Tariq Ali's Blog, page 10

Tariq Ali on history and fiction

James Saville writes for the Dhaka Tribune:

On Sunday evening Tariq, who came here to attend the Hay Festival Dhaka 2013, captivated an audience of students and professors at ULAB with a talk entitled ‘History and Fiction’

Always eloquent, and by turns sombre and witty, Tariq Ali, the renowned British Pakistani writer and journalist, beguiled his audience with a potted history of capitalism since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Tariq, who came here to attend the Hay Festival Dhaka 2013, captivated an audience of students and professors at ULAB with a talk entitled ‘History and Fiction.’

He told of the astonishing success of China’s particular brand of capitalism, and how he believes this has turned it into such an unequal society.

“More so than the United States of America, or any western European capitalist country, the gap between rich and poor in China is the largest gap in the world.”

The fact that advanced education is no longer universally available under the current Chinese system of state-backed capitalism, is particularly ironic he suggests, given that it was the skilled workforce provided by free education that enabled China to ditch communism and embrace competition in the first place.

After detours covering many diverse topics including Europe’s financial travails, the Arab spring, and homosexuality in Islam, he eventually returns to China – discussing its problems with corruption.

This in turn segues nicely to sub-continental matters; discussing a recent ranking of the most corrupt countries in the world, in which Nigeria came first and Pakistan second, he tells of jokingly asking a friend in the Pakistani civil service: “How could you let this happen… how could you only come second?”

“We forgot to bribe them,” comes the response. Read more

 

The Faces of Maoism

The recent Monty Python revival has come with a bizarre reminder from south London that once, long ago, there were a few tiny Maoist groups in Britain who used language that could have been cribbed from Life of Brian.

Aravindan Balakrishnan, 73, and his 67-year-old wife, Chanda – arrested last week on suspicion of holding three women as slaves in a flat for 30 years – were leaders of a tiny sect of 25 members known as the Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, invisible to the left at large. This sect had split from its father organisation, the Communist party of England (Marxist-Leninist), which itself had less than a hundred followers. The Maoists’ antics were rivalled by a number of Trotskyist sects, smaller and larger, whose implosion often involved the mistreatment of women, and the story is by no means over.

The Balakrishnans’ Brixton commune, it is now alleged, kept three women as virtual prisoners against their will. But it prospered. Membership declined, but property increased. The Balakrishnans pre-empted China’s turn to capitalism – according to some reports they had interests in 13 properties, three more than their total membership at the time.

What was the attraction of Maoism? The figure of Mao and the revolution loomed large, but the outpourings from these groups did not suggest a close reading of On Contradiction or other texts by Mao that might have stimulated the brain cells. Instead they became fantasy outfits, each with its own homegrown Mao playing on the genuine desire for change that dominated the 1967-77 decade.

As a political current, Maoism was always weak in Britain, confined largely to students from Asia, Africa and Latin America. This was not the case in other parts of Europe. At its peak, German Maoism had more than 10,000 members, and the combined circulation of its press was 100,000. After the great disillusionment – as the Chinese-US alliance of the mid-70s was termed – many of them privatised, and thousands joined the Greens, Jürgen Trittin becoming a staunch pro-Nato member of Gerhard Schröder’s cabinet. In France, the Gauche Prolétarienne organised workers in car factories, and set up Libération, its own paper that morphed into a liberal daily. Ex-Maoist intellectuals occupy significant space in French culture, though they are now neocons: Alain Finkielkraut, Pascal Bruckner, Jean-Claude Milner are a few names that come to mind. The leading leftwing philosopher Alain Badiou never hides his Maoist past.

Scandinavia was awash with Maoism in the 70s. Sweden had Maoist groups with a combined membership and periphery of several thousand members but it was Norway where Maoism became a genuine popular force and hegemonic in the culture. The daily paper Klassekampen still exists, now as an independent daily with a very fine crop of gifted journalists (mainly women) and a growing circulation. October is a leading fiction publishing house and May was a successful record company. Per Petterson, one of the country’s most popular novelists, describes in a recent book how, when Mao died, 100,000 people in a population of five million marched with torches to a surprised Chinese embassy to offer collective condolences. All this is a far cry from the cult sect now being excavated in Brixton. Read more

 

Tariq Ali’s Don Quijote

Der tragische Held Don Quijote bricht auf zu neuen, hochaktuellen Abenteuern: von Piratenüberfällen vor der Küste Somalias über die Untiefen des Finanzsystems bis hin zu offenem Rassismus.

