Free, p.26
Free, page 26
Her tone was in striking contrast to her words. She spoke without enthusiasm, as if she was helping diagnose an illness rather than discussing options for the future. I decided to remain silent.
“I don’t understand,” my father said nervously. “They never studied any philosophy at school. Not even Marx. How am I going to ask people to lend me money for her to study? To study what? Phi-lo-so-phy. People will think we have lost our minds. What does she know about philosophy?” There was anger in his voice.
That night, we made a pact. They promised to let me study philosophy, and I promised to stay away from Marx. My father let me go. I left Albania and crossed the Adriatic. I waved goodbye to my father and my grandmother on the shore and travelled to Italy on a boat that sailed over thousands of drowned bodies, bodies that had once carried souls more hopeful than mine but who met fates less fortunate. I never returned.
EPILOGUE
EACH YEAR, I BEGIN my Marx courses at the London School of Economics by telling my students that many people think of socialism as a theory of material relations, class struggle, or economic justice but that, in reality, something more fundamental animates it. Socialism, I tell them, 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. 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 realize their potential but fails to change the structures that prevent everyone from flourishing is also oppressive. And yet, despite all the constraints, we never lose our inner freedom: the freedom to do what is right.
My father and my grandmother did not live to see what became of my studies. After quitting his career as an MP, my father was thrust from one private employer to another, each time blaming the dismissal on his poor English and, increasingly, his rudimentary computer skills. To facilitate his job searches, the family moved to a flat in the capital, close to the old Botanical Gardens, now one of the most polluted areas in the country. His asthma deteriorated. One summer evening, shortly after his sixtieth birthday, he had a violent asthma attack. He rushed to the window and opened it to breathe but was wrapped in a cloud of carbon monoxide and dust. The ambulance found him dead.
My mother was in Italy when it happened. My parents had reconciled, but she worked there seasonally as a carer or cleaner to help offset some of our new debts, while her siblings in Albania chased their old confiscated properties. Those efforts, which Nini had always deemed a “waste of time,” came to fruition a few months after my grandmother’s death, following that of my father. A large chunk of coastal land was sold to an Arab property developer, and our fortunes changed overnight.
I no longer needed to count my last pennies until the next scholarship instalment. I could enjoy meals out and drink late in bars, discussing politics with my new university friends. Many of those friends were self-declared Socialists—Western Socialists, that is. They spoke about Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Salvador Allende, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara as secular saints. It occurred to me that they were like my father in this respect: the only revolutionaries they considered worthy of admiration were the ones that had been murdered. These icons showed up on posters, T-shirts, and coffee cups, much like how photos of Enver Hoxha would show up in people’s living rooms when I was growing up. When I pointed this out, my friends wanted to know more about my country. But they did not think that my stories from the eighties were in any way significant to their political beliefs. Sometimes, my appropriating the label of Socialist to describe both my experiences and their commitments was considered a dangerous provocation. We used to go to a large open-air concert in Rome for 1 May, and I could not help but reminisce about the parades of my childhood on Workers’ Day. “What you had was not really socialism,” they would say, barely concealing their irritation.
MY STORIES ABOUT SOCIALISM in Albania and references to all the other Socialist countries against which our socialism had measured itself were, at best, tolerated as the embarrassing remarks of a foreigner still learning to integrate. The Soviet Union, China, the German Democratic Republic, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Cuba—there was nothing Socialist about them either. They were seen as the deserving losers of a historical battle that the real, authentic bearers of that title had yet to join. My friends’ socialism was clear, bright, and in the future. Mine was messy, bloody, and of the past.
And yet, the future they sought, one that Socialist states had once embodied, found inspiration in the same books, the same critiques of society, the same historical characters. But, to my surprise, they treated this as an unfortunate coincidence. Everything that went wrong on my side of the world could be explained by the cruelty of our leaders or the uniquely backward nature of our institutions. They believed there was little for them to learn. There was no risk of repeating the same mistakes, no reason to ponder what had been achieved, and why it had been destroyed. Their socialism was characterized by the triumph of freedom and justice; mine by the failure of these ideas to be realized. Their socialism would be brought about by the right people, with the right motives, under the right circumstances, with the right combination of theory and practice. There was only one thing to do about mine: forget it.
