‘If the Vietnamese peasants can do it, why can’t we?’
Tariq Ali
He embodies the French expression, “Before 30 a
revolutionary, after 30, a swine!”—except, in his case, the swinishness
developed early on and just grew.
David Walsh
The dialectics of history have already hooked him and will
raise him up. He is needed by all of them; by the tired radicals, by the
bureaucrats, by the Nepmen, the upstarts, by all the worms that are crawling
out of the upturned soil of the manured revolution. He knows how to meet them
on their ground, he speaks their language, and he knows how to lead them. He
has the deserved reputation of an old revolutionist, which makes him invaluable
to them as a blinder on the eyes of the country. He has will and daring. He
will not hesitate to utilise them and to move them against the Party. Right now,
he is organising himself around the sneaks of the party, the artful dodgers.
Leon Trotsky
Statement of 1924 on Joseph Stalin's growing power base, in
Stalin, An Appraisal Of The Man And His Influence (1966); also in Stalin's
Russia 1924-53 by Michael Lynch, p. 18
All the parties of capitalist society, all its moralists and
all its sycophants will perish beneath the debris of the impending catastrophe.
The only party that will survive is the party of the world socialist
revolution...
Leon Trotsky
Their morals and ours: and, The moralists and sycophants
against Marxism (ed. 1968)
Street Fighting Years is the first part of a two-part
biography.[1]
By Tariq Ali, one of the best-known and one of the worst political opportunists
and scoundrels ever to disgrace the workers' movement. This new edition from
Verso covers Ali’s litany of betrayals throughout the sixties and beyond. This
edition includes a new introduction, as well as the famous interview conducted
by Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1971.
After Street Fighting Years was written, Ali was already
looking for “greener pastures,”. He became a darling of the bourgeois media, a
novelist and a political pundit. He told the Guardian in May 2010: “It’s a
problem people have had to come to terms with at different times in history:
what do you do in a period of defeat?”
Ali came from a high-class family in Lahore. His uncle was the
chief of Pakistan’s military intelligence. Ali went to England to study at
Oxford. In 1968, he joined the International Marxist Group 1968. The IMG was
the British section of the Pabloite movement. This was a retched organisation
that, according to David Walsh, specialised in “political provocation, with
more than its share of ‘naughty schoolboys.’ Dressed in Mao caps and the latest
gear, they would occasionally show up at picket lines or in working-class neighbourhoods.
Mostly, they stayed on the university campuses. Their supporters helped produce
journals such as the Black Dwarf and the Red Mole.”[2]
Ali’s book covers the decade of the 1960s and into the 1970s,
which were years of political, social and economic upheaval both in Europe and
around the world. That the Capitalist system was able to survive during this period
was thanks to the Stalinist and social democratic parties, and the trade
unions, which used their mass influence to control the struggles and lead them
to defeat. Ali, in his book, provides a left cover for these organisations.
Ali dedicates his book to another fellow political scoundrel,
Ernest Mandel. According to a statement by the Socialist Equality Party, Ali
was Mandel’s disciple. The leader of the Pabloite organisation in Britain could
not contain his enthusiasm for perestroika and its initiators. He dedicated his
book, Revolution From Above: Where Is the Soviet Union Going?, published in
1988, to Boris Yeltsin. His moving tribute declared that Yeltsin’s “political
courage has made him an important symbol throughout the country. Ali,
describing his visits to the Soviet Union, informed his readers that “I felt
really at home.” The policies of Gorbachev had initiated the revolutionary
transformation of Russian society from above, Ali asserted. There were those,
he noted cynically, who “would have preferred (me too!) if the changes in the
Soviet Union had been brought about by a gigantic movement of the Soviet
working class and revived the old organs of political power—the soviets—with
new blood. That would have been very nice, but it didn’t happen that way.” Ali
then offered a succinct summary of the Pabloite perspective, which combined in
equal measures political impressionism, naiveté, and personal stupidity.”[3]
Ali’s treachery and outright stupidity were welcomed by other
pseudo-left groups. Paul Foot, writing for the UK Socialist Workers Party,
wrote in the Literary Review, “He may be a rotten Marxist, but he's the best
raconteur the British Left has seen since the war. So spoke a sectarian friend
of mine some fifteen years ago about Tariq Ali. I agree with both propositions.
