I am reviving something I was writing
in Latvian for a closed reading list. It started with looking at the
government and ruling elite as an unknown creature from which we try
to elicit some kind of response. First we make sounds at the
creature. Nothing happens. Then we flash colored lights at the
creature (this is getting to be like the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind). Finally, (and this is not to be tried lightly
with a real alien or unknown beastie), we poke the thing (a minor act
of violence) and it finally responds.
It seems to have been the same with the
Latvian government. Peaceful public protests were dismissed as
“yapping” by angry little dogs by the government of Aigars
Kalvītis. The protests involved both audible (chanted slogans) and
visual (signs and placards) cues. There was no response. On January
13, 2009, a mob “poked” the creature of government by stoning
the parliament (Saeima) and other buildings, trashing some
storefronts, fighting the police and overturning some of their
vehicles.
Boy did that get a response! Ivars
Godmanis, prime minister at the time, appeared on national television
the next morning, stone-faced and speaking in a voice almost from
beyond the grave. “We have awoken in another Latvia”, he
intoned. Well, good fucking morning, as if this shit hadn't happened
in other countries, in some, like Greece, just weeks before!.
Right after that, then president Valdis Zatlers also gave the Saeima
an ultimatum – to pass amendments to the Latvian constitution
allowing popular initiatives to dismiss the Saeima, to change the
election laws to prevent powerful candidates or “locomotives”
from running in more than one electoral district as well as other
measures by March 31 of the year. Some of what Zatlers requested
actually got done and he never acted on that ultimatum.
The quick and simple, maybe
oversimplified conclusion is – a bit of violence is the only
communication that elicits a response from the ruling elite in
Latvia. Paving stones and smashed glass are “heard”, words
and protests, ignored.
But that is about the end of it. There
was needless and senseless collateral damage from January 13, such as
the stoning of a library building near the Saeima, the ransacking of
a liquor store and serious injuries to a teenager hit in the eye by a
rubber bullet. It also became clear that the “political” stone
throwers were joined by a rabble out for the thrill of destruction
and looting.
Even the political stone throwers
represented no one beyond themselves and their personal anger with
politics and politicians. Even their violence was “senseless”
because it had no agenda and no organizational back-up in society. In
other words, these guys were not the vanguard or fighting unit of a
well-organized and defined revolutionary movement.
I started writing this before the
rioting in the UK, which puts a different angle on things. Those
events gave an entirely new meaning to the idea of politically (and
economically)senseless violence. One may be able to better examine
things once data are collected on the more than 1600 persons arrested
in the wake of the UK disorders, but it now looks like what happened
was an outbreak of theft, violence and destruction by the British
equivalent of what are called urlas
in Latvia. These are uneducated, unemployed (though not always)
purposeless, substance-abusing, petty criminal rabble. They are
apolitical except to the extent that some commentators on events try
to interpret the formation of the UK lumpenproletariat in political
terms. It is likely that the Brit-urlas
have no political agenda and little or no political consciousness.
Before anyone starts drawing
conclusions from what I have written so far, I am not building up to
advocating terrorism in Latvia. Suffice it to say that in earlier
times, somewhat better organized Latvians did turn to anarchism
and/or revolutionary violence, such as in the uprising in 1905.
Terrorism is merely the other side of extremely poor and often
oppressive governance, it is a reaction to the action or inaction of
the state – at least in simple terms, discounting the terrorist
movements based on shared misperceptions of reality and bizarre
ideologies.
One can safely say that there is little
basis for domestic terrorism in Latvia, mainly because those
dissatisfied with the state of affairs have taken the much easier
step of emigrating and see no sense in staying behind to fight a
political battle. Latvia's citizens have seen all to often that when
“political battles” (elections) are won, the spoils are divided
among some of the winners at the expense of taxpayers, or, at best,
literally despoiled and wasted in attempts at governance by
incompetent fools. Electing a few “good people” merely thickens
the brake linings on some wheels of a what has been a runaway train
of corruption, incompetence, cluelessness and folly that has
characterized much of Latvian politics over the past 20 years. That
is what the reform movements of recent years have accomplished,
thickened the brake linings without stopping and just slightly
slowing the train. I refer to the Jaunais Laiks (New Era) experiment,
the re-try of the same formula with Vienotība, the work of “good
people” (no irony intended) such as Valdis Dombrovskis, the “new
kids in the Saeima” or the former exile Latvians and some of their
allies.
Tax resistance?
Maybe I am misinterpreting some
socio-economic phenomena too optimistically or politically, but some
parts of the population have reacted to this pattern of failure of
governance by simply withdrawing from economic engagement with the
state. That is another way of saying – not paying taxes. Again, at the
risk of overpoliticizing what is happening and projecting a
consciousness into this behavior that isn't there, I would argue that
this form of effective “secession from the state” is, at least, a
minimally effective form of resistance.
