Enlightenment and progress: Make it easier!

Was the Enlightenment a matter of a few clever men whose teachings gradually spread throughout society? Or did the gentlemen named Rousseau, Kant and Voltaire pick up on a mood, so that their books merely reinforced an already smoldering desire for freedom? Loel Zwecker, born in 1968 and studied art historian, answers this interesting question with a humorous book that sees emancipation not as an elite project, but as a matter for the common people.

“The Power of the Powerless” is the name of his attempt to extrapolate a cursory historiography of the subaltern. He presents examples of some political movements and their protagonists, including early feminism, the trade union movement and abolitionism. The thesis: »Most, almost all, positive social developments of overarching importance were not initiated by people with official authority or economic power such as princes, presidents, military officers, magnates or CEOs; And they weren’t revolutionary leaders or ‘great thinkers’ – but apparently powerless people, ‘those down there’, simple people.”

Now you have to sort that out a bit. The fact that the elites of an existing system usually stick to the status quo is not surprising, since they are among its beneficiaries. But why does Zieler also relegate the well-known rebels and great thinkers to the back of the list? Is the impact of the individual, revolutionary subject really negligible? A claim that could be easily proven if one were to assume that ideologies and economic structures actually guide the course of the world, that is, each and every one of the so-called ordinary people is a carrier of ideas, a proxy of the zeitgeist. You would then just have to confuse this specific characteristic with the whole person and everyone would be revolutionaries. But that would mean choosing a sociological perspective, which is definitely not what Zieler is concerned with. He doesn’t want to tell history so much as he wants to tell stories. Apparently he intentionally did not substantiate his thesis particularly well, as it should be light enough to leave room for one or two anecdotes.

And so he tells us about “Mother Jones,” a left-wing icon of the US trade union movement at the beginning of the 20th century, who once marched on New York with a train of child laborers. About the suffragette Emily Davison, who spectacularly gave her life in the fight for women’s suffrage by throwing herself in front of the king’s horse during a race in 1913. Or Benjamin Lay, who agitated tirelessly against slavery in the 18th century and was quite inventive in doing so. Lay tampered with a Bible, slashed it with his sword, caused it to spurt blood, and claimed that God himself was threatening the slave owners present.

In short: Zieler, author of several volumes of popular history, doesn’t particularly care about his own theory, but just chats away. Christina of Sweden (1626 to 1689), a queen after all, or José Mujica, left-wing head of government of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015, can also belong to the category of little people. After all, Mujica donated a large part of his salary to the poor and railed against the banks. And Christina had neither anything for life at court nor for so-called feminine manners, which qualifies her for Zieler’s creative definition of emancipation. For him, it’s about “completely reinventing yourself and your lifestyle.”

The author consistently cuts away anything that is too abstract or complex from his subject until the exemplary fate and one heroic act remain. Of course, things shouldn’t be too complicated in the world. And so it’s not surprising when he spends a few paragraphs speculating about the conditions under which it would make sense to have pop stars lead a consumer strike and who might be willing to do so. (He thinks Radiohead or PJ Harvey are possible; he thinks Beyoncé or Bob Dylan would be great.) The fact that something like that actually already exists, namely the anti-Israel BDS movement, seems to have escaped the author’s notice.

In another place, Zieler calls for an end to the “all the clever differentiations, abstractions and supercharges of money,” which should now only “simply serve as a means for the meaningful exchange of goods and services.” At a time when one could stop passers-by in Berlin-Mitte to discuss Modern Monetary Theory or the democratic legitimacy of central banks, this is an impressively simple view. But the intellectual restraint that shines through in such places is definitely intentional with Zieler: intended and used in a targeted manner. It takes a while to understand what “The Power of the Powerless” is actually about: It breathes hope for a world in which being on the left is easy again and, above all, finally helps again. The sad point of this book is that the author has to look into the past.

Loel Zieler: The power of the powerless. A story from below. Tropics, 416 pages, hardcover, €26