The Sham,and the Damage,of “Living in Truth”

There was always something I did not like about Václav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless—which is surprising since Havel’s text was one of the best articulations of the late 1970s’ East European oppositionist ideas of civic engagement and anti-politics that I thought so transformative and was so intent on disseminating. ¹ That dislike has only grown over time. For while the manifesto still offers one of the best cases for the radically transformative power of civic activism, it makes the case through class blinders that compromise the appeal both morally and politically, making it complicit in promoting the illiberal, anti-intellectual backlash that so threatens democracy today.

The problem is the essay’s most famous section—indeed, its only famous section—the parable of the greengrocer. The story goes like this: the lead employee of a small vegetable mart is told to post on the window a sign proclaiming “Workers of the world, unite!” and does so. That single banal act stands, for Havel, as the symbol of the social passivity allegedly keeping the system afloat. In putting up the sign, the worker perpetuates the Communist system, prolonging it through a demonstration of social submissiveness and fear. For when the greengrocer “stops putting up the slogans . . . [and] begins to say what he really thinks” (VII), he will begin—here we get to Havel’s key concept and prescription for emancipation—to “live in truth.” ² As more people do so, the system is stripped of the rituals protecting it, exposed as an inhuman farce, and gradually loses its force. No grand “political” struggle against the regime can work, says Havel. The system is based upon the performance of roles, and only breaking that performance can break the system.

What is the problem with Havel’s approach? It is morally wrong in that it blames the most vulnerable. It is politically false: state socialism did not collapse because regular people stopped conforming to rituals, but when movements organized by activists became strong enough to win over and transform wary conformists. Havel’s approach drives supporters away, makes intellectuals feel good about themselves and bad about “the people,” and thus provides a basis for the caricature of “smug” intellectual elites who, in the eyes of today’s populist right, must be taken down a notch together with the liberal democracies they’ve helped build.

In focusing on the greengrocer, Havel singles out the resource-poor worker as the archetype of the compliant dupe supposedly propping up the authoritarian regime. For while the term in English suggests a small shopkeeper or “petty bourgeois,” a state socialist–era greengrocer (zelinář), even (as specified by Havel) its “manager” (vedoucí), was simply a retail worker, someone with significantly less clout than Havel’s mainly intellectual and professional readers, less even than Czechoslovak factory workers. His shop (obchod) occupied no key node in a production cycle. No firms were dependent on its products. Aside from the shop’s few employees, its manager was in little position to influence anyone. This was no Djilas-type “new class” official with some power, in the post-Stalinist era, to set a moral example. Havel himself depicts the greengrocer as a lone individual, without networks to deploy in case of need. Other accounts agree. According to these, the greengrocer is “an ordinary man of no particular education or stature”; ³ a “non-dissident, non-trouble-maker, . . . not . . . extraordinary in any way”; ⁴ “seemingly unimportant and powerless,” “nameless because he can be any one of us”; ⁵ a “stand-in for the ordinary citizen.” ⁶ He is, in other words, an isolated employee with few resources. The harried greengrocer either puts up the poster or is fired and forgotten.

Yet it is none other than the greengrocer whose character Havel dissects with such icy condemnation. The greengrocer posts the Party slogan, asserts Havel, as a way of pleading with the authorities to just let him be: “I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach” (III). Is there any possibility that the greengrocer posts the slogan as a ruse, to free himself from unwanted control so as to think and discuss other thoughts? Not for Havel. No, posting the slogan constitutes proof of the worker’s docile self-effacement and signals others to behave the same.

Havel’s judgment is unsparing: “If the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan ‘I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient,’ he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the truth” (III).

The truth? That’s it? Putting up the poster makes him “unquestioningly obedient”? No other interpretations? Here the playwright in Havel corrupts his political sensibilities. The playwright can present us with the hidden intentions of his characters, but how does Havel know what actual people think or mean when they make their daily compromises with power?

