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PREFACE: IN PRAISE OF DISSENT

The big bee flies high,


The little bee makes the honey;
The black folks makes the cotton,
And the white folk gets the money.
Leadbelly
Dissenting voices and rebellions against existing authority—pagan,
tribal, religious, civil, feudal, bourgeois and Communist—form a global
pattern. They have always existed in some shape or another. It is some-
times automatically assumed that conflict in ancient times or the medieval
period, and even the English, Dutch and French revolutions, lacked the
clarity, insight and precision of twentieth-century upheavals. This was
not always the case. There are good reasons why the slave rebellion led
by Spartacus left such a deep mark on history and was to be forever
remembered, especially by the European theorists and practitioners of
revolution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was not acci-
dental that the highly literate and cultivated German revolutionaries of
the early twentieth century named their organization Spartacusbund, only
to be crushed just as ruthlessly by the German state as the slaves who
dared to free themselves were by its antique Roman predecessor.
Or take the example of 2 BCE Sparta; here, a huge class fissure
developed in the two centuries following the Peloponnesian conflict,
unusually for that city-state accustomed to all its male citizens carrying
out similar military tasks. The gap between rich and poor grew so wide
that a revolution from above, backed by the peasantry, became inevi-
table. The class divide precipitated a set of socio-politico-economic
reforms that prefigured all the struggles in the modern world and
created a city-state that was more politically advanced than, to take but
one instance, contemporary Britain.
A triumvirate of three radical monarchs—Agis IV, Cleomenes III
and Nabis—created a structure to help revive the state on a new basis:
nobles were sent packing into exile; the dictatorship of magistrates was
abolished, slaves were given their freedom, all citizens were allowed to

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vote and lands confiscated from the rich were distributed to the poor.
The early Roman Republic, threatened by this example, sent its
legions under Quintus Flaminius to crush Sparta. According to Livy,
the great Roman historian of Antiquity, Nabis responded with a cold
anger but great dignity:
Do not demand that Sparta conform to your own laws and institutions . . .
You select your cavalry and infantry by their property qualifications and
desire that a few should excel in wealth and the common people be subject
to them. Our lawgiver did not want the state to be in the hands of a few,
whom you call the Senate, nor that any one class should have supremacy in
the State. He believed that by equality of fortune and dignity there would
be many to bear arms for their country.1

Had Charles I, Louis XVI and Abdulmecid I followed the example of


the Spartan rulers, the history of Europe might have taken a different
course. These episodes alone, properly contextualized and described in
detail, could take up half a book, but all anthologies are notorious for
their inability to satisfy every reader. That is the nature of the beast.
The Verso Book of Dissent is no exception, but there is a difference.
Unlike its various predecessors in the Anglophone world, we have
attempted to cover the entire globe. The book was compiled in our
offices in New York and London with the help of authors and friends
of Verso across every continent. To do proper justice to the subject,
we would have needed several editors stationed in different parts of the
world, unlimited time and resources to produce a three-volume ency-
clopedia on this theme. Logistical problems and material scarcity made
this an impossible task. Speed was essential since the volume marks the
fortieth anniversary of New Left Books/Verso, a publishing endeavor
that has survived the fall of the Berlin Wall because it challenges the
established verities of all the different worlds that existed in 1970 when
it was founded: the United States and its satellites, the Soviet Union
and its subordinates, with China and India, amongst others, also subjected

1 Quoted in Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, New Left


Books, 1974. This work cannot be too strongly recommended for its
Gibbonsian-Marxist account of the rise and fall of the ancient empires of the
European world.

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to critical analyses. Entire thought-systems and state structures, econo-
mies capitalist and non-capitalist were analyzed and challenged by many
of our authors. The contrast between the vision of socialism defended
by Marx and the reality of the post-capitalist states was too stark to be
ignored. Dissenting voices from Eastern Europe and China always
found a place in Verso catalogues.
We were fortunate in that the group of people who founded New
Left Books/Verso were, in the main, associated with the New Left
Review. Intellectual affinities with NLR essayists were the foundation
stone of New Left Books before it expanded and created Verso as its
paperback arm in 1975: Perry Anderson did the books, Anthony
Barnett did the first business plan with a handwritten cash flow in red
and blue. More importantly, Barnett understood the crucial impor-
tance of a single-market strategy, retaining and re-taking rights to the
US market that helped establish Verso as a transcontinental publishing
house a good decade before many illustrious publishing names followed
suit. The name “Verso”—the left-hand page—was Francis Mulhern’s
suggestion and only squeezed through the horse-race mechanism
deployed by the NLR editorial committee, displacing more popular
suggestions that included “October,” “Salamander” and “Arcades.”
We owe a debt to Mulhern.
In 1970, the first book published by New Left Books was Ernest
Mandel’s Europe versus America: The Contradictions of Imperialism, a
sharp polemical response to the French liberal politician Jean-Jacques
Servan-Schreiber’s The American Challenge: a plea in favor of Europe
becoming America’s permanent second fiddle and for France to
break with all Gaullist ideas of independence. On this, Servan-
Schreiber, we must regretfully acknowledge, appears to have been
totally vindicated by history. In 2010, Perry Anderson revisited the
subject in his The New Old World, which revealed the consequences
of EU Atlanticism. A deep crisis confronted the European elites: a
growing democratic deficit at home, the adoption of the economi-
cally disastrous Wall Street system and the support for American wars
and policies in the world, in many cases against the expressed desires
of European citizens.
The contents of this anthology, therefore, should not come as a
surprise to those who read Verso books. We have concentrated on

