Casleton's Monthly: Book Review, "Free"
News & Politics
Welcome to a week-late edition of Casleton’s Monthly — coming to your inbox from Berlin, Germany. This month I review Lea Ypi’s recent memoir “Free: Coming of Age at the End of History.” As always, you can find past newsletters here.
In the news:
First, a brief but informative discussion of the recent killing of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. All the evidence points to murder by an Israeli sniper. This should be particularly troubling to the US, given that Abu Akleh was not only a journalist but a US citizen. (On the weak response of the Biden administration, see this Atlantic article.)
Second, an article on the ongoing civil war in Tigray. As the article points out, around 500,000 people have died in this region of Ethiopia, yet the conflict receives just a sliver of the attention paid to Ukraine, where far fewer civilians have died. A quote from the article: “‘I don’t know if the world really gives equal attention to Black and white lives,’ WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, himself an ethnic Tigrayan based in Geneva, said at a press conference given on April 13.”
Third, an alarming report on the resurgent white supremacist movement in Idaho. The Republican Party has come to maintain a symbiotic relationship with this movement in Idaho, so much so that the party and the movement are in some cases indistinguishable. Idaho’s current lieutenant governor, as the report details, embraces the ideals of the movement while denying any explicit association.
Review Essay: “Free: Coming of Age at the End of History”
At the end of her memoir — “Free” — Lea Ypi recounts the conversation in which she revealed to her father she would study philosophy at university. Her father, skeptical and steeped in Marxist thought, quoted to her Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point is to change it.” This is her father’s tongue-in-cheek attempt to dissuade her from studying philosophy, a profession ostensibly less useful than becoming a doctor or a lawyer.
But Ypi herself was keen enough to discern the meaning of Marx’s Eleventh Thesis: that philosophy should not content itself with mere understanding, but always aim also at action. Philosophy, done properly, should be oriented toward changing the world.
Sometimes, however, philosophy brings unwanted consequences. The history of Marxist thought, as passed down by Lenin and Stalin, reveals the dangers of philosophical dogma when wielded by powerful state functionaries. Ypi’s memoir of growing up in Albania illustrates this very clearly. Albania was one of the most strict, and hence isolated, adherents to unreformed Marxist-Lenninism in the decades following the second world war.
Ypi helps orient her reader by providing at snapshot of the history of Albania during this period:
“In the late forties we split with Yugoslavia when the latter broke with Stalin. In the sixties, when Khrushchev dishonored Stalin’s legacy and accused us of “leftist nationalist deviationism,” we interrupted diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. In the late seventies, we abandoned our alliance with China when the latter decided to become rich and betrayed the Cultural Revolution.”
Born in 1979, Ypi came of age in a period during which her country was a pariah state. Like all Albanian children, Ypi grew up on a steady diet of Marxist dogma, taught by her school teachers that only Albania’s version of socialism provided political freedom. With the innocence of a child — or, more accurately, a child thoroughly deceived — Ypi would study the anti-fascist resistance of her country and patiently explain to her classmates that she was in no way related to the former prime minister, also named Ypi, who acted as a client ruler under Italian-Fascist occupation.
It thus came to her as a shock to discover that this prime minister was, in fact, her great-grandfather — a fact that had been concealed from her by her parents. This revelation is one of many that symbolize both Ypi’s transition to adulthood and Albania’s transition to post-communism. While Ypi’s story is fascinating precisely because her coming-of-age coincided with this epochal break in her country’s history, she is somewhat artless in how she brings her reader into the know about the lies she was told in her childhood. The reader is a bit confused throughout the opening chapters by mysterious conversations between Ypi’s parents and obscure allusions to historical events, which are all explained in just a couple pages at the end of Part 1 of the book. One assumes that Ypi was trying to keep the reader in ignorance just as she was kept in ignorance throughout her childhood, but the poor execution simply leaves the reader unsure, at times, whether they have misunderstood something about Albanian history.
Albania’s departure from communism, like a person’s departure from childhood, is the story of a long period of uncertainty. Albania officially became a plural-party democracy in December of 1990, but it would enter a state of civil war in 1997. The history of the civil war is inextricable from the history of the opening up of the Albanian economy. Ypi recounts her parents’ decision to invest a portion of their savings in new-fangled investment companies – which turned out to be pyramid schemes. When these schemes collapsed, huge amounts of Albanian families’ wealth evaporated overnight. The following social unrest devolved into the civil war, only quelled when the UN authorized a peacekeeping force to intervene.
Albania’s experience with pyramid schemes typifies the period of economic liberalization (or, neo-liberalization) introduced in former communist countries. The so-called ‘shock therapy’ economics applied in Eastern Europe (and Latin America) was the brutal reality behind a slew of capitalist buzzwords: “individual initiative”, “property”, and “investor confidence.” The central theme of Ypi’s book — freedom — is highlighted by the conflict between old socialist claims to freedom for workers, on the one hand, and capitalist claims of freedom for private enterprise and multi-party democracy, on the other.
Ypi recalls US Secretary of State James Baker’s visit to Albania in 1991, during which he declared, to a crowd of hundreds of thousands, that “freedom works.” Of course, Baker, along with most American freedom-exporters, did not consider the tension between democratic freedoms and the freedom of a largely unregulated economy. The economic chaos following communism depended on a lack of democratic control of the economy, and, as Albania well illustrates, this resulted in widespread social injustice and social unrest.
The resulting impression left by Ypi’s account of Albania’s transformation in the 90s is a sense of longing for the values espoused by socialism that were never satisfied by the Albanian state – values that economic liberalization also largely failed to promote. Principally, this is the value of human freedom, to which both socialists and (economic) liberals lay claim. Curiously absent from this story, however, is the question of equality. This absence is especially strange given the emphasis on equality in the socialist tradition and, in addition, the amount of recent work in political theory and economics on inequality.
Yet, this is not a work of political philosophy – it is a memoir. Ypi gives vivid color to life in one of the world’s most hard-boiled state socialist regimes. In her Epilogue, she claims that one of her goals was to undermine facile claims, made by her West-European colleagues, that the socialism of Eastern Europe was an aberration. For Ypi, herself a socialist, advocates of human freedom cannot be allowed to forget how easily this ideal can be corrupted by over-zealous Party officials claiming to liberate their subjects from capitalist oppressors.