The Chatto Book of Dissent
By Michael Rosen and David Widgery
Chatto and Windus. 457 pp., $19.95
Reviewed by Dave Riley
"Nothing is harder and takes more character than to stand in open opposition to one's time and loudly say: No!", wrote the great German satirist, Kurt Tucholsky, in 1919. But saying no is never an end in itself — no matter how loudly you may say it. Nonconformity needs both a wider politics and a systematic activism if it is to rise above mere social negation and effect some real change.
But as we begin to question the ready-made world around us, it is often difficult to locate one's opposition as part of something much broader. Being a rebel without a cause is a very lonely mission.
Furthermore, as editors Rosen and Widgery point out in their introduction to this anthology, "politics without dissent has a corpse in its mouth and the Left, often surprisingly conformist in its attitudes, needs to recognise the importance of a much wider notion of subversion".
"There is still more to political life", they add, "than there seems".
It is a pity that this fact is missed by so many. Today's campaigns have been preceded by the many activities of earlier people in opposition to their own historical time. But while we inherit the world they helped create, we can also draw on their tradition for inspiration.
What has Lenny Bruce or Percy Bysshe Shelley in common with Galileo or Francis Bacon? And what are the writings of Karl Marx doing in the same volume as song lyrics by the Sex Pistols? Well we may ask. Likely answers are pursued in this book through more than 300 entries.
Aside from the work of the the ubiquitous "Anon", there are lyrics of songs writen by the likes of Bessie Smith, James Brown, Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello; verses penned by William Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, Dorothy Parker, Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman; satirical pieces by Karl Kraus, Jonathan Swift, Jaroslav Hasek and Flann O'Brien; a range of political manifestoes — from the Communist Manifesto of 1848 to that of the Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM) drafted in 1969 — and contributions drawn from struggles throughout the world, such as an excerpt from Nelson Mandela's speech to the court prior to his sentencing in 1964.
It is all a very fine medley of protest and rebellion stretching as far back as the Spartacus slave revolt against the Roman Empire and the writings of the first Greek materialists in the fourth century BC.
While the collection reflects the political history particularly of Britain and is Eurocentric, the editors have managed to draw on other regions and on languages other than English to complete their list.
It is a pity therefore that they have not included examples of the rich literature of protest that emanates from the Caribbean basin or from within the nationalist tradition of South-East Asia. Jose Marti or Che Guevera, Ho Chi Minh or Pramoedya Ananta Toer — or their kin — are missing from the collection, although contemporary Central American poets such as Ernesto Cardinale and Otto Rene Castillo are included.
Vladimir Lenin enters by default via a poem by Mayakovsky but must settle between an article produced by the 1921 Kronstadt mutiny and brutal verse attacking Joseph Stalin by Osip Mandelstam (which was to contribute to the poet's later persecution, imprisonment and eventual death).
Maybe I'm a bit picky. When you consider what a book of dissent could have collected under such a banner, the editors' achievements are quite remarkable for the relevance of their selections and their maintenance of a consistently revolutionary theme.
Rosen and Widgery give their real intentions away by including Friedrich Engels' letter to Joseph Bloch, posted off sometime in 1890, wherein Engels warns against too much stress being placed on the economic side of historical interpretation. "We make our own history", writes Engels to his friend, "but in the first place under very definite presuppositions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are finally decisive. But the political, etc., ones, and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one."
A documentary montage such as this can skew the relative significance of events and ideas, particularly as the writings are left to speak for themselves. Tom Paine's pamphlet The Rights of Man may have been a great clarion call for democracy when it was published in 1791, but its historical relevance pales compared to that of the mighty French Revolution that inspired it. Nonetheless, if I want to be inspired by the rebellions of the past and present, these contemporary voices can call to greater fervour.
This is the major achievement of The Chatto Book of Dissent — the Sex Pistols do share the same historical pathway as Karl Marx. Buy it. Read it. Be inspired. There is more to political life than there seems.