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dissenters and rebels who have attempted to move mountains, to
improve, change, transform the world since the earliest times. There are,
of course, forms of dissent within established structures whose aim is to
strengthen the existing order by preventing obvious errors that might
lead to the most extreme form of dissent: revolutions . . . from below.
These we have avoided even though temptations were strong. Take for
instance, a letter written (but not dispatched) by Emperor Joseph II of
Austria to his flighty sister Marie-Antoinette in her Versailles bunker,
which is harsher in tone and far more insightful than the recent pseudo-
feminist biographies of her that encourage gender-sympathy while
ignoring the larger picture. Joseph knew his sister rather better than her
present-day fan club and the letter is therefore worth quoting in some
detail (a case of using the preface to cheat on the anthology):
Let me, my dearest sister, address you with a frankness justified by my
affection for you and my interest in your welfare. From what I hear, you
are becoming involved in a great many matters that are no concern of
yours, and of which you know nothing, led on by intrigue and flattery
that excite in you not only self-conceit and a desire to shine but jealousy
and ill-feeling. This conduct may well impair your happiness and sooner
or later must provoke serious trouble between you and the King, which
will detract from his affection and esteem for you, and cause you to fall
into disfavor with the public . . . Why should you, my dear sister, employ
yourself in removing ministers from their posts, in banishing one and
giving office to another, in seeing that some friend of yours wins his
lawsuit or in creating a new and expensive court appointment . . . Have
you ever asked yourself what right you have to meddle in the affairs of
the French Government or monarchy? What studies have you made,
what knowledge have you acquired, that you believe your opinion of
value, particularly in matters calling for such wide experience? You, a
charming young woman, who think only of frivolity, of your toilette, of
your amusements; who do not read books or listen to serious talk for
more than ten minutes in a month; who never stop to reflect, or to
give a thought to the consequences of what you say or do? . . . Listen
to the advice of a friend, give up all these intrigues, have nothing what-
ever to do with public affairs . . . For the rest, do some reading, improve
your mind.

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Some of the more complacent and visionless rulers of Europe as well
as their accompaniments—Sarkozy-Bruno, Berlusconi and his prosti-
tutes, for example—might ponder these sage words.
Had we more space and time we would have included an illustrated
section with various covers from satirical magazines such as the old
Private Eye and the young Charlie Hebdo, Le Canard Enchaine, Titanic,
etc. Earlier this year, while in Zagreb, I spoke to young dissidents,
some of whom had been involved with a satirical paper which I had
not heard of before, the Feral Tribune, whose writers and designers
challenged the narrow nationalism defended by state-controlled media,
described war-crimes committed by their own soldiers, denounced
Franjo Tudjman’s ultra-nationalist views justifying the Ustaše collabo-
ration with German fascism during Croatia’s first experiment with
controlled independence. Corruption, state-church relations, war-
mongering and xenophobia were the regular targets. The issue of Feral
Tribune that is now a collector’s item and impossible to locate was the
cover depicting digitally altered images of Tudjman and Milošević as
lovers in bed as Bosnia-Herzegovina is being divided.
In Sarajevo, most people regret the breakup of the country. Tito’s
portraits are visible in a number of places, and journalists, students and
war veterans speak openly of the large-scale corruption and the fragil-
ity. In Serbia, I spoke to the courageous journalists of B92, a radio
station that criticized its own government as well as the NATO jets
dumping bombs on Belgrade and the bridge to Novi Sad. Dissent was
alive and well in the former Yugoslavia. Many critics of what took
place twenty years ago as well as the crisis of the present situation are
beginning to cross frontiers and meet again at book fairs and film festi-
vals, and there is talk of making the island of Korcula in Croatia a
virtual Yugo-space where dissenters from the whole region can gather
once a year to exchange ideas and experiences.
There is much that had to be left out of this volume to preserve a
geographical and historical balance. In order to preempt some nit-picking
criticism, let me explain the reasons for one of the absences. Were there
dissenters in the early Stone Age? Despite the lack of any evidence, it’s
likely that primitive forms of dissent did exist (as they do in parts
of the animal kingdom today). Disagreements before the emergence of
language were expressed through gestures––still the case in Naples,

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Lahore and elsewhere (as Sraffa pointed out to Wittgenstein in Cambridge
after the latter claimed that all propositions have logical forms; Sraffa
made a derogatory gesture in response and asked, “What is the logical
form of this?”)––or grunts, or in extreme cases, through violence, though
probably far less frequently than in the agricultural civilizations that
followed. Contrary to comic book clichés, there is nothing to suggest
that early Stone Agers were either patriarchal or matriarchal. But since
the emergence of a primitive alphabet was still several hundred centuries
away and even cave art had not yet emerged it was, regretfully, not
possible to include a single dissenting voice or image from those times in
this anthology. If a reader demonstrates our ignorance here we will
include the missing link in a subsequent edition.
Andrew Hsiao and Audrea Lim (Verso NY) have worked long and
hard to prepare this volume, and to them and all those who helped,
our thanks.
Tariq Ali
August 2010

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