In the summer of 1985 there was no more desired decorative object in Albania than an empty Coca-Cola can. They were bought privately and placed, with or without a solitary rose inside, on the shelf in the living room. In view of the neighbors, although perhaps not all the neighbors. That can appears on the cover of Libre (Anagram), the memoir by Lea Ypi (Tirana, 1979) and also stars in one of the most memorable chapters of this double initiation story, that of a girl and a pre-adolescent who grows up "in the end of history” (or at least at the end of the Eastern bloc), and that of a country, which comes out of the tutelage of a peculiar regime – the father of the country, Enver Hoxha broke with the USSR and later also with China and imposed a personalist system based, among other things, on the cult of Stalin – to delve into the uncertainty of capitalism. Ypi, who is a professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics and an expert in the work of Marx, sat down to write a book with philosophical roots on the idea of freedom and what came out was very different and highly enjoyable, a reconstruction literature of a time and a country.
At what point did you assume that the book you were writing was not going to be as planned?
The truth is that the book was not going to be personal or literary, but rather a reflection on the idea of freedom in the liberal tradition and in the socialist tradition. But then Covid arrived, with all his existential crisis, and I locked myself in a closet in Berlin...
Literally in a closet?
Literally. It was quite big because it was a German cupboard, but a cupboard nonetheless. We were confined. My three children were running everywhere. The youngest was only two years old. She was trying to find places to hide for work and that was the only place the kids didn't find me for a while. I think that when you work in a different place, your mind starts to work in a different way. Strange dislocations happen. Now that I'm writing another book, sometimes I think I need another dislocation. Maybe it doesn't have to be a global pandemic, but something that allows me to think in this way.
What was on the air in 2020 that made you remember these anecdotes from your childhood in Albania?
In Germany there was a lot of talk about freedom, about whether a state of emergency was necessary. The debate was between personal autonomy and those who defended social solidarity. For me, that debate was not about two different values, but about two conceptions of the same value. Some interpreted it as a social conception of freedom, and others as something more individualistic. So, locked in my closet, I began to think that we had already had these conversations in Albania in the 90s. There, too, we believed that everything was going to change. During a crisis, people tend to believe that everything is going to be different, but it is not. Right now the world is not that different from what it was before Covid.
The first part of the book is very bright, which seems logical. Almost no circumstance seems strange to children, because that is their reality.
It's not that my childhood was necessarily happy, it's that I didn't know anything else. Children take their circumstances for granted and their idea of freedom is very different from that of adults. It has to do with security and trust. Children do not have political opinions and cannot experience censorship. The most problematic aspect of Albania during socialism was not scarcity, which is something that the children came to understand. The most problematic was political censorship and that is not enough for children. That's why the first half of the book is more innocent. In the second part I am a teenager and everything becomes more complex.
It is something that I have heard from people who were very young during the Spanish Transition, who were adolescents when the country was also. Somehow it happened to you too. He reached puberty in a country in full turbulence, which discovered things and was fascinated by the West.
Of course, when I talk about how the book became another type of writing, I also think that it is a story of growth, an initiation story, but not only for the individual, but for the entire country, which woke up from childhood, from this network of ideological deceit, to enter a period of chaos, such as adolescence. I found out after writing the book that there is a whole generation of people from the Eastern Bloc who had been teenagers during their transitions and who saw themselves in the book. We are the former communist children.
What do all these former communist kids have in common?
The sense of disruption in our life. We identified the world of our childhood and then we were thrown into what seemed like a world of freedom but ended up being a different kind of oppression. All these countries were at the mercy of the market, there were massive waves of migration and people who had had very specific training in their countries had to go to the West to work as truck drivers and cleaners, so there was also a sense of social breakdown. All these experiences unite those of us who grew up under the iron curtain. The other common experience is to discover that socialism didn't work and to be promised this world of illusions of capitalism, which also has its problems. That has left a lot of people with a fierce skepticism and the ability to believe in anything, a kind of nihilism I don't share but understand.
Communism collapses and suddenly you discover many things about your own family that you did not know. Her family lied to protect her, an obvious act of love, but one that must have caused her confusion at the same time.
I don't remember feeling sad or traumatized that I was lied to, just confused because I didn't know what to believe. I kept a diary then and it has been very useful to consult it. You can see there that I didn't feel resentment towards my parents for lying to me. The curious thing is that I recorded in the diary in a very factual way how I was learning the new vocabulary. What used to be the “university” where I had been told my grandfather was now called “jail”. She was eleven years old, not a child but not a teenager either. I will never know what would have happened to me if I had discovered that reality later, which is what my parents hoped would happen. It's like when children discover the truth about Santa Claus. I don't know if I would have kept my faith in socialism or if I would have become a dissident.
You now have children of that age and are raising them in a very different environment than the one in which you grew up. Do you ever find yourself using your communist childhood to try to limit your consumerism?
