November 1, 2022: Talk by Petr Kužel: Prague Spring 1968: The Struggle for Economic Democracy, Workers’ Councils and Social Self-Government

Tuesday, November 1st, 2022, 5-6:30pm

Harvard University
Plimpton Room, Baker Center
12 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

Petr Kužel (Czech Academy of Sciences)
Introductions: Nick Nesbitt (Princeton University)

The Prague Spring of 1968 is justifiably associated with the democratization process. For the first time in Czechoslovakia, censorship was abolished, cultural life was free to develop, forms of a pluralistic democratic system were discussed, greater participation of citizens was emphasized, civil society and political and civil rights were developed. However, the emancipatory efforts of the Prague Spring were not limited to the achievement of political and civil rights. One of the main pillars of the economic reforms advocated by Ota Šik was the struggle for economic democracy and social self-government associated with the so-called workers’ councils and the removal of the role of the state to directly manage enterprises. Today this aspect of the Prague Spring is somewhat overlooked. This lecture will therefore outline the debates that led to this radical policy, the profiling of the various political currents, the public opinion polls of the time, the real functioning of these councils, in which 900,000 people participated, and the struggle against their suppression after the 1968 invasion.

Petr Kužel is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences, focusing mainly on Czech and French philosophy of the second half of the 20th century. He is also the author of the book The Philosophy of Louis Althusser. On Philosophy that Wanted to Change the World (2014). A member of the editorial board of the journal Contradictions. A Journal for Critical Thought and the editorial board of Emancipation and Critique. In 2017 he prepared for publication a book of Bondy’s political texts, Labour Analysis and Other Texts, and a year later a collective monograph, The Thought and Work of Egon Bondy, which traces the work of Egon Bondy, and in 2022 an English translation of Bondy’s book The Buddha, published in India. He also co-authored the monographs Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete (2021), Imagination and Form. Between Aesthetic Formalism and the Philosophy of Emancipation (2018), The Varieties of Marxist-Christian Dialogue in Czechoslovakia (2017); The Autumn of Postmodernism: Theoretical Challenges of the Present (2016) and others.

Nick Nesbitt is Professor of French and Italian at Princeton University and Senior Researcher at the Czech Academy of Sciences. He is the author of Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment, among other books.

Organized by the Czechcafe, Veronika Tuckerova