We bring an apt contribution to the theoretical section. It could help
root out the current unhappy state of our movement. ---- The article by
the well-known Prague anarchist Petr Wohlmuth was published on his
now-defunct blog 11 years ago, but he still manages to name some trends
that we have not dealt with even after thirty years. At the time,
however, the article - mainly because of its offensiveness and the
considerable unpopularity of its author - did not provoke any reflection
in the movement. Over time, Wohlmuth himself worked his way up to the
position of those he criticized in his articles, mainly through careful
self-censorship of his anarchist past. The following text is, among
other things, a critical look at the controversial figure of our movement
Jakub Polák.
During the last twenty years, most of us Czech anarchists have become
experts in focusing on legitimate but secondary issues - and pushing
aside the crucial ones. Most of us have never made a political "coming
out" and subscribed to anarchism as it is - or is nothing - that is, an
anarchism firmly rooted in the radical promises of European modernity -
one of the last worldviews that carried the message of a consistent,
revolutionary transformation of society, and therefore the combative,
social plane was completely inseparable from it.
But the unthinkable has been a fact in our parts for a long time now,
and many of us show only a polite peripheral interest in anarchism and
from time to time nostalgically move our hearts and march under the
black and red banners. At least for one afternoon a year, on May Day.
The majority of the so-called movement consists of "notorious
sympathizers", people who are "inspired by anarchism", but it is not the
core of its worldview. Our movement is mostly made up of people who
subscribe to anarchism only when it suits them, preferably during big
anniversaries or meetings with foreign visitors.
There were constantly a thousand reasons to deal with trifles and leave
the essential matters aside - after all, the trifles are also
"legitimate". Surely it should have been legitimate to play a punk
concert for a dog shelter - than to drive nags off the streets, surely
it should have been "legitimate" to organize street parties and other
events for fun - than to build some class project and social movement.
Trapped in a foreign language
This situation is visible at first glance in the language with which
anarchists talk about themselves. The profiling of meaningless stickers,
which also includes the adjective "libertine", is traditional in our
country. In the same way, labels such as "independent", "informal",
"from below", "alternative", or "anti-capitalist" were overused. Most of
us spoke of ourselves in timid language, reflecting the anxiety of being
full-blown anarchists. Read its statement "Who we are" on the website of
the North Bohemian Association Alerta, written in a language that
carefully avoids the word "anarchism".
In the north of Bohemia, an infoshop called "Ateneo" was also recently
established, whose name represents another personification of this
alienated language. What kind of university is this? Athenaeum
originally meant a public educational institution in ancient Rome, and
as a general term adopted later, it does not attach itself to any idea.
This infoshop presents itself in an encrypted form for every connoisseur
of anarchist history. It refers to a kind of "atenea" in Spain in the
1930s, and few people know that in the truly mass anarchist movement of
the time there was no such thing as an ateneo, it was always either
ateneo anarquista or ateneo libertario, which in the context of the time
were one and the same - an anarchist cultural center, usually associated
with a workers' evening school. Even Alerta, which describes itself as
"the voice of creativity and defiance", only knows "ateneo". The
anarchist ateneo does not.
A Czech anarchist, willing to use this term in public at all, is
becoming an endangered species. People who don't hide behind meaningless
labels, behind a comforting weekend subculture, focused on local mutual
help and resigned to a revolutionary project - no matter what form it
takes - such people that one should search not with Google, but directly
with a magnifying glass.
In the mid-1990s, the first generation of anarchists appeared, who
overcame the phase of doublespeak and made a political coming-out with
great effort and under very adverse conditions. These were mainly people
associated with the Federation of Social Anarchists, later the
Federation of Anarchist Groups - or the Organization of Revolutionary
Anarchists - Solidarity, later the Anarcho-Communist Alternative.
However, their wave has already subsided and at the moment no one is
following it.
Anarchists are no longer revolutionaries, they are somewhat more vocal
civic activists of sorts. For a long time it has been a subculture of
mostly peaceful, quiet and decent people who get together in the
evenings and exchange old sweaters and books without using money, watch
human rights documentaries or travelogues, cook herbal teas and vegan
meals, and occasionally get lectures from of their friends, university
humanities students, grateful for the fact that someone will listen to
their postmodern thought constructions, which they embodied in their
diploma theses.
But where are the roots of such a state?
