Interview, 2011: Democracy Finds its Continuity in Totalitarianism
May 30, 2011 | Tjaša Pureber
Democracy Finds its Continuity in Totalitarianism: A Conversation with Jasna Koteska
I
first met Jasna Koteska in 2009 at a conference in Moderna Galerija,
Ljubljana. She stepped on the stage in what seemed to be a radical gesture: she
refused to sit and lecture. Instead, she was standing in what at first seemed
to be rather uncomfortable manner but which soon proved to be well-staged
performance that, with her witty and lucid thoughts, instantly captured the
entire audience. Among other things, she talked about her father, the famous
Macedonian poet Jovan Koteski,
who was, along with his family, persecuted by the secret services in the former
Yugoslavia. Jasna Koteska has ended her family’s silence on the matter by
putting her father’s fate into the sphere of political. And it was this topic
that has gained Koteska international recognition as one of the most renowned
contemporary Macedonian authors.
She is closely linked to Slovenia, for she has
been teaching 19th century Slovenian literature for nearly 15 years at Skopje’s
state university. Other than literature, with which she made her PhD, she
works in the sphere of theoretical psychoanalysis and gender studies and deals
with topics such as intimacy, sanitation, trauma, ressentiment, identities, abjection and
communism. She was born in 1970 in Skopje, Macedonia, and studied at the
Central European University in Budapest and at the University of Skopje. She
has written several books and articles. Her book Intimist (which
was the Yugoslav secret police file’s code name for her father) has been
translated into Slovene. It explores the 20th century as the world without
intimacy.
TP: Do
you celebrate the first of May?
JK: I
would be lying if I said that I celebrate it in any pre-defined, ritualistic
way. In Macedonia, the 1st of May is traditionally celebrated with outdoor
barbeques, turbo-folk and lots of alcohol. It is not a message, a voice sent
against cruel working conditions, but a perverse festivity: you go and work
your ass off in the field, or in the factory, and then, once a year, you get
lost in a drunken leisure, celebrating precisely the time spent recovering from
work, as a form of leisure for the sake of the (next) work period. In my view,
Macedonians have a limited knowledge of workers’ rights, not to mention their
poor tradition as protesters, and the 1st of May, apart from small number of
activists, remains a fuzzy souvenir from the communist past.
Of
course, the meaning of the Day of Labor is highly important, and not only
within the 19th century struggle for the eight-hour workday. I agree with
Bertrand Russell that a four-hour workday would suffice to keep everybody in
comfort; but we should also constantly remind ourselves of Bob Black’s famous
manifesto “Abolition of work” and its opening sentences: “No one should ever
work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world.” When I was younger,
I had his manifesto posted on my fridge, more as a joke. The older I grew, the
more meaningful it seemed to me. To abolish forced work, to eliminate
compulsory production – this might be the most central call of our generation.
TP: Can
you relate this manifesto to the present situation in Macedonia?
JK: Black’s
manifesto sounds absurd for where I come from. There are numerous Western
movements: the “living with 2 dollars per day” movement, the Dave Bruno’s
concept of living with 100 or less personal items per year, etc., which
testifies that some people are tired of the industrial ideals of work and
consumption. But these movements seem ridiculous for my country, in which one
third of the population lives in poverty and is forced to accept whatever job
is offered to them. Many of my fellow citizens indeed do live with 2 dollars
per day; their dream does not exceed possessing 10 personal possessions per
year, etc. Two decades after the fall of communism and the full shelves of
capitalist supermarkets remain a dream to a third of my fellow citizens. That
is a reminder why the 1st of May is as important today as ever.
TP: But
it seems that, in the countries of former Yugoslavia, many people look at the
struggle for workers’ rights with some sort of nostalgia, with no real hopes or
courage to engage in it in the present situation.
JK: I
am not nostalgic in any concrete, local-historical way, I hated communism and
would never advocate for its return. But also, we should be aware that when the
socialist movement came here, it meant something only remotely analogous to its
original idea.
