The perversities of modern power

Over the past year or so, I have been coming back to some questions I first posed a decade ago – namely how people of my age (disgusted as we are by the behaviour of our corporate and political elites) might best focus our energies and resources to help nudge the systems of which we are part to a more hopeful future - and who were the people we could support in that venture . 
My initial - if rather tentative - answers were contained in a 30 page paper Draft Guide for the Perplexed. (The link gives the pdf file of the Guide which, unfortunately, doesn't allow the access to the links in the body of the text (the footnote links are OK), You can find a word version linked at the end of the post Draft Guide for the Perplexed – its about 20 titles up from the end of the list which that website link gives)

Breaking Out from an Insane World was one important recent post in that series.

The last post in the series had a summary of my recent reflections about the subject which I’ve now amended to read -

• The “mixed economy” which existed from 1950-1990 was a healthy and effective system for us in the West (The UK, as always, is an exception)  
• It worked because power was diffused. Each type of power – economic (companies/banks etc), political (citizens and workers) and legal/admin/military (the state) – balanced the other. None was dominant.
• Economic globalisation has, however, now undermined the power which working class people were able to exercise in that period through  votes and unions
• Privatisation is a disaster – inflicting costs on the public and transferring wealth to the few
• Neo-liberalism has supplied a thought system which justifies corporate greed and the privileging       (through tax breaks and favourable legislation) of the large international company
• All political parties and most media have been captured by that thought system which now rules the world
• People have, as a result, become cynical and apathetic
• Two elements of the “balanced system” (Political and legal power) are therefore now supine before the third (corporate and media power). The balance is broken and the dominant power ruthless in its exploitation of its new freedom
• It is very difficult to see a “countervailing power” which would make these corporate elites pull back from the disasters they are inflicting on us
• Social protest is marginalised
• Not least by the combination of the media and an Orwellian “security state” ready to act against “dissidence”
• But the beliefs which lie at the dark heart of the neo-liberal project do need more detailed exposure
• as well as its continued efforts to undermine what little is left of state power
• We need to be willing to express more vehemently the arguments against privatisation - existing and proposed)
• to feel less ashamed about arguing for “the commons” and for things like cooperatives and social enterprise (inasmuch as such endeavours are allowed)

But how do we go about re-establishing some sort of balance of power?

How can social forces be strengthened; and political and state systems of power reformed - so that the wings of corporate power can be properly clipped??

I’ve been encouraged to return to this theme by the summary of and papers from this very recent Conference on the Restructuring of the Corporation 

The papers are certainly fascinating – but suggest (with the exception of Henry Mintzberg) that change will come from within the system. Most people involved in these arguments about social and economic change focus on one or other of the three parts – political, legal or commercial ie stronger, more focussed protest; or different voting systems; or more social enterprise; or more corporate social responsibility; or stronger legislation against lobbying for example. Few so far seem to see Mintzberg’s point that we need a mixed cocktail!  

The illustration is a woodcut by the marvellous Hans Masserel

Dealing with the Past - Encountering Romania Part 9

The countries on which the Iron Curtain fell have had a difficult time since 1989 dealing with the record of repression, imprisonment, flight and death inflicted on millions of their citizens during that almost 50 year period. A few countries passed laws banning those holding power at that time from any future positions of authority but most countries, including Romania, had a reluctant and confused response to such questions of responsibility and justice.  25 years on from the end of the Ceaucescu regime, for example, there are still almost 100 serving Romanian MPs who held senior positions in that regime – and it was only in 2006 that the various archives were made (more or less) fully accessible to allow the researchers of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Communist Dictatorship in Romania to do their work. 
Coming to terms with the communist past in Romania is a 2011 article which analyses the highly politicised way the Commission report was treated by politicians and the media. 
Romanian communism between commemoration, nostalgia and scientific debate (2011) widens the analysis.

Transitional Justice in post-communist Romania (2012) is a recent book which assesses how such issues as property restitution and the rewriting of history books have been handled.

In Western European countries we turn to social history for insights into the recent past (particularly the last 50 years or so). I did a blogpost not so long ago about the extensive work which is available on post-war Britain. 
But in central and eastern European countries history of any sort is a highly contested field; and it is to anthropology and ethnography that we need to turn to get a deeply textured feel for the past as lived by the mass of people.

Katherine Verdery is an American Professor who has written extensively about Romanian cultural patterns from the research she was allowed to do here from the 1970s. 
Another recent book which deals with a key but strangely neglected subject is Heroes and Victims – remembering war in 20th century Romania by Maria Bucur (2010)

New Wave on the Black Sea

A few months back I viewed a tough portrayal of contemporary Romania - Child’s Pose which received the top award at this year’s Berlin Film Festival but which we found a bit too close for comfort. 

One cold evening in March, Barbu is tearing down the streets 50 kilometres per hour over the speed limit when he knocks down a child. The boy dies shortly after the accident. A prison sentence of between three and fifteen years awaits. High time for his mother, Cornelia, to intervene. A trained architect and member of Romania’s upper class, who graces her bookshelves with unread Herta Müller novels and is fond of flashing her purse full of credit cards, she commences her campaign to save her lethargic, languishing son. Bribes, she hopes, will persuade the witnesses to give false statements. Even the parents of the dead child might be appeased by some cash.
Călin Peter Netzer, the fil’s director, portrays a mother consumed by self-love in her struggle to save her lost son and her own, long since riven family. In quasi-documentary style, the film meticulously reconstructs the events of one night and the days that follow, providing insights into the moral malaise of Romania’s bourgeoisie and throwing into sharp relief the state of societal institutions such as the police and the judiciary.

A detailed review of the film can be read here. The film represents the new wave of Romanian films which have been coming out in the past 5-6 years and have attracted a lot of attention eg this recent New York Times' piece  

The emptiness of authority is an unmistakable theme in the work of nearly all the younger Romanian filmmakers. Doctors, grandiose television hosts, swaggering bureaucrats - all display a self-importance that is both absurd and malignant. Their hold on power is mitigated sometimes by their own clumsiness but more often by unheralded, stubborn acts of ordinary decency. An ambulance technician decides to help out a suffering old man who is neither kin nor especially kind; a student stands stoically by her irresponsible friend; a militia officer, in the middle of a revolution, goes out of his way to find and protect an errant, idealistic young man under his command.There is almost no didacticism or point-making in these films, none of whose characters are easily sorted into good guys and bad guys. Instead, there is an almost palpable impulse to tell the truth, to present choices, conflicts and accidents without exaggeration or omission.
This is a form of realism, of course, but its motivation seems to be as much ethical as aesthetic, less a matter of verisimilitude than of honesty.

There is an unmistakable political dimension to this kind of storytelling, even when the stories themselves seem to have no overt political content. During the Ceausescu era, which ended abruptly, violently and somewhat ambiguously in December 1989 — in the last and least velvety of the revolutions of that year — Romanian public life was dominated by fantasies, delusions and lies.

 And the filmmakers who were able to work in such conditions resorted, like artists in other communist countries, to various forms of allegory and indirection. Both Cristi Puiu and Cristian Mungiu describe this earlier mode of Romanian cinema as “metaphorical,” and both utter the word with a heavy inflection of disgust.................. I can say, though, that every conversation I had in Bucharest, even the most casual, circled back to the old days, so that I sometimes felt that they ended much more recently than 18 years ago.

And the physical aspect of Bucharest confirms this impression. The busy shopping streets have the usual storefronts — Sephora, Hugo Boss, various cellphone carriers and European grocery chains — and the main north-south road out of town is jammed with Land Rovers and lined with big-box discount stores. Turn a corner, though, or glance behind one of the billboards mounted on the walls of old buildings, and you are thrown backward, from the shiny new age of the European Union into the rustiest days of the Iron Curtain.
The architecture is a jumble of late-19th-century Hapsburg-style villas and gray socialist apartment blocks, some showing signs of renovation, others looking as if they had fallen under the protection of some mad Warsaw Pact preservation society. .....

“There is no Romanian film industry.” This is not another one of Cristi Puiu’s counterintuitive provocations but rather a statement I was to hear again and again in Bucharest as I visited the offices of film schools and production companies, a studio back lot and the headquarters of the National Center for Cinematography (C.N.C.). There was no shortage of industriousness, but Romania lacks the basic infrastructure that makes the cycle of production, distribution and exhibition viable in other countries. What is missing, above all, is movie theatres: there are around 80 cinemas serving a country of 22 million people, and 7 of the 42 largest municipalities have no movie screens at all. (In the United States there are almost 40,000 screens and millions of movie fans who still complain that there is nothing to see).
 What Romania does have, in addition to a backlog of stories crying out to be told on screen, are traditions and institutions that give filmmakers at least some of the tools required to tell them. The “dinosaurs” at U.N.A.T.C. take their pupils through a rigorous program of instruction that includes courses in aesthetics and art history and requires them to make two 35-millimeter short films before graduating, one of them in black and white. This kind of old-school technical training, which extends to acting as well, surely accounts for some of the sophistication and self-assurance that Mungiu, Porumboiu and their colleagues display. Not that anything comes easily. The shortage of screens means that the potential for domestic commercial returns is small, and therefore it is hard to attract substantial private investment, either from within Romania or from outside the country.

And the scarcity of theaters makes exhibition quotas — which other countries use to protect their film industries from being overwhelmed by Hollywood — untenable. But if there is no film industry, there is at least a Law of Cinematography (modeled on a French statute) that establishes a mechanism by which the state helps finance movie production. Taxes collected on television advertising revenue, DVD sales and other media-related transactions go into a fund, money from which is distributed in a twice-yearly competition. Winning projects are ranked, with the top selections receiving as much as 50 percent of their production costs from the fund. Film costs tend to be modest — the budget of “4 Months” was around 700,000 euros — and the filmmakers have 10 years to pay back the state’s investment, at which point they own the film outright.Many of the filmmakers I spoke to complained about the system. Corneliu Porumboiu, impatient with its slow pace and bureaucratic obstacles, financed “12:08” himself. Shortly before Cannes last year, Cristian Mungiu was involved in a public spat with the C.N.C. that made headlines in the local press. After a dispute with the centre, Puiu circulated a letter pledging never to participate in the system again.

 A useful little book on the Romanian cinema is A Short History of Romanian Cinema by Marian Tutui

And this article gives some background (in Romanian) on the relevant films. 

Images of Bucharest in the 20th century - Encountering Romania part VII

Encouraged by the images from an impressive book issued last month - Demolished Bucharest 1985 - unofficial archive images edited by Serban Bonciocat et al - we took a stroll on Friday in the area on the edge of the ginormous People’s Palace where there are still, amazingly, buildings which survived the megolomaiac onslaught on this central area. We even lunched in one of them – a new fish restaurant, Le Chef Calcan, on the long straight Regina Marie Boulevard. We were impressed that the chef welcomed us and advised on the meal which took in a very nice bottle of white wine (for only 11 euros) – the guys are from Constanta and the fish menu is large and fresh.

While trying (unsuccessfully) to find a reference for the new book, I came across a couple of very interesting websites which document the destruction Ceaucescu inflicted on the city in the 1980s 

- Bucharestian is an ambitious site which offers not only images but other goodies such as these crisp comments on Romanian mores 

- The Only Romania website has a collection of wonderful black and white photographs of Bucharest - including these of the 1970s before the demolitions – and some equally rare photos of the bustle of the cityin 1985 and shots from a Swedish visitor in the mid 1970s 

The images encouraged me to buy the 2012 book Bucharest’s Photographer  - Carol Popp de Szathmari (2012). De Szathmari was born in 1812 (died in 1887) and was one of the world’s first photographers. They are a great addition to the library I am slowly developing of images of both Bucharest and of Romania eg The Discreet charm of Bucharest by Dan Dinescu (2008) by Dan Dinescu  and Bucharest Architecture and Modernity – an annotated guide (2009) by Mariana Celac et al 

Romanian Painting - Encountering Romania part VI

There are two superb guidebooks on cultural Romania – The Pallas Guide to Romania (2009) edited by John Villiers who worked for the British Council here for 3 years; and Caroline Juler’s Blue Guide Romania  (2000) – curiously out of print already. (Her blogsite Carpathian Sheep Walk  gives a good sense of the life of one of the many sections of people still trying to life off the land here).

Villier’s book has chapters on the country’s history; the painted monasteries; the wooden churches and fortified churches of Transylvania; art and architecture; and Bucharest. But its section on art only lists about 10 painters in a couple of lines – very curious treatment for a book which purports to be about culture!

Having been so bowled over in recent years ago by Bulgarian realist painting of the first part of the 20th Century that I produced a booklet about it, events seemed to conspire against a similar appreciation of Romanian painters of the same period. Bulgarian galleries and books, somehow, were more evident and accessible in Sofia than their equivalents in Bucharest

I have, however, made some effort in the past year to track down the full beauty of the Romanian painting which were in such evidence a hundred years ago (it’s amazing how many superb Romanian painters were born around 1880!). Not easy since so many were secreted in private collections during the Communist period – some even before then eg the Zambaccian collection. 
And quite a few of the nouveaux riches after 1989 have developed their own private collections - which have been captured in a huge book in 2012 by painter Vasile Parizescu. One of the collectors is "businessman" Tiberiu Posteinica who was so brazen as to produce a sizeable book to glorify his ill-gotten collection. I was lucky enough to find a copy in a second-hand bookshop here.

The national art galleries here (and various publishing houses) have, of course, published various books on Romanian painters but making no concessions in recent years to those without the Romanian language and focussing on a favoured few such as Nicolae Grigorescu, Theodor Amman, Camil Ressu and Theodor Pallady. 

Things were actually better in the 1960s when the Meridian publishing house produced a great series of affordable booklets on Romanian painters (with attractive pasted prints). From the second-hand bookshops here I have slowly acquired many of these – eg Nicolae Darescu, StefanPopescu, JeanSteriadi and Josef Iser.

And last year I came across two great websites which have allowed me to access the Romanian painting tradition – a personal one ; and ArtIndex – a Romanian Art Review. So I now have a list of 75 classic Romanian painters (compares with a list of 150 Bulgarian for a country one quarter of Romania's size). 
My initial selections have been posted here 

Encountering Romania - part V Memoirs

Amidst the huge groups of people who have suffered from war, starvation and murder over the past century, the inhabitants of Central-East Europe occupy their own particular niche which has been well documented by over the decades by people such as Arthur Koestler, Aleksander Wat, Czeslaw Milosz  and, more recently, by academics such as Norman Davies, Ann Applebaum and Timothy Snyder 

Gregor von Rezzori is one of the most neglected of writers from lands which have been variously part of Austro-Hungary, CzechoSlovakia, Hungary, Romania and now Ukraine. Over thirty years he wrote marvellous prose about his early years in the town of Czernowitz when it lay in the northern redoubts of Romania eg  

• Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (1979); 
• Snows of Yesteryear (1989)

Mihai Sebastian was a Jewish journalist in Romania whose Journal 1935-1944 TheFascist Years caused quite a stir when they were eventually produced after 1989 – the English version in 2000.

Norman Manea is Romania’s most translated author and still writes in Romanian although he left the country almost 30 years ago. The Hooligan’s Return (2005) is a powerful and bitter memoir.

The education of a political animal IIB – Book III A Diary of Nine Months in the Peoples’ Democracies 1959-60  by Arthur D Kahn (2009) gives us almost a hundred pages of fascinating insights from one political writer’s three- week visit to Romania in 1959. It was entirely by accident I came across it on the internet yesterday. It does not figure on any list I have seen but deserves its place on this list

Jessica Douglas-Home was one of a small group who spent a lot of time in the 1980s supporting dissidents in central europe (Timothy Garten Ash is the most famous) and wrote it up in Once Upon another Time; (2000)

The Eighties in Bucharest is a powerful record of life in Romania in that decade published by Martor (Anthropological Review of the Museum of the Romanian Peasant) - Number 7 (2002). The link seems to give the entire text - structured alphabetically eg starting with "abortion". The Review (and the Museum) is to be congratulated for its website which allows access to the entire run of this worthwhile journal!

The title of Carmen Bugan’s Burying the Typewriter; childhood under the eyes of thesecret police (2013)  says it all.

Since the 1990s there has been an explosion of diaries (in Romanian) about life under communism. An English-language  Sibiu cultural magazine has an article about the artefacts which figured in old households which lists the titles of some of these

Surrealism and Survival in Romania - part IV of Encountering Romania

One of the chapters of Inner Lives of Cultures, mentioned in the last post, is “Surrealism and Survival in Romania” by Carmen Fimen (at pp 177-193) and is worth quoting at length -

The symbol of Romania is the peasant. Looking old and wise, or just tired, dressed in a long fur coat, a shepherd scrutinizing the horizon, or just searching for his magical ewe or lamb, he represented the essence of this place – agrarian by excellence, resilient over time, the iconic image of stability and persistence. One of the dramatic consequences of the Communist ideology in Romania was the destruction of the villages along with their traditions and customs, and the humiliation of the peasant torn from his natural surroundings, forced to leave his land, his church and his belief and to move to the outskirts of the big cities, in order to work in socialist mammoth factories, where he lost his ancestral identity, where he felt depersonalised and estranged from his native environment........Romania can be described as a country rich in ethnic diversity striving to preserve its uniqueness at the crossroads between the East and the West, between the Balkans and the Orient, with a people that displays a Mediterranean temper in the South combined with Balkan customs, a Slavic pace in the Northeast, or a rigorous diligence in Transylvania.  

The inter-bellum period - The period of glory for Romania is considered by many to be the era between the two World Wars.After the unification of all its territories in 1918, Romania looked like a fairly large and prosperous state, going through a time of important reforms, a time of economic and cultural flourishing, development of its industrial sector, and it became one of the most important exporters of oil and wheat. Bucharest, nicknamed ‘little Paris’, as rumours have it, could stand next to any major European metropolis. .....A new artistic movement emerged, the Romanian avant-garde, which eventually conquered Europe and contributed to the birth of surrealism in visual art, literature and cinema.......Between the two World Wars, Romanian culture was for the first time in sync with the latest Western trends in Paris or London, becoming a strong participant in the international dialogue of values. Remarkable avant-garde and surrealist talents emerged in Romania, featuring a cosmopolitan cultural attitude. In 1916, Tristan Tzara, a Romanian émigré to Zurich, invented Dadaism. There were three distinctive groups of artists: modernist – focused on Western, urban and intellectual culture; traditionalist – oriented towards the religious orthodoxy of the rural world; and the third, proclaiming the birth of the national character, situated at the crossroads between tradition and modernity. But even this time of prosperity had its paradoxes: except for a few big cities and the wealthy elite, the rest of the country was still impoverished and illiterate and there was no time left for profound changes.

 Fifty Years of Isolation - Romania entered the harshest dictatorship in Europe, weakened and humiliated by the Fascist regime and the Iron Guard that compromised the country’s prestige during the Second World War. Years of terror followed. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Communist gulag continued the Fascist horrors. For almost 50 years, Romania experienced isolation and was cut off from the West.The local Communist leaders annihilated any trace of intellectual opposition.

Between 1948 and 1964, one Romanian out of nine (meaning about two million people) was sent into a Communist concentration camp. The official literature, or so-called socialist realism, glorified Stalin, his politics and the new proletarian class. 

Despite all the official oppression, intellectuals gathered in informal discussion groups to keep their sanity and, slowly, a counterculture was born. Several groups of artists rejected the aggressive intrusion of the Communist propaganda, bringing along a fresh, nonconformist subversive voice, opposed to the official ideology. Although Romania didn’t have an organised Samizdat, individual voices of courage made themselves heard, like the political dissident Paul Goma in 1977 or, later, the ‘Blue Jeans generation of writers’. Over the years, Romanians were perceived through various stereotypes, more or less warranted: a people hesitating between excessive praise and self-disparagement, between laments or victimisation and an ostentatious superiority; coming up with dark plots and conspiracies to explain historical events, but also with an interesting, rich culture and a lively artistic life, with sophisticated intellectuals; xenophobic, nationalistic, but still tolerant in many respects; hospitable, enthusiastic, genuine and warm; inclined towards constant ridicule, with a predisposition to mock everything. 

