Me: Come in, 1988. This is 2003 calling. Hello, 1988, can you hear me? Shit, where’s the volume control on this thing? Ah, there you are. Hi, Rosanne?
Me (looks up): Who are you?
Me: I’m you from the future.
Me: Cool. Where are you? Doesn’t look like Sydney.
Me: Prague.
Me: Cool. You know, Vaclav Havel is one of my heroes.
Me: That’s kinda what I need to talk to you about. What’s that you’re reading?
Me: 10 Days that Shook the World by John Reed, it’s…
Me: Yeah, I know what it is. I just bought a replacement copy last year off amazon.com.
Me: Amazon what?
Me: Don’t worry, it’s a thing called a Web site. They get invented next year but you don’t find out about them till 1992. But that’s handy, because it’s communism I wanted to talk to you about. There are a lot of changes going on around you right now, a lot of anniversaries of key events.
Me: Yeah, I know. I just went to a 20th anniversary of Paris May 68 and what’s happening with Lech Walesa and the whole thing in Prague is so cool.
Me: Mmm. That stuff all has a lot of ramifications next year. The Berlin Wall is going to be knocked down. The Prague protests lead to what they call the Velvet Revolution. The Baltic states are going to stage a huge protest next year that will lead to their independence. But have you actually considered that all these amazing protests that you think are so inspiring are reactions against the very state established in the revolution that you think is so inspiring in that book?
Me: Hang on a second… You can’t blame Lenin for what Stalin did.
Me: Yeah, I’ve been using that argument for a very, very long time. Next year, when you move on from Marxism and become an anarchist after a bad encounter with the International Socialists and a good encounter with the Beyond Social Control anarchist conference, you’ll adjust it slightly to say that Lenin was a good guy right up until he established the Cheka in 1921, but I’m beginning to wonder actually.
Me: I become an anarchist?
Me: Yeah. Can we move on from that? I’m not saying that the need for protest and resistance in Russia wasn’t great or even that the courage to imagine another world and pursue that is any less than what I’ve always thought it, but I just think we need to acknowledge the contradiction inherent in championing Lenin and Trotsky *and* Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa and the Situationists. Have you considered that you might just be in love with the idea of protest qua protest? That you’ve completely romanticised revolutionary fervour regardless of its intent?
Me: Whoa. I can be anti-capitalist and anti-State Communism at the same time can’t I? I’ve never said I think Stalinism was a good thing.
Me: Sure. And when you get to here, you’ll have just as big a problem with how the post-Communist countries are idealising capitalism as the answer to all woes and hell, St Petersburg is practically returning to a dream of monarchy with its idolisation of Peter the Great. But this is my point: How come every place that threw off the chains of communism championed capitalism? Was there really no other way, no socialist dream of liberty and equality that could have survived in the middle?
Me: I don’t know. Why the hell you asking me? You’re the older and wiser one right?
Me: Hoped you’d have an answer. You were always such a damned know-it-all. Oh well, nice talking to you anyhow. Enjoy living in the basement while you can, by the way. All too soon, you’ll be moving out of home and it’s pretty weird from there. Oh and watch as many episodes of Soap as you can, ‘cos they stop showing re-runs soon. Did you know that the Czech for white sugar is Bily Krystal?
Me: You’re strange.