If we could destroy bolshevism, could we not also destroy capitalism?

It ‘s autumn of 2009, twenty years after the fall of Berlin wall. I live in Lithuania, one of the three Baltic states. Twenty years ago I participated with my family in the Baltic way, symbolic action to remember the Ribbentrop – Molotov pact. After twenty years I am participating in the protests against the neoliberal oligarchic state that Lithuania is today. Is it difficult to understand such shift – from the national patriotism to the radical left? I think it is not a shift but a really radical democratic stance – to protest against the global capitalism as well as against fake authoritarian socialism that is as far from communism as dictatorship from democracy.

The national movement, „Sąjūdis“, that rose in Lithuania twenty years ago was also the democratic one. It was basically the right wing, but there were many anti-consumption slogans, especially among the green movement (the leader of this movement committed suicide soon after the declaration of independence and the beginning of the great privatization). Finally it was a moment of organization – the movement was based on local councils that fully represented the people‘s everyday needs. But on the „upper floor“ there was a communist bureaucracy, the real ruler of the resources and the first student of the neoliberal reforms of Lithuania. There were two segments of consciousness already in that movement (according to Deleuze&Guattari) – „fascist“ segment, seeking to govern and to obey the leader, to construct the ideology, to emphasize history and victimize itself, and the democratic, „revolutionary“ segment, the civil movement. In the first year of independence the avantgarde of the movement was fully co-opted into the state power mechanisms and collaborated with the former communist nomenclature in the process of harsh privatization and concentration of capital into the hands of the few. The Berlin wall was built again – and it was built between the politics and the political, the government and the people, that had a little say in the political process. The people that fought for the independence together were now called a „grey crowd“ by state propaganda.

In the first and second year of independence there was a fatal shift of emotions and of the public consciousness. I would say that the national democratic revolution was founded on a really socialist basis – the level of emotions, mutual understanding and communication was enormous. I would say that this feeling of being together was something good – maybe the only good thing – that we got from the socialist world. I think the revolution, even the national one, wouldn‘t have happened if we had lived in the highly privatized capitalist world. We have seen the becoming capitalism in Lithuania and we have felt the consequences of it. It was such enormous level of alienation that even family members split up and did not communicate among themselves – it was firstly because of politics. There was an abyss between the right, patriotic conservative wing of the movement and the supporters of the former communists who pointed at the social inequality without noticing that the main plunderers of the common wealth were the former communists, now the socialdemocrats, Of course, every step of neoliberalism in Lithuania was monitored by such notorious international organizations as WTO and the World Bank, and the free trade ideology soon became the superstructure of all former ideologies that “appeared to be fake in the lights of supermarkets“. We entered a very interesting stage of world order, where political freedom was detached from the social one, where a possibility to choose hided the social darwinism, the struggle for life. The neoliberalism was built on the foundation on the harshest dialectical materialism; the inherited soviet dogmas, like the dogma of work, became the living elixir of the capitalist economy.

The living conditions of the major part of the 90s did not differ from those in the end of Soviet times. Most people did not have enough money to live in huge private houses that was a privilege of the few. We lived in the faceless block of flats in the “sleeping residential area“ far away from the city centre. As in the Soviet times, I and my parents were materially dependent from our grandparents that lived in the country and gave us such food as potatoes. There was a tradition of potato-digging working bee, when we all went to the country to work and to share the crop – we had no need to buy such food in shops. There was a huge amount of goods that people were producing themselves – they preserved fruits and vegetables, smoked ham. There was a strong natural economy that survived the Soviet times of permanent material lack and persisted in the first years of independence. But it also consisted a natural communal experience, that many permaculture activists try to revive now.

Computers and internet in those days also still were a distant vision, but it was a wide impact of the first commercial radiostations that played still a very wide spectrum of music. The centres of the cities were still not as clean and tidy, as after the process of urban commercialization, there were many „autonomous“ ruined places for wild youthful freedom. We still feel nostalgia for it. And then it all began – the rise of consumer society, privatization of everyday life, the gentrification of urban space.

Consumer mentality in postsoviet societies was fostered by tremendous lack of commodities in socialism. Empty shops, resale of the wanted commodities in the first years of independence – these are the factors that gave birth to insatiable consumerist appetite. Since the appearance of the first supermarkets in the end of the previous decade our life turned into fake, flat play of simulacra, that divided our society: logos, brands, glaring shop-windows, talk shows and the magazine covers occupied our reality. The relations among people now really reminded of relations between images and commodities. The market ideology destroyed the last remnants of communal mentality, people that earned more money, joined the higher life and capitalist circuits, they often socially excluded themselves from their friends and family members living under worse conditions. However, the improving material conditions that people were given in return to increasing loans and credits, allowed many people to join the consumer society. The privatization of public consciousness, that caused the huge impoverishment of everyday life, including virtualization of the relations and building the walls of communication among the likes and the others – pariahs, intruders from the poorer spaces. It was a real society of spectacle, one needed a little sensitivity to feel it.

The becoming of the consumer society built another great wall among the rich elite and the poor, those who conform and join the flows of capital, and those who have got no place in the world of supermarkets and have to recede into margins, into the ghettoes. Another haunting thing was an immense emphasis of security. If one wanted to be secure one had to move in banal, familiar ways, to choose life under surveillance and control. The desire to overcome the ignorance and ghettoisation, to find the outside of the established way of life, to smell something forbidden was a crucial thing for becoming an activist.