The legacy of Jakub Polák
Last year, a personality who, for some reason, was perceived by many as
a kind of founding father of modern Czech anarchism - Jakub Polák, died.
He was the main protagonist of the first phase of the movement in the
years 1990-1993, which, unfortunately, rooted in the anarchist movement
most of the semantic and thought problems we are talking about - which
later left a deep impression on the practice of our movement.
The key to thinking about the current situation is to look at the past.
Jakub Polák is not a personal culprit, nor a symbol of the given state.
But it is an example that can be used to understand some of the causes.
Jakub Polák himself was different, much more open, he did not hide
behind any doublespeak. He came from the ranks of the democratic left
(he was the founder of the Radical-democratic group Left Alternative)
and often bluntly wrote that for him anarchism meant a somewhat more
consistent liberalism with a left-wing ethos. The end, nothing more.
This was his boundary, which he consistently defended throughout his life.
I think the reason was simple. Jakub Polák did everything his own way.
He remained his personality in the concept of "anarchism" from 1990,
when the movement was completely unprofiled and still dominated by two
important elements from the period before 1989 - the emphasis on the
cultural underground and the emphasis on the defense of human rights
originating from political dissent, which in principle rejects
confrontational and militant efforts and anti-systemicism.
This is a very important point.
In the key years 1990-1991, the ideology of dissent was transferred to
the environment of the Czech anarchist movement with everything that
goes with it. Indeed, the ideology of dissent represents the opposite of
anarchism as a modernist revolutionary worldview. Dissent is essentially
focused on an "internal" critique of power and an effort to cultivate
and democratize it, at most some transformation into a "fairer" form.
Anarchism is focused on an "external" attack on social power and an
effort to remove it and replace it with a positive, revolutionary social
project.
Polák and A-Kontra magazine
The first and for a long time the only Czech anarchist magazine -
Polák's magazine A-Kontra - inherited its name precisely from the
underground. The newsletter "Kontra" was a continuation of the
underground Voknovin, a newsletter that emerged from the environment of
the VOKNO magazine and was supposed to fill the gaps between the
irregular publication of issues. In August 1990, the last issue, the
25th, was published, which was already marked as the first issue of
"Kontry". A few months later, Polák appears around the Kontra editorial
office and revives an almost dead project with his tireless activity.
Kontra becomes "A-Kontra", which is taken over by the Czechoslovak
Anarchist Association, which disbands almost immediately in the same
year. The Pole takes advantage of the situation and, after the punk
Karolína Zarzycka, gets the (unelected) position of editor-in-chief.
Space and background will be provided by the former dissident and
activist of the Jazz Section, Karel Srb, in the exclusive premises of
Artfór in Valdshtejnská Street in Prague, in the well-known Pálffy
Palace in Malá Strana.
Polák did not come from a dissident-underground background. During the
previous regime, he went against the grain, but in a different way than
his apologists believe today - he was a quirky private entrepreneur
without state approval, and at one point he found himself in prison on
charges of large-scale theft of "socialist-owned" building materials and
attempted murder in connection with by this activity. If his political
involvement in dissent and the underground before 1989 is discussed
today in connection with how his younger colleagues create his
hagiographic myth, then this is at best a historical inaccuracy, at
worst a deliberate lie.
In my personal opinion, Poplák always felt a certain inferiority complex
towards the underground and dissent and tried to compensate for these
circles with diligent activity after 1989. The fact that he liked to be
proud of the Award of the Charter 77 Foundation, which he received for
eminently democratic, human rights and pro-regime activity, she is very
eloquent.
Dissident-underground circles, however, became an environment whose
ethos Polák absorbed very quickly in 1990 and gained many contacts
there. But at the same time, they became his horizon, a border that he
never crossed. That's why there were so many references to VOKNO and the
cultural underground in A-Kontra, that's why it contained interviews
with VOKNO editors SM Blumfeld and even Frantishek Starek, who at the
time was already working for the new "democratic" secret Federal
Security Information Service - albeit for anarchists these conversations
were basically about nothing. It was prestigious for the Pole. That's
why several A-Kontra covers were designed by the underground artist and
leading Czech surrealist Joska Skalník. In the same way, Polák achieved
that Petr Cibulka produced a number of issues of the magazine in his
printer.
A unique fusion of pre-November dissidence and the cultural underground,
to which Polák added a little liberalism - that was "anarchism" for him.
