“No matter where it’s built, the parallel polis takes time and tenacity”. Czech dissidents, and Native Americans in California, show how to prototype a better society
See bottom for blog for more info on Bratislava’s Paralelni Polis
In her new book The Politics of Waking Up, A/UK’s Indra Adnan has been exploring the idea, taken from Czech dissidents in the Communist era of the 70s, of “parallel polis”.
In her reading, it’s a network of deliberative and productive social organisations that amplify community power over that of the state, local or national - what we’ve been calling CANs at The Alternative UK (citizen action/community agency networks). It’s a great lens to focus on how communities can find the right “container” for their diverse interests and powers - focusing both their willpower and their understanding.
We’ve been sent a brilliant long read, “Building the Parallel Polis”, which both explores the original concept of parallel polis (as developed by Vaclav Benda and Vaclav Havel), and compares it to forms of Native American activism in California. As the intro puts it:
For victims of state repression, the invitation into politics can be a death sentence. How can marginalized or oppressed groups bring change to systems that are predicated on their destruction? At every scale—from the neighbourhood to the city to the nation—the targets of systemic attack must choose how and with whom to make politics in the midst of systems that threaten them. Sometimes they succeed. But how?
Anne Focke, an American artist and writer, looks at two powerful examples: the “parallel polis” described by Czech dissident Vaclav Benda, in 1977, as a tool for resisting—and ultimately overthrowing—the repressive post-War Communist government in Czechoslovakia; and an innovative set of strategies called “the dynamics of difference,” that was driven by Native American tribes in the Humboldt Bay area of California, in their successful attempt to regain stolen land and create a tribal health centre.
As Focke observes, both of these struggles “[continue] to unfold. There will be no final chapters (or happy-ever-after endings) here.”
We invite you to read it as a whole - the comparison is illuminating and inspiring. But a few excerpts below:
Václav Benda wrote “Paralelní Polis” in late 1977, and it was translated to English as “The Parallel Polis” a year later. This short, quickly written text was meant as a discussion paper. “None of my essays was more improvised,” he recalled in 1988. With “The Parallel Polis” Benda had a specific audience in mind: his fellow signatories of Charter 77, an informal civic initiative published in January 1977 in what was then the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.
Benda was one of 241 signatories (235 Czechs, six Slovaks) that the Charter itself described as a “loose, informal, and open association of people…united by the will to strive individually and collectively for respect for human and civil rights in our country and throughout the world.” They were also united, as Benda carefully phrased it, by “a very dim view of the present political system and how it works.”
The Chartists, as they were called, intended to hold the Czechoslovakian government accountable to its own laws and the international agreements it had signed, including the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which guarantees human rights and freedoms, and the 1966 United Nations covenants on political, civil, economic, and cultural rights. They wanted their basic human rights, including the right to live and speak honestly and with dignity.
Benda described Charter 77 as “a deliberately naive” statement of principles and used his essay to lay out some of the pragmatic problems that would follow from it. At their core was the inherent weakness of any widely agreed-upon moral grounds for such divergent, oppositional parties.
To speak in common, as they managed to do in Charter 77, they had to use broad moral arguments about dignity and freedom that would mean very little when it came time for action. But to succeed, they needed clear paths of action that would inspire and mobilize each of them and other citizens to take action in their daily lives.
“The Parallel Polis” sketched a possible answer. Benda proposed that “we join forces in creating, slowly but surely, parallel structures that are capable, to a limited degree at least, of supplementing the generally beneficial and necessary functions that are missing in existing structures.”
Action was necessary for the abstraction to hold. “The Parallel Polis” described seven specific arenas in which individual parallel structures already existed (or needed to be built), including law, culture, education and science, information networks, the economy, and foreign policy.
In theory, these would be numerous, widely varying structures, some closely aligned with the Charter and others autonomous. All together they would constitute the parallel polis.
By signing the document, Chartists put themselves in grave peril. A campaign of harassment and arrest was launched against them, until the government realized that, instead of turning them into a cause célèbre, it would be more effective to just isolate them, or, as Benda put it, “limit itself to acts of strangulation in the dark.”
While the secret police continued to harass the Chartists, which meant arrest and several years in jail for Benda, Václav Havel, and others, the regime’s attempt to isolate them did not stop, nor even slow, a huge increase in the number of parallel structures in the years between 1977 and 1989.
Charter 77 and Benda’s writing circulated widely, reaching, among many others, H. Gordon Skilling, a Canadian political scientist whose focus was Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe. A lifelong student of Czech culture, Skilling began supporting the dissidents in many ways, for instance, by smuggling Western newspapers, journals, and books into the country for them. In 1987 and 1988, he co-edited Civic Freedom in Central Europe, Voices from Czechoslovakia, and made the full text of “The Parallel Polis” its main focus. Skilling wrote:
The concept of a parallel society often had a mythical or romantic aspect which seemed to relate more to the future than to present realities, but it sustained people in the belief that their actions were worthwhile and might eventually exert an impact on the relations between state and society. The explosion of independent activities in the 1980s was a continuation and culmination of these tendencies and seemed to open the way…to a fundamental transformation of state-society relations and perhaps the establishment of a truly “civil society.”
