Sun 21 Apr 2019
04.00 EDT
Up until the collapse of
Yugoslavia in 1991, foreigners were not allowed to visit the beautiful
Dalmatian island of Vis, then home to a major naval base. Two years ago it was
the location for Mamma
Mia!
Here We Go Again, doubling as the fictional Greek island of Kalokairi.
One way of looking at the
transformation from military redoubt to Hollywood idyll is as a triumph of
freedom of movement over draconian restrictions. But that’s not how the
Croatian philosopher Srećko Horvat sees the resulting media attention, rising
real estate prices and what he calls the “tourist occupation” of Vis, where he
now lives, when he’s not travelling and organising.
“Where once there was a
sustainable local community,” he writes in his new book, Poetry from the
Future, “there are weekending easyJet tourists; where fishermen’s boats once
rode at anchor, now luxury yachts are moored.”
You probably haven’t heard of
Horvat, though you will have heard of plenty of people who have. He’s friends
with the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis,
with whom he set up the Democracy
in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25). He was a regular visitor to Julian
Assange, before he was extracted
from the Ecuadorian embassy. He’s also in close contact with Assange’s
friend, the former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson.
He is a staunch friend
of Slavoj Žižek, the maverick
Slovenian celebrity academic (they co-wrote a book in 2013 entitled What
Does Europe Want?), as well as being on good terms with one of Žižek’s most
vituperative critics, the renowned American academic Noam Chomsky. He
also hangs out with the celebrated Mexican film-maker Alfonso Cuarón.
But at 36, Horvat is far from
being some kind of right-on hanger-on. In fact he’s one of the busiest leftwing
political activists in Europe. Aside from DiEM25, which campaigns to reform the
EU into a “realm of shared prosperity, peace and solidarity”, and for whom he’s
standing in the European elections, he is a founder of the Subversive festival, an annual jamboree in
Zagreb of radical thought that has featured the likes of Oliver Stone and
Antonio Negri, he set up the Philosophical theatre in the
same city, whose contributors have included Adam Curtis, Vanessa Redgrave
and Thomas
Piketty. And he has been involved in everything from Occupy Wall Street to
the World Social Forum and protests about the 2017 G20 Hamburg summit.
Yet in leftist circles in the
UK Horvat remains unknown. When I mentioned his name to several leading young
British anticapitalists, I received blank expressions. His publishers are
hoping that will change with the publication of his new book, Poetry from the
Future: Why a Global Liberation Movement Is Our Civilisation’s Last Chance.
Despite the apocalyptic
subtitle, the book is a series of discursive essays in the continental
tradition: all ideas, epigrams and lyrical flourishes. Unafraid to
mention Mamma Mia! and The X-Files along with erudite
references to Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault, Horvat is the kind of
free-ranging thinker who reminds you of Sartre’s observation on Nietzsche: “A
poet who had the bad luck to be mistaken for a philosopher.”
All the same, tourist
occupation? Isn’t that a little melodramatic in relation to an island that was
literally occupied, and by Italian fascists, in the second world war?
And then there’s the tone of
mournful despair. “Today,” he writes, “we are living in a long winter of
melancholy, not only in Europe but across
the world.” Or this: “The past is forgotten, and the future is without hope.
Dystopia has become a reality.”
What’s the good news?
As my bus pulled into Komiža,
the more remote of Vis’s two coastal villages, I wondered if I was going to be
meeting some gloomily earnest revolutionary, bristling with disgust for western
decadence and aching with the misery of it all. But the moment I was greeted by
Horvat’s beaming countenance, I was not just disarmed, but practically ready to
take up arms by his side.
A passionate yet playful
character with a patchy beard and high forehead that seems to forewarn of his
formidable intellect, he bears a sparkling-eyed resemblance to a young Billy
Crystal – if you can imagine the American comedian mastering the vocabulary of
critical theory.
Horvat may lack Žižek’s gift
for comic provocation or Varoufakis’s charismatic air of danger, but in person
he more than makes up for it with an instantly infectious warmth and unaffected
enthusiasm. As he leads me to the hotel he recommended I stay in, he sings its
proletarian praises.
The Bisevo, he tells me, is an
unreconstructed socialist-era hotel that represents a slice of the former
Yugoslavia he fears has almost disappeared.
“This is the kind of place
that all workers could come to each year for a holiday by the sea,” he says,
ushering me into the large crepuscular reception.
The near-empty building, with
its long silent corridors, feels not just out of season, but out of time – a
strange throwback to the dream of universal provision, when the concept of
service culture was all but a crime of bourgeois deviationism. It may lack a
few mod cons, but it’s clean and quiet and yards from the gently lapping sea.
