"Do we need a Parallel Polis?"—the question A/UK asked of Helsinki's Untitled festival/community. Here's the full video
We were delighted to be asked to contribute a 90 minute session to the Untitled festival, based out of Helsinki (and powered by Demos Helsinki), particularly as one of the themes in their invite was “Ontological Politics”. A politics about who gets to define what’s true and real? That’s very much in our zone at A/UK (see Tell The Story and Create The Feel).
We agreed that the best way to demonstrate this was to expand on the concept of “parallel polis” that Indra adapts from the Czech radicals of the 70s and 80s, and explores further in her new book The Politics of Waking Up. More in the video above, but here’s an extract on PP from POWU:
In the mid-1980s, during the oppressive years of Socialist ‘normalisation’ in Czechoslovakia, Havel and his philosopher friend Václav Benda imagined what they called a parallel polis – ‘a space for informed, non-bureaucratic, dynamic, and open communities’ (to some extent prefigured by his secret life with dissident friends) to develop independently of the state.
Explicitly opposing the ‘demoralisation of the consumer value system’ of capitalism, as much as the fake solidarity of communism, Havel wanted to deeply address human powerlessness, the ‘machine-like’ nature of politics, and sought a return to love as a political language.
Havel’s parallel polis never imagined building a parallel power system, not least because it would challenge the very establishment that Havel was elected to lead. Instead, the possibility dissolved in the crass materialism and market exuberance of liberated post-communist societies.
Yet the concept, as we face our own sclerotic, gridlocked and creaking political establishments, may very well be worth the revival. Can we imagine how the relationship between the state and a parallel polis might look with a different approach? One that looks at power as constantly redistributing itself across the whole polity, as people become ever more self-organised in the task of meeting the multiple crises of these times?