Polák tried very hard to ensure that A-Kontra and the anarchists around
him were perceived as a kind of continuation of the pre-November
dissident traditions. His contacts and constant references to VOKNO were
used precisely to legitimize this relationship.
Polák did not know his own anarchist tradition and deliberately ignored
it. He didn't care. He was not a reader, he was not a theoretician, he
could not elaborate or support his views in the overwhelming majority of
discussions about anarchism. His "anarchism" was his individual,
autonomous, intuitive matter, which had nothing to do with "anarchism"
as such, with the tradition of a revolutionary social movement. Polák
did not even feel the need to continue the legacy of the old Czech
anarchism of the "first wave" from the 1880s to the 1920s. He did not
consider this tradition important, knew nothing about it, did not read
its authors, did not know its historical experience or lessons.
Polák could not support his concept in any way other than with general
phrases about the necessity of a pluralistic, alternative view of the
matter. In several discussions, he used the inexplicable term
"alterity", which was essentially postmodern relativism. According to
him, there were two currents in anarchism - intuitive and analytical. He
subscribed to the first, the second was just the proper anarchism in
itself, with a project and program of a revolutionary nature. The other
Pole naturally refused.
Polák's legitimacy as an anarchist thus came from several specific
sources: personal contacts with the generation and group around the
VOKNO magazine, from the "legal" heritage of the (A)Kontra magazine
brand, and from his great activist commitment. The Pole could simply be
seen and heard everywhere. He was at a considerable advantage over
others who studied or went to work every day. His disability pension (he
suffered a serious work accident in the boiler room of a Prague hotel in
the 1980s) allowed him to be a "freelance anarchist", a super-activist
who is capable of an order of magnitude more commitment than most other
people and has time for everything.
This is where bread broke:
The Pole actually adopted the pre-November, dissident concept, painted
in black and red, not of resistance or even resistance against the
regime, but an emphasis on legalistic defense of human rights and
"justice". Just as the generation of Charter 77 basically rejected the
resistance against the Bolshevik system and only wanted to point out its
most obvious absurdities, contradictions and errors, so too Polák did
not see anarchism as something that should confront the "system" - which
was then a novelty for the state and capitalism. Anarchism in his
conception was a combination of human rights activities and
investigative journalism, nothing more, nothing less.
The Pole did not think and act in the spirit of concepts and social
movements like revolution or resistance - terms like "dialogue" and
"tolerance" were much more prominent in his vocabulary. If we were to
use the contrast often shaken in politics and the media - Pole versus
revolutionary anarchists - it was something like Václav Havel versus the
Mashín brothers.
A fighter for Roma rights?
Jakub Polák as a fighter for Roma rights is another part of his legend.
Polák's emphasis on the pre-November, dissident conception of the
defense of human rights and "justice" meant that his policies and
actions never posed any challenge to the system. They were just a
dogged, honest, but utterly futile effort to force the system to act,
investigate and judge fairly. To force the justice machinery to be fair.
Squaring the circle.
With the full force of his headstrong personality who always did
everything his way, he ignored any serious discussion about anything. He
remained ideologically in the 1990s, in the beginnings of modern Czech
anarchism, and continuously involved contradictory and senseless
initiatives and elements, such as Václav Belohradský, into the anarchist
environment and debate. God judge what significance this thoroughly
liberal philosopher and left-wing democrat has for anarchists. In my
humble opinion, none.
We now circle back to our initial consideration of anarchists behaving
as a minority of sorts, afraid to make a social coming-out.
It is Jakub Polák and the tradition founded by him, which is still very
visible, that is one of the historical sources of why the Czech movement
never carried out its majority political coming-out, why it did not
start speaking and acting openly - why it never matured. The underground
turned into subcultures, the dissident timid emphasis on human rights
was translated by Polák's contribution into a very specific concept of
"anarchism" as radical human rights activism, connected with something
like a general investigative-journalistic critical approach.
Czech anarchism, which remained mostly trapped in this situation, was
not an anti-system, revolutionary force in its majority and for most of
its career. The generation of young Polák's successors in A-Kontra
provides continuity to this chaos of inconsistent but very
radical-looking social criticism to this day.
