AT THE WINGS OF POLITICS...:

Viewing the Occupy Wall Street movement from post-Communist Europe, I can't stop thinking of October 1917.

This date, when the Bolsheviks seized power from the Russian Provisional Government and set in place a Communist dictatorship that would last for more than seven decades, was brought to mind by the recent comments of the great Polish dissident and newspaper editor Adam Michnik. Speaking on a panel at Forum 2000, the annual conference put on here by his friend, the former Czech president Vaclav Havel, Michnik heard a familiar message in the rhetoric of the protesters in New York. The topic at hand was "Europe's Future: Constitutional or Populist Democracy?" Fortunately, revolution (whether from the left or the right) is unthinkable in the United States, the world's oldest constitutional democracy. But it is not so unthinkable in Europe, destroyed by a world war just seventy years ago, where Spain and Portugal only emerged from fascist rule in the 1970s, and where one half of the continent freed itself from Communist domination not long after that.

It was in the context of rising European populism that Michnik obliquely criticized the Occupy Wall Street movement, then spreading across the United States and around the world from the original demonstrations in downtown Manhattan. A man with solidly social democratic credentials, Michnik would find himself comfortable on the left wing of the American Democratic Party and is certainly sympathetic to demands for a greater redistribution of wealth. But he is too smart and too familiar with Europe's dark history to fall so easily for the insidious, if deliberately vague, calls for "social justice" and even "people's democracy" that have been voiced by the Occupy Wall Street protesters and their echo chamber here in Europe. Michnik prefers "regular, normal, sinful democracy." For all its faults, such boring democracy is at least a system "where, if someone calls you at six a.m., you know it's the milkman at the door."

Having been joined on October 15th by solidarity protests in hundreds of cities across the world, Occupy Wall Street is trying to invoke the legacy of 1968 rather than 1917, and they might as well. For it was 1968, as Michnik said, that witnessed actualization of the ideas espoused by Herbert Marcuse, the German philosopher, "who explained to students that fascism is in the United States." That year, while students in France, the Federal Republic of Germany, and the US were protesting what Marcuse alleged to be the West's "repressive tolerance," Michnik was sitting in a jail cell for his dissident activities in Communist Poland. It was then that he "learned to be careful" when hearing people in free countries voice existential doubts, no matter how benign-sounding, about electoral democracy.

The self-appointed heir to Marcuse, Michnik said, is the Slovenian Marxist academic Slavoj Zizek, one of the first in a series of radical left-wing figures to address protesters in New York. In a subsequent mini-essay, posted on the website of the London Review of Books under the title "Democracy is the enemy," Zizek opined that "democratic mechanisms are part of a bourgeois-state apparatus that is designed to ensure the undisturbed functioning of capitalist reproduction." Therefore, nothing less than the American system of liberal democracy itself must be overturned, Zizek wrote, and it is this end to which Occupy Wall Street must strive, presumably using violence if necessary. "Badiou was right to say that the name of the ultimate enemy today is not capitalism, empire, exploitation or anything of the kind, but democracy: it is the 'democratic illusion', the acceptance of democratic mechanisms as the only legitimate means of change, which prevents a genuine transformation in capitalist relations," he opined.

Zizek, this "new guru of the new Europeans," as Michnik characterized him, "is trying to pressure us to give space to the new dictatorship of the proletariat." We must guard ourselves against such calls, for "we've seen this before." Americans and Western Europeans may take their liberal democratic capitalism for granted, but it took generations for it to reach its current, advanced stage, and it still has many detractors. The world financial crisis and the seeming inevitability of Chinese global hegemony pose new threats. Democracy faced no greater challenges than the twin totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century, fascism and then communism. Having withstood these monumental adversaries, supporters of democracy have rested on their laurels, leaving the liberal democratic order vulnerable. A Slovenian poseur preaching Marxist drivel to crowds in Manhattan may not seem threatening, but then, neither did many people pay attention to the bearded German Jew scribbling away in the British Museum's reading room, nor, at least initially, did they pay much heed to the Austrian paper-hanger ranting about perfidious socialists in Munich beer halls. As bad as things may seem in the West right now, Michnik counseled the audience against falling for the promises of snake oil salesmen. It is "better to have imperfect democracy than perfect dictatorship," he concluded.

Follow @brothersjudd