Memoirs

Free—Coming of Age at the End of History, Lea Ypi. £20.00

“I got to Marx from Hegel and Kant. A lot of people asked, ‘How could you be interested in Marx, given your family background?’ My mother was completely obsessed with worry . . . But for me, it was hard to say, ‘I’m turning back because my family wouldn’t like this.’ I wanted to explore these ideas. For me, Marx is neither a saint nor the enemy, in a way.”

Lea Ypi

“One of the things people misunderstand about the book is that they think I’m trying to compare Socialism and capitalism and trying to say one was worse than the other . . . But you are not comparing like for like.”

Lea Ypi

The first thing that strikes you about this book is the sheer volume of praise and recommendations before one has even read a word, four pages, to be precise. Either this is the work of a budding genius, or quite a few people have lost their intellectual sanity.

The second thing about the book is the title- Free—Coming of Age at the End of History. A cursory look inside the book will tell you that this is not a philosophical memoir. It is barely a political memoir. The title alludes to the neoliberal champion Francis Fukuyama. In his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man.

Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History uses a loose version of Hegel’s idealist phenomenology. Fukuyama announced that the tired march of history had arrived at its final station—a US-style liberal bourgeois democracy based on the unfettered capitalist market. This was the summit of human civilisation! This theme was elaborated in countless variations by gullible and impressionistic petty-bourgeois academics, always anxious to be on what they take to be, at any given moment, the winning side of history. Whether Ypi, now a political philosophy professor at LSE in London, believes this is the “End of History” as we know it remains to be seen.

She has, however, become a darling of the petty-bourgeois left. The British Socialist Workers Party(SWP) believes she is an “avowed Marxist. In the review by Gareth Jenkins, he writes, “If you believed in ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’ during the Cold War, what’s not to like about Lea Ypi’s autobiography? “.

The SWP professes to be a Marxist organisation. Still, one wonders how many of its members have been taken to lunch at an expensive restaurant by the Financial Times, the leading financial organ of the British bourgeoisie, or had a whole-page interview as Lea Ypi was given in the same newspaper.

The book is not without merit. It is well-written and shows what life was like growing up in Stalinist Albania. The book is written through the eyes of a young person growing up trying to make sense of the world around her. At one point, she writes, “I never asked myself about the meaning of freedom until the day I hugged Stalin.”  However, this “avowed Marxist” has little or no understanding of the complex phenomena of Stalinism, How it arose and how to combat it. I doubt also she has read any of the works of Leon Trotsky. While criticising her former society for contradicting the Marxist idea of freedom, she opposes the conception of Socialism if “brought about by the right people, with the right motives, under the right circumstances, and the right combination of theory and practice”, would succeed.

Any reader looking for a worked-out revolutionary solution to mankind’s problems should perhaps give this book a miss. Her course at the London School of Economics starts with the premise that “Socialism is above all a theory of human freedom, about 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, and how to behave. A society that claims to enable people to realise their potential, but fails to change the structures that prevent everyone from flourishing, is also oppressive.”

The goal of human freedom and a free society, which many great revolutionary thinkers wanted, cannot be achieved by having some vague notion of behaving better or having a mild critique of capitalism and then hoping for the best. It can only be completed in the words of  Nick Beams, “if the tyranny of global capital and its rule through the “free market” is overturned. It must be replaced by a social system in which the productive forces, created by the intellectual and physical labour of working people the world over, are harnessed by them to meet their needs”.