#2 Reading ‘Free’ by Lea Ypi
“Socialism, I tell [my students], is above all a theory of human freedom, of how to think about progress in history, of how we adapt to circumstances, but also to 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.” – Lea Ypi
Image credits: The Sunday Times
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I read Lea Ypi’s Free over the weekend. She teaches Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where I studied, and I still regret not taking her classes when I was there. The book is a stunning autobiography, in which she reveals her strategy only at the end: Initially conceived as a philosophical book about how ideas of freedom overlapped in liberal and socialist traditions, she realized that “ideas turned into people; the people who made me who I am.” The political is thus intimately personal. Here, it is embodied in Ypi’s incredible ‘biography’ – a loaded term in Hoxha’s regime –, set against a turbulent history of late 20th Century Albania.
Albania is a country I know very little of. In this text I learned more about its Ottoman past; its eventual transition to a fascist (Italian) protectorate to which Ypi shares a personal connection via her great-grandfather, former Prime Minister Xhafer Ypi, who served then; the terror under Enver Hoxha’s Communist regime; the terror of a different sort transitioning to liberalism, smothered by Structural Reforms; and civil war sparked by the collapse of a deeply flawed financial regime (families lost entire savings to what were effectively pyramid schemes, with the plausible collusion of political forces). This account is clearly non-exhaustive, and I know I am neglecting a rich, if turbulent, history. Deep trauma oozes especially from the second-last chapter, movingly composed with teenage Ypi’s diary entries, revealing a child who had long lost her innocence in the midst of a national (and transnational) tragedy. One hardly needs to learn the names of world capitals when the Kalashnikov replaces the sound of birds. Ypi ends the book when she leaves Albania for her studies, never to return. Ypi seems to have reserved her comments on contemporary Albania for another time/space. But the story that we do have is an important one. Even more so, when even so-called Western socialists are too keen to dismiss it (no prizes for guessing why).
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One wonders if Ypi is successful in tracing the development of her political thought alongside the figures in her life. One elects to think that her father, a socialist who always put the people first and refused to reduce solidarity and people’s lives to numbers and logics imposed by the ‘international community’, might have left his greatest mark. The politics of her mother, a tough-as-gun-metal personality born into a higher class and who remained inclined towards market solutions, leaves us in a more ambivalent position. Both Babi and Mami saw their capacity for hope dissipate in the lead-up to, and most definitely in the chaos of, 1997. Her father, who had joined her mother’s party and ran as an MP, found his political run cut terribly short. For a period in the civil war, Ypi wondered if her dad would return home safe. Nini, Ypi’s grandmother, we are told, had no less an impact than teaching her how to live life itself. Perhaps not the life of a Marxist which Ypi grew to become, but surely one of tender love and immense strength.
Importantly, I found the revelation of political events through the partially ironic lens of a young but brilliant girl thoroughly rewarding. Who knew that ‘getting a degree’ under Hoxha’s regime meant going to prison, ‘dropping out’ meant one’s execution, and ‘studying international relations’ meant being charged with treason? We lose our naivety just as young Ypi, who had been buzzing about her early-Pioneer status, lost hers, most notably with the fall of Communism in 1990. We have more to learn, too, from young Ypi at the End of History. For one, she seems to observe, ostensibly through the lens of her father especially, that individuals were simply, not quite free. Things remained difficult, just under different names. Replacing ‘the Party’ with capitalist and developmentalist buzzwords brought more pain than dignity: transition, Shock Therapy, ‘civil society’ as in the World Bank, and foreign sponsors would entail their own absurd, if not cruel logics. In Ypi’s account, we encounter anything from the gradual inflow of coke cans, once idolized by families (some criticize this is as a trope); to the influx of Western feminists looking for testimonials from Ypi’s mother, a leader of a women’s association; and, most memorably for me, a World Bank technocrat whose impersonality and inability to receive the warmth of Ypi’s communal neighborhood dramatized a determination to shrink entire countries to mere (comparative) case studies. Folks sharing their raki, kadaifi, silovitz, et cetera were merely workers of another replicable town. They would, in the end, be allusions to somewhere this World Bank technocrat had been before. Not people, but numbers in a march towards development.
In the end, interrogating what it means to be ‘free’ is the (home)work Ypi leaves us. Beyond the succinct section quoted above, what I find interesting is the many articulations of freedom by the characters throughout the book, which the philosophy professor leaves us to chew on. These characters, much as Marx had noted, were “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 disillusionment. We lived in the same place, but in different worlds. These worlds overlapped only briefly; when they did, we saw 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, turning a blind eye to injustice.”
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What then? Freedom, for Ypi, continues to be worth struggling for. Revealing her Kantian commitments, it is imperative to demand yet another system change. This is a duty she owes to people who gave up so much – indeed, their lives – because they knew that their future had to be fought for.
I end by merging Ypi with Rosa Luxembourg, whose words form the epigraph for the book.
“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 that they choose.”
“But they make history nevertheless.”
