Reading the book For us history does not end: The political work and thinking of the Czech left-wing exile by historians Jiří Suk, Tomáš Zahradníček and Kristina Andělova is like reading a greeting from ancient times. Times when ideas about the future were shaped by different currents of the left. Memories of the left-wing exile, its political successes such as the election of Jiří Pelikán to the European Parliament for the Italian Socialist Party, the publishing of countless books and magazines, the smuggling of materials into Husák’s Czechoslovakia, and the endless conflicts between the leading representatives of the exile - all this was overshadowed by the development after in 1989. In the current reality of the clinical death of the political left and the left’s bewildered disunity, the intellectual narrative of leftist exile seems almost unbelievable.

In the book published at the end of 2023 by the publishing house Argo, the three authors from the Institute for Contemporary History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic gradually focus on three left-wing groups that were active outside Czechoslovakia between 1968 and 1989. In the chapter Socialism without Moscow, historian Kristina Andělová describes the development of the group around the bimonthly magazine Listy, which included prominent reform communists associated with the Prague Spring, such as Jiří Pelikán or Zdeněk Mlynář. Jiří Suk deals with a group of student refugees around the revolutionary socialist quarterly Infomat. Tomáš Zahradníček then describes the environment of exiled social democracy in his chapter.

Sixty-eighters

Since its founding in 1971, the magazine Listy profiled itself as a tribune of the Czechoslovak socialist opposition. Through the statement of the editor-in-chief, Jiří Pelikán, the director of Czechoslovak Television who was fired after the Soviet invasion, the bimonthly supported the ideas of democratic socialism. According to Pelikán, the magazine was supposed to be “an interpreter of our people’s struggle against the occupation and the so-called normalization”.

In the current reality of the clinical death of the political left and the left’s clueless disunity, the intellectual narrative of the left’s exile seems almost unbelievable.

One of the most interesting disputes in Listy was waged by former party prominent figures over the question of whether it is possible to maintain the hegemony of democratic socialism while at the same time questioning and criticizing some of the procedures of the Communist Party. Andělová aptly points out that “independent opposition” was never on the table in reformist communist thought, and political plurality was not understood by the editorial circle around Listů as a competition of political parties modeled on Western capitalist democracies. They were far more concerned with a kind of “party corrective” that would adhere to Marxist political doctrine.

The reactions from the position of democratic socialism to the appearance of Charter 77 are really interesting. Most of the documents issued by the Charter were reprinted verbatim on the pages of Listy and the authors of Listy were involved in debates about the future direction and form of the political struggle of the entire charter community. Listy themselves were then smuggled into Czechoslovakia thanks to Jiří Pelikán’s connection with Prague dissident Petr Pithart.

In intra-Charter debates, Zdeněk Mlynář pleaded for the formation of an independent mass movement within the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSČ) on the model of Polish Solidarity and the transformation of the Charter movement into a political party. He also warned against accents of “non-political politics” and the ambition to escape to an “independent sphere” outside the power of an authoritarian regime. He saw in this the risk of “ghettoization” of the Charter and its locking in the elitist dichotomy of intellectuals against “the people”, while the intellectuals with their conscience will flee into the non-political sphere, but also abandon the “masses”, whose mobilization is necessary to trigger real political change.

In the end, however, the masses were not mobilized by the reformist communist discourse or the human rights movement of non-political politics, but rather by the collapse of the Communist Party and subsequently a mixture of various neoliberal promises about the “tenfold certainty” and the “return to the West” by Václav Klaus.

Criticize Husák from the left

The story of the group around the quarterly Informáční materiály (Infomat for short) perhaps most powerfully shows how misguided is the left-wing identification with the politics of the Husák KSČ. The group consisted mainly of “young Czech radical leftists”, as Jiří Suk describes them. These were mainly young students influenced by many schools of thought and currents, but at least until the presentation of the Charter, Infomat was united by a Trotskyist starting point and a connection with the leading Brussels Marxist Ernest Mandel.

Infomat brought extensive news from abroad. Its authors, such as Jan Pauer, Jaroslav Suk and a host of foreign correspondents, including Jacques Rupnik, aimed to erase the “black-and-white view” of the development of the modern world, which, according to them, was offered by Radio Free Europe or the magazine Svědectví. Infomat reported on West German left-wing radical politics, revolutionary Cuba and Allende’s Chile.

Some of Infomat’s authors, including Egon Bondy, flirted with Maoism for a while. But among their absolutely key inspirational impulses was the revolutionary upsurge in France in 1968. Although over time the Infomat circle left Trotskyism, the ideas of self-government, economic democracy and the rejection of Brezhnev bureaucratism were among the essential and defining features o the magazine. Bondy, for example, in his extensive Labor Analysis from 1969, considered the Soviet Union and, by extension, post-August Czechoslovakia as a state-capitalist bureaucratic dictatorship, which is the result of the degeneration of socialist development. As Suk points out, the drive for a self-governing society based on informal relationships and rejecting authoritarian, bureaucratic management resonated strongly even in the Charter environment. Indeed, Václav Havel’s Power of the Powerless is a clear example of this.