Václav Havel, writing in the same volume, described “these informal, non-bureaucratic, dynamic and open communities [comprising the parallel polis]” as “a sort of embryonic prototype or symbolic micro-model of future political structures.” Benda added, also in Skilling’s book, that, “even my most audacious expectations have been considerably surpassed.…It is no longer necessary to show that the parallel polis is possible.” It existed.
***
As Benda had prescribed in 1977, the movement grew quietly and slowly. After the government course-corrected and restricted its response to the Chartists through, as Benda put it, “acts of strangulation in the dark,” the number of parallel projects—that is, all the myriad efforts to act together, separate from official culture—grew in their own kind of darkness. Writer Monika Richter recalls her Czech émigré parents telling her, “the regime didn’t want to draw attention to an initiative that challenged its legitimacy and could spur protest.”
Passive obedience was common—or as Flagg Taylor wrote, “a sort of resigned cynicism”—in exchange for the relative peace and quiet in which parallel projects could spark and grow without notice. A Czech friend of mine, born and raised in Prague, had only dim memories of the Chartists. In a recent conversation, though, she told me she agreed with Timothy Snyder, in On Tyranny, that an act like brewing beer–so important to the Czechs, she added–could be understood as a way to contribute to a civil society.
This helped me recognize how parallel structures could grow in unnoticed, small-scale, day-to-day work, things we mostly think of as non-political, which could then also give citizens a sense of independence, freedom, and agency in their daily lives. When the powers-that-be focus only on their own, largely-ignored “official narrative,” countless changes can take place in the wider margins that then fall outside the scope of their story. Much ground can be gained.
To “defend the gains that an independent community had wrested from the powers that be,” said Martin Palous (who, like Benda, was a Chartist, scientist, philosopher, samizdatwriter, and programmer), we must “[create] all kinds of independent parallel structures—that is, structures unmanipulated by totalitarian power: parallel information networks, cultural and educational institutions, parallel foreign contacts.”
Like Palous, Benda believed that the mission of the polis was to encourage as many parallel structures as possible, as a way to make up for the inevitable losses. For Benda all tactical tasks, all “small-scale work” involved in creating the parallel polis was “connected with the renewal of the national community in the widest sense of the word.”
In concrete terms this meant taking over for the use of the parallel polis every space that state power had temporarily abandoned. “The mission of the parallel polis is constantly to conquer new territory, to make its parallelness constantly more substantial and more present.”
***
No matter where it’s built, the parallel polis takes time and tenacity. Before they even got to the Arcata City Council hearings in 1997, the Native tribes in northern California were not only building their own health centre in the woods but had begun quietly to build relationships with the white community.
Culture bearers and white allies had been slowly opening doors and lowering barriers through relatively modest efforts—an annual exhibition of contemporary Native art at a community-based arts centre, tribal participation in the local community foundation, an “apology and reconciliation conference” hosted by a consortium of local churches, and more.
The construction and development of the Potawot Health Village, which opened in 2001, offered additional opportunities for collaboration. Communication and trust grew and spread eight miles down the bay to Eureka, where in 2018 the City Council peacefully transferred—or “returned”—a 200-acre island to the Wiyot Tribe without rancour, lawsuits, or financial gain, the first such act in the U.S.
The island, Tuluwat, is sacred land to the Wiyot who for centuries have considered it the centre of the world. Tuluwat was also the site of the white settlers’ greatest atrocity against the Wiyot, the massacre of 1860; and now, without force or violence, it had been reclaimed.
To make this kind of progress, Peter Pennekamp observed, they had to change their relationships with each other. American Indian people did the internal work that prepared them for this encounter with white society and gave them the ability to share their history and culture. Internal reckoning and strength helped them endure their 150-year experience of brutal attack, near annihilation, racism, and fear while also guiding a white community to see what they hadn’t seen or recognized before.
Changing relationships also required white policymakers to reckon with what their ancestors had done and what they themselves might be doing in the region where they lived. They had to understand what the region meant to Native people and had to change what they had come to believe about their own identity, history, and place on the land over the last 150 years.
As they developed and built the Potawot Health Village, the Native “parallel polis” began weaving in with the official governmental structure. Ever since, in most practical matters, they’ve settled down alongside each other, connected through the relationships of trust and cooperation that they’ve built together.
But Pennekamp adds a warning: The work of building relationships in the Humboldt Bay area is unfinished. Old tensions remain and new differences and conflicts will arise. This work has no easy end.
Update from history: the picture at the top is taken from publicity around this Bratislava, Slovakia crypto-start-up, titled Paralelní Polis (an “institute of Cryptoanarchy”). Here’s a profile in Undiscovered Prague, and a 2018 Interview with the founder here.