Yes, for example, the other day we had no milk left and my oldest son said: 'Let's order it through Deliveroo'. And I got angry. I told him: 'No! Not everything is available to you just because we have money and have a mobile. I tell them about Albania and my childhood, although I don't want to burden them with my privations. You have to find the balance between making them socially responsible and not turning them into sorry beings. London is a place of enormous inequality and social anomie. I live in a part of the city that is not particularly elegant, but it is in the middle of two very different areas. If we take the bus to one side, we end up in Knightsbridge, in Harrod's, the entire area that the Russian oligarchs once stayed and now the Saudis. If we take the bus to the other side, we find ourselves in some of the poorest areas of the country. Everything is full of gambling halls, people suffer very real hardships. Both places are 20 minutes from my house. I try to tell my children that this is what capitalism produces, an unequal society, and that they should never think that it is people's fault to have one life or another.
What he tells about the word 'biography' in Albania is fascinating. It was fundamental and the regime wrote your biography before it even happened.
I grew up with this word and didn't know what it meant. The word seemed so important that I didn't dare ask. ‘Biography’ had to do with your place in the world. It could be bad, good, dirty or clean. My grandmother used to say: your biography is as good as it could be. What she was referring to is that my grandfather had been in jail but my parents had been able to study at the university. Within our experience of oppression, we had been lucky. 'Biography' was how the state saw you and the opportunities you would have. Someone with my biography, for example, would never have been able to study Philosophy in Albania, because only the children of party people could do it.
It is interesting that he says that, because that is happening now in Europe without going any further. Humanities, Art and Philosophy studies are becoming a redoubt for the rich. No one else can afford this 'useless' knowledge.
I saw it very clearly when I went to study in Rome, ironically. I lived in the Casa dello Studente, had a very small scholarship, barely enough for three meals a day in the residence. Maybe 200 euros a month. I didn't stay to go to the movies or go out. I studied Philosophy at an elite university and poor people did not study Philosophy, only those from wealthy families could do it. But even for you to do well in the race you needed to have money. All my classmates studied German so that they could read the German philosophers. I asked: where can I study German? And they told me: at the Goethe-Institut. But the Goethe-Institut tuition cost more than my scholarship to survive the whole year. I came from a privileged family in Albania, but in Italy I was a poor immigrant and all my classmates were rich kids who didn't realize that not everyone has money. Sometimes I fear my children will grow up like this.
He was aware of the problems of the capitalist system quite early.
While I was in Albania we thought: well, this must be the Transition. At some point it will end. The first waves of migrants who had left Albania in the early 1990s to make a living in Europe returned with horrific stories of discrimination and inequality. There were also many problems of sex trafficking, drug addiction. When I went to Italy I realized that no, that does not end after a Transition. There's a huge sense of alienation, and it's almost worse in Britain. Sometimes I define being an emigrant as a person who goes around trying different types of failed states.
With all this baggage, you go and become a Marx scholar.
Coming from Albania, I had a complicated relationship with Marxism. He did not look to Marx for answers to the failures of capitalism, like many Western colleagues on the left. I got there through Kant and Hegel, but when I got to Marx I understood a lot of things that I had experienced. Albanians relate to Marx in a destructive way and Westerners in a very positive way, saying: "Ideas are fine, it was practice that failed." Easterners say, "Well, the ideas were wrong, too." I have always stayed in the middle.
His parents had an important political life after the fall of the Albanian regime.
My mother found her paradise in post-communist Albania. She comes from a family of landowners and believes that all you need is the right to own property and the right to inheritance. She was consistent as a libertarian: she stopped teaching, went into politics, gave speeches, talked about the promise of the market. She found herself a perfect fit into the new system. My father, however, was not like that, he was not a libertarian. My mother thought that if you are poor it is because you deserve it and the State should not help you. It will be that you are lazy and do not work enough. What happened to my father was tragic. In the 1990s he was put in charge of the country's main port at the time it was being privatized and had to fire hundreds of workers. He personally was responsible for putting hundreds of Roma gypsy citizens on the streets. Although it was his job, he didn't believe in it. He found it very hard emotionally and his anxiety skyrocketed, he suffered a lot from having to make these decisions that were not his, they were given to him.
There is a fantastic passage in the book, when he explains that everyone in his family had a favorite revolution and a favorite summer fruit. Do you still have a favorite revolution?
I have changed my way of thinking about revolutions. I think that it is no longer necessary, I think that we should not think of revolutions as fruits. For me a revolution is a fundamental change in the legal system. There are reforms that look like revolutions and revolutions that look like reforms.
How do you see the movements of the left?
I don't think the left has much movement right now. It is very fragmented. What we need is a leftist perspective on Europe that is internationalist, but not one that goes back to the 20th century. As I see it, the left is very divided between one that is rigid, dogmatic and looks backwards and one that is social democratic and has lost its anti-capitalist message. We need a left that is a bridge between the two and that is truly international, and I don't see this happening. I don't see anyone articulating a theory about what a left-wing Europe would be like.