Strangely it was the first time when the ideas of the alterglobalisation came to Lithuania. It was a bit confusing to see the leftist movement in Lithuania after a half century of stalinist brutality. That was the opinion of the bigger part of the grown up people, who had seen all the atrocities of bolshevism. I myself needed to read lots of books and to participate in different discussions. Actually there was an interesting shift in interpretation of history. Twenty years ago the soviet past was well remembered by real victims and witnesses, the emphasis was put on the tragedies, broken lifes of guerilla fighters and the deportees. But after twenty years the history, according to Lord Acton, repeats itself as farce. The spectre of bolshevism has grown, the Red Scare now includes such figures without common denominator as the hatred of stalinism and construction of ideological evil figure – contemporary Russia, the scare of the antiglobalisation movements and of all leftist thought. Communism is a bad word in our newspeak, along with such words as bourgeoisie, class struggle and proletariat. All the leftist discourse has drowned along with the ruins of Soviet Empire. All the efforts to speak about bolshevism as an enemy of the social movements, to remind of the warnings of Bakunin and the lessons of Kronstadt all over the World are unsuccessful. The ideologisation of soviet past now became not only a source of ressentiment and bad conscience in the right wing, but also a source of indoctrination in political sciences and within a new yuppie class. The consumerist mentality revealed another comic pattern of the memory of the soviet past. For my parents the soviet system was the system of empty shops, radically different than the capitalist one. Such argument of course does not include any thought on the destruction of community. The communal experience is extremely insignificant for the privatized consciousness.

In 2005 I joined the civil movement that protested against the commercialization of public cultural spaces, it was a moment when the civil, democratical segment of the independence movement revived. But it was something more. It was a rebel against our parents that believed in Western capitalism. It was a rebel against the propaganda mechanisms and the media that has a huge impact on the privatized consciousness. It was a rebel against the established models of popular historical interpretation that collated Stalin with Che and Lenin with anarchists. Finally, it was a feeling of a repetition of Western history: after the bourgeois 1950s, the 1960s of the West came into Lithuania – it was the outburst of civil initiatives, from anarchist to patriotic environmental scene. The conflict among the public and the private was recognized. Otherwise, many initiatives, especially those who arise from the institutional or established foundations, fall into impasse – they are used by patriots, those who are not satisfied with the management of the state and want to expand it. Others criticize the power, but the critique in our times also serves the mechanisms of power. Civil movements are not radical, they want to participate in the major politics and expect to change the very system.

There is another way, and it is closer to radical democratical view – I talk about the minor politics, the term used by followers of Deleuze&Guattari. This kind of politics appears when the increasing number of social movements move beyond the big politics, a conjunction of state and business politics, and engage in creative everyday struggles for life. This is the democratic way abandoned by our new rulers, it must be taken over by us if we seek to make our lives worth living.

I think it would be useful to remember a great insight of Deleuze&Guattari, that there no more antagonistic classes – no bourgeoisie, no proletariat. There is only one class that lives in the spectacle society, works eight hours a day, watches TV, pays taxes and interests, obeys to the New World Order. And there is a huge marginal underclass, huge swarm of the outcasts that refuses to conform, to work, that wages the social war for life independent from the capitalist socius. It is especially true when thinking about the soviet system, where the power of the unions and the power of the whole working class was totally subsumed by the state apparatus. This underclass is problematic, it is precarious and holds no representatives – the unions reflect the needs of state and capital. But the ability to construct the alternative globalisation, the creative power of the future is in the hands of the precarious movement. Of course, the dissent is often diminished by the migration process, but, otherwise, the formation of international solidarity of precarious people and the experience of migration is also dangerous for power structures. Thanks to the ideology of the spectacle, most people still don‘t have a rebellious conscience, the conscience of being precarious in unstable capitalist world. By saying the word „precarity“ they emphasize instability but not disobedience. They still depend on the rules and dogmas of the capitalist society, especially on the dogma of work. Such thing as the refusal of work that was so important for Western social movements is unknown for Lithuanian living labor. Maybe thanks to crisis people will regain this kind of creative spirit and the suspicious view towards the social struggles will be considered as still important?

If the new capitalist crisis after twenty years of the fall of Berlin wall suggests something to us, I think, it is the question "If we could destroy bolshevism, could we not also destroy capitalism?". Destroy it with the power of our own creativity, destroy the artificial walls that were built after the demolition of the Berlin wall – the walls of capitalist alienation, the walls of segregation, the walls that divided the communities and isolated man from his environment. The new social struggles must reinvent the communal life in the cities. Currently I am participating in the anarchist movement of Lithuania, we have our website and magazine. I and my friends have initiated the local Free University – a free informal educational initiative. This initiative that was organized to resist the neoliberal university reforms, contributes to the creation of alternative thought and the common experience. We share our knowledge and skills, while "growing seeds" for the communal life in future. This spirit of communal life must be embodied by reclaiming of the public space, squatting. We cannot live outside of the system anymore – the creative autonomous spaces and affinity groups must diffuse within the body of the capitalist socius. I understand communism not as the stalinist ideology that bankrupted twenty years ago but as the reclaiming of the communal life which we have experienced in the past, which we have forgotten due to the capitalist ideology. As I have shown in this text, there are the many Berlin walls in the contemporary Lithuania that we must break in order to be come a really free community.