Das Schauspiel Essen zeigt eine anekdotische Adaption des Literaturklassikers mit prominenten Namen hinter den Kulissen: Inszenieren wird das Auftragswerk Jean-Claude Berutti, ein europaweit bekannter Regisseur. Der streitbare Tariq Ali hat das Stück verfasst; wie Don Quijote selbst ist der gebürtige Pakistaner ein Grenzgänger zwischen den Welten und ein Kämpfer gegen das Unrecht. Was kommt heraus, wenn das Schauspiel Essen internationale Theaterprominenz ins Revier holt? Ein Probenbesuch von West ART. Read more and watch a video here

México está ‘atado’ para defenderse de espionaje de EU

Ante las revelaciones del espionaje de EU a países como México, el escritor pakistaní Tariq Alí dice en entrevista con Carmen Aristegui que la reacción del gobierno mexicano “es como si estuviese siendo violado en términos de sus políticas, economía que son espiadas y el presidente no dice nada”.

El escritor, que participó en la Feria del Libro de la Ciudad de México, recuerda la reacción de la presidenta Dilma Rousseff quien demostró “una reacción de un país soberano e independiente, enojado” con acciones como cancelar su visita de Estado a Washington DC y condenar el espionaje ante la ONU; mientras que la del presidente de México fue la de “un país que depende de EU moralmente, políticamente y psicológicamente”. Read more

Tariq Alí visita a la CNTE: “Un país sin educación está condenado a morir”

México transita hacia un totalitarismo suave: Tariq Ali

Mónica Mateos-Vega

En México, como en varios países del mundo, la democracia está dejando de existir gradualmente para dar paso a un régimen de totalitarismo suave, producto, por supuesto, del neoliberalismo, afirma en entrevista conLa Jornada el ensayista, historiador y cineasta Tariq Ali (Pakistán, 1943).

El también periodista se encuentra en el Distrito Federal, invitado por los organizadores de la 13 Feria Internacional del Libro (FIL) en el Zócalo para participar en varias tertulias públicas y compartir sus agudos análisis acerca de los movimientos sociales, los fundamentalismos y las nuevas formas de operación del imperialismo, entre otros temas.

La cita con el escritor es en un hotel en el Centro Histórico, en medio de calles vigiladas por granaderos y decenas de vehículos de la policía en los alrededores. Tariq Ali sale, observa a los uniformados, pide que se le haga una foto con ellos detrás y señala: No me sorprende lo que ocurre ahora en México; es el resultado lógico de las políticas neoliberales que hasta hace no mucho tenían ciertos controles, pero se han perdido todo tipo de restricciones y los neoliberales hoy operan libremente; lo malo es que esto se puede poner aún peor, es un proceso de degeneración.

El autor lamentó que en el país se estén aceptando como normales los viejos hábitos totalitarios que ya se conocían: En esta normalización, no importa qué partido gane, si es de derecha o de centro izquierda, pues se trata de un sistema en el que el partido totalitario tiene un control hegemónico y domina todo el sistema.

La vez anterior que Ali estuvo en México fue en 2007, cuando participó en la Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara. Iniciaba el gobierno de Felipe Calderón. El escritor afirmó entonces que Estados Unidos había trabajado muy duro para que su candidato ganara. (La Jornada, 2 de diciembre de 2007)

En todo el mundo siempre existe un pensamiento: las cosas no se pueden poner peor, pero sí, se ponen peor. Cuando estuve aquí hace seis años, muchas personas esperábamos que ante una elección tan claramente manipulada los ciudadanos se enardecerían y habría protestas, pero eso no sucedió, el proceso continuó, explica.

Por tal motivo, puntualiza: “Para que un sistema cambie se requiere la participación activa de todos los agentes de la sociedad. En el momento en que un grupo o movimiento se rehúsa a participar, como hicieron los zapatistas que entonces dijeron ‘nosotros no nos ensuciamos las manos en asuntos como la política’, en ese momento se imposibilita el cambio. Es la misma posición que están tomando los indignados en España.

Esos argumentos, el decir que la política es sucia y abandonar todo, no nos sirve. Si no se actúa con las herramientas del sistema político se abandona cualquier posibilidad de cambio.