Ways of Coping....We lived under one of the toughest dictatorships in Europe, watched by the secret police, and isolated from the rest of the world. We did our best to survive within a closed society. One way was to get together in groups selected on the basis of affinities which had to do with art, literature, philosophy or simply a few common tastes.
 Our lives were simple. We didn’t care about cholesterol, pollution or the negative effects of smoking; nor did we worry about the dangers of obesity, drug addiction or violence. We didn’t need anti-depressants, although we had good reasons to take Prozac. No one sought psychoanalysis, therapists or shrinks, although we had good reason to be depressed. When you live in a cave, with few choices, all sorts of self-defence mechanisms spring into action. One is interpersonal communication. In a society like ours, communication involved sincerity and spontaneity. People talked loudly, gesticulated profusely and even cursed often; they lived and hated passionately. They used to make grandiose plans in the evening, over many glasses of alcohol, only to discard them as impossible to achieve the next morning. And yet these people were authentic in their despair and passionate in their fantasies.

Paradoxically, in such an abnormal and repressive society, they were anything but alienated. In fact, they practiced a type of group therapy, unorganised and without clear goals. In that Balkan atmosphere, their conversations in the shadow of ruined ‘little Paris’ were delightful, a never-ending chatter, spectacular and useless, over full ashtrays and cheap alcohol, all-night-long discussions and hung-over mornings. They weren’t in a hurry to get anywhere. They had no place to go.In the opaque world of Communism, time meant nothing. The dictatorship seemed permanent. To keep our sanity, we had only the refuge of books and an inner language of freedom, parallel to the official one. Words had no power to change our destiny, but they could keep us sane. And our soul? Nobody mentioned it, but it was there all along, in the arabesques of our lamentations, in the last cigarette butts crushed at sunrise against the background of a hideous smoking factory at the outskirts of the city.

 People learned not to trust the official language in the press, in schools, and at work. Most of them doubted any official political speech and cultivated disbelief and irony as part of their self-defence mechanism.Everybody was aware of living in a ‘make-believe’ world, fully aware of its duplicity.As writers, the metaphor was our main weapon to evade political censorship.

Although biographies and memoirs were almost impossible to squeeze through the tight net of censorship, poetry and prose could be enveloped in a protective shell of metaphor and allegory, esoteric enough to get the forbidden truth out regardless of whether it was about political or social reality. Communism disregarded metaphors. It identified the soul as its main enemy. Demolishing churches and synagogues was not enough. That merely eliminated places of worship, but they also got to destroy the metaphors of spirituality, making them appear weak and misleading.

Another source of refuge was humour, carelessness or frivolity. In spite of our bad times, we managed to maintain our sense of humour. There was no shortage of jokes in those days, which acted like some sort of a safety valve. We seemed to be a surreal people who could not stop laughing, even while we were slowly dying! We were like patients in a militarised hospital, subjected to a utopian treatment for an imaginary disease, feeling both guilt and absolution. Guilt, because of the cowardice each one of us had to practice; absolution, because the collective farce so perfectly played on us. 

After Communism.......After the fall of Communism, other clichés became associated with Romania, describing a country still haunted by the ghosts of the Communist nomenclature which was soon back in power, by stray dogs, orphans, AIDS victims infected by contaminated blood which they had received in hospitals, human traffic, impoverished Roma population, pickpockets and thieves making headlines in the Western media. I’m not fighting against clichés. They are based, after all, on reality, however exaggerated or generalised it might be. But Romania, despite all its problems, continued to produce an intense cultural life. Even during the totalitarian era, culture had symbolised resistance within the Communist censorship, defence from the absurdity of the system and an underground form of freedom. In the late 1980s, a visitor from England remarked in awe: ‘This country looks surreal to me. You have nothing to eat but wait in line for hours to buy theatre tickets and books…’ It was our form of survival, sanity and refusal to submit to alienation.