Double-edged legacy of Václav Havel
From humanitarian wars to the post-democracy
I
Humanitarian wars
I distinguish between the good and the bad legacy of VH. The first one is extremely appealing to the new generation´s in their quest for stronger democracy, the other one is to be rejected as a fatal flaw of democratic transformation of the post-communist countries.
Let me discuss firstly the bad legacy of VH; and let me affirm my personal conviction that the good legacy of VH is related to the dissident political culture, meanwhile the bad one is related to the anticommunist political culture, both actively operating in the Charta 77 and the parallel polis. The core question of the dissident political culture was the crisis of the modern civilization, meanwhile the core interest of the anticommunist The "living" legacy of VH we must - deepened and enlarged - integrate into the contemporary political theory, meanwhile the bad one remains with us as a sort of warning about the fatal consequences of projecting into the structures such as NATO Havel´s concept of "truth". As Slavoj Žižek put it commenting the book of John Keane "Václav Havel: Tragedy in six acts: "cruel inexorable lesson of Havel's tragedy (is that) the direct ethical foundation of politics sooner or later turns into its own comic caricature, adopting the very cynicism it originally opposed."
The confusing interconnection of these two contradictory legacies may be illustrated by Pankaj Mishra´s reaction to the election of "liar Trump" as president USA. This important liberal political thinker, author of the influential book Age of Anger: A History of the Present in a mobilizing article entitled Václav Havel's Lessons on How to Create a Parallel Polis" (New Yorker, February 8, 2017) proposes to turn to the Havel´s political legacy in order to learn to resist the irrational and inhuman power. He writes: "Long before the George W. Bush Administration went to war in Iraq on a false pretext, Havel identified, in the free as well as the unfree world, a power grounded in an omnipresent ideological fiction which can rationalize anything without ever having to brush against the truth."
The paradox of this sincere appeal consists in the fact that Václav Havel has given unconditional support to the Bush´s war based on "fake news" and overt "mediatic manipulation". So, let me speak firstly about bad legacy of VH.
Whenever in CR Havel´s legacy is under discussion, the generally accepted conclusion is that the greatest merit of our first post-communist President was his unconditional "going West", his unconditional support for the integration of our country "in the western structures" such as NATO, EU, WB and so on. It is, I believe, an utter paradox, given that his political philosophy was built upon the idea that European history consists in a "permanent quarrel" between "intentions of structures" and "intentions of life" in terms of Havel and between legitimacy and legality in terms of political science. The unconditional support for the "western structures" resulted at the end in what I call "apologetic definition of structures" to use the expression forged in the past by Hungarian dissident András Hegedus.
To set the stage I would quote an important passage of his programmatic discourse in Parliament of Canada (29.4.99). He declared in that occasion that the NATO as an institution acting in representation of "human rights" is therefore deputed to transcend legitimately the borders of national States. So the USA led aggression against Yugoslavia in overt violation of international law is interpreted by VH as legitimate action, because the West was acting in representation of humanity as a whole and moved by "transcendental moral imperatives".
He said for example: "there is a value which ranks higher than the State. This value is humanity... Human rights rank above the rights of states. Human liberties constitute a higher value than State sovereignty. ... there is something that ranks higher than our interests: it is the principles that we espouse... (NATO is waging in Yugoslavia) probably the first war ... that is not being fought in the name of interests, but in the name of certain principles and values. ... Alliance is fighting (in Kosovo) in the name of human interest for the fate of other human beings." In this context we must situate the oxymoron "humanitarian bombing" which was attributed to him by the media.
The NATO´s attack on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia without a direct mandate from the UN, this manifest transgression of international law, is presented by Havel as an action whose legitimacy derives from the respect for a LAW that authorizes us to act against the positive law, because "it ranks higher than the law which protects the sovereignty of states".
Kosovo harbors by now camp Bondsteel - an enormous USA military basis, which is clearly an instrument of interest, not principles; moreover, many investigations have verified that the separatists have used terrorist method in their combat. But the stance of VH on this issue was in contradiction with the most tragic lesson we have learnt from our national history, that of Pact of Munich. In Kosovo was on display the same question as in Sudetenland in 1938 - the right of a regional minority to claim secession instead of autonomy. This tragical memory of our people commands to be coherent and refuse the secession of Kosovo.