Tariq Ali, asesor del canal de televisión sudamericano Telesur, con sede en Caracas, y autor del libroPiratas del caribe. El eje de la esperanza, en el cual presenta una semblanza de Fidel Castro, Evo Morales y Hugo Chávez, afirma que el único país donde hay un auténtico avance y cambio de sistema es Venezuela. No llamo a lo que sucede ahí una auténtica revolución, pero sí existe un trabajo real en pro de los pobres; es la única región que se está moviendo hoy día en esa dirección. En México hubo esa posibilidad de cambio. Si el grupo que empujó a Calderón no hubiera manipulado las elecciones, este país estaría marchando en aquella dirección.

Ahora, lo que podría funcionar, añade, es la combinación de un líder carismático con un ideario claro que defienda con pasión, y un movimiento social que lo apuntale y se encargue de que ese programa sea una realidad. Pero los líderes no caen del cielo, son producto de situaciones muy concretas. México tiene una tradición rica en ese aspecto, ahí esta la Revolución campesina de 1910, empujando al país a cambiar, o el modelo de República de Lázaro Cárdenas, que empujaba a la nación en dirección de la gente más desprotegida. No hay un solo tipo de líder, lo importante es que empujen a la nación en la dirección correcta.

A propósito de las revelaciones que el ex agente Edward Snowden hizo al semanario alemán Der Spiegel,difundidas ayer domingo, respecto de que la Agencia de Seguridad Nacional estadunidense (NSA, por sus siglas en inglés) espió el correo electrónico del ex presidente, Ali bromea: Hay que decirle a Snowden que lo que realmente nos interesa saber no es cuántos tequilas se echaba Calderón, sino cómo y qué intereses manipularon esas elecciones.

Tariq Ali ha sido activista político desde los años 60; estudió Ciencias Políticas y Filosofía en Oxford. En 1990 empezó a escribir ficción, entre sus novelas más conocidas están las agrupadas en la serie Quinteto islámico. Su obra The Shadows of the Pomergranate Tree, un estudio sobre la decadencia de la civilización musulmana, fue galardonada en 1994 en España como la mejor novela extranjera con el Premio Arzobispo Juan Clemente del Instituto Rosalía de Castro.

Insiste en que “vivimos en un mundo dominado por lo que llamo el ‘extremo centro’, una corriente que apoya las guerras, el combate, el abuso, el despojo y el comportamiento neoliberal que se ve en todo el mundo.

“En México, el enemigo es doble: no sólo la oligarquía local, sino el gran imperio estadunidense, pues es un país estratégicamente muy importante, por eso el vecino del norte siempre va a invertir y gastar lo que sea necesario para que la oligarquía aquí se mantenga donde está.

“La izquierda, cualquiera que ésta sea, tiene que entender que cuando ataca los intereses de la oligarquía local, ataca al imperio. Los actos simbólicos son muy importantes, pero por sí solos no logran mucho. Todo esto se ha visto en Europa.

“El único país donde los movimientos de izquierda tienden hacia algo distinto es en Grecia. La clase media está aterrada con la Coalición de la Izquierda Radical (Syriza), que ha fusionado en un partido único las facciones y organizaciones que hasta ahora la componían, con el propósito de reforzar sus posibilidades de convertirse en alternativa de gobierno.

“El líder de este partido, Alexis Tsipras, con quien hablé la semana pasada, es un tipo muy capaz e inteligente. Le preguntaron que a quién admiraba en el mundo y respondió Hugo Chávez; de inmediato todos los medios europeos se fueron sobre él. Pero no cambió su discurso. Read more

“The Islam Quintet” now available as e-books

Tariq Ali’s acclaimed historical cycle The Islam Quintet has been released for the first time in ebook format, available from Open Road Media.

The novels are available as individual titles:

Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree

The Book of Saladin

The Stone Woman

A Sultan in Palermo

Night of the Golden Butterfly

“The Islam Quartet” now available as e-books

Tariq Ali’s acclaimed historical cycle The Islam Quartet has been released for the first time in ebook format, available from Open Road Media.

The novels are available as individual titles:

Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree

The Book of Saladin

The Stone Woman

A Sultan in Palermo

Night of the Golden Butterfly

L’Affair Milliband

The only function of the assault on the reputation of Ralph Miliband was to punish and discredit his son. This operation, masterminded theDaily Mail and its editor—a reptile courted assiduously in the past by Blair and Brown—has backfired sensationally. It was designed to discredit the son by hurling the ‘sins of the father’ on the head of his younger son. Instead, Edward Miliband’s spirited response united a majority of the country behind him and against the tabloid. Ralph, had he been alive, would have found the ensuing consensus extremely diverting.

