The essay goes on to discuss ideas and possible actions by loose communities of individuals linked by a common cause, such as human-rights petition Charter 77.
Havel wrote "The Power of the Powerless" in October 1978, originally meant to be the basis of a planned book of Polish and Czechoslovak essays on the nature of freedom.
[4] After the launch of Charter 77, which coincided with the release of The Power of the Powerless, Havel was put under continuous pressure by the secret police; he was under constant government surveillance and they interrogated him almost daily.
[3]: 254 He was arrested in May 1979—along with other members of the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted (Výbor na obranu nespravedlivě stíhaných, or VONS), an organization that Havel co-founded that year—and he remained imprisoned until February 1983.
[6] The essay was translated into English by Paul Wilson and published in 1985 as part of a volume of essays edited by John Keane, entitled The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, which includes an introduction by Steven Lukes and contributions from various Soviet-era Eastern-European dissidents and intellectuals.
This became the crux of his essay, which was one of the most "original and compelling pieces of political writing" to come out of the Eastern Bloc, according to Havel biographer, John Keane.
[3]: 268 Dedicated to the memory of Jan Patočka, the opening section of the essay sought to explain what Charter 77 signified to those living within Czechoslovakia, and "to give courage" to fellow opponents of the Soviet bloc elsewhere.
And the rank and file saw us as leaders of the movement...[6] Individuals at each level within the bureaucracy must display their own equivalent of the grocer's Workers of the world, unite!
[3]: 270 Havel explained step-by-step that the powerlessness of the powerful is traceable to several factors: Those who rule at the top of the pyramid are fundamentally incapable of controlling every aspect of an individual citizen's life despite their best efforts to do so.
And those in petty power positions all the way down the line perform the prescribed rituals mandated by the State yet it is this blind obedience which in turn tends to dull the perceptions of the leaders at the top—inadvertently opening space for those who wish not to conform.
However, "policemen, prosecutors, or judges… exposed to public attention… suddenly and anxiously begin to take particular care that no cracks appear in the [legal] ritual.
"[8]: 75–7 In later sections, Havel writes of what form opposition in such regimes could take and the nature of being a dissident in the circumstances of the time, using the example of Charter 77.
He contrasts Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk's observation of the limits of grassroots organization, of so-called small works, with the example of the Polish Workers' Defence Committee (Komitet Obrony Robotników, or KOR) and of what could be achieved through an independent social life and organization to achieve "social self-defense".
A new experience of being, a renewed rootedness in the universe, a newly grasped sense of higher responsibility, a newfound inner relationship to other people and to the human community-these factors clearly indicate the direction in which we must go.