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 sometimes 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 accidental 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 inevitable. 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 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.
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 encyclopedia 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 to critical analyses. Entire thought-systems and state structures, economies 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 importance 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 economically 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 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 whatever to do with public affairs … For the rest, do some reading, improve your mind.
Some of the more complacent and visionless rulers of Europe as well as their accompaniments—Sarkozy-Bruno, Berlusconi and his prostitutes, for example—might ponder these sage words.
~~The Verso Book of Dissent -ed- Edited by Andrew Hsiao and Audrea Lim -- from the Preface by Tariq Ali
