Counter-Culture, Counter-Memory, Counter-Experience: Memory of Communism and Working-Class Experience in the Czech Republic
Abstract
The purpose of the contribution is to examine the current state of fragmentation in both post-Communist collective memory (memories) and the societies in which these memories exist: the continuing disputes over historical memory between governments, academics and journalists, and the disintegration of major features of twentieth-century modernity: mass industrial employment and the linguistically-culturally homogeneous nation state. In turn, this process affects the common understanding of the recent past: the emergence of a broader elitist-vs.-populist dynamic refusing of both cultural and economic liberalism.
The paper examines the emergence of a new range of working-class identities, and how shared social conceptions of the past can be used as self-justification for class identity. It asks if the populist narrative of a "counter-memory" reflects genuine popular moods, and if its presence is reflected in the debates of the shapers of memory-policy.
The paper suggests that attention focus on anti-Communist opposition that emerged from outside of intellectual-dissident circles, in the form of working-class sub- or counter-cultures, which would communicate a more complex impression of past social orders, and take the working-class experience into account as more than a passive, directionless entity.