When
communism began, there were barely any traces of market economy in Macedonia,
and literally no industry, which means there were hardly any workers to be
exploited. According to the census from December 1945, there were 140 factories,
163 enterprises, 8,873 work posts and only 3,391 employees in Macedonia, the
lowest in all of Europe. (Slovenia, by comparison, had 1,094 factories, 1,222
enterprises and 87,113 work posts). Since there was no industry, the question
was how to get the money to build one, in order to fulfill the big communist
dream of mechanization.
TP: They
found the solution in the village.
JK: Yes, the
only place where there was any “real” – and not just virtual – money. In 1939,
76.6% of the entire population of Yugoslavia worked in agriculture. However, at
the outset of the Second World War, there were a total of six (6) tractors in
Macedonia, six sewing machines and 20 threshing machines! That was the entire
base for production. One third of the peasants literally worked by hand, they
didn’t even have the most primitive working tools. All I want to say is that,
when the Western workers’ rights movement is contextualized here, it shows that
the exploitation was mainly being transferred onto the peasants. The peasants were
not only exploited, but, additionally, were declared a public enemy to the
communist ideology, and so were confronted with double stigmatization.
But
as a general question, of course, the fight for workers’ dignity is far from
being over. Marx, in London, saw the big factories gobbling people up, he saw
how people become machines, saw the human as the prosthesis of the machine.
Marx’s prognosis on the impoverishment of the workers to the extent that he
announced it, never really happened, if we take into consideration today’s
worker, who owns a car and has a microwave oven. However, Marx clearly
explained that he understands the proletariat as the lowest class segment, what
is today known as a subclass: the unemployed, the sick, the old, the castaways,
the homeless. In 1970, the theory of the “leisure age” appeared, when, because
of the automatization of production, there arose a belief that no one would
have to work as much, people would remain idle throughout their days. But this
did not happen, and statistics says that the workers today work more than they
worked, for example, in the 1980s.
Although
Marx’s definition of the end of capitalism proved to be incorrect, what has
remained true is his detailed analysis of the Capital that today transforms in
all possible ways (decrease of fees, the transfer of large corporations to
Third World countries because of the cheap labour available, etc.), and Marx
has remained a disturbing reference without which the 21st century cannot be
viewed.
TP: On
your blog, there is an interesting essay you wrote about the latest pressure
and court persecution against critical members of Macedonian civil society. It
seems those processes are not meant so much against any concrete person as they
are to frighten everyone else who dares to challenge the existing norms, which
are determined by the elite class of Macedonian society.
JK: Yes,
this is an ongoing phenomenon. Unfortunately, it is not a new trend, and
possibly not only linked to small countries without the critical mass for
genuine societal reform, as is the case with Macedonia. In an important essay
by Michel de Montaigne on the “Art of Conference”, already in the 16th century,
the pair “public dialogue/court” is mentioned in the very first sentence.
Montaigne says: we do not correct the man we hang; we correct others through
him. This combination of “dialogue/court” was commonplace during communism as
well. But capitalism is not that much better. Look at the astonishing data on
inhuman torture in the Guantanamo files released a few days ago by Wikileaks.
They show the ugly face of capitalist illegal prisons, their own Gulags. It
seems that democracy, of which we are all proud nowadays, oddly enough only
finds its continuity in totalitarianism.
The
question regarding Macedonian elites is mainly confined to the political elites
(and their controlled media, judicial and financial satellites). With the 2008
budget adjustments, the intelligence and counter-intelligence administration of
Macedonia was allocated much more funds in comparison to previous years. After
years of careful investigation of the secret services, today we know that their
darkest secret was that they were never really aimed at foreign policy
intelligence.
TP: You
often say that their main task was to work against the inner enemy, as it was
in the case with your father.
JK: Yes,
their main task remained to be the work of discovering and discrediting
internal dissidents, as in a famous communist phrase: “Who is not with us, is
our enemy.”
