Lea Ypi
“One of the things
people misunderstand about the book is that they think I’m trying to compare
Socialism and capitalism and trying to say one was worse than the other . . . But
you are not comparing like for like.”
Lea Ypi
The first thing that
strikes you about this book is the sheer volume of praise and recommendations
before one has even read a word, four pages, to be precise. Either this is the
work of a budding genius, or quite a few people have lost their intellectual
sanity.
The second thing about
the book is the title- Free—Coming of Age at the End of History. A cursory look
inside the book will tell you that this is not a philosophical memoir. It is
barely a political memoir. The title alludes to the neoliberal champion Francis
Fukuyama. In his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man.
Francis Fukuyama’s The
End of History uses a loose version of Hegel’s idealist phenomenology. Fukuyama
announced that the tired march of history had arrived at its final station—a
US-style liberal bourgeois democracy based on the unfettered capitalist market.
This was the summit of human civilisation! This theme was elaborated in
countless variations by gullible and impressionistic petty-bourgeois academics,
always anxious to be on what they take to be, at any given moment, the winning
side of history. Whether Ypi, now a political philosophy professor at LSE in
London, believes this is the “End of History” as we know it remains to be seen.
She has, however, become
a darling of the petty-bourgeois left. The British Socialist Workers Party(SWP)
believes she is an “avowed Marxist. In the review by Gareth Jenkins, he writes,
“If you believed in ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’ during the Cold War, what’s
not to like about Lea Ypi’s autobiography? “.
The SWP professes to be
a Marxist organisation. Still, one wonders how many of its members have been taken
to lunch at an expensive restaurant by the Financial Times, the leading financial
organ of the British bourgeoisie, or had a whole-page interview as Lea Ypi was
given in the same newspaper.
The book is not without
merit. It is well-written and shows what life was like growing up in Stalinist
Albania. The book is written through the eyes of a young person growing up
trying to make sense of the world around her. At one point, she writes, “I never
asked myself about the meaning of freedom until the day I hugged Stalin.” However, this “avowed Marxist” has little or no
understanding of the complex phenomena of Stalinism, How it arose and how to
combat it. I doubt also she has read any of the works of Leon Trotsky. While criticising
her former society for contradicting the Marxist idea of freedom, she opposes
the conception of Socialism if “brought about by the right people, with the
right motives, under the right circumstances, and the right combination of
theory and practice”, would succeed.
Any reader looking for a
worked-out revolutionary solution to mankind's problems should perhaps give
this book a miss. Her course at the London School of Economics starts with the premise
that “Socialism is above all a theory of human freedom, about how to think
about progress in history, of how we adapt to circumstances, but also try to
rise above them. Freedom is not sacrificed only when others tell us what to
say, where to go, and how to behave. A society that claims to enable people to realise
their potential, but fails to change the structures that prevent everyone from
flourishing, is also oppressive.”
The goal of human
freedom and a free society, which many great revolutionary thinkers wanted,
cannot be achieved by having some vague notion of behaving better or having a
mild critique of capitalism and then hoping for the best. It can only be completed
in the words of Nick Beams, “if the
tyranny of global capital and its rule through the “free market” is overturned.
It must be replaced by a social system in which the productive forces, created
by the intellectual and physical labour of working people the world over, are
harnessed by them to meet their needs”.