The Tories and Lib-Dems made their distaste for the Mail clear, Jeremy Paxman on BBC’s Newsnight held up old copies of the Mail with its pro-fascist headlines (‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ the best remembered), two former members of Thatcher’s cabinet defended Miliband pere with Michael Heseltine reminding citizens that it was the Soviet Union and the Red Army that made victory against the Axis powers possible in the first place and an opinion poll commissioned by the Sunday Timesrevealed that 73 percent supported Ed Miliband against the Rothermere rag. Did these figures compel the paper to hire a hack writer to carry on the Mail campaign in a marginally more ‘sophisticated’ style, but replete with smear and innuendo?  If Paul Dacre is soon put out to pasture on his large estate in Ireland, the story will have a Hollywood ending. The triumph of good against evil, as one might say, using the language often deployed by tabloids and politicians in these bad times.

The demonization of Ralph Miliband raises a few issues avoided by both the Tory and the liberal press. These relate to Miliband’s own political views on Britain, its political institutions as well as the world at large; the context of the first Lord Rothermere’s addiction to Mussolini and Hitler and their English offspring in Britain (Oswald Mosley and gang but not them alone) right up till September 1939 and the question of patriotism and its compatibility with leftwing views.

The popularity of fascism on the Right was not, alas, confined to the Rothermeres or the Mitfords. The class confidence of European conservatism was shaken by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia whose declared aim was to destroy global capitalism. Fear stalked the corridors of power in every capital and the presence of large numbers of Marxists of Jewish origin in both the Bolshevik and Menshevik parties stoked anti-semitism throughout Europe. The impact of the black-shirted fascist triumph in Rome, five years after the Bolshevik victory, should not be underestimated. With rare exceptions the European Right, including its liberal segments, greeted it as a huge triumph for western civilization and heaved a huge collective sigh of relief. Capitalism had found its own shock troops

Distinguished English-language publishers in London (Hutchinson) and New York (Scribners) published Mussolini’s My Autobiography in several editions: the introduction by Richard Child, a former US Ambassador to Italy and a fascist groupie who helped ghost-write the book, praised the dictator in extravagant language as one of the ‘leading statesman in the world.’  To the end of his days the fascist leader would quote from memory what Winston Churchill had said during a visit to Rome five years after the fascist triumph in 1927:

‘I could not help being charmed, like so many other people have been, by Signor Mussolini’s gentle and simple bearing and by his calm, detached poise in spite of so many burdens and dangers. Secondly, anyone could see that he thought of nothing but the lasting good, as he understood it, of the Italian people, and that no lesser interest was of the slightest consequence to him. If I had been an Italian I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.’

Churchill proceeded to explain the international significance of fascism as lying in its capacity to mobilise friendly social forces to defeat the common enemy:

‘Italy has shown that there is a way of fighting the subversive forces which can rally the masses of the people, properly led, to value and wish to defend the honour and stability of civilised society. She has provided the necessary antidote to the Russian poison. Hereafter no great nation will be unprovided with an ultimate means of protection against the cancerous growth of Bolshevism.’

Here we have it without any obfuscation. Fascism was a necessary bulwark against the threat of communist revolution. And all this was written and spoken long before the abomination of Stalin’s purges and the famines resulting from forced industrialization. It became the common sense of the continental Right and explains, apart from other things, the ease with which the regime at Vichy began its years of collaboration with the Third Reich after the 1940 occupation of France. Read more

Ralph Miliband: An Obituary

Tariq Ali’s obituary for Ralph Miliband, first published in the Independent, May 1994.

Tariq Ali with Ralph Miliband in 1986

Ralph Miliband was a socialist intellectual of great integrity.

He belonged to a generation of socialists formed by the Russian Revolution and the Second World War. His father, a leather craftsman in Warsaw, was a member of the Jewish Bund, an organisation of socialist workers. Poland, after the First World War, was beset by chaos, disorder and, ultimately, a military dictatorship. There were large-scale migrations. One of Ralph’s uncles had gone eastwards and joined the Red Army, then under Trotsky’s command. His parents had left Warsaw separately in 1922. They met in Brussels where they had both settled and were married a year later. Ralph was born in 1924.

Hitler’s victory in Germany, followed a few years later by the Spanish Civil War, had polarised politics throughout the Continent. It was not possible for an intellectually alert 15-year-old to remain unaffected. Ralph joined the lively, Jewish-socialist youth organisation, Hashomeir Hatzair (Young Guard), whose members later played a heroic role in the Resistance. It was here that the young Miliband learnt of capitalism as a system based on exploitation where the rich lived off the harm they inflicted on others. One of his close friends, Maurice Tran, who was later hanged at Auschwitz, gave him a copy of the Communist Manifesto. Even though he was not yet fully aware of it, he had become enmeshed in the business of socialist politics.