Non-independent and non-autonomous anarchists
The result of the transfer of the ideology of dissent and the
underground was, among other things, that as anarchists we mostly did
not promote any unique project of our own, but on the contrary - very
naively constantly supported someone - and did not think about
ourselves. It's hard to look back like this - but since the beginning of
the 90s, Czech anarchists were constantly reaching out to someone and
constantly playing tricks on someone - first and then constantly the
autonomous and squatter subculture, then ecologists - for some time they
made kanonenfutr tied to the Temelín Nuclear Power Plant - then to
various non-governmental organizations - then to Marxists and finally
also to anti-fascists.
Anarchists, in an effort to get out of the ghetto, constantly focused on
some broader contexts that should bring anarchism to a more socially
relevant level - but they did not understand that in doing so they were
retreating from their basic starting points - non-negotiable opposition
to the state and capitalism, to unnatural authority in any form . For so
long, anarchists have tried to broaden their horizons until they finally
find that they are playing a completely different game - democratic,
environmental, human rights, anti-fascist or left-liberal - on a
completely different playing field. And then it was too late. In the
meantime, the elite anarchist activists have worked their way into the
good places in the media, NGOs and academia - and found that they are
content there and want no more, and with their newly acquired cultural
capital they can easily ideologically control a movement that has come
to see them as experts of sorts, superiors to others. As if the truest
anarchist was the one who gets a doctorate on a related topic.
The anarchist movement has become illegitimate and illegitimate. He
began to be driven by interests other than his own. For the most part,
we have never understood that left-wing democrats, NGO workers, or
Marxists and liberal environmentalists have never been, are not, and
will never be colleagues and partners who respect anarchism. For them,
anarchists represent only mostly youthful, enthusiastic useful idiots
who will help with a few things and sometimes willingly take banners in
their hands. They don't trust us and have little interest in seeing our
goals accomplished - but over the years they've learned to be credible
pretenders, and the young anarchists come in handy at times.
A clash of two worlds
Perhaps the best illustration of what originally represented Polák's
dissident-underground legacy was the large text that sparked the
wide-ranging polemic "Defense of Revolutionary Anti-Fascism" in
2003-2005. It represented probably the deepest and most serious debate
on the topic of the starting points of a revolutionary, anarchist
approach not only to anti-fascism. Two profiled worlds that did not
understand each other had already met.
Polák and his younger followers from A-Kontra presented themselves as
convinced liberals and left-wing democrats in three long texts of this
polemic. They rejected revolutionaryism, rejected opposition to the
state as an undeniable and inalienable element of anarchist identity,
and recycled the dissident-human rights spirit of the 1990s. They
postulated that groups of politically skilled activists could navigate
the gray area of the law, use state power for the common good, and
achieve some results " here and now". But hey, those results basically
only strengthened the existing status quo. If the authors did not cloak
themselves in anarchist-sounding rhetoric, their articles could very
well be used, for example, in the presentation of the Green Party.
After the deplorable failure of anarchist revolutionary activities in
the years 1995-2010, when all anarchist revolutionary groups and
organizations gradually disappeared from the scene, or withdrew into
practical seclusion, on the vacant stage through their modern-day
youthful epigones, the old legacy of anarchism as a
dissident-underground human rights activities. A huge semantic shift
also occurred with it.
It is more than symbolic that the Anti-Fascist Action was the first to
be "cleansed" of revolutionary symbolism and vocabulary, i.e. primarily
its website and all external outputs. Anti-fascists were no longer
revolutionary, but "radical" and so on and so forth. Where are the times
when in March 2004 the magazine Akce published the first part of the
aforementioned Defense of Revolutionary Anti-Fascism as a program text.
Today, things are different and there is open talk of postmodernism or
postanarchism.
Today, we no longer talk about the classic anarchist modernist
perspectives of social revolution and classless society, but for example
about "social development of the locality", about "strengthening
dialogue". All this is, of course, sincerely meant, but old familiar
social-democratic vocabulary.
When we are unable to be anarchists in our language or in our culture
and its symbols, when we do not want to be public anarchists - how can
we hope to achieve anything? If the majority of anarchists talk and
think about themselves in a language full of expressions like social
development, dialogue, democracy or citizenship, then they themselves
resign from their revolutionary project.
