Where to from Socialism? Continued
When does he realize that in erasing traces of the past and adapting to the mainstream of thinking after communism and the Cold War, he is not occupying his own skin?
Perhaps at the point in the late 1990s, when he notes:
Several tenets of economic dogma are lying in ruins. The most important one is that the development of investment, trade and technology will increase the prosperity of the whole of society. The situation is different: nowadays the people getting rich are the ones who were already rich to start with. Mankind can be divided, on the scale of each country and of the entire planet, into two groups – winners and losers.1
Or certainly when he writes:
More and more is being said about globalization, but it is understood not as the way cultures and societies come closer and get to know each other, but as a financial and economic operation, as the right of capital to act on all world markets, infused with the spirit not of closeness but domination . . .
The particular harmfulness of neo-liberalism pervaded with egoism lies in the fact that it became the practice of wealthy states the moment when, as the result of a demographic explosion, vast crowds of poor people, numbering hundreds of millions, appeared on our planet, who without the support of the richer people cannot find themselves a fair place on earth.2
In 2001, when he observes the entry of Subcomandante Marcos’s guerrillas into Mexico City – in the first rebellion against neo-liberalism – he again becomes the reporter he once was, with his heart on the left: always siding with the rebels against big capital and power, always in defence of the losers.
Now he calls himself an ‘interpreter of cultures’ – a formula that springs from an ideological stance, a world outlook, a left-wing attitude. If we live in a world where the winner takes all, imposes the rules of the game, and exploits those who are weaker, usually including people from cultures other than his own, and if the old left-wing language of criticism has lost its credibility, its penetrating force, we should seek a new language, replenish the old diagnoses and criticism, draw conclusions from our failures and formulate a message appropriate for the present day.
‘Marx still has his uses,’ he says one day, when I recount my observations from a journey to Brazil.
I had been travelling around the Brazilian interior, and in Mato Grosso I was told about the dead bodies that are cast up now and then on the banks of the Araguaia River. These are the corpses of peasants who have illegally occupied plots of land, often agricultural wasteland. Earlier they would have worked for owners of the latifundia for starvation wages. When they lost their jobs, they had nowhere to go. The only possibility that occurred to them was to trim off a piece of their former master’s land and live off it. Hunger and despair having driven them to infringe the sacred law of ownership, the landowners’ private police forces now hunt them down and throw their dead bodies into the river.
‘A classic class conflict, straight out of Marx,’ is Rysiek’s diagnosis.
He understands perfectly why the ‘fashion for Marx’ is returning: because there are conflicts for which Marx’s description is an exact fit. Even The Economist devotes an issue to the renascence of Marxian thought, even though it still firmly defends the neo-liberal form of the market. In the ‘post-socialist’ era, Kapuściński treats Marxism not as the skeleton key to open all doors, but rather as a set of observations about the world, or sometimes a method for analysing events and posing questions. Marxian thought, he contends, has kept its vitality and is useful in many situations: ‘The whole of Marx has been too hastily thrown on the rubbish heap.’3
Once again there is the same detachment, the same reluctance to admit to an error: ‘has been thrown’, not ‘we have thrown’.
In the late 1990s Kapuściński the commentator begins to speak and write entirely openly in the language of the left-wing critics of neo-liberalism and globalization. Essentially he never parted from left-wing thinking, but at the beginning of the 1990s he was unable to find a spiritual and intellectual space for himself; in the realm of neo-liberal ideology, where the market is elevated to a pedestal, ruthless competition is deified and the losers are ignored, he felt unmoored. This disorientation and this attempt to find a place for himself in the new reality are the impetus for commentaries and opinions in the first few Lapidaria that do not fit with anything he wrote either before or after. When, towards the end of the decade, criticism of capitalism and social (global as well now) inequalities returns to the scene, and new protest movements appear, Kapuściński revives, feels the wind in his sails and finds his homeland – except that this homeland is usually outside Poland. It is abroad, not in Poland, that he has an audience who really listen to him; his evaluations are respected and have penetrative force in Spain, Italy, Mexico and Argentina – if only this one from the Lapidaria’s penultimate volume:
Globalization is not global, because it involves almost exclusively the North, where 81 percent of all foreign investments are made . . .
The rapid, dynamic development of the world brings along two dangerous distortions:
• firstly, this development generates inequalities (inside a country and on a planetary scale);
• secondly, everywhere the strength and wealth of the centre are growing, while the outskirts are getting weaker and poorer.