The quasi-religious vision of the role of military power of USA has been re-presented in the Letter of Eight in support of the invasion of Iraq on "false pretext". "The real bond between the United States and Europe is the values we share: democracy, individual freedom, human rights and the Rule of Law... Today more than ever, the transatlantic bond is a guarantee of our freedom." Given that the invasion of Iraq was based on the counterfeit, this moralistic vision of American military power results particularly tragic.
Let me stress three fatal flaws the unconditional moral support for USA unilateral power to intervene all over the world generated.
First of them is the splitting of Europe in old one and new one, as Donald Rumsfeld put it in his well-known discourse: " you're thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don't. I think that's old Europe. If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the east. (new members) ... are not with France and Germany on this, they're with the United States." This division between old and new Europe is a severe injure of European unity, which has created a state of mutual distrust between "old and post-communist" members of EU harming seriously the European solidarity. For example Donald Trump´s discourse in Poland is extremely menacing for the unity of EU: "Just as Poland could not be broken, I declare today for the world to hear that the West will never be broken. Our values will prevail... our civilization will triumph... together, let us all fight like the Poles -- for family, for freedom, for country, and for God."
The second fatal flaw is that VH has fostered - in contradiction with his previous attitude - the idea that the cold war has been won by the West. This spirit of victory has obliterated the fact that no real problem has been resolved by the West, that all problems are still ahead - political status of the Third World, full of toxic waste of the cold war which has really taken place there and the ecological crisis.
3. Third fatal flaw is that this attitude has definitively buried the idea that "we have something to offer - a sort of new conscience" as Havel said in USA Senate. The totalitarian system might be understood as "a convex mirror of all modern civilization and a harsh, perhaps final call for a global recasting of how that civilization understands itself.. Totalitarian regimes are ... the avant-garde of a global crisis of this civilization, first European, then Euro-American, and ultimately global."
Boris Buden comment on this issue: "Only yesterday, they taught the world a history lesson in courage, political autonomy and historical maturity, yet today they must assert themselves before their new self-declared masters as their obedient pupils. Only yesterday, they were the saving remedy for fatally ill societies; today, they themselves suffer from children's illnesses, which they must survive in order to become capable of living. What wizard turned these people into children?"
Summarizing: in the unipolar military power of USA VH has projected his "political religion" of the LAW which ranks higher than positive laws".
I see one more cause of this sanctification of the American power and of its "disrespect of the positive laws".
The political arena was totally dominated by Václav Klaus and his "political politics" based on the structural privilege attributed to the party systems and party apparatus. I remember one passage of his celebrated essay (based on some of my considerations as you maybe know) Politics and conscience: "I favor antipolitical politics, that is, politics not as the technology of power and manipulation, of cybernetic rule over humans or as the art of the utilitarian, but politics as one of the ways of seeking and achieving meaningful lives, of protecting them and serving them. I favor politics as practical morality, as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care for our fellow humans."
With an enormous misunderstanding Havel projected into NATO and American military power his vision of antipolitical politics. I believe that his sacralization of American militarist power was a reaction to the enormous delusion by the political
II
POST-DEMOCRACY
If we google the term "postdemocracy" we obtain the information that this term has been proposed and academically legitimized by Colin Crouch in his book Postdemocrazia (italian version 2000) and later Postdemocracy (engl. version 2004). We can consider as symptoms of postdemocracy the following pervasive processes in which all democratic societies are involved: decline in the size of the working class in traditional sense; the rise of the global firm and the loss of confidence in a public sector separate and distinct from the interests of business; the representatives of the business are included in government indirectly by main political parties or invade directly the political scene; radical degradation of political communication, above all rapid decline of "public use of reason" or "argumentative public debate" in habermasian style.
The term "postdemocracy" is largely used at present to describe a society where all the democratic institutions are in place-freedom of speech is respected, free elections are held, voters can choose between several political parties - but where is little or no difference between the representatives they elect so that "real change" is impossible. As we see later postdemocratic inertia is what VH has recognized ain seventies as the hallmark of the democracy fused together with consumer society. "Personal freedoms and other advantages of western way of life give no real room for radical change".