I will join sectarian battle with Tariq before this is over (where better than
in the Literary Review, none of whose readers agree with either of
us) but it is worth saying right away that there is no time of the day or night
when any sane person would be sorry to see Tariq Ali and to talk with him. He
laughs most of the time, especially at himself and his comrades. He is the most
marvellous and melodious public speaker, with a deep love and care for the
English language. What he is like speaking in his first language is beyond
imagining.”[4]
Ali’s book catalogues all the major revolutions and
political upheavals, but in a very cursory and superficial manner and without examining
the major defeats and reasons behind several high-profile defeats. Take France 1968, Ali writes, “In France,
there was the largest General Strike in capitalism’s history and when the trade
union bureaucrats went up to the workers and said ‘the bosses want to share a
bit more of the cake with you’, the response from rank-and-file workers was
‘No! We want the whole bakery.” Ali played a not small part in the defeat of
the French working class in the events of May-June 1968.[5]
Another revolution mentioned by Ali is the Portuguese Revolution.
He writes, “In 1975, the Portuguese workers, peasants, students, soldiers and
young officers brought society to the brink of revolution. They created a
feeling that a fundamental change to society was possible and was within our
grasp. And we felt that revolutionary change in Portugal would feedback, deepen
and revive our movement across the rest of Europe.” Despite occasional setbacks
and defeats, the period as a whole bred confidence in ordinary people and a
deepening radicalisation that lasted up until about 1975.
These “occasional setbacks” are the bloody defeats of
revolutions that swept throughout Europe and beyond. None more so than the
terrible defeat that the Portuguese working class suffered and is still dealing
with the aftermath even today.
On April 25 1974, a coup by lower-ranked army officers
overthrew Portugal’s fascist Estado Novo government. The coup opened the way
for a massive mobilisation of the working class, which had not been seen in
Portugal before. It was one of the most important revolutions since the Second
World War and caught the international bourgeoisie completely by surprise. It
would take nearly two years to defeat the revolution. With relatively little
violence or bloodshed, the Portuguese bourgeoisie could take back power at the
expense of a few limited reforms. The popular front government established by
the revolution, which contained a significant Communist Party presence under
the leadership of Álvaro Cunhal, handed over power without a murmur from the
numerous pseudo-left groups.
Despite his catalogue of betrayals, Ali is still lionised in
the bourgeois press. When asked What do you think are the prospects for the
left today? He writes
“Starmer is dreadful. I’m in no doubt that his policies will
create a space that, at the moment, the far right will try to fill. We need to
respond. But we can’t simply do what we did in the past, in the same ways. In
the 1970s, the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism were vital, but the
world has changed, the situation is different, and we need appropriate
responses. It won’t be easy, but you know it wasn’t always easy in the 1960s
and 1970s. It took time to build the anti-Vietnam War movement. We were constantly
under surveillance and harassment from the state.
Over the last few decades, we have witnessed the growth of
dynamic movements, like Stop the War. Today, the struggle around Palestine has
brought large numbers into action. The horrors of Gaza, the complicity of the
Western governments in the slaughter, and the scale of the resistance movement
on the streets will shape a generation. But we need to think about
organisational outcomes, establishing networks and rebuilding a progressive
political alternative. For the left, the Labour Party is finished. We should
encourage the small number of left Labour MPS (especially those who had the
whip removed) to work with the Independent MPS and together to try to offer an
alternative vision and voice for the future. We need some type of home,
not necessarily a formal political party, for the 200,000 who left Labour when
Corbyn was marginalised and kicked out; a home to those from the Palestine and
anti-imperialist movements; a home for the old and new left. I think we
face a long period of rebuilding, there is no quick fix. But if we sit back and
do nothing, things will only get worse.”[6]
As this answer shows, Ali has no qualms about ditching his
radical past for a financially comfortable existence as a bourgeois
commentator. There is no trace of his “brief spurt of leftism, which fizzled
out by the late 1970s.
As David Walsh points out “Ali has never explained,
anywhere, for any of his political peregrinations: Why he supposedly adopted
Trotskyism in the late 1960s, or why he abandoned it some years later; why he
wanted to disrupt Labour Party activities at one moment and later tried to
install himself as a member. He embodies the French expression, “Before 30 a
revolutionary, after 30, a swine!”—except, in his case, the swinishness
developed early on and just grew.”
[1]
You Can't Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024
[2]
The presence of Tariq Ali at the “Socialism 2010” conference- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/06/tari-j18.html
[3]
Perestroika and Glasnost in the USSR- www.wsws.org/en/special/library/foundations-us/56.html
[4]
Paul Foot-Rotten Marxist, Nice Bloke Street Fighting Years
By Tariq Ali Collins 208pp £12.95
[5]
www.counterfire.org/article/tariq-ali-memories-of-the-struggle-reloaded/
[6]
www.counterfire.org/article/tariq-ali-memories-of-the-struggle-reloaded/