In 1940, as the German armies were beginning to roll into Belgium, the Milibands, like thousands of others, prepared to flee to France. This proved impossible because of German bombardment. Ralph and his father walked to Ostend and boarded the last boat to Dover, which was packed with fleeing diplomats and officials. His mother and younger sister, Nan, had remained behind and survived the war with the help of the Resistance.

Ralph and his father arrived in London in May 1940. Both worked, for a time, as furniture removers, helping to clear bombed houses and apartments. It was Ralph who determined the division of labour, ensuring that his main task was to carry the books. Often he would settle on the front steps of a house, immersed in a book. His passion for the written word led him to the works of Harold J. Laski. He had read in one of these that Laski was at the London School of Economics (then exiled in Cambridge) and was determined to get there. His English was getting better by the day and after his matricuation, he did find his way to the LSE. Laski became a mentor, never to be forgotten. Only several months ago in a review-essay for the 200th issue of the New Left Review, Ralph Miliband acknowledged his debt:

I came to know Harold Laski as a student at the LSE between 1941 and 1943; and I was fairly close to him after I came back to the LSE in 1946. I was quite dazzled, as a 17-year-old student, by his scholarship, his wit, his extraordinary generosity to students, and his familiarity with the great and the mighty. I had a deep affection for him, which the passage of years since his death in 1950 at the age of 56 has not dimmed.

The three missing years to which he refers were spent in service as a naval rating in the Belgian section of the Royal Navy. Aware of the fact that many of his Belgian comrades were engaged in the war against Fascism and traumatised by the absence of his mother and sister, he had volunteered, using Laski’s influence to override the bureaucracy. He served on a number of destroyers and warships, helping to intercept German radio messages. He rose to the rank of Chief Petty Officer and was greatly amused on one occasion when his new commanding officer informed him how he had been rated by a viscount who had commanded the ship on which he had previously served: ‘Miliband is stupid, but always remains cheerful.’

After the war he graduated from the LSE with a PhD. and embarked on a long teaching career. He taught first at Roosevelt College in Chicago and later became a lecturer in Political Science at the LSE and later still a Professor at Leeds. This was followed by long stints at Brandeis and New YorK. Teaching, for him, was always a two-way process and, for that reason, it gave him great pleasure. It was an arena for lively debates and a genuine exchange of ideas.

In the late Sixties and Seventies, he was in great demand at campuses throughout Britain and North America. He winced at some of the excesses (‘Why the hell do you have to wear these stupid combat jackets?’ I remember him asking a group of us during a big meeting on Vietnam in 1968), but remained steadfast.

A Miliband speech was always a treat; alternately sarcastic and scholarly, witty and vicious, but never demagogic. Apart from a brief spell in the Labour Party, he belonged to no organisation. His fierce independence excluded the Communist Party.

His dislike of posturing and sterile dogma kept him away from the far left sects. This turned out to be a strength. He was unencumbered by any party line, which made his speeches refreshing. There was music in his delivery and he always varied the peroration at the end and this coupled with his passionate commitment to socialism.

As a writer he deployed a wide political culture and clarity of argument. Two of his books, Parliamentary Socialism (1969) and The State in Capitalist Society (1972), became classics during the Sixties and Seventies. As he lay dying in hospital, what gave him great pleasure was physically to feel the proofs of his last work, Socialism for a Sceptical Age, to be published by Polity Press this autumn. His wife Marion and his two sons, David and Edward, had read the first draft of the book. He had not accepted all of their criticisms and suggestions, but the process had stimulated him. It had also made him very happy. He was very proud of his family.

Ralph Miliband had pledged his own intelIect to the struggle for human emancipation. He was impatient of those who had begun to drift. The introverted argot of post-modernism depressed him. He had lost close friends and others whom he admired greatly. Raymond Williams, Edward Thompson, Isaac Deutscher, Marcel Liebman, C. Wright Mills, had all, like Ralph Miliband, been public intellectuals, dissidents in the capitalist West, who had enriched our political culture.

His death has now left a gaping void in times which are bad for socialists everywhere.

This obituary was written by Tariq Ali and first published in the Independent

NOTE

Socialist Register, the canonical new left journal that Ralph Miliband founded with John Saville, will celebrate its 50th Anniversary next month.