A very ambiguous moment of the post-democratic turn is the growing suspicion of politics as such, its function in the society and the demagogic plans to submit it to close regulation - what we can call "antipolitical movement". Contemporary mass endorsement of l evaluation of the political engagement as corruption, and the populist demand to put a strict limit to the elected governments suits the agenda of those who wish to limit the capacity of the society to regulate corporate power.
The most distinctive feature of post-democracy is anyway the decline of political communication. In postwar decades we note "the relative similarity of language and style in government documents, serious journalism, popular journalism, party manifestos and politicians' public speeches", meanwhile during last decade "the language of serious documents remains more or less similar to what it was then", but media and party manifestos divest political discussion of any complexity of language or argument. "Someone accustomed to such a style" has no chance to understand serious political debate. "Television news presentations, hovering uneasily between the two worlds, probably thereby provide a major service in helping people make such links."
2. Havel´s postdemocracy
I would recall anyway that VH has a primacy in having introduced the term Postdemocracy in the European political philosophy in his rightfully celebrated essay Power of powerless anticipating so the political development of last decades, which we used to refer to by formulas like "deliberative democracy" or "democracy of multitudes". Havel aspires to seize with this term the essence of the political system capable to produce changes in advanced consumer society. In such a political system "both political and economic life ought to be founded on the varied and versatile cooperation of dynamically appearing and disappearing informal, spontaneous and self-managed organizations." VH considers the progressive substitution of the hierarchical formal structures by "informal non-hierarchical structures " as the only way "of achieving the genuine participation "of citizens and workers in decision making processes "leading to a feeling of genuine responsibility" for the outcomes of collective actions.
As we see immediately that Havel´s conception of post- democracy differs from this of Crouch and others in that is positive political program we are demanded to sustain to overcome the state of disarray in which the globalization of business interests, fragmentation of what we called demos, the marginalization of trade unions and the deregulation of the labor market, the divorce between citizenship and social rights, the reduction of the role of the state to that of policeman and incarcerator, the rapid grow of inequality, the progressive delegitimization of the redistributive function of taxation and the declining capacity of public discernment to resist the translation of the particular interests of business leaders into public policy has precipitated democratic system.
According to VH the path to postdemocracy is "the existential revolution". We must cleanse his political philosophy of antipolitical pathos, made up of a mixture of heideggerisms, such as uprooteness, a radical renewal of the relationship of human beings to the "human order," which no political order can replace, a new experience of being, a renewed rootedness in the universe, a newly grasped sense of higher responsibility, an inner relationship to other people and to the human community".
Postdemocratic structures are not organizations held together by the common orientation on the technology of political power, but at the "sense" of power, which is that to facilitate collective actions aimed to realize limited scopes. The functioning of structures of this type presuppose the "rehabilitation of values like trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, love".
Instead of political parties the political system will be made up of "structures that are open, dynamic, and small", because "beyond a certain point, human ties like personal trust and personal responsibility cannot work". Above all: these structures do not oppose the proliferation of other similar structures.
Once emancipated Havel´s political philosophy from blurred concepts of "existential revolution" heavily contaminated by secondhand heideggerianisms and contiguous to moral kitsch, the transition from democracy to postdemocracy may be in Havel´s vision described as political response to the irruption of postmodernity which, revolving around the following three events, have disrupted democratic narratives..
I propose to use in the limited context of this discussion the expression "event" which is becoming a prominent rhetorical figure in contemporary philosophy (Badiou, Žižek) in a very simplified way as a disruption of narratives with which the society is held together. The event has consequences we are not able to integrate in the system without its radical transformation and imposition of a new narrative line. The following three events have imposed the transition from democracy to postdemocracy. We find easily in Havel´s writings the scattered references to them I am only trying to systematize them.
The postmodern mass disenchantment
First of these events I propose to call "mass disenchantment imposed by postmodern transformation of communication". To set the stage for the discussion of this point, let me quote in a modified frame the acclaimed example of the manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop (our famous greengrocer!) who places in his window the slogan "Workers of the world, unite!". To the real semantical content of this message he is totally indifferent, but VH adds: "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... The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window... for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity."The semantics of the statement changes radically, now is involving, the message has disruptive impact on his "self", is degrading of his image, destroys his self-esteem, is very difficult to tolerate a translation of the publically displayed message in such a nihilistic version.