I drop my bag off and Horvat
whisks me away to his friend’s restaurant where we discuss how he came to adopt
and develop his ideas. His book is a rallying cry for resistance to the
rapacious forces of capitalism, an emotive argument against the complacent
acceptance of “Tina” – the idea that “there is no alternative”.
He takes as his inspiration
the Partisans, the Yugoslav resistance fighters who made their base on Vis
during the war and ousted the Italian forces.
“What the period of fascist
occupation of Vis shows,” he says, “is that resistance can acquire many forms
and even a small number of determined people on a remote island can defeat a
numerically and technologically superior army.”
Their achievements were indeed
impressive, gaining the respect of British military officers and ultimately
Winston Churchill. But Marshal Tito, the head of the Partisans, was to preside
for decades over the authoritarian and increasingly sclerotic communist regime
that ruled Yugoslavia until its demise.
Horvat’s father was an
opponent of that regime, a liberal who sought asylum in Germany with his family
shortly after Horvat was born. The family didn’t return until Horvat was eight,
when the Yugoslav civil war started in 1991. In Germany he had been perceived
as a Yugoslav; back in Croatia he
was made to feel like a German. Because he was an outsider he turned to books,
reading everything he could get his hands on. At that time, the new nationalist
Croatian regime was busy getting rid of any books it deemed connected to
Marxism, which included any books connected to Russia.
“Like Dostoevsky,” he says,
shaking his head. “It’s a big scandal but I have most of these books at home,
because I saved them.”
Yet given that his father was
a dissident, and had only returned because communism had come to an ignominious
end, why was Horvat drawn to the Marxist end of the political spectrum, from
which communist Yugoslavia had emerged?
“In the 90s,” he says between
sips of beer, “it was either nationalism or this dream of the end of history,
in the sense that capitalism will solve all our problems and finally we can buy
all this stuff we couldn’t buy with communism. Those were the two
alternatives.”
He rejected both and found an
outlet for his disaffection in hardcore punk music, travelling with his band around
the different states of the former Yugoslavia, where he met like-minded
teenagers. This anarchic scene spawned a lively fanzine culture, which took to
publishing renowned revolutionaries.
“I translated Kropotkin at 16,”
Horvat says, a boast that I’m confident Sid Vicious was never able to make.
Of course, it’s all very well
denouncing the system when you’re a teenager, and it’s fine to celebrate the
courage and commitment of the Partisans, but isn’t the great lesson of
socialist revolutions that they start out full of heroism and righteous
conviction and descend into state repression and paranoid social control?
Horvat was just six when the
Berlin Wall came down. It’s a moment in history to him rather than a memory of
long-awaited freedom. He’s from a generation for whom opposition to capitalism,
and even celebration of communist revolutionaries (Lenin and Che Guevara both
receive favourable mention in his books), has little to do with the real-world
communist regimes that immiserated hundreds of millions across the globe.
He duly distances his ideas
from such regimes in Poetry from the Future, and insists he’s “not a
nostalgic for Yugoslavia”. But we decide to save the nitty gritty of politics
to the following day. In the meantime Horvat wants to take me to ŽŽ, his friend
Čedo’s bar, or konoba, which is tucked down a narrow side lane leading to
the sea. Horvat describes it as a “cross between an atelier and a social
centre”, with room for about 10 people to sit. Apparently it’s packed with
tourists in summer.
Now in the off-season there
are just a few old hands – the regulars are stonemasons, fisherman, painters –
drinking rakia, the local hard liquor of choice, rolling joints, sharing jokes
and lamenting the direction of the world. In common with many millennial
revolutionaries, central to Horvat’s political outlook is the belief that
climate change is humanity’s greatest existential threat since the last ice
age.
It’s a jolly scene, full of
high spirits and low expectations. The talk, a little incongruously, is of
rising sea levels, growing nationalism and racism, like a shebeen for
Corbynistas, though more entertaining than that sounds.
Despite a steady flow of
drinks and snacks, no money is exchanged that I can see, and my offers to
contribute are met with implacable dismissals. Later I ask Horvat how it works.
“Most of it functions as exchange,” he says, “on the principles of –
using Lyotard’s
term – libidinal economy. Or the micro-politics of desire.”
I’m not sure what that means
but if this is what a post-capitalist economy looks like, I can’t complain.
At the end of the night, I
stumble back to the Bisevo, ready to volunteer for the cause, even if I can’t
remember what it is.