But
I would also advocate looking into this question from the other way around, and
what it means for the so-called “neutral citizens”. We know that when the book
Hitler’s Willing Executioners from 1996 by Daniel Goldhagen appeared, it caused
a lot of controversies because the author claimed that the number of killed
Jews was known to the majority of Germans, and that the refusal to participate
in the genocide was punished neither by death nor by any mayor injustice. Those
who refused to collaborate with the state authorities didn’t suffer any
personal harm. Moral choices are always possible, especially for the
intellectuals. The problem is that the intellectuals are most frequently the
state’s servants and are pecuniarily dependent on it. Darius Rejali, the author
of the book Torture and Democracy, says: “Torture is not useful for collecting
information. People think torture worked for the Gestapo, for example. It
didn't. What made the Gestapo so scarily efficient was its dependence on public
cooperation. Informers betrayed the resistance repeatedly in Europe, and
everyone knew this, but it was more convenient to say the Gestapo got the truth
by beating it out of us.” Regardless of the illusion about the ideological
style, which may vary from liberal to cruel, the critical voices are always
crucial in keeping the society healthy. Silence kills people.
TP: You
and your family were faced with a traumatic experience because your father was
the victim of repression by the secret services in the former Yugoslavia. It
seems you take the steps of many relatives of regime victims, especially those
in Latin America, who fight for the recognition of being, for stopping being
invisible, by publicly talking about the experience. Have you been able to come
to some kind of conclusion by putting the personal experience of your family
into the sphere of political?
JK: When
I started studying my family’s past, I was not led by the need to understand
great history, I didn’t want to dismantle the logic of the Yugoslav communism.
I wanted to come to peace with my family’s past. I felt some kind of personal
historical loss, some unrecognizable sadness, as in people who live with the
burden of a sadness that cannot be publicly grieved.
My
basic premise was that if the post-communist states want healthy nations, they
have to psychoanalyze themselves extensively, in order to know what happened to
them and where they are now. So I invited the children of the former political
prisoners to open the communist files they kept at home, saying: I know you
keep away from the drawers, because it hurts you, but if you open them, once,
maybe it will start hurting less.
TP: What
would you say your basic “coordinates” were before the beginning of this
process?
JK: My
question was: what kind of reconciliation is still possible for the people of
my generation (born around the 1970s), for our intergeneration, for us who were
the children of that system and the parents of this one? If the requirement of
confronting the past is systematically necessary, proper in the sense of an
evolving civilisation and historically important, whence did we pass the
threshold to stop afflicting pain? In short: what would be the best approach
for making peace with our ideological past?
In
almost all the former communist countries, there was a legitimate question of
the next generation: should I perform artificial respiration procedures on my
parents, should I keep my parents’ family universe from slipping into the
unconsciousness of history, displaying communist paraphernalia and pretending
communism hasn’t left anywhere, or will I question their world? You remember
Wolfgang Becker’s film Good Bye Lenin, where the leading hero’s mother wakes up
from a coma and the doctors warn her son that it will be shocking for her to
find out that while she was in a coma East Germany ceased to exist. So, the son
starts to recreate the DDR as it used to exist in his mother’s apartment. This
was an excellent lesson, that changes in the real political universe always
happen as a nightmare, while people are in coma, and the right diagnosis is
that the historical changes fall on their children. Benjamin has formulated
that question: “We must wake up from the world of our parents. But what can be
demanded of a new generation, if its parents never dreamt at all?”
But
I admit, I was not well aware of what I was getting into. As you rightfully
say, when you put personal memories into the sphere of public, there is a big
danger of their being instrumentalized by the political elites, especially in
small countries like Macedonia. As much energy as I have spent writing my book
about my communist experience, I have spent the same amount of energy defending
it from the rightist wings of my society.
TP: Macedonia
was, I think, the only of the ex-Yugoslavia countries to accept the lustration
law. Too late, you said. You also say that the law should only deal with the
crimes by the previous regime. But it seems to me that the state control has
merely taken new turns in multi-party democracy, but is no less violent toward
personal freedom than the socialist regime was. Perhaps only the mechanisms
have changed.
JK: True.
It is too late for lustration. The successful lustrations in the Eastern
European bloc were already done in the early nineties of the last century. But
it is not too late for the confrontation with the past. Only, it should have
historical value, and not political.
TP: This
is why you want Yugoslav archives to be open for public?
JK: For
more than half a decade now, I have been publicly speaking about the need for
de-classifying the archives of communist Macedonia and opening them
immediately, on the principle “all for all”, without mediation of political
structures and the media – essentially the same process that Wikileaks has
done, but to an unparalleled degree – not only for the past, but also for the
current archives of the secret services and of diplomacy. That is why, to me,
Wikileaks is the hero of our time.