The hyperrealism of this new frame of communication is upsetting as if somebody who is answering the simple formal question "how are you" was suddenly obliged to confront his narrative with the X-Ray photograph of his body which the listener would suddenly have exhibited. The omnipresence of so translated messages is the core of the postmodern mode of communication - from the frustrating translation of narratives in which human actions are included in a hyper-realistic version is impossible to escape. I have indicated this new pervasive public space where all messages are out of frame and no frame is stabilized with the formula "global village of leaked messages" or "global village of hidden face of everything" The postmodern mass disenchantment has been generated by this new global village.
According to Milan Kundera the mission of the art of novel is to unveil "under the lyric version of our lives the realistic (prosaic) one" and so to provoke an mass "antilyric conversion". It seems to me that the postmodern transformation of the public space has the similar effect - everybody and everything is immerged in this new media deluge and compelled to suffer un upsetting "antilyric" re-framing of the public version of his life. We entered an epoch in which no greengrocer is able "to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience" - to allude to the Havel´s formulation.
This conversion has delegitimized the political dimension of the democratic society as such: the expressions such as "collateral damages, human rights, economic growth, people, political party, democratic elections as expression of the popular will or free market" are perceived as void cover-up formulas, void ideological masks, which "offer human beings the illusion of dignity and morality... and conceal their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the public and from themselves".
Thousands of ethically inspired hackers disseminate incessantly in cyberspace leaked pieces of evidence illuminating the real functioning of political and corporate powers: secret pacts, agreements and bargains, illegal bugging, covert synergies between economic and political power. "The excusatory function of ideology" can not survive in this new "icy water" to use a Marx´s expression.
We can conclude that this new mass disenchantment generated by the web-based hyper-public space obtrudes upon symbolic communication so radically that it impedes the constitution of any cultural hegemony as we can call stabilized and shared frame of communication. what makes resentment particularly malign today is a growing contradiction. The ideals of modern democracy - the equality of social conditions and individual empowerment - are deprived of any credibility in the grotesquely unequal societies created by globalized capitalism and disclosed by postmodern density of communication. Never have so many individuals felt so frustrated by so cruelly revealed contradiction between "reality and ideology". This gangrenous resentment intoxicating the public space erupted volcanically with Trump's victory in USA and with the increasing electoral success of populist parties in EU.
VH was conscious of this dimension of postmodern public space, its subversive power used to summarize with the term "autoignition of media".
The instauration of hyperlegality
In semiotics and postmodern theory the term "hyperreality" refers to the quality of certain media to simulate something that never really existed or to fabricate reality that becomes seemingly more real than the reality it was originally supposed to represent.
With the term "hyperlegality" I indicate in similar way the "legal code" which is much more real than the "justice" it is supposed to represent. The legality becomes so complex that is necessary to disconnect it be totally from "outside" which gives to it the "legitimacy" - that is the correspondence between "sense of justice" proper to every human being and the "letter of the law".
The increasing gap between legitimacy and legality is the second event which has provoked the shift from democracy to the postdemocracy. For the scopes of this consideration I propose to use a limited "Weberian" definition of the legitimacy: legitimacy is the frame of all arguments we can refer to in order to justify the refusal of an individual or group to comply with the imperatives imposed by law. I remember that the contraposition between legality and legitimacy originates in monarchical France of the period of Restauration after 1815 when have validity both the codes Napoleonic that is the legality conceived of as an incarnation of the Rationality and the historic legitimacy of restored dynasty. The most incisive evolution of the difference between legality and legitimacy concerns the tension (between the Life-world in which every sense is necessarily rooted and the technologically installed environment governed by the imperative of incessant economic growth and corporate logics. The authors of reference are Husserl, Patočka, Habermas, and the dissidents in the communist countries who have promoted the concept of parallel polis - specially Vaclav Havel.
VH wrote: "Like ideology, the legal code functions as an excuse. It wraps the base exercise of power in the noble apparel of the letter of the law; it creates the pleasing illusion that justice is done, society protected, and the exercise of power objectively regulated. ... It is the legal code that gives the exercise of power a form, a framework, a set of rules." A persistent and never-ending appeal to the laws offers the "noble" version of economic and political power, whose real functioning is based on pacts and principles hidden under the textual surface of the "legal texts". The laws are mere facade, a "world of appearances" by referring to which the corporate power can conceal its real interests, cloak them in inexorable legal imperatives. The legality assume in that way "theexcusatory function" which VH ha attributed to the ideology that is "to provide people with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe".
This description of the legality as an enormous "excusatory power" is becoming rapidly appropriate for the contemporary capitalism, where the legal code is only an instrument for settling the quarrels between corporations, not between corporations and citizens. Enormous apparatus held together by an artificial language VH has called half century ago "ptydepe" that is language in which no ambiguity is possible.
I dare to summarize the question in this way: the globalization generated the progressive reduction of legitimacy to legality - what is legal is legitimate. No place more for the question of legality. This formula is in radical contradiction with the European tradition which we is based on the contrary on permanent tension between legitimacy and legality according to the formula "what is legal is never completely legitimate and what is legitimate is never completely legal." Since the moment that the legality became "self-sufficient apparatus" the link between civil society and the state, between life-world and technological environment is irreparably broken.
Hyperlegality means a sort of dominant power which generates its own 'legend', its self-legitimation. Legal imperatives without any confrontation with the arguments based on the points of views (and experiences) extern the legality justify them-self. Legality generates legitimacy as mere supplement of itself. Max Weber has considered the legality as one type of legitimacy" - his view assumes in this context new menacing sense.
To explain this point more adequately we could examine thoroughly the twilight of the Nation-state which largely transcends the boundaries of this discussion. I propose to limit ourselves to conclude that VH´s analysis of the function of legality in post-totalitarian countries may be applied productively to the contemporary globalized corporate order which is the main cause of transformation of democracy into postdemocracy.
The rise of non-representable society
The crisis of representation became since long a commonplace but it does not change the fact that representative powers of all types - as mayors, college presidents, premiers, even popes well know - is rapidly declining. The "hegemony" the symbolic dimension of representation on which is based the authority that a representative has for those being represented is rapidly declining.
I would underline three main reasons of this decline. Firstly, the fragmentation of society generated by the postfordism that is by tha fact that modern industrial production has moved away from mass production in huge factories towards specialized markets based on small productive units. Secondly the globalization has reduces the role of Nation-States and so the idea of one people unified by shared great narratives inventing a myth of common origin. Thirdly the profound transformation of the public space by new media which has imposed symmetric communication instead of asymmetric creating so the conditions for the rise of "digital populism" but also "cooperating multitudes as theorized.
Most generally we can describe the rise of non-representable society as the decline of the capacity of representatives to produce "the silence of represented". The essence of representation is the absence of the represented on the scene of representation which must be legitimized: this power new representatives have no more. The represented chime continuously in the discourse of the representatives delegitimizing so the delegated authority of the representatives which needs their silence to gain general acceptance. This postmodern refusal of representation would be totally misinterpreted if it were to lead to some rehabilitation of a regressive rehabilitation of some immediate communication between people and masses orof antirepresentative prejudices of direct democracy.
VH often spoke about "technology of power" referring to the accumulation of power as the unique sense of politics in a very general sense. Self-reproduction as unique telos! The democratic elections, reduced since long to mere technology of persuasion industry of selling techniques, are an example perfect of the technology of power. The submission of the political debate in the public space to the selling techniques aroused by the imperatives of the competition among political parties (formal structures) has divested elections from any capacity to generate a durable symbolic hegemony and so the genuine representation.
So the most important consequence of the irruption of symmetric web based communication in the public space of democratic countries is that a representation of the society as a whole is rendered impossible. Given that no hegemony can be established, no representation is possible and without representation there is no people, only multitudes, less or more angry.
The sweeping influence of the US advertising industry has rendered the electoral success completely depending on the investments in "the persuasion business", democratic elections are so distorted. "We have now become so accustomed to this that we take it for granted that a party's program is a 'product', and that politicians try to 'market' us their message." The political messages instead of being based on argumentation model itself on advertising strategies: very brief messages requiring extremely low concentration spans; the use of words to form high-impact images instead of arguments appealing to the intellect. The elections escape from any form of rational dialogue. "Its aim is not to engage in discussion but to persuade to buy". Adoption of its methods has not served the cause of democracy itself.
Moreover the elections expose the politics to the influence of the corporations given the increasing costs of "persuasion industry".
The degradation of mass political communication has still an other form - that of populism which means the promotion of the charismatic leadership instead of the public discussion over conflicting interests. Electoral competition based on the populist appeal takes the form of a search for charismatic individuals: "politicians promote images of their personal wholesomeness, devotion to the people, while their opponents only intensify the search through the records of their private lives to find evidence of the opposite" (Colin Crouch). To promote the image of integrity would demand the capacity to control the reputation systems that makes it possible "to bring the best to the top".
In the toxic postmodern "global village of leaked messages" is impossible to credit publicly such an integrity image of a politician - no reputation system has this power of control, only dictatorship. Moreover, the political space is increasingly characterized by enormous technical complexity of problems to resolve, whose consequence is the growing incapacity of modern citizens to work out what their interests are.
4. Counterdemocracy, Postdemocracy, Platform democracy
The processes we have tried to describe - mass disenchantment as the effect of intoxitated web-based public space, the hyperlegality divested of any bond with legitimacy and the non-representability of the society as consequence of fragmentation of society and dissolution of symbolic hegemony exercised by the elites - has rendered the traditional parlamentarian democracy totally inefficient as response to the involution of system.
For Havel the political system based on the hierarchically organized political parties is characterized by what he calls - "automatism". With this generic term he indicates formal structures totally concentrated on self-reproduction, on accumulation of power. All the concepts Havel has elaborated such as ideologies, apparatus, bureaucracy, artificial languages and political slogans constitute in their interconnection a malign power "depriving rulers as well as the ruled of their conscience, of their common sense and natural speech, and thereby, of their actual humanity." Ptydepe - artificial language set to exclude as imperfection every ambiguity and chaotic quest for meaning proper to human being - is a well known symbol of automatism.
It is worth of recording, in passing, that Havel´s concept of political system of postdemocracy is closely related to the idea of András Hegedus, Hungarian reformist marxist thinker, who has developed the idea of "political movements" inside the socialist countries. inspired by anti-apologetic definition of socialism. He considered as apologetic definition of a political value the reduction of this value to the accumulation of power of the structure which present themselves as the only institutions deputed to the realization of them for example "democracy is the power of NATO" or "socialism is the power of socialist states", or also "the Christianity is the power of the church". Between the institutions and the values which legitimize them must be a strong difference from which the critical attitude derives its force and cogency. It is possible to define automatism as the consequence of "apologetic" definitions of institutions. Every formal structure - political partis above all - tend to apologetic autodefinition.
According to VH "the automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society drags masses of postindustrial consumer societies towards the social and environmental destruction". The democracy does not function as a shield against this trend, because in democratic societies "people are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the post-totalitarian societies", above all by the offer to escape from the one common disturbing world into private world richly furnished by consumer-oriented economics. The traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no resistance to this automatism, because are centered on the rigid and hierarchical mass political parties "run by professional apparatuses" which consider the engaged citizens as potential enemies offer no rooms for radical change. "The omnipresent dictatorship of consumption, production, advertising, commerce, consumer culture, and all that flood of information" can not be imagined as the source of radical change¨.
Havel´s postdemocracy can be conceived of as a political project aiming to establish the system where incessantly emerge "structures not in the sense of organizations or institutions, but like a community" no more based on ideologies like the mass political parties, "but rather on how, in concrete terms, they enter into a given situation". Instead of formalized organizations in the system will operate "organizations springing up ad hoc" concentrated on a particular purpose and disappearing with achieving it. The authority of leaders must derive from the outcomes of their political practice "and not from their position in any nomenklatura". Their eventual "lawmaking powers" should be based on the confidence credited to them on base of experiences made in concrete actions.
These "informal and extremely flexible structures" should naturally arise as a consequence of authentic social self-organization in "living dialogue" with the genuine needs of the communities which compose the society. "The principles of their internal organization should be very diverse, with a minimum of external regulation." As is clear from this account so structured political system "goes significantly beyond the framework of classical parliamentary democracy". Havel refers to it with the term "post-democratic" system.
Havel conclude his outline of postdemocracy with a very strong consideration: Does not this vision of "post-democratic" structures in some ways remind one of the "dissident" groups or some of the independent citizens' initiatives as we already know them from our own surroundings? Are not these communities (and they are communities more than organizations)-motivated mainly by a common belief in the profound significance of what they are doing since they have no chance of direct, external success... Do not these groups emerge, live, and disappear under pressure from concrete and authentic needs, unburdened by the ballast of hollow traditions? In other words, are not these informal, nonbureaucratic, dynamic, and open communities that comprise the "parallel polis" a kind of rudimentary prefiguration, a symbolic model of those more meaningful "post-democratic" political structures that might become the foundation of a better society?
"Perhaps all this is only the consequence of a common threat". VH referred to the communist repression but we are at present living many other types of thread - global warming, corporate power, environmental crisis, extreme inequality an so long. May this thread produce the same solidarity as that which has held together the parallel polis?
As the possibilities that has postdemocratic turn will take place in the reasonably proximate future are concerned, it seems to me that such a system is already taking shape but not as outcome of an existential revolution (as VH has coveted) but as outcome of deep economical and technological changes. So VH has indirectly anticipated with his concept of "postdemocracy" the necessary transformation of democracy imposed by the postindustrial transformations we are used to indicate with formulas such as society of the access, postcapitalist economics, postfordism, platform capitalism, deliberative democracy or "democracy of multitudes".
I introduce the term "platform democracy" to indicate simply the political system in which the new forms of political interventions are made possible by the "proliferation of platforms", defined in a very general way as "emergence of new forms of connecting people and making ideas, knowledge, labor and use rights for otherwise idle assets move between communities scattered in the space but connected and interactive online". Platforms render effective economic and political cooperation in environment consisting of social media, online marketplaces, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and all other forms of the networked exchange relations characterized by their disinter mediated, collaborative and democratizing qualities which otherwise would be too expensive.
For the narrow goal of this discussion I define 'the platform' as "a distinct mode of socio-technical intermediary and cooperation arrangement incorporated into wider processes of collective activities and participatory political culture. Platforms in this sense may be viewed as permanent infrastructures of collective actions. "While marketplaces connect supply and demand between customers and companies, digital platforms connect customers to whatever. The platform is a generic 'ecosystem' able to link potential customers to anything and anyone, from private individuals to multinational corporations." Postdemocracy presupposes installation of permanent public platforms, which will reduce radically the transactional costs of collective actions making obsolete the role of traditional political parties.
In this new context far beyond Havel´s political imagination his apparently utopian view of post-democratic takes a much more realistic shape of system centered on public platform of collective activity.
VH concludes his reflection with a seminal question: "Do the dissident groups or some of the independent citizens' initiatives as we already know them... anticipate this vision of "post-democratic" structures? Are not these communities ... motivated mainly by a common belief in the profound significance of what they are doing? Do not these groups emerge, live, and disappear under pressure from concrete and authentic needs, unburdened by the ballast of hollow traditions?" In other words: are not these informed, nonbureaucratic, dynamic, and open communities that compose together parallel polis a rudimentary prefiguration of "post-democratic" political structures?
There is no room to search a response to this question but I consider it as essential. "Perhaps all this (solidarity) is only the consequence of a common threat", at the moment that the threat ends, this community based on solidarity "will begin to dissipate as well" - has written VH trying to evaluate the chance of the parallel polis to survive the "state of exception" created by the totalitarian power.
Well, it is my considered opinion that the global warming, the global pollution the global corporate control of human lives, the global destructive impact of the unipolarism of USA constitute the common threat similar to the totalitarianism. But it is far beyond the limits of my discussion...
(speech from The International conference "The Power of the Powerless: Masaryk, Patočka, Havel" organized by the Faculty of History and Philosophy of the University of Latvia, the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University in Prague and the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Riga on 25-26 February 2017)