The following day Horvat is
keen to show me the island’s sights. There’s Tito’s cave, in which the Partisan
hero was said to have hidden – Evelyn Waugh, on an army mission, actually flew
out to meet him. There’s also an abandoned network of military bunkers and
tunnels, and a secret submarine shelter. Before we see these delights we sit
down for an interview.
I’m intrigued at how and why
the shadow of 20th-century communism seems to leave so little mark on the
anticapitalists of today, especially those living in former communist
countries. For despite his reservations about Yugoslavia, Horvat doesn’t want
its strengths to be forgotten. He speaks glowingly of a recent exhibition at
MoMA in New York entitled Toward a Concrete Utopia,
“which showed that Yugoslavia had a modernisation project that was also
connected to arts, culture, architecture”. And, he continues, Yugoslavia “had
economic democracy, which came immediately after the break with Stalin [in 1948
Tito established independence from Moscow]. It was called self-management. Of
course it had many problems. The biggest problem was that in practice it didn’t
really function.”
He speaks in such an ecstatic
rush of eloquent English that sometimes it’s hard to work out whether or not
he’s making a joke. But he’s serious when he suggests that the standard of
living enjoyed by Yugoslavs was higher than that of Croatians today. Statistics
don’t bear this out, but Horvat bases his comparison on the experiences of his
family and friends.
“Just the ability to go to the
sea for vacation. In Yugoslav times almost everyone had this as a fundamental
right. This architecture,” he says, gesturing to the Bisevo behind us. “Hotels
were built for workers – in that sense the living standard was higher. There
was more equality of course but today healthcare and higher education are
gradually being privatised and there is huge emigration from Croatia. There are
no shipyards any more. Once we had the strongest shipyards in Europe.”
What Croatia does have is
tourism, which Horvat says accounts for a higher percentage of its GDP (18%)
than any other European nation. Any economy that is reliant on such a large
foreign presence will inevitably breed resentments. But as much as Horvat wants
to preserve the livelihoods and lifestyles that have been subordinated to the
tourist industry, he is also a fierce proponent of an open borders policy.
He rightly attacks the
xenophobia that is growing in Hungary, Poland, Austria and Italy – not to
mention elsewhere – and believes Europe must prepare for hundreds of millions
of refugees. But how can a culture like Vis hope to contend with potentially
vast numbers of migrants if its culture is so vulnerable to a much smaller
number of tourists?
“First,” he says, “I’m not a naive leftist who
advocates open borders and what happens happens. The policy of letting in
people who are fleeing wars or, in the future, climate change is the only
correct policy – in the way Germany welcomed me when we came from Yugoslavia.
But that’s not enough. We are advocating a Green New Deal that’s connected to
migration policy.”
This deal amounts to a massive
investment in infrastructure which, he says, will guarantee jobs and therefore
remove the perceived threat of migrants undercutting native workers.
Perhaps, I say, but it’s not
just an economic question. There seems to be a growing anxiety about identity
right across the political spectrum. In his book he talks about the importance
of “shared values”. That’s the kind of language, employed with a different
meaning, that’s used by his political opponents to describe what makes up
people’s collective identities. Right or wrong, it’s the thing that many people
fear losing.
“They’re not losing their
identities because of migration but because of global capitalism. And this
migration is also happening because of global capitalism,” he says.
Horvat rejects categories like
communist or Marxist as self-descriptions, but he can certainly sound like one
when he wants.
“The only identity that’s
worth fighting for,” he concludes, “is one that comes out of the struggle and
class solidarity.”
Interestingly, he barely
touches on identity politics in his book. The whole fashionable discourse of
intersectionality doesn’t get a mention. Perhaps it’s something to do with
coming from a country that collapsed and reverted to religious identities –
Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim – that were largely buried for half a century.
“I’m very critical of so-called
cultural Marxism and identity politics,” he says. “I don’t think the solution
to today’s problems is just to advocate more of your identity whether you are
gay or vegetarian or whatever. I think we need something much deeper. The Greek
worker and German worker have to realise they’re in the same shit even if the
German worker has a better salary and lives in a more functional country.”
Is it better, I ask
hypothetically, to have greater equality but a lower standard of living or to
raise the base standard of living even if there are greater inequalities? He
gives a long, thoughtful reply that doesn’t answer my question, finishing with
an attack on simple redistribution: “Rutger Bregman and Thomas Piketty
constantly talk about taxation, taxation as if the true solution of inequality
lies in taking more from the rich and redistributing it. I think we have to
radically transform society so that it would be impossible that Warren Buffett
or Jeff Bezos can be the richest person in the world. I think taxation is not
enough.”