The Polish poet Stanisław Barańczak once expressed his impatience with a different Czech writer’s cajoling insistence on the one correct interpretation of human behavior. Fed up with Milan Kundera’s omniscient moralizing, this time about a motorcyclist who rides fast in order, Kundera explains, to discover “a state of ecstasy” and exist “outside time,” Barańczak wonders what a real motorcyclist riding fast might be thinking. Perhaps he had to catch up with a train on which he had accidentally left the medicine necessary for his dying mother? ⁷ In other words, real people are complex. Havel’s analysis is complex. Havel’s brewmaster, about whom more in a moment, is complex. Only the poor greengrocer is not. Yet this is the one made to bear the burden of perpetuating the regime.

The elitism is unmistakable. It is also quite wrong. “The public transcript is an indifferent guide to the opinion of subordinates,” James C. Scott writes in his study on how the resource-weak challenge power. ⁸ Those with few resources rarely risk their livelihoods by challenging it directly. Their “public” deference in official relations with authority—hanging a poster in accordance with instructions, for example—tells us little about what they think, what they do, or who they are. It is no test of their mettle.

For Havel, though, “living in truth” means rejecting power to its face. Yet he seldom considers who has the means to do so. His essay’s title assumes everyone was in the same position, but no, not everyone was equally powerless. When Havel was punished for his political activities, international petitions poured in on his behalf. Friends in the international press, support from an elite domestic community, status as a renowned intellectual kept him relatively safe and ensured he would not be forgotten or beaten down, even when in prison. Many of his fellow intellectual dissidents enjoyed similar levels of support. Who did the greengrocer have?

In section VII, Havel acknowledges the difficulties the greengrocer would face should he “reject the ritual and break the rules of the game.” He would lose his job, his children’s opportunities would evaporate—a tall price to pay for feeling morally cleansed, but one which Havel fully commends. But is this really the only way to challenge the system? Havel fails to recognize that this public “living in truth” is the intellectual’s way of resisting, the budding oppositionist’s way of resisting, the way of resisting for those with resources to deploy in their defense.

The resource-poor have other ways to resist and assert their dignity. For them, as Scott shows with numerous examples, deception and dissimulation often work better. Indeed, by playing a game based on accepting state socialism at its word—by pseudo-embracing the words of Havel’s reviled poster, one might say, and insisting that they were the dominant class—workers during state socialist times often could improve wages and conditions and wrest respect on the job, more than is possible today with global capitalism’s treatment of labor as expendable. In fact, with higher wages and better supplies granted by post–Prague Spring governments acting in “enlightened self-interest” to forestall working-class complaints, workers in state-socialist Czechoslovakia generally suffered less exploitation than their counterparts in neighboring bloc states. ⁹

Havel never gives the greengrocer his due. He is nicer to the aforementioned brewmaster, Havel’s supervisor during a brief brewery stint in 1974. Proud of his craft, constantly exhorting his co-workers to make even better beer, brewmaster Š, according to Havel, never sought to “live in truth” but found himself doing so nevertheless when he wrote to company supervisors to complain about the plant’s Party director obstructing all efforts to improve beer quality. Š lost his job, lost the chance to use his skills, and “ended up as a subcitizen, stigmatized as an enemy,” free to “say anything he wanted” without any opportunity to be heard (XIV).

Havel notes that Š might have succeeded. It is possible, he now allows, to make life better without demasking the regime and its rituals. Indeed, in section XIV he seems to reverse what he was arguing before, now insisting that those unwilling to live in truth can be “decent and responsible people” and that it is wrong to “condemn those who have kept their positions simply because they have kept them, in other words, for not being ‘dissidents.’” What he still misses is that “living in truth” might not, for the greengrocer, be the most dignified stance to take, or the most effective for political change. Of course, Havel himself seems to have imagined this eminently political text as a moral and existential appeal on how to live a decent and dignified life in the face of a regime that seemed to crush human initiative. But in stressing the power of the powerless, Havel wants also to argue that personal comportment can change the power structure too. One can see how the brewmaster’s efforts might have done so: by promoting an ethic of cooperation for a common good and challenging the dictates of the sycophantic nomenklatura. But the greengrocer’s refusal to put up the poster would not symbolize some alternative conception of power. It would only be a direct challenge to power that could only rebound against the greengrocer himself.