Czech anarchism is still waiting for its political coming-out, for its
second wave. I'm sure it will come again after some time.
https://oafed.noblogs.org/post/2024/06/11/cekani-na-druhou-vlnu/#more-1222
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
root out the current unhappy state of our movement. ---- The article by
the well-known Prague anarchist Petr Wohlmuth was published on his
now-defunct blog 11 years ago, but he still manages to name some trends
that we have not dealt with even after thirty years. At the time,
however, the article - mainly because of its offensiveness and the
considerable unpopularity of its author - did not provoke any reflection
in the movement. Over time, Wohlmuth himself worked his way up to the
position of those he criticized in his articles, mainly through careful
self-censorship of his anarchist past. The following text is, among
other things, a critical look at the controversial figure of our movement
Jakub Polák.
During the last twenty years, most of us Czech anarchists have become
experts in focusing on legitimate but secondary issues - and pushing
aside the crucial ones. Most of us have never made a political "coming
out" and subscribed to anarchism as it is - or is nothing - that is, an
anarchism firmly rooted in the radical promises of European modernity -
one of the last worldviews that carried the message of a consistent,
revolutionary transformation of society, and therefore the combative,
social plane was completely inseparable from it.
But the unthinkable has been a fact in our parts for a long time now,
and many of us show only a polite peripheral interest in anarchism and
from time to time nostalgically move our hearts and march under the
black and red banners. At least for one afternoon a year, on May Day.
The majority of the so-called movement consists of "notorious
sympathizers", people who are "inspired by anarchism", but it is not the
core of its worldview. Our movement is mostly made up of people who
subscribe to anarchism only when it suits them, preferably during big
anniversaries or meetings with foreign visitors.
There were constantly a thousand reasons to deal with trifles and leave
the essential matters aside - after all, the trifles are also
"legitimate". Surely it should have been legitimate to play a punk
concert for a dog shelter - than to drive nags off the streets, surely
it should have been "legitimate" to organize street parties and other
events for fun - than to build some class project and social movement.
Trapped in a foreign language
This situation is visible at first glance in the language with which
anarchists talk about themselves. The profiling of meaningless stickers,
which also includes the adjective "libertine", is traditional in our
country. In the same way, labels such as "independent", "informal",
"from below", "alternative", or "anti-capitalist" were overused. Most of
us spoke of ourselves in timid language, reflecting the anxiety of being
full-blown anarchists. Read its statement "Who we are" on the website of
the North Bohemian Association Alerta, written in a language that
carefully avoids the word "anarchism".
In the north of Bohemia, an infoshop called "Ateneo" was also recently
established, whose name represents another personification of this
alienated language. What kind of university is this? Athenaeum
originally meant a public educational institution in ancient Rome, and
as a general term adopted later, it does not attach itself to any idea.
This infoshop presents itself in an encrypted form for every connoisseur
of anarchist history. It refers to a kind of "atenea" in Spain in the
1930s, and few people know that in the truly mass anarchist movement of
the time there was no such thing as an ateneo, it was always either
ateneo anarquista or ateneo libertario, which in the context of the time
were one and the same - an anarchist cultural center, usually associated
with a workers' evening school. Even Alerta, which describes itself as
"the voice of creativity and defiance", only knows "ateneo". The
anarchist ateneo does not.
A Czech anarchist, willing to use this term in public at all, is
becoming an endangered species. People who don't hide behind meaningless
labels, behind a comforting weekend subculture, focused on local mutual
help and resigned to a revolutionary project - no matter what form it
takes - such people that one should search not with Google, but directly
with a magnifying glass.
In the mid-1990s, the first generation of anarchists appeared, who
overcame the phase of doublespeak and made a political coming-out with
great effort and under very adverse conditions. These were mainly people
associated with the Federation of Social Anarchists, later the
Federation of Anarchist Groups - or the Organization of Revolutionary
Anarchists - Solidarity, later the Anarcho-Communist Alternative.
However, their wave has already subsided and at the moment no one is
following it.
Anarchists are no longer revolutionaries, they are somewhat more vocal
civic activists of sorts. For a long time it has been a subculture of
mostly peaceful, quiet and decent people who get together in the
evenings and exchange old sweaters and books without using money, watch
human rights documentaries or travelogues, cook herbal teas and vegan
meals, and occasionally get lectures from of their friends, university
humanities students, grateful for the fact that someone will listen to
their postmodern thought constructions, which they embodied in their
diploma theses.
But where are the roots of such a state?