At the time of my visit,
Assange is still in the Ecuadoran embassy, where Horvat believes he is
effectively held “prisoner”. I ask him what he thinks about the WikiLeaks
founder, particularly in the light of the allegations, currently dropped or
suspended, of rape in Sweden, his links with people like Nigel Farage and his
preference for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.
“Julian is my friend,” he
says. “We often agree, and we often disagree. One of our disagreements was
Brexit. He advocated the Leave option while me and Yanis campaigned for the
Remain option. But I really think there is a character assassination going on.”
He is sympathetic to Assange’s
claim that the Swedish investigation was part of an attempt to frame him so
that he could be extradited to America. But if the allegations haven’t been put
to legal test (because Assange avoided going to Sweden), what of the
suggestion, explicit in Andrew O’Hagan’s long LRB profile, that Assange
had a “sleazy” attitude towards women.
“I never experienced that. And
most of the collaborators at WikiLeaks were women. I know he’s a controversial,
divisive figure. But many important historical figures are like that. WikiLeaks
should be appreciated.”
A couple of weeks later, in
London, with Assange now in custody, and many MPs suggesting that he should be
extradited to Sweden to face the original allegations, I go back to Horvat and
ask him where he now stands.
“Whether you like him or not,”
he replies, “we should be opposed to his extradition to the US, on the basis of
protecting the freedom of the press. And if he is extradited to Sweden, Sweden
should guarantee he won’t be extradited to the US. I’ve been to the embassy
plenty of times and can assure you that all these stories about his hygiene, or
his cat spying, are lies constructed in order to further discredit someone who
has suffered enough. The UK shouldn’t be a puppet in the hands of Trump but a
sovereign state protecting whistleblowers and publishers, and the basis of
liberal democracy.”
Back in Vis, it’s time to go
on our tour. We meet Horvat’s girlfriend, Saša, and her friend Jelena, who are
both originally from Novi Sad in Serbia. Horvat met Sasa at a political
festival. She works for an NGO and, although she seems to share his ideological
world view, she’s clearly an independent spirit.
Horvat’s previous book was
called The Radicality of Love, in which, paraphrasing the French far-left
philosopher Alain
Badiou, he wrote: “Love is communism for two. But love is as difficult as
communism, and can often end up as tragic as communism. Like revolution, true
love is the creation of a new world.”
I can’t say if Srećko and Saša
amount to communism for two. But they seem quite happy together.
Tito’s cave is rather
underwhelming. It is just a small cave high in the mountains with an
inconspicuous commemorative plaque. But Horvat is energised by the thought of
resistance fighters hiding up here from the planes overhead, as though he can
visualise their plight. We drive on to see the submarine base, a huge hole in
the cliff that drops into the sea. I say that it looks like something from a
James Bond film.
“Yes!” he exclaims
indignantly. “We’re not a Mamma Mia! island! We’re a James Bond
island!”
Later that night, Horvat
attempts to persuade me to stay on in Vis. I want to, despite work commitments,
because it’s a truly lovely place. Indeed, it’s such a paradise that I find it
hard to imagine how Horvat can remember that the world is such a nightmare.
“I think it’s paradise but I’m
nostalgic for things that will disappear,” he says. “I see things that are
already disappearing and changing. The local population feels it even better
than me. We need to be mad prophets who might turn out wrong. We need to shock
the people with the dystopian facts. No sea fish, only plastics, no air.”
In many respects, of course,
he’s not wrong. We do need to be aware of the dangers of climate change and
environmental despoliation. And the inequalities he rails against are real and
growing and require urgent attention. But Horvat writes in revolutionary terms
and revolutions have a habit of quickly betraying their ideals. He seems to me
the most gentle and benign of characters, the kind of person who would probably
not thrive in the ruthless power struggles of dramatic sociopolitical upheaval.
He confides that he’s
ambivalent about the prospect of becoming an MEP. A big part of him just wants
to stay on Vis and write. But while I’m there, his phone keeps ringing – often
it’s Varoufakis – and he’s dragged into the tiresome business of political
management and internal conflict resolution.
Back in London, I write to ask
him if he thinks the radical change he’s calling for can take place without the
use or threat of large-scale violence.
“I believe that the current
system,” he replies, “with its never-ending war against the majority of people,
other species and nature, is already more violent than any revolution. That
said, I don’t like violence of any sort. But a revolution is not a dinner party
or writing an essay. Although it often starts like that.”
I disagree, because
revolutions can be and certainly have been more violent than the current
system, for all its injustices. But at the same time, Srećko Horvat is the kind
of guy you’d never be disappointed to see at a dinner party.
• Poetry from the Future by
Srećko Horvat is published by Penguin (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or
call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders
min p&p of £1.99
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