Lea Ypi’s superbly nuanced and ironically titled memoir.
Growing up in the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania, Lea Ypi’s early lessons in the differences between socialism and capitalism teach her that socialism is based on principles of sufficiency, reciprocity and equality whilst capitalism is based on principles of excess, selfishness and inequality. Delivered as a window on the past, looking into a socialist European childhood, these lessons are surely also potential windows to the future. For now, the vast majority of the world’s population is yoked to unethical and unsustainable systems of governance, production and consumption rooted in excess, selfishness and inequality. Ethical and sustainable ways of securing our future survival on planet Earth will have to be based instead on sufficiency, reciprocity and equality. Borrowing from one of Ypi’s most poignant images which recurs through a number of her recollections, does humanity need more of less Coca-Cola cans? Do we need more or less cans of Coca-Cola? Once you encounter the subtle distinction Ypi is making here, you will never look at consumerism in quite the same way again.
It is also obvious that, growing up in the former Eastern Bloc, Ypi passed through a system of education based on the propositions and transactions involved in teaching and learning the curriculum content required to meet the society’s needs and to foster the individual’s talents, rather than the system now prevailing in the West which is based on vague postmodern, neoliberal notions of facilitation and self-discovery. Graduating from primary school in the 1980s, Ypi’s peers knew more about European literature, mathematics and science than most young adults graduating from secondary school today in the West where the replacement of teaching and learning with facilitation and self-discovery has led to widespread mistrust of teachers and schools and an undervaluing of education as a personal and social good.
On the other hand, contemporary Western education has, of course, served its purpose of maintaining a high level of ignorance and apathy in so-called democratic societies very effectively. What’s really been facilitated is a decline in the autonomy of the individual, in respect for otherwise legitimate authority, and in our capacity for solidarity, compassion and empathy. At the individual level we can see the prevailing default states of mind of anger and alienation. To the usual list of negative contemporary social consequences – Brexit, the Trump presidency and the rise of the authoritarian right in so-called liberal democracies – we can also add the failure of the 2023 referendum to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to parliament. A meaner, more shamefully revealing result than the sixty percent who voted ‘No’ cannot be imagined.
Ypi expends considerable effort on describing and explaining her childhood as she lived and experienced it. From her years in primary school she was, in fact, a model new citizen of her socialist society, filled with pride at her country’s repudiation of capitalism and imperialism, admiration for the leader and loyalty towards the Party and its ideology. Indeed, as a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics she now tells her students that socialism, ‘is above all a theory of human freedom, of how to think about progress in history, of how we adapt to circumstances, but also try to rise above them.’ It would be very easy to dismiss or misread these elements of her memoir as the delusions of a child brainwashed by the ideology of a one-party dictatorship, but the reach and sweep of Ypi’s narrative is deeper and richer than that. It is not her intention to do a hatchet job on the failed social experiments of socialism in Eastern Europe in the second-half of the twentieth century, so much as to try to understand the kind of social context they created and to consider the potential benefits alongside the disadvantages. The disadvantages were severe in terms of shortages of food, electricity and consumer goods and the persecution, imprisonment and torture of dissidents and those with so-called enemy biographies. An obvious benefit was the centrality of education in children’s lives to meet their potential and the needs of their country. Another, is the capacity for analytical and critical thinking encouraged by that socialist education as evidenced in every paragraph of Ypi’s book.
As a school student, Ypi reminds me very much of two Bulgarian boys I taught in the senior literature stream at a large private secondary school in Istanbul in the early 1990s. When I expressed a mixture of surprise and admiration for the clarity of their analytical thinking one of them responded with the word, ‘Diamat.’ My lack of understanding drew a clarification from his friend Bülent. ‘Ustaz, in Bulgaria we were taught dialectical materialism as part of our curriculum.’ Ypi’s description of the prostitution of so many Albanian girls and women reminds me of the waves of Russian women sweeping across Turkey in the early ’90s who were forced to initiate themselves into free market capitalism through the sex trade. Distressed at the potential for social dislocation and family breakdown, Turkish wives in towns and cities published and broadcast appeals to these foreigners to not seduce their husbands. The stories collected by Svetlana Alexievich of the strength, sacrifice and suffering of those Russian women’s mothers and grandmothers during the Second World War in her extraordinary The Unwomanly Face of War, might be a suitable restorative. In either of our apartments in Istanbul, my friend Bill and I would occasionally find ourselves lamenting the collapse of the Soviet Union, usually towards the bottom of the second glass of Yeni Raki.
Was there poverty, corruption and coercion in the country of Ypi’s birth and childhood? Yes, there was, but to that I would raise a further question: Why are we so much more capable of seeing these in other people’s ways of life and systems of governance than in our own? We all know that the answer is definitely not that poverty, corruption and coercion don’t exist in our own back yard. Ypi is by no means an apologist for the atrocities and inadequacies of the one-party socialist states that have collapsed since the breaching of the Berlin Wall but she is always a keen analytical and critical observer of the world as it changes around her.
What did totalitarian socialism give its people? Isolation from pretty much the rest of the world. In the case of her own family whose ‘biography’ meant that even she with her patriotism, loyalty and solidarity could never be on the right side of society, it was ‘messy, bloody and of the past.’ However, what did democracy give the same people in its place? The deregulated, neoliberal marketplace gave the Albanian people opportunities to be exploited or to exploit themselves and each other in the capitalism of prostitution, pyramid schemes, and profiteering. It brought drug abuse, crime and violence, culminating in a civil war. When those former values of sufficiency, reciprocity and equality were swept away, so was any notion of neighbourhood, community, society or belonging. The so-called ‘structural reforms’ replacing them brought unemployment, social dislocation, disadvantage, precarity and alienation.
Ypi’s narrative is nowhere more poignant than in her evocation of her father, a parent who tries to protect his only child with a buffer composed of jokes, self-deprecation and loving nicknames such as Stuffed Pepper and Gavroche. Endlessly pliable and accommodating, he is very different from Lea’s mother who is determined for the family and the country to reap the benefits of the new democracy and capitalism, or his mother who is claiming back the family’s confiscated pre-socialist properties. Ypi’s recreation of family life is exquisitely nuanced, humorous and tragic in turn. Most amazing is her realisation as a teenager when the Socialist Republic is falling that she is the only member of her family who has ever been a committed socialist. Only once her elders are no longer afraid to speak openly, does she realise that their endlessly muffled conversations about various relatives graduating from different universities identified only with a single letter were actually code for family members being released from various prisons around the country, that she and her family were always going to be on the wrong side of history and the regime because of her grandparents’ status, politics and property ownership.
What stays with Ypi though is that critical intelligence informed by Marxist analysis. Through the story of her own life, her family, and the modern history of her country, Ypi is trying to understand how socialist societies that promised liberation and freedom became so authoritarian and unfree, whilst democratic societies remain so inegalitarian and, therefore, so oppressive. ‘Freedom is not sacrificed only when others tell us what to say, where to go, 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.’
english literature teacher 