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COUNTERBLASTS is a series of short, polemical titles that aims to revive a tradition inaugurated by Puritan and Leveller pamphleteers in the seventeenth century, when, in the words of one of their number, Gerard Winstanley, the old world was ‘running up like parchment in the fire’. From 1640 to 1663, a leading bookseller and publisher, George Thomason, recorded that his collection alone contained over twenty thousand pamphlets. Such polemics reappeared both before and during the French, Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions of the last century.
In a period where politicians, media barons, and their ideological hirelings rarely challenge the basis of existing society, it is time to revive the tradition. Verso’s Counterblasts will challenge the apologists of Empire and Capital.
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The second and third were at two pivotal moments of the Cold War, with their locus largely in the United States. These were in the immediate aftermath of World War II, as former Communists, Trotskyists, and left-liberals made their adjustments to the Cold War, and in response to the civil rights and antiwar movements that crested about twenty years later, with the neoconservatives. Some of the same figures – notably, Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell – populated both camps of reaction, first becoming Cold War liberals, then neoconservatives. But while the cold warriors comprised a broad and ascendant political bloc, with ex-communists forming the vanguard, the neoconservatives arose amid the breakdown of the Cold War consensus and the revival of leftist politics. As a result the ex-communists could be more single-mindedly focused on the international struggle against the Soviet Union, while the politics of neoconservatism were far more substantially inscribed by domestic struggles on issues ranging from race to education – a fact reflected in the ensuing culture wars.
This is to state things in an extremely schematic fashion. In reality turns to the right among the intelligentsia were drawn-out processes punctuated by miniwaves and with distinct temporalities in each society. For example, while the neoconservatives began to take shape in the United States in the wake of the civil rights movement, the French ‘antitotalitarians’ emerged from their Maoist chrysalis in the mid-1970s as the struggles unleashed after May 1968 subsided. Similarly, in the UK a new generation of reactionaries emerged amid the crisis of social democracy and particularly the ‘winter of discontent’. During that nadir ‘former leftwingers such as Kingsley Amis, Max Beloff, Reg Prentice, Paul Johnson and Alun Chalfont anthologised their apostasy in a book proudly titled Right Turn. Most of these would find themselves comfortably in the Thatcherite camp. Another of their number, Robert Conquest, even spent time as Mrs Thatcher’s speechwriter.24
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