In
2008, the Macedonian Parliament voted for the so-called “Lustration Law”, which
was planned to cover the period from 1944 to 1990. According to this Law, the
accuracy of any statement that a present or a future official had not
collaborated with the secret services would be vetted by a Committee selected
by the Parliament. The problem with this solution is that it again includes an
authority of mediation (this time it is the Committee, which mediates between
the past and the people), which means that even with this Law, the archives
will not actually be free.
And, as you rightfully say, the bigger problem with it is its political
instrumentalization. In 2009, the Law on Lustration was amended to state, inter
alia, that the lustration has to cover the period from 1945 to 2008! Luckily,
the Constitutional Court annulled the respective stipulation about the duration
of the lustration and ruled that it should stop in 1991, when Macedonia gained
its independence.
But
you are right about the present state of affairs, as well. In Macedonia, at the
moment, there is an ongoing debate about controversial government-proposed
amendments to the Law on Electronic Communications that is still in the process
of being passed by the Parliament, which allows for the invasion of citizens’
privacy on a massive scale, thus creating a legal basis for the arbitrary and
unlimited use of electronic communications. It entails surveillance of citizens
without a court warrant, therefore without the possibility for any external
control according to the principles of transparency. It is even at odds with
the provisions of the constitution and, even more, similar amendments have
already once been dropped as unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court. In
other words, maybe Evgeny Morozov’s dark diagnosis of the Internet as a new
tool for totalitarian control is true. We should be aware of these dangers.
TP: One
of the first myths every nation has to create is the one about its history.
When Slovenia was entering the EU, we witnessed a significant turn towards an
imagined ancient Slovene identity, as if in fear that we would lose something
we never had. This process often, of course, leads to nationalism and
exclusion. It seems to me that Macedonia is going through a similar process,
since we can see many politicians trying to create a link to the ancient Greek
origins of Macedonia. But if you can understand the politicians and their
populist lies, how can we explain scientists being as uncritical as they can
possibly be on this matter, even contributing to it with the misrepresentation
of the historical facts?
JK: I
will answer with the best answer I have ever yet heard, given by the Macedonian
professor Denko Maleski when he was interviewed for the Greek television on the
issue of the name dispute: “In the Balkans, to be recognized as a nation, you
need to have a history of 2,000 to 3,000 years old. Since you (the Greeks) made
us invent a history…we did invent it! The pressure we received from the Greek
political world has had as a result that we have been forced into the arms of
the extremist nationalists, who today claim that we are direct descendents of
Alexander the Great.”
Of
course, the ancient roots of today’s Macedonia is a nebulous myth, and also,
the attitude of today’s Macedonia should not be based on this premise: you
don’t recognize us, now we will invent our history, and you will have to
recognize it. Because, of course, it is the responsibility of the Macedonian
citizens to remain calm in this name dispute, and to insist that an identity is
something you have and do not need to justify, be it national, social,
political, gender, sexual or whatever else. But Macedonians do not have either
the power or the knowledge needed to stay calm and to stop falling into the
irrational. However, we have to be aware that the big part of the reason why
many scientists and classicists in these desperate times are remaining silent
against the irrational and are not making a clear distinction between today’s
Macedonia and the ancient one is because the state needs our lie about
antiquity to justify our failures, our low-quality products and our provincial
thoughts. If you claim you are the oldest around, at least you can claim that
once you were great and, if not now, you were great in the past. Whatever the
point of view, this is a sad story, both a political one (of ours and of our
neighbors) and a national one.
TP: Lately,
we are witnessing a wave of Yugo-nostalgia throughout all of the post-Yugoslav
countries. People are creating myths without any serious relations to the real
historical experiences. How do you explain such phenomena? Is this a symptom of
the helplessness of people who instinctively feel something is wrong in
capitalism but feel there is no future alternative and so turn to an imagined
past one?
JK: Nostalgia
is a strange cookie. The entrepreneurs who sell paraphernalia serving the
socialist nostalgia today (posters, remakes, the entire image) are capitalist
cows there to milk cash. It is logical today to support the socialist nostalgia
only if you are a capitalist. Which paradoxically means that if you write
against communism, you are still nostalgic!