The legacy of Jakub Polák
Last year, a personality who, for some reason, was perceived by many as
a kind of founding father of modern Czech anarchism - Jakub Polák, died.
He was the main protagonist of the first phase of the movement in the
years 1990-1993, which, unfortunately, rooted in the anarchist movement
most of the semantic and thought problems we are talking about - which
later left a deep impression on the practice of our movement.
The key to thinking about the current situation is to look at the past.
Jakub Polák is not a personal culprit, nor a symbol of the given state.
But it is an example that can be used to understand some of the causes.
Jakub Polák himself was different, much more open, he did not hide
behind any doublespeak. He came from the ranks of the democratic left
(he was the founder of the Radical-democratic group Left Alternative)
and often bluntly wrote that for him anarchism meant a somewhat more
consistent liberalism with a left-wing ethos. The end, nothing more.
This was his boundary, which he consistently defended throughout his life.
I think the reason was simple. Jakub Polák did everything his own way.
He remained his personality in the concept of "anarchism" from 1990,
when the movement was completely unprofiled and still dominated by two
important elements from the period before 1989 - the emphasis on the
cultural underground and the emphasis on the defense of human rights
originating from political dissent, which in principle rejects
confrontational and militant efforts and anti-systemicism.
This is a very important point.
In the key years 1990-1991, the ideology of dissent was transferred to
the environment of the Czech anarchist movement with everything that
goes with it. Indeed, the ideology of dissent represents the opposite of
anarchism as a modernist revolutionary worldview. Dissent is essentially
focused on an "internal" critique of power and an effort to cultivate
and democratize it, at most some transformation into a "fairer" form.
Anarchism is focused on an "external" attack on social power and an
effort to remove it and replace it with a positive, revolutionary social
project.
Polák and A-Kontra magazine
The first and for a long time the only Czech anarchist magazine -
Polák's magazine A-Kontra - inherited its name precisely from the
underground. The newsletter "Kontra" was a continuation of the
underground Voknovin, a newsletter that emerged from the environment of
the VOKNO magazine and was supposed to fill the gaps between the
irregular publication of issues. In August 1990, the last issue, the
25th, was published, which was already marked as the first issue of
"Kontry". A few months later, Polák appears around the Kontra editorial
office and revives an almost dead project with his tireless activity.
Kontra becomes "A-Kontra", which is taken over by the Czechoslovak
Anarchist Association, which disbands almost immediately in the same
year. The Pole takes advantage of the situation and, after the punk
Karolína Zarzycka, gets the (unelected) position of editor-in-chief.
Space and background will be provided by the former dissident and
activist of the Jazz Section, Karel Srb, in the exclusive premises of
Artfór in Valdshtejnská Street in Prague, in the well-known Pálffy
Palace in Malá Strana.
Polák did not come from a dissident-underground background. During the
previous regime, he went against the grain, but in a different way than
his apologists believe today - he was a quirky private entrepreneur
without state approval, and at one point he found himself in prison on
charges of large-scale theft of "socialist-owned" building materials and
attempted murder in connection with by this activity. If his political
involvement in dissent and the underground before 1989 is discussed
today in connection with how his younger colleagues create his
hagiographic myth, then this is at best a historical inaccuracy, at
worst a deliberate lie.
In my personal opinion, Poplák always felt a certain inferiority complex
towards the underground and dissent and tried to compensate for these
circles with diligent activity after 1989. The fact that he liked to be
proud of the Award of the Charter 77 Foundation, which he received for
eminently democratic, human rights and pro-regime activity, she is very
eloquent.
Dissident-underground circles, however, became an environment whose
ethos Polák absorbed very quickly in 1990 and gained many contacts
there. But at the same time, they became his horizon, a border that he
never crossed. That's why there were so many references to VOKNO and the
cultural underground in A-Kontra, that's why it contained interviews
with VOKNO editors SM Blumfeld and even Frantishek Starek, who at the
time was already working for the new "democratic" secret Federal
Security Information Service - albeit for anarchists these conversations
were basically about nothing. It was prestigious for the Pole. That's
why several A-Kontra covers were designed by the underground artist and
leading Czech surrealist Joska Skalník. In the same way, Polák achieved
that Petr Cibulka produced a number of issues of the magazine in his
printer.
A unique fusion of pre-November dissidence and the cultural underground,
to which Polák added a little liberalism - that was "anarchism" for him.