Undeniably, the lack of tax revenues is
(and we have heard this song before) deprives pensioners, the health
system, the police, the schools, the roads etc. of funding that would
have made these government services better. But it also says, from
the de-facto tax-refusers' point of view – that I am also depriving
one of the world's most expensive bridges of my money. I
am not paying for borderline-poor medical services so that characters
like Mr. Golden Hands (New Era's first Minister of Health Āris Auders), the
surgeon, can take my money
that was earmarked for his treatment of patients, and then hit these
patients again for a hefty envelope payment.
In what may be an
idealistic fantasy, I think that at least a few Latvian businesses
are paying in envelopes not to enrich the boss at the expense of
depriving the state of tax revenues, but simply because envelope
payments instead of withholding social tax are actually a form of
direct-action social welfare. An example I often use is that if a
small business has monthly labor costs of say, LVL 10 000, the owner
takes some LVL 3000 or whatever the social tax rate is, and pays it
to the state. Month after month, those LVL 3000 have no visible
impact on the miserable looking pensioners, the beggars (at least
those who are not professionals), the local hospital about to close
with its “fat-years” MRI unit that gets used twice a month, etc.
etc.
Now
take those LVL 3000 and pad the envelopes of employees that one knows
personally – Jānis, who looks after his infirm mother, Anna, who
is paying for her daughter's university, Sergejs, who can now afford
a private day-care center for his son and needs elective surgery
himself. The extra money, taken away from the rathole of paying the
state with a negative return on taxation
now becomes a tangible, here and now (or in the foreseeable future)
benefit for a small circle of people who need it and use it wisely.
It is,
of course, pure political science fiction to imagine that, having
experienced a degree of state failure for 20 years (minus the
attributes of real
failed states, gunmen in the streets, three hours of electricity, the
whole Somalia scene), Latvian society would self-organize into
communities of resistance as
it did, to some extent, when forming the Peoples' Front (Tautas
Fronte) in the late 1980s. Having exhausted the possibilities of
getting a response from the present political system, such
communities of resistance could at least improvise local solutions to
problems the state is unable to solve.
Electronic civil disobedience?
For example –
shutting down a hospital to cut costs (after deranged, shambolic
spending on health during the “fat years”)? The community simply
occupies it, organizes that some work is done voluntarily in exchange
for care, local business puts in some funds to benefit the town's
citizens, the MRI units services are offered, on the internet, to
patients across the country (or even from abroad).
Elsewhere,
people can take non-violent, disciplined direct action against the
state –occupying ministries or government buildings, at least for a
short, symbolic period, or organizing electronic political actions,
including the limited “hacking” (a note on a home page – this
agency is run by thieving or wastrel fools). Such actions would
involve technically illegal behavior and would require backing by
legal defense and public relations teams, to do everything to hinder
(by legal means) the prosecution of persons involved in resistance
activities, and to explain to society and the media (with social
media, everyone is media) the reason that activists were being made,
in effect, political prisoners.
Back to Gewalt gegen Sachen?
At
some point, there would have to be symbolic violence against the
state, targeted trashing of state property, but if this was done
against the background of a mass civil resistance and direct-action
movement, it would be a small price to pay for finally breaking the
grip of a political ruling elite that has, by the “experiment”
described above, shown that violence is the only language that it
hears.
Having said that, I
have to emphasize that this is an impossible scenario and there are
no signs that anyone is trying to execute it. The human capital
needed for something like that has been dispersed abroad by the
consequences of 20 years of the political elite's behavior. Those who
remain are too disorganized, drawn to crackpot ideologies, übermother
political movements or simply given up on the whole mess, often based
on a rational assessment of the situation. I think I can count myself
among the latter.
We
will have yet another election, triggered by good intentions to throw
the bastards out, but
I suspect the result, at
best
will be another deceptively bright false dawn, and, more likely, a
typically Latvian political bardaks
where the sleazy but untainted-by-being-in-government Harmony Center
(Saskaņas Centrs/SC) will be the biggest winner. Then, no one among
the “good guys” will want to play with them. So they may end up
with a “worser” if not worst case scenario of SC aligning with
the Green and Farmers' Union (Zaļo un Zemnieku Savienībā/ZZS) to
put one of the oligarchs (and a popular one among the large ignorant
and populist-manipulated part of the electorate), Aivars Lembergs, in
de-facto control of the state.
More nothing special..
So
the coming election battle, triggered by the drama of dismissing the
Saeima and the subsequent referendum, may yet again amount to nothing
– nothing
special.
The referendum showed that almost 95% of the electorate rejecting
the present political elite and the antics of the parliament up to
now. One could almost say it was a reflexive vote against two decades
of state
underperformance,
if not what I call state
failure light. But
that is it. There will be no second Awakening/Atmoda. There will be
no powerful popular movement of resistance and direct action, no one
is there to lead it, and the very few, probably too few good people
able to change much of anything, are running again for what I call
the Big Monkey House (disrespectful? Check those referendum results
again).
Maybe,
just maybe, the 2020s may be a time when the last hard-core homo
postsovieticus
retires from political life or dies off, and then the 1,6 or 1,8
million left in a marginal, stagnant little European country may, at
last perk up and find that they can at least adequately govern
themselves. But is there any point for someone like me, of advanced
youth but with a few good years left (working and writing)to linger
here and wait to see where the chips fall in ten or fifteen years?