But I was reluctant to forget. It is not that I felt nostalgic. It is not that I romanticized my childhood. It is not that the concepts I had grown up with were so deeply rooted in me that it was impossible to disentangle myself. But if there was one lesson to take away from the history of my family, and of my country, it was that people never make history under circumstances they choose. It is easy to say, “What you had was not the real thing,” applying that to both socialism and liberalism, to any complex hybrid of ideas and reality. It releases us from the burden of responsibility. We are no longer complicit in moral tragedies created in the name of great ideas, and we don’t have to reflect, apologize, and learn.
“We are doing a reading group on Das Kapital,” a friend told me one day. “If you join it, you will learn about real socialism.” And so I did. When I read the opening pages of the preface, it felt a bit like hearing French: a foreign language I had been taught as a child but rarely practised. I remembered many of the keywords—capitalists, workers, landlords, value, profit—and they echoed inside my head in the voice and simplified formulations of my teacher Nora, adapted for schoolchildren. Individuals, Marx wrote in the opening pages, “are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class relations and class interests.” But, for me, behind every personification of an economic category, there was the flesh and blood of a real person. Behind the capitalist and the landlord, there were my great-grandfathers; behind the workers, there were the Gypsies who worked at the port; behind the peasants, the people with whom my grandmother was sent to work in the fields when my grandfather went to prison, and about whom she spoke condescendingly. It was impossible to finish reading and just move on.
My mother finds it difficult to understand why I teach and research Marx, why I write essays on the dictatorship of the proletariat. She sometimes reads my articles and finds them baffling. She has learned to weather awkward questions from relatives. Do I really believe these ideas are convincing? Or feasible? How is it possible? Mostly, she keeps her criticisms to herself. Only once did she draw attention to a cousin’s remark that my grandfather did not spend fifteen years locked up in prison so that I would leave Albania to defend socialism. We both laughed awkwardly, then paused and changed the topic. It left me feeling like someone who is involved in a murder, as if the mere association with the ideas of a system that destroyed so many lives in my family were enough to make me the person responsible for pulling the trigger. Deep down, I knew this was what she thought. I always wanted to clarify, but didn’t know where to start. I thought that it would take a book to answer.
This is that book. At first, it was going to be a philosophical book about the overlapping ideas of freedom in the liberal and Socialist traditions. But when I started writing, just like when I started reading Das Kapital, ideas turned into people—the people who made me who I am. They loved and fought each other; they had different conceptions of themselves, and of their obligations. They were, as Marx writes, the product of social relations for which they were not responsible, but they still tried to rise above them. They thought they’d succeeded. But when their aspirations became reality, their dreams turned into my disillusionment. We lived in the same place, but in different worlds. These worlds overlapped only briefly, and when they did, we saw things through different eyes. My family equated socialism with denial: the denial of who they wanted to be, of the right to make mistakes and learn from them, to explore the world on one’s own terms. I equated liberalism with broken promises, the destruction of solidarity, the right to inherit privilege, selfish enrichment, cultivating illusions while turning a blind eye to injustice.
In some ways, I have gone full circle. When you see a system change once, you start believing that it can change again. Fighting cynicism and political apathy turns into what some might call a moral duty; to me it is more of a debt that I feel I owe to all the people of the past who sacrificed everything because they were not apathetic, they were not cynical, they did not believe that things fall into place if you just let them take their course. If I do nothing, their efforts will have been wasted, their lives will have been meaningless.
My world is as far from freedom as the one my parents tried to escape. Both fall short of that ideal. But their failures took distinctive forms, and without being able to understand them, we will remain divided. I wrote my story to explain, to reconcile, and to continue the struggle.
Acknowledgements
THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN mostly from a closet in Berlin during the COVID-19 pandemic. It turned out to be the perfect location to hide from the children I was supposed to be home-schooling (my own) and to muse about my grandmother’s words: “When it’s difficult to see clearly into the future, you have to think about what you can learn from the past.” Thank you to my mother, Doli, and my brother, Lani, for being willing to revisit that past with me, for letting me share their stories in my words, and for always telling the truth.
Thank you to my editor, Casiana Ionita, for being the first person to ask if I ever thought about bringing my academic writing to a wider audience, and to my agent, Sarah Chalfant, for giving me the confidence to pursue a project that ended up being very different from how it was initially envisaged. Without their intelligence, questions, comments, patience and good humour at various stages, this book would not exist.