Some readers may be protesting that I am too harsh. After all, Havel does eventually acknowledge that the compliant greengrocer should not be condemned, and most of the essay actually deals with other matters: the nature of dissidence, the meaning of ideology, the traps of technology, and Havel’s hopes for an “existential revolution” leading to “a moral reconstitution of society” (XXI). Indeed, to some extent my critique of Havel is a critique of the Havel that comes from his legions of interpreters, who speak copiously of Havel’s denigration of the greengrocer rather than his later, albeit weak, exculpation, and who rarely engage the subtler discussions of the later parts of the essay.

But only to some extent. As James Krapfl notes, much of Havel’s essay develops ideas earlier introduced by the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka. ¹⁰ In section XX, Havel echoes the phenomenologist when he calls “the crisis of technological society” “the most essential matter” of all. But Havel wished for a wider audience, and must have known he needed a hook. Whether he intended the parable to help bring attention to these “essential matters,” I of course do not know. But Havel is known for his recognition of complexities and his subtlety of observation, all of which the parable lacks. One can’t write a line about greengrocers—and only greengrocers—being “unquestioningly obedient” and then plead for a recognition of complexity. Then again, Havel never did plead his case. He never rushed to criticize interpreters for repeating, again and again, how the trapped and cowardly Czech greengrocer was unwilling to “live in truth.”

In the end, whether Havel wished it or not, it is this patronizing, condescending rejection of the greengrocer that stands as a chief legacy of The Power of the Powerless. This is what legions of Havel fans pass on to their readers, playing it for scorn, sometimes for laughs. There is something untoward in the laments about conformist greengrocers that issue from every adulatory account of Havel (and virtually all accounts of Havel are adulatory). The brewmaster is OK, since he tried his best to improve production and became thereby a political dissident. But the greengrocer—of whom Havel demands only political gestures (not putting up the poster, not voting in elections, saying “what he really thinks at political meetings”)—keeps the system going by not being the political activist, even though activism in his case has no chance of succeeding (VII). (Someone, after all, will put up the poster, while Š might have really created a better workplace.) Havel of course describes such activism as simply “living in truth,” but as already noted, and as Scott’s work shows in detail, the resource-poor live in truth in less self-destructive ways, and they do not deserve to be patronized for doing so.

Effective opposition ultimately needs the resource-poor, too, but the latter usually join in only after committed activists build movements providing resources, not before. Change happens, and happened, not when typically politically unengaged individuals decide to live in truth, but when such individuals are able to join movements that activists who do not limit themselves to acts of individual testimony organize, and when political opportunities open up allowing those movements to develop. It was not greengrocers living in truth that brought about the Czechoslovak movements of 1968 or 1989. Once they came about, many greengrocers joined and took those posters off the wall. But committed activists—some of whom, of course, were greengrocers and workers—had to take the lead, and the authorities had to decide to hold back state repression, before the mass “living in truth” that characterizes such moments could take place.

Before the Prague Spring, there was considerable grumbling among the intelligentsia, inside and outside the Communist Party. Only when the terrain was safe for involvement did the resource-poor get involved in open political contestation. Havel wrote The Power of the Powerless exactly ten years later, when the widespread defiance of 1968 had disappeared, and he called on the greengrocers to revive it. But 1978 was like 1967: most greengrocers, with good reason, would not risk getting involved. There would have to be more grumbling by those less powerless, who could open up opportunities for others. Charter 77 and people like Havel started doing just that, though it took until 1989 before it was safe for the resource-poor to join, with opportunities opened up chiefly by Gorbachev, Polish Solidarity’s ascent to power, and the sense these developments provided that activism this time could have different results.

In discussing the civic participation that followed the repression of the November 17 protests in 1989, Krapfl ¹¹ describes a situation resembling Poland after the formation of Solidarity in 1980, or France in May 1968, or what Aristide Zolberg has described more generally as “moments of madness”: those times and places when people suddenly come to believe that systems can be transformed and that “all is possible.” ¹² Just prior to such moments, small groups of activists deploy available resources to initiate protests. But it is only when these protests “take,” for diverse reasons but always including the power structure’s temporary retreat from using its full repressive force, that individuals without access to many resources typically join in—a necessary condition for turning an organized protest into a “moment of madness.” As we know from the history and theorization of social movements, it is rarely the poorest and most vulnerable who lead the way. ¹³ Greengrocers do not start revolutions on their own, for they have the least chance to win and the most to lose. This is why capitalists and authoritarian leaders alike fear trade unions, for they provide resources to those who would otherwise be too vulnerable to protest and thus too weak to succeed.

Lech Wałęsa’s activism straddled this divide. As a resource-poor twenty-seven-year-old electrician, originally from the provinces and with only a vocational education, he took part in the 1970 shipyard strike in Gdańsk, organized by others. But the strike was crushed, Wałęsa was arrested, and with no one to protect him, no community to sustain him, no resources to draw on, he cracked. For nearly three years afterward, he apparently became an informant for the secret police. Should one say that Wałęsa lived in truth in 1970 before embracing lies soon after? Havel would likely have seen him as one of the “unquestioningly obedient” in 1973. But even then, he was anything but. In 1974 Wałęsa severed all police connections and soon became an activist, not by engaging in individual acts of defiance but by linking up with the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) and the Free Trade Unions of the Baltic Coast, gaining the resources these organizations provided and accepting the repression that came with such activism. By 1980 Wałęsa was one of the resource-rich activists helping to pry open the possibilities for the greengrocers to join in.

While James C. Scott focuses on how the resource-poor can live in truth even while dutifully hanging posters up on the wall, Rick Fantasia shows how conformists often become transformed into dogged participants once strikes and mobilizations get under way. ¹⁴ Surveying attitudes tells us little. When the activists go out on a limb and gain some headway, then the greengrocers join in. In authoritarian societies especially, most people lay low until resource-rich actors help bring about change, at which point the greengrocers, too, participate in events that yesterday they wouldn’t have dreamt of participating in—and might even have opposed. Calling on greengrocers to challenge power and “thereby” live in truth in authoritarian conditions without realistic chances of success is only calling on them to commit suicide.

Is living in truth important at all? For political oppositionists trying to build a following, it is. They build a reputation that way, as they come to be seen by society to suffer for a larger cause. It wins them loyalty, which becomes important when political opportunities open up. This was the case for Havel, who was eventually able to “cash in” (though this was certainly never his aim) his oppositionist living-in-truth bona fides for the presidency. Intellectuals can also gain from small-scale everyday defiance, particularly small-nation intellectuals constructing themselves as bearers of national mythology.

These resource-rich potential oppositionists were the group to which Havel should have directed his attentions. Or rather, they were the group to which he directed his attentions (he didn’t expect many greengrocers to read his essay), and he told them that the greengrocers were a key obstacle to change.

Polish theorists of civil society understood all this far better than Havel. Michnik, Kuroń, and the KOR circle of the 1970s urged people to break free of restraints but never derided anyone as “unquestioningly obedient” for not doing so. They knew they themselves were willing to take risks, and they worked hard to minimize those risks by accumulating protective resources through access to the intelligentsia, the foreign press, and other elite fields of power. But far from insisting that the greengrocers follow their lead, they recognized the privileges their resources accorded them. Thus, they signed their own names and addresses to oppositionist appeals, but only gently urged others along. They published samizdat publications showing how resistance might be done, and offered concrete material support, yet no judgment, both to those who sat on the sidelines and those who resisted in ways they did not condone.

Polish activists admired Havel’s text, but never deployed its central trope. They seemed to understand that calling their approach “living in truth” would imply that those who did not do what the activists did were living in lies. Some lesser-known Czech dissidents also recognized this trap and criticized Havel accordingly. In his 1978 “Notes on Courage,” Ludvík Vaculík warned against making perilous moral and political demands on regular people who were no fools. Implying that they were fools, moreover, by berating them for enabling injustice, would only marginalize the activists themselves. “Anyone who urges people when times are rough to do things beyond their capacity shouldn’t be surprised if they get clobbered,” he wrote. ¹⁵ Emanuel Mandler, meanwhile, rebuked Havel for setting himself up as a “moral judge” of society—a stance that Mandler believed could only deepen societal divisions and make concerted opposition less rather than more likely. ¹⁶

As noted, it is better to think of change happening not when individuals somehow “decide” to live in truth but when opportunities, created by political activists from below and changing calculations above, open up. ¹⁷ Then people change, and the system can change. Do people then live in truth? No, most just adapt to a new system, in ways largely dependent on the resources they possess. This, indeed, is what kept vexing President Havel, who kept appealing to people to be their rational, fair selves, as if no structures or class position constrained them, and kept being disappointed with the results. Havel may have been living his truth when calling on others to embrace the strategies he endorsed or be labelled obedient. But when we recognize how such strategies pay dividends unequally, mainly rewarding intellectuals or political activists committed to being in public life, Havel’s naive Sartrean conviction that in choosing for himself he was choosing for the world seems pretty astonishing. And this was in fact a naive Sartrean conviction, sticking with Sartre’s early insistence that everyone not only could but had to choose their lives freely, with only authenticity and good faith required, before Sartre’s addition of the “situation,” with its economic and class structures that shape the possible choices any of us can, or ought to, really make. ¹⁸

Here is where Havel’s essay contributes to today’s right-wing backlash against “elitist” liberal intellectuals and the democracies they helped build. For in not recognizing his own privilege, Havel was very much a sign of the times. For the next decade and more, liberal intellectual reformers remained blind to their own privileges. Focusing on the kind of reforms that benefited them and their children, insisting on their universal applicability, they have helped drive today’s greengrocers and their kids to rebellious support for right-wing leaders alarmingly committed to wiping self-satisfied smiles from “truth-livers’” lips.

Havel was not responsible for this. He was only one of the early theorists of this emancipatory notion of civil society, and with his constant internal wrestling concerning what should be done, he was certainly one of the best. But the political text for which he is most well-known, with its enduring parable of the greengrocer, did help implant and sustain, just as Vaculík and Mandler foresaw, patronizing anti-popular predilections that have now elicited the backlash wreaking havoc on political democracy. So while he is not responsible, he is, alas, complicit. Right-wing populists who typically exaggerate intelligentsia condescension can find in that parable a perfect specimen of such dismissal. Ironically, this is just what Havel claims about the greengrocer: putting up the poster doesn’t make him responsible for the system but does make him complicit. Havel’s thrashing of the greengrocer helps the populists make their case. It is not, of course, that Havel particularly admired intellectuals. He criticized them, too. Yet only the poor greengrocer is made the symbol of the sycophant, weighted down with the burden of maintaining the old dictatorship. This remains the baneful legacy of the text.

People have the right not to be heroes. Not being one does not make one a dupe. People live in truth—or not—in their own ways. Oppositionists and critics should be who they are, do what it takes, and accept the costs and potential rewards that go with it. They should try to convince the fence-sitters, but shame none. Demanding that others “live in truth,” and believing they know what that means, is morally dishonest, politically wrong, and will only backfire.