Polák tried very hard to ensure that A-Kontra and the anarchists around
him were perceived as a kind of continuation of the pre-November
dissident traditions. His contacts and constant references to VOKNO were
used precisely to legitimize this relationship.
Polák did not know his own anarchist tradition and deliberately ignored
it. He didn't care. He was not a reader, he was not a theoretician, he
could not elaborate or support his views in the overwhelming majority of
discussions about anarchism. His "anarchism" was his individual,
autonomous, intuitive matter, which had nothing to do with "anarchism"
as such, with the tradition of a revolutionary social movement. Polák
did not even feel the need to continue the legacy of the old Czech
anarchism of the "first wave" from the 1880s to the 1920s. He did not
consider this tradition important, knew nothing about it, did not read
its authors, did not know its historical experience or lessons.
Polák could not support his concept in any way other than with general
phrases about the necessity of a pluralistic, alternative view of the
matter. In several discussions, he used the inexplicable term
"alterity", which was essentially postmodern relativism. According to
him, there were two currents in anarchism - intuitive and analytical. He
subscribed to the first, the second was just the proper anarchism in
itself, with a project and program of a revolutionary nature. The other
Pole naturally refused.
Polák's legitimacy as an anarchist thus came from several specific
sources: personal contacts with the generation and group around the
VOKNO magazine, from the "legal" heritage of the (A)Kontra magazine
brand, and from his great activist commitment. The Pole could simply be
seen and heard everywhere. He was at a considerable advantage over
others who studied or went to work every day. His disability pension (he
suffered a serious work accident in the boiler room of a Prague hotel in
the 1980s) allowed him to be a "freelance anarchist", a super-activist
who is capable of an order of magnitude more commitment than most other
people and has time for everything.
This is where bread broke:
The Pole actually adopted the pre-November, dissident concept, painted
in black and red, not of resistance or even resistance against the
regime, but an emphasis on legalistic defense of human rights and
"justice". Just as the generation of Charter 77 basically rejected the
resistance against the Bolshevik system and only wanted to point out its
most obvious absurdities, contradictions and errors, so too Polák did
not see anarchism as something that should confront the "system" - which
was then a novelty for the state and capitalism. Anarchism in his
conception was a combination of human rights activities and
investigative journalism, nothing more, nothing less.
The Pole did not think and act in the spirit of concepts and social
movements like revolution or resistance - terms like "dialogue" and
"tolerance" were much more prominent in his vocabulary. If we were to
use the contrast often shaken in politics and the media - Pole versus
revolutionary anarchists - it was something like Václav Havel versus the
Mashín brothers.
A fighter for Roma rights?
Jakub Polák as a fighter for Roma rights is another part of his legend.
Polák's emphasis on the pre-November, dissident conception of the
defense of human rights and "justice" meant that his policies and
actions never posed any challenge to the system. They were just a
dogged, honest, but utterly futile effort to force the system to act,
investigate and judge fairly. To force the justice machinery to be fair.
Squaring the circle.
With the full force of his headstrong personality who always did
everything his way, he ignored any serious discussion about anything. He
remained ideologically in the 1990s, in the beginnings of modern Czech
anarchism, and continuously involved contradictory and senseless
initiatives and elements, such as Václav Belohradský, into the anarchist
environment and debate. God judge what significance this thoroughly
liberal philosopher and left-wing democrat has for anarchists. In my
humble opinion, none.
We now circle back to our initial consideration of anarchists behaving
as a minority of sorts, afraid to make a social coming-out.
It is Jakub Polák and the tradition founded by him, which is still very
visible, that is one of the historical sources of why the Czech movement
never carried out its majority political coming-out, why it did not
start speaking and acting openly - why it never matured. The underground
turned into subcultures, the dissident timid emphasis on human rights
was translated by Polák's contribution into a very specific concept of
"anarchism" as radical human rights activism, connected with something
like a general investigative-journalistic critical approach.
Czech anarchism, which remained mostly trapped in this situation, was
not an anti-system, revolutionary force in its majority and for most of
its career. The generation of young Polák's successors in A-Kontra
provides continuity to this chaos of inconsistent but very
radical-looking social criticism to this day.