After the launch of Charter 77, there were disputes and differences of opinion within the Infomat group. Petr Uhl or Egon Bondy fundamentally reformulated their positions. The Trotskyist Uhl became a supporter of human rights and democratization, and Bondy, after noting the failure of the Maoist Cultural Revolution, tried to formulate a position from which he could criticize both Soviet socialism and capitalism. Both e gaged with new Western criticism of capitalism and considered it necessary to avoid both the passivity of the Brezhnev regimes and the passivity of Western societies of growing consumerism and declining political parties. Perhaps precisely because Uhl took the idea of democracy very seriously, he saw socialism as the most suitable political arrangement.

As Jiří Suk points out, the collapse of perestroika and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc completely overshadowed the criticism of capitalism from the circles around Infomat. After November 1989, the main tasks were breaking the Communist Party’s monopoly of power, free elections and finally building a market economy. Criticism of consumerism, ecological damage, armaments and the neoconservative turn to the right faded into the background.

The dead end of anticommunism

The history of social democracy in exile, elaborated in a separate chapter by Tomáš Zahradníček, differs in many ways from the two previous stories. While the prominent reformist communists could develop their activities in the background of universities thanks to their academic degrees and popularity among the Western left, the social democrats organized the exile party mainly in their free time. The ranks of the exiled Social Democrats were made up of people with varied stories. In addition to social democrats who had been living abroad since the Second World War, party members who fled after 1948, political prisoners or those who tried to restore social democracy in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring gradually joined the party in exile.

It follows from Tomáš Zahradníček’s account that the voice of the exiled social democracy was a voice reminiscent of the unflattering past that many figures on the left played in the 1950s. It is no accident that Zahradníček named the chapter Never Again with the Communists. Social democrats like Jiří Loewy, who went through the communist prisons and mines in Jáchymov in the 1950s, simply could not forgive the communists and their collaborators within the ČSSD. This fact created a fundamental distance between the exiled social democracy both towards the left-wing groups of reformers around Zdenek Mlynář, and surprisingly also towards Charter 77. Besides Václav Havel and Jan Patočka, Jiří Hájek was also its first spokesperson, before February 1948 a ČSSD politician with an active participation in the pro-communist coup within the party and subsequently a prominent communist of the 1950s. In the 1960s, he became a representative of the reform current and subsequently one of the leading representatives of the dissident movement - but for the Social Democrats he was above all a traitor with a direct share in the tragedy of their party and in their personal life tragedies.

Social democrats in exile evaluated any development based on their relationship to communism. “While the surrounding world of the European left went through decades of remarkable intellectual development, the exiled social democrats did not move anywhere in their ideas,” Suk, Andělová and Zahradníček evaluated their activities before 1989.

In the wake of the Velvet Revolution, the exiled social democrats failed to gain influence. Under the chairman and exiled social democrat Jiří Horák, the renewed ČSSD entered the parliament in 1992, but from the spring of 1993 Miloš Zeman led the party. The last role was played by the representatives of the Social-Democratic exile in the disputes over the People’s House, when the court took into account their testimony about the continuous existence of the party in exile. This is precisely how they proved the ČSSD’s claim to a large property and the historic home of social democracy in the center of Prague.

Free the imagination

For us, History does not end offers insight into Czechoslovak history before 1989. In particular, Suk and Andělová remind in their chapters that the political thinking of the Czechoslovak left in the second half of the 20^th century was far from dominated by the neo-Bolshevism of the Husák regime, on the contrary. The analyzes and thinking of people like Egon Bondy, Zdeněk Mlynář or Petr Uhl are penetrating attempts to understand the events of that time from their distinctive leftist, anti-Soviet positions.

The Czech left has something to remember and build on. But there is no need to return. As the example of exiled social democracy shows, remembering past wrongs may be justifiable and humanly understandable, but it often represents an insurmountable barrier in future political struggles.

If history does not end even for the current Czech left, it should above all open ways out of crises and liberate our ideas about the future from the increasingly narrow cave of neoliberal capitalism of cuts and inequalities, and if we take the consideration to the consequences, then also from the imminent destruction of social structures and living conditions on the planet .

Reflections on the self-governing socialism of the Infomat group, the attempts of the Listy to maintain a humanistic interpretation of Marxism from the time of the Prague Spring despite adverse historical developments, or the way in which exiled social democracy (mis)come to terms with the traumas of the past, are inspirations with which the left of today can boldly step beyond the horizons of , which we now consider possible.

Matej Moravansky

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