Everywhere, all of us are taking part in a game, the principle of which is that winner takes all (e.g., the boss earns as much as all the rest of the staff put together). In short, it is a new form of feudalism: at the top there is the master, the ruler, the sovereign, and lower down there is the entire feudal world subordinate to him – the vassals, servants and yokels.4
Left-wing protest movements, especially in Europe and both Americas, but also in some countries in Asia and Africa, have a good ear for these issues. The final volumes of Kapuściński’s Lapidaria include catalogues of social scandals – hunger, poverty, exploitation, new inequalities – which harmonize with the themes taken up by the anti-globalization movement since the second half of the 1990s.
Nonetheless, towards the end of his life Kapuściński shies away from political affiliations. He sees himself as an unaligned, critical commentator on world affairs; being associated with a particular tendency or labelled as an anti-globalist – although on basic questions he said the same things as the anti-globalists – could have irritated him.
He does his best to preserve his independence.
In The Shadow of the Sun he records a spectrum of disappointments, though he presents them in the form of conversations with other people. One of his African commentators notes that religious and ethnic fanaticism is dangerous for decolonized Africa. Another says that Africa must wake up.
‘Before he got down to writing The Shadow of the Sun,’ says Jerzy Nowak, ‘he went to Africa to check which elements of what we had formerly admired could still be defended. Afterwards he told me that one could come to the sacrilegious conclusion that it is worse than it was in the colonial era – though he does not blame the Africans for that, but rather the affluent North, which is in no hurry to help, although it could. Instead of help, the prosperous countries are only interested in exploiting Africa’s raw materials, nothing more.’
The world of late Kapuściński is getting complicated. He remains an advocate of Africa, but admits it is questionable whether African cultures are capable of being self-critical, ergo of achieving progress and development. He still demands the affluent world’s help for Africa, and shares the following thought:
Europe’s image of Africa? Hunger; skeletal children; dry, cracked earth; urban slums; massacres; AIDS; throngs of refugees without a roof over their heads, without clothing, without medicines, water, or bread.
The world therefore rushes in with aid.
Today, as in the past, Africa is regarded as an object, as the reflection of some alien star, as the stomping ground of colonizers, merchants, missionaries, ethnographers, large charitable organizations . . . Meantime, most importantly, it exists for itself alone, within itself, a timeless, sealed, separate continent.5
In his other favourite region, Latin America, he is delighted by the ‘springtime of the peoples’, the new left-wing wave which started at the end of the 1990s.
We are witnesses to a great new awakening, the ethnic rebirth of the part of Latin American societies derived from their indigenous populations . . .
The heart of the matter is a total change of atmosphere in almost all the countries I recently visited in the region; also a belief that a positive scenario of events is possible for this part of the world. Latin America has ceased to be a continent where global tensions are concentrated, and has begun to be a laboratory for some new social and cultural forms, the site of various experiments. The twenty-first century will be Latin America’s century.6
Some people think that in old age he squared accounts – in The Shadow of the Sun, among other places – with the revolutions, rebellions and revolts that fascinated him in his youth. What does ‘squared accounts’ mean here? That he turned away from what he wrote earlier? Negated what he had seen and experienced? Revisited his former judgements? As expert on his work Andrzej Pawluczuk writes:
I once asked Kapuściński if nowadays, twenty years on, he would have written those books of his the same way, identically: The Soccer War and Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder. Yes, identically, he replied without hesitation.7
To the end, he asserted it was ‘evil’ Moscow, not the ‘good’ West, that was helping Third World countries push through to independence; the West was a force enslaving the societies of the South. So what if the Soviets had made their own economic and geostrategic deals along the way? Should the Africans continue putting up with colonialism just to prevent that? To help the West in the Cold War? Rubbish. What was in it for them? Kapuściński regarded it as absurd to make retrospective judgements of the legitimacy of revolt, the independence struggle or revolution on the basis of later defeats.
Of course, Moscow did not support wars of liberation or revolutionary rebellions in every corner of the Third World during the Cold War. More than that – it opposed them when it was concerned about peace with Washington, or when some movement or revolt did not suit it ideologically and did not recognize Moscow as the revolutionary’s Rome. At that point, Kapuściński’s sympathies usually leaned towards the heretics – not necessarily for ideological reasons. It was more a matter of empathy, solidarity with the desperate or with idealists who despite all sorts of adversity pick up a gun and sacrifice their own peace, often their lives, to go and fight for a fairer world.
Kapuściński now returns to his own path, from which he deviated in the early 1990s. He breaks free of the political correctness of the new era, just as he broke free of it in the days of the PRL. At the same time, he stays in the mainstream as the biggest star of Polish journalism – exactly as in the previous era. But what he now writes and says about contemporary conflicts and challenges has a limited influence on the thinking of Poland’s political and journalistic establishment. He is not the first or the last idol to be totally ignored.
Following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the rift in world-view between Kapuściński and the ‘environment’ of mainstream thinking (certainly the mainstream in Poland) becomes manifest.
A few days after the incident, he calls me to say, ‘Come by, we must have a chat.’
I have never heard this tone in his voice before, full of irritation and impatience.
‘It’s awful what they’re writing in the paper – it’s all wrong, with no thought put into it. Stuff and nonsense!’
‘Shall we do an interview?’
‘Ask if they’d like that.’
I arrive with Aleksander Kaczorowski, who is then in charge of Gazeta Świąteczna, the weekend section in which Gazeta Wyborcza’s longer essays, features and interviews appear. Kapuściński sketches a panorama of globalization as the context for the 9/11 attacks:
The phenomenon of globalization does not function on a single level, as is often said, but on two, or even three. The first of them is the official one, in other words the free flow of capital, access to free markets, communications, supra-national companies and corporations, mass culture, mass goods and mass consumption . . . But there is also a second form of globalization, in my view very powerful, negative and disintegrative. This is the globalization of the underground, criminal world of mafias, drugs, the mass weapons trade, money laundering, tax evasion and financial fraud . . .
And there is a third level of globalization too, which covers various forms of public life: international extra-governmental organizations, movements and sects. It testifies to the fact that people no longer find answers to their needs in the old, traditional structures – such as the state, the nation, and the church – and so they go looking for something new. So while the beginning of the twentieth century was characterized by the existence of strong states and strong institutions, the beginning of the twenty-first is characterized by a weakening of the state and a great expansion of various kinds of small, extra-state, extra-governmental forms – both civil and religious. The context and structure in which man used to live is changing . . .
This is an extremely vital circumstance for understanding events such as 9/11, because it shows that we may be dealing with forces over which no one has control, and which will be hard to control in the future.8
Not for the first time, he postulates the idea of global solidarity:
This is not about short-term aid of the kind provided in the case of a flood, an earthquake, a famine or other disaster. What we need here is an overall conception of goodwill on the part of the developed world. Something like that has never yet come into being . . . If we do not help the poor, if we don’t smooth out the inequalities in the world even to a minimal degree, we shall end up killing each other. I think we are going through a dramatic crisis in humanitarian thinking.9
Towards the end of the interview he strikes an oppositional tone, critical of the main current of thought on what happened in New York and Washington on 9/11:
I cannot bear to hear any more statements about Islam or Arab culture, on which suddenly everyone seems to be a great expert. Or about plans concerning whom to kill, on whom to be avenged, or whom to bombard. Of course the perpetrators of the attacks in America should be identified and punished. But the horizon of thinking about the present crisis should not be like this. If we are only going to think about military revenge, we will not get far. If after a military response we return to the blissful state we have been stuck in for the past decade, in a short while something else will give us a shock . . .
9/11 revealed how terribly fragile this world of ours is. Awareness of this fragility seems to me incredibly important – for further reflection on the world, and above all further action within it.10
A week later, the only time in the history of Gazeta Wyborcza, a polemic arguing with Kapuściński appears: although mild in tone, it firmly opposes the current of thought he represents. It is written by the paper’s former deputy editor, Ernest Skalski.
Here are some extracts:
One can agree with Kapuściński or not, but his knowledge and the standard of his analyses oblige one to do some thinking . . .
‘I think the most important thing at this moment is to establish and understand the context of this event’, says Kapuściński. I am ready to agree that this is the most important thing, but here the eternal conflict appears between importance and urgency. Understanding demands consideration, and consideration takes time. The thinkers may come to various conclusions, and so it will be difficult to establish anything. Meanwhile we must start to take action, to avoid being surprised by yet another terrible attack while we’re doing all this thinking . . .
Practice tells us that sharing out wealth is not a solution to poverty. In any case, organized terror is not generated in extreme poverty and stagnation, but where something has got moving, where new aspirations have appeared, and are outgrowing the potential to satisfy them. The Palestinians have a higher standard of living than the Yemenis. Nor is it worth deluding ourselves that all the world’s difficult problems can be solved within the remit of the fight against terrorism . . .
[I]n the democratic countries all forms of aggression and violence have passed their expiry date and should no longer be tolerated. This also applies to the anti-globalists. Civilized debate on the topic of globalization is certainly needed. Acts of aggression are definitely not.11
Skalski’s article is a good illustration of the Gazeta editors’ line of thinking at the time. Kapuściński is annoyed and upset. He takes the piece as a sort of blow, from the least expected direction. Yet he does not respond.
The differences between his evaluations of the world situation and those of Gazeta’s editors become even clearer during the propaganda campaign designed to justify US aggression against Iraq. Gazeta openly sympathizes with the Bush administration’s plans for war. In the words of editor-in-chief Adam Michnik, it recognizes the invasion and the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship as a necessary evil. The paper’s commentators see a threat in the global spread of ‘anti-Americanism’, not in the imperial tendencies of Washington policies. They applaud the idea of ‘spreading democracy’ with the help of the American (and Polish) armed forces.
Kapuściński argues with this way of thinking in Gazeta, in an interview given on the eve of the American invasion of Iraq.
‘[A]nti-Americanism’. This term prompts my doubts. America is very many things, it is a vast number of wonderful achievements that are the dream of millions, if not billions of people worldwide. America means fabulous science, an impressively disciplined society, technological achievements – nowadays all this is the motor of development for the entire planet . . .
Many people in the world are opposed not to America, but to the American ‘war party’. They are opposed to America’s imperial designs, which is understandable. People are opposed to any kind of domination; such is the nature of man – man is in favour of freedom, and against being controlled or having something imposed. Here lies the problem of ‘anti-Americanism’. There is an attempt to define people’s mood as anti-American, when it is actually an anti-imperial, anti-war mood . . .
[I]n America they talk about ‘anti-Americanism’ perhaps in order to create the belief within society that people in the world outside are hostile to their homeland . . .
I interpret all the talk about exporting Western democracy as an attempt to justify expansion operations. In colonialism, too, conquest was justified by the fact that it brought progress, higher civilization, and conversion to the true faith. And that does in fact happen, but at the price of great bloodshed and several centuries of occupation and domination. So it is not a new idea, and history knows many examples of bringing ‘the barbarians’ another, ‘higher civilization’. These justifications accompanied the entire, more than five-hundred-year history of European colonialism. Yes, it’s not a bad idea . . . but first you have to estimate how many millions of human beings it will cost. Who will take responsibility for that? How many generations will it last? How many hundreds of years?12
‘He took a critical view of America’s and Europe’s actions conducted within the remit of the “war on terror”,’ recalls Jerzy Nowak. ‘I defended the American intervention in Afghanistan, but Rysiek thought it would only lead to the country’s further ruin. He did not support the war in Iraq. He was critical of the Israeli government, and spoke of Israel with regret, saying that it had started from an ideal, only to rely on force thereafter. Towards the end of his life there was a great deal of pessimism in Rysiek’s thinking about the ongoing conflicts in the world.’
About national politics he keeps quiet, on principle. He has a growing conviction that Poland is a political and intellectual backwater, a tin-pot country. He doesn’t want to know who dislikes whom, or who is plotting with whom against whom. He doesn’t want to know, though while partaking in political gossip he asks questions about everything. Then he forgets. On his lips, names that are well-known from television sometimes sound as if a foreigner were saying them, someone who has only just heard them for the first time and is making sure he has remembered them properly.
As I now try to trace how his attitude to the post-communist order in Poland changed, all that remains are my own memories, and those of his other friends and acquaintances. Just crumbs of information, no statements or interviews on the topic.
Wiktor Osiatyński: ‘He felt euphoria in the days of the Mazowiecki government, and then watched the scrimmage, the chaos, the invasion of boorish elements, and the weakening of quality of the political class with increasing anxiety. He was worried about the weakness of the left and disturbed by the growing inequalities.’
At some point Jerzy Nowak says that a comparison of Rysiek’s views and sensitivities with those of Jacek Kuroń is justified.
Kuroń was a minister in two governments after 1989, and built capitalism in order, as he put it, to have something to share afterwards. Towards the end of his life he blamed himself for having built an unfair order, full of injustice and inequality. Kapuściński’s thinking about the transformation in Poland had a similar pitch, a similar tone, though it was never verbalized into a coherent evaluation.
I remember a comment he made about Balcerowicz, in the final years of his life: ‘doctrinaire.’