Non-independent and non-autonomous anarchists
The result of the transfer of the ideology of dissent and the
underground was, among other things, that as anarchists we mostly did
not promote any unique project of our own, but on the contrary - very
naively constantly supported someone - and did not think about
ourselves. It's hard to look back like this - but since the beginning of
the 90s, Czech anarchists were constantly reaching out to someone and
constantly playing tricks on someone - first and then constantly the
autonomous and squatter subculture, then ecologists - for some time they
made kanonenfutr tied to the Temelín Nuclear Power Plant - then to
various non-governmental organizations - then to Marxists and finally
also to anti-fascists.
Anarchists, in an effort to get out of the ghetto, constantly focused on
some broader contexts that should bring anarchism to a more socially
relevant level - but they did not understand that in doing so they were
retreating from their basic starting points - non-negotiable opposition
to the state and capitalism, to unnatural authority in any form . For so
long, anarchists have tried to broaden their horizons until they finally
find that they are playing a completely different game - democratic,
environmental, human rights, anti-fascist or left-liberal - on a
completely different playing field. And then it was too late. In the
meantime, the elite anarchist activists have worked their way into the
good places in the media, NGOs and academia - and found that they are
content there and want no more, and with their newly acquired cultural
capital they can easily ideologically control a movement that has come
to see them as experts of sorts, superiors to others. As if the truest
anarchist was the one who gets a doctorate on a related topic.
The anarchist movement has become illegitimate and illegitimate. He
began to be driven by interests other than his own. For the most part,
we have never understood that left-wing democrats, NGO workers, or
Marxists and liberal environmentalists have never been, are not, and
will never be colleagues and partners who respect anarchism. For them,
anarchists represent only mostly youthful, enthusiastic useful idiots
who will help with a few things and sometimes willingly take banners in
their hands. They don't trust us and have little interest in seeing our
goals accomplished - but over the years they've learned to be credible
pretenders, and the young anarchists come in handy at times.
A clash of two worlds
Perhaps the best illustration of what originally represented Polák's
dissident-underground legacy was the large text that sparked the
wide-ranging polemic "Defense of Revolutionary Anti-Fascism" in
2003-2005. It represented probably the deepest and most serious debate
on the topic of the starting points of a revolutionary, anarchist
approach not only to anti-fascism. Two profiled worlds that did not
understand each other had already met.
Polák and his younger followers from A-Kontra presented themselves as
convinced liberals and left-wing democrats in three long texts of this
polemic. They rejected revolutionaryism, rejected opposition to the
state as an undeniable and inalienable element of anarchist identity,
and recycled the dissident-human rights spirit of the 1990s. They
postulated that groups of politically skilled activists could navigate
the gray area of the law, use state power for the common good, and
achieve some results " here and now". But hey, those results basically
only strengthened the existing status quo. If the authors did not cloak
themselves in anarchist-sounding rhetoric, their articles could very
well be used, for example, in the presentation of the Green Party.
After the deplorable failure of anarchist revolutionary activities in
the years 1995-2010, when all anarchist revolutionary groups and
organizations gradually disappeared from the scene, or withdrew into
practical seclusion, on the vacant stage through their modern-day
youthful epigones, the old legacy of anarchism as a
dissident-underground human rights activities. A huge semantic shift
also occurred with it.
It is more than symbolic that the Anti-Fascist Action was the first to
be "cleansed" of revolutionary symbolism and vocabulary, i.e. primarily
its website and all external outputs. Anti-fascists were no longer
revolutionary, but "radical" and so on and so forth. Where are the times
when in March 2004 the magazine Akce published the first part of the
aforementioned Defense of Revolutionary Anti-Fascism as a program text.
Today, things are different and there is open talk of postmodernism or
postanarchism.
Today, we no longer talk about the classic anarchist modernist
perspectives of social revolution and classless society, but for example
about "social development of the locality", about "strengthening
dialogue". All this is, of course, sincerely meant, but old familiar
social-democratic vocabulary.
When we are unable to be anarchists in our language or in our culture
and its symbols, when we do not want to be public anarchists - how can
we hope to achieve anything? If the majority of anarchists talk and
think about themselves in a language full of expressions like social
development, dialogue, democracy or citizenship, then they themselves
resign from their revolutionary project.
Czech anarchism is still waiting for its political coming-out, for its
second wave. I'm sure it will come again after some time.
https://oafed.noblogs.org/post/2024/06/11/cekani-na-druhou-vlnu/#more-1222
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten