. Indeed, the open letter is itself a distinguished genre in which secrets are made manifest. Havel believes in a mysterious "ground of being" - and the contingent world of changing phenomena. Is this a hopelessly obscurantist and retrograde idea? Not at all. It has been, it is, it will always be the inspiration for much of art, science, and ethics. Beginning with such a premise, you can, not predict in any linear fashion all the ideas and actions which might follow. For Havel, it is simply the brightest star within a whole constellation of convictions. In some respects, Havel belongs within a diverse tradition of aristocratic conservatism. Dismiss him and all that company into outer darkness? Too stupid. There is no good reason why committed humanists, democrats, and socialists should not make a critical survey of that tradition and make good polemical and practical use of whatever they find.

Scott Tucker is an artist, activist, and writer, as well as a founding member of the Philadelphia chapter of ACT UP.