Thank you to Alane Mason at W. W. Norton and to Edward Kirke at Penguin for excellent editorial suggestions on the manuscript as a whole, and to the incredibly talented and passionate teams that turned the book into material reality: Sarah Chalfant, Emma Smith, and Rebecca Nagel at Wylie Agency; Casiana Ionita, Edward Kirke, Sarah Day, Richard Duguid, Thi Dinh, Ania Gordon, Olga Kominiek, Ingrid Matts, and Corina Romonti at Penguin Press; Alane Mason, Mo Crist, Bonnie Thompson, Beth Steidle, Jessica Murphy, and Sarahmay Wilkinson at W. W. Norton.
Thank you to Chris Armstrong, Rainer Forst, Bob Goodin, Stefan Gosepath, Chandran Kukathas, Tamara Jugov, Catherine Lu, Valentina Nicolini, Claus Offe, David Owen, Mario Reale, Paola Rodano, and David Runciman for excellent comments on early drafts of the book, and for their ongoing support and friendship.
Thank you to my friends from Albania, and from the “other” side of the Iron Curtain more generally, who shared their childhoods with me, helped me reconstruct events and impressions, and gave me praise and criticism in due proportion. I am especially grateful to Uran Ferizi and Shqiponja Telhaj (my unofficial editors!), and to Odeta Barbullushi, Migena Bregu, Eris Duro, Borana Lushaj, Xhoana Papakostandini, and the Secret Pioneer for excellent comments on the manuscript and for invaluable comparative perspectives both geographical and political. Thank you also to Joni Baboci, Tsveti Georgieva, Bledar Kurti, Anila Kadija, Viliem Kurtulaj, Gjyze Magrini, Roland Qafoku, Fatos Rosa, Adlej Pici, and Neritan Sejamini, for help with different aspects of the project, and for sending material from Tirana at short notice, even during the lockdowns.
Thank you to my wonderfully supportive colleagues and my brilliant students at the London School of Economics for many inspiring conversations on freedom, to all the members of the Normative Orders colloquium in Frankfurt for an excellent early discussion of my ideas for the book, and to the Leverhulme Trust and the Humboldt Foundation for funding the research leave that enabled me to write these pages.
Thank you to my family: Jonathan (another unofficial editor!), Arbien, Rubin, Hana, Doli, Lani, and Noana, for sharing all the torments and joys of this book, and for everything else.
My father, Zafo, and my grandmother, Nini, have been with me all along. Zafo would have found a joke to make at this point, probably about me claiming to be a Marxist while saying “thank you” so many times. Nini taught me how to live and how to think about living. I miss her every day. The book is dedicated to her memory.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR FREE BY LEA YPI
“Free is one of those very rare books that shows how history shapes people’s lives and their politics. Lea Ypi is such a brilliant, powerful writer that her story becomes your story.”
—Ivan Krastev, coauthor of The Light That Failed
“Written by one of Europe’s foremost left-wing thinkers, this is an unmissable book for anyone engaged in the politics of resistance.”
—Paul Mason, author of Postcapitalism
“This extraordinary coming-of-age story is like an Albanian Educated, but it is so much more than that.”
—David Runciman, author of How Democracy Ends
“A lyrical memoir, of deep and affecting power, of the sweet smell of humanity mingled with flesh, blood, and hope.”
—Philippe Sands, author of The Ratline
“Thought-provoking, deliciously funny, poignant, sharply observed, and beautifully written, this is a childhood memoir like very few others—a really marvelous book.”
—Noel Malcolm, author of Agents of Empire
“Remarkable and highly original. . . . Both an affecting coming-of-age story and a firsthand meditation on the politics of freedom.”
—Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller
FREE is a work of nonfiction. All names other than those of the author’s family
members have been changed. Some incidents have been reconstructed from memory
and/or condensed for clarity.
Copyright © 2021 by Lea Ypi
First American Edition 2022
First published in the UK under the title FREE: Coming of Age at the End of History
All rights reserved
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Production manager: Beth Steidle
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Ypi, Lea, 1979– author.
Title: Free : a child and a country at the end of history / Lea Ypi.
Description: First American edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, 2022.
| First published in UK with subtitle: coming of age at the end of history.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021033437 | ISBN 9780393867732 (hardcover) |
ISBN 9780393867749 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Ypi, Lea, 1979– —Childhood and youth. | Albania—History—
20th century. | Albania—Politics and government—20th century. | Albanians—
Biography. | Political scientists—Biography.
Classification: LCC DR977.25.Y75 F74 2022 | DDC 949.6503—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033437
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