On
one hand, I think that the first gesture of Macedonia’s real awakening from the
communist dream, paradoxically, was when all the Yugo-nostalgic iconography
first started appearing – for example, establishments such as bars and
restaurants with names like “Broz Caffe” and “At the Marshal”, or postcards
with Titoist themes, or even newly emerging political parties, and so on – all
of which provided dizzying confirmation that we have lived through a change in
the political world. There is a new political party, “Tito's United Left
Forces”, that appeared in Macedonia in 2007 and which is proof that Tito’s
forces are part of a dead, past time. Small as they are, they even managed to
squeeze one councilor onto the Skopje city council. Now we want to check Tito’s
decisions, to see if they are still functional and to see what was good in that
system. In other words, the clear distance from the communist tradition can
happen only when people begin to see communism as a period “other” than their
own.
On
the other hand, capitalism today has organized the entire recognizable
civilization, it has monopolized reality and it is a cruel system. Furthermore,
the transition is terribly problematic; it shows the horrible pit of
inhumanity. But the trick is that it was the same in the years of communism.
Verdery gives a genius insight into the communist subordination before the
capitalist definition of civilization. She says that the irony was that
indebted regimes from the communist countries refused the definition imposed
from without, and had they united to default simultaneously on their Western
loans (which, in 1981, stood at over $90 billion), they might well have brought
down the world financial system and realized Khrushchev’s threatening prophesy:
“We will bury you! Your grandchildren will be Communists!”
This
did not happen, and instead, it showed how crucial the capitalistic monopoly is
for the definition of social reality. And that horrible stability of the cruel
Capital is another reason for the nostalgia.
TP: It
seems there are other reasons, too, however.
JK: True.
In 2007, on a panel about communist nostalgia in Budapest, a Hungarian Jew told
me: “My mother is 93 years old and she still talks about how good her youth
was. In 1942, she was 28 years old. When I asked her how it is possible to be
nostalgic about the period of the Third Reich, and she was a Jew, my mother
replied: it is better to be 28-year-old girl, even in Nazi Hungary, than
93-year-old grandmother in today’s Hungary.” This is probably one of the most
correct insights into nostalgia: when I long for the past, I long for the
youth.
But
maybe most important for the Yugoslav nostalgia is the fact that simply the
territory was bigger. Though to some that may seem irrelevant, I argue it is
not. Now, we are all stuck in our small nations, lacking the critical mass and
we feel claustrophobic.
TP: Is
the art world in Macedonia capable of producing any sort of meaningful critique
of the current situation or is it capitalizing on the radical ideas and
gestures by fetishizing and therefore neutralizing it? Is the financing of
artists by the state a way to neutralize them?
JK: At
the moment, the biggest Gaius Maecenas here is the Government of the Republic
of Macedonia, which is spending enormous amounts of budget money to erect
monuments to Alexander the Great and other more recent historical figures
mainly in or around the city’s main square.
TP: This
is changing Skopje as we know it.
JK: Most
of this novel building spree is a result of a concentrated, single governmental
project entitled “Skopje 2014”, which consists of all sorts of things: from
baroque-like buildings to antique memorials. Most of us just throw scared
glances at them, since all the opposition movements against the “Skopje 2014”
project proved incapable of stopping the Government’s aggressiveness to reshape
the landscape and, with it, its identity and our memory.
We
are being intensely exposed to what is here referred to as “the process of
Antiquisation”, which, of course, is falsified, potentially corruptive and
highly controversial and, on top of it all, it also further segregates the
ethnic groups living in my country, since most of the monuments only serve the
purpose of building up the dominant Macedonian group identity, while Albanians,
Turks and other ethnic groups are shunned.
There
are many art movements that are opposing the present craze of the Government,
and such movements utilize the only resistance they can presently muster – that
would be: art, protest songs, literature and performances – I can single out
the informal chorus called “Singing Skopians”, a chorus that sings a cappella
at various locations in Skopje as an act of resistance via art.
(c) photo by
Ivan Todorovski
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