Dissidence: Essays Against the Mainstream

Simon Dalby is a research associate at the Centre for International
Studies at Simon Fraser University.

For three decades, Dimitrios Roussopoulos, the moving force behind the
journal Our Generation and the publisher of Black Rose Books, has been
writing articles and editorials exhorting people to political protest.
This collection of his writings spans his long political career as
agitator and advocate for libertarian politics. Among the salient themes
are the persistence of political ideals from the early days of the New
Left in the 1960s and, in particular, the advocacy of ethically based
grassroots democratic actions in support of a just and sustainable
society.

The 36 articles that make up this collection are grouped into five
chapters. Chapter 1 deals with the politics of peace, including early
concerns with nuclear disarmament in the 1960s; a short editorial
updates these themes, commenting on the persistence of militarism in the
Gulf crisis and war of 1991. Chapter 2, which occupies nearly a third of
the book, deals with Canada’s “the national question” in the late
1960s and early 1970s (Roussopoulos found himself at the centre of
events, in Montreal). Chapter 3 addresses the New Left, focusing on its
political organization and strategy in the late 1960s, with an
additional update from 1980. Chapter 4 extends these themes in essays on
political theory and political analysis. The final chapter contains two
essays from the 1970s on questions of urban politics.

The author’s rationale for publishing these essays and articles
together at this time is that they are relevant to contemporary attempts
to reconstruct a radical democratic politics to challenge global
environmental and militarist dangers to human survival. This is,
however, a rather disjointed collection that some readers may find to be
more of historical than of topical interest, particularly because the
“lessons” of earlier periods are not always explicitly clear in the
changed contexts of the 1990s. Nonetheless, these essays constitute a
political testament by one of the most trenchant and persistent of
Canada’s dissidents.