At the same time he could not bear populism, boorishness, or the mob’s demand for rights in the name of those who had been wronged. As early as the 1980s, when no one had dreamed of a political movement such as (the nationalist party) Samoobrona (Self-Defence), he noted:
Steer clear of the rabble, or you’ll come to a bad end, because it will sink you and destroy you. Treat those people as carriers of plague, give them a wide berth. In the rabble there is a sort of will to conquer, a jealous desire to destroy everything. The rabble’s aim is to disturb your peace, make your work impossible, and make progress impossible for mankind. The rabble movement is always a backwards movement, it is a motionless movement.13
‘Why did someone as left-wing as Rysiek dislike populism so much?’
‘Because the populists spoiled his conception of the world.’ So says Hanna Krall.
He took a warm view of the initiatives of the young left in Poland, though he had no profound thoughts about them. ‘That quarterly, Krytyka Polityczna, is all right, don’t you think?’ he partly asked, partly assured himself.
He gave one of his essays, on ‘encountering the Other’ as the main challenge for the future, to the Polish edition of Le Monde diplomatique, a left-wing monthly to whose French edition he had subscribed for many years (it was always lying on his desk). In conversation he was always referring to comments and information he had found in its pages, and he and the journal’s long-time editor-in-chief, Ignacio Ramonet, had a mutual regard.
But usually he went on about the right.
‘Dreadful chaps!’
‘It’s turning into fascism!’
‘You can’t imagine what’s going on here!’ he fumed in the summer of 2006, when I returned to Poland after a year away. (For more than six months Lech Kaczyński had been president, and his brother Jarosław had just become prime minister.)
Above all it was about lustration, in other words exposing the co-operation by well-known figures in public life with the PRL’s secret service. And also about squaring accounts in the broader sense – which involved branding people in politics and culture who had once belonged to the Party and believed in socialism.
‘He went on and on, saying, “You’ll see, now it’s the end, the Kaczory [a popular nickname for the Kaczyński twins] are going to sort us out!” ’ says one of his friends.
He shows anxiety, concern, and even fear whenever, with each successive political crisis and election, the issue of ‘former agents’ comes up again – always as a weapon in the fight for power, almost never with the aim of learning about the history of post-war Poland, the workings of the system or how to understand people’s careers. His opposition to lustration links him strongly to the Gazeta Wyborcza environment.
In the early 1990s, at a party given by the ambassador of one of the Western countries, Kapuściński listens as a post-1989 Ministry of Foreign Affairs official lists – in the presence of everyone – the names of current Polish diplomats who in his opinion were Soviet agents. As the party comes to an end, the assembled company hear an altercation in the corridor. Rushing to intervene, they find Kapuściński holding the ministry official by the lapels of his jacket, pinning him to the wall and shouting, ‘How dare you, you bastard!’
In the second half of the 1990s one of the right-wing journalists (earlier a press acquaintance in the PRL era) writes in a niche weekly that Kapuściński ‘had very good knowledge of all the inside facts and complexities of Party in-fighting, rises and falls’, and that ‘even if he wasn’t a staff intelligence agent’, he ‘was quite often used on an ad hoc basis for covert operations’.
Kapuściński laughs at his denouncer, but his laughter is not unrestrained – he is afraid.
‘I could see the fear growing in him that eventually they’d drag out his connections with the intelligence service,’ says Osiatyński.
‘Did you ever talk about it?’
‘Yes. He said, “I’m sure to have something in my documents.” ’
In the final months of his life, rumours reach him that in one of its features programmes the public television channel intends to reveal his connections with the PRL’s intelligence service. He doesn’t know exactly ‘what they’ve got on him’, but he is horrified, doubled up with anxiety.
He calls his friends and acquaintances at Gazeta.
‘Do you know what they’re planning?’
Two months before his death he goes to a book launch for Krzysztof Teodor Toeplitz, accused by public television a few days earlier of co-operation with the security service. Daniel Passent from Polityka was ‘outed’ at the same time.
‘We took Rysiek’s appearance as a gesture of solidarity,’ say both Toeplitz and Passent.
‘He called to say he’d come half an hour early for a chat,’ says Passent. ‘He was agitated. It felt as if the clouds were gathering over him, too, but none of us said it at the time. He came to show us he was with us, and that he didn’t agree with this people-hunt that the right wing was conducting.’
In one of their last conversations, he tells Osiatyński that he doubts whether ‘what we have in Poland can be called democracy yet’.