Bad Times

On​ 30 September 2001, Tariq Ali was arrested at Munich airport. His hand luggage contained two objects which were regarded as suspicious: a book by Karl Marx and a copy of the Times Literary Supplement, which included a review, annotated by Ali, of a volume about Algeria. These items were confiscated and he was taken to the airport’s police headquarters. ‘You can’t travel with books like this,’ the arresting officer said. It was less than three weeks after 9/11. He was told by another officer that he would probably be detained until at least after his flight had left.

‘At this point,’ Ali writes in You Can’t Please All, his second volume of memoirs, ‘my patience evaporated and I demanded to use a phone.’ The second officer asked whom he wanted to call. ‘The mayor of Munich,’ Ali replied. ‘His name is Christian Ude. He interviewed me about my books and the present crisis on Friday evening at Hugendubel’s bookshop. I wish to inform him of what is taking place in his city.’ The officer left the room and was replaced by yet another, who told Ali to come with him. Without saying anything else, he led Ali to his flight, which he was allowed to board although the gate had closed. A German fellow passenger approached Ali and ‘expressed his dismay at the police behaviour’. Further compensation of a sort came later from the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which ‘asked me to write a piece’ about the episode. He doesn’t say whether he ever got the Marx or the TLS back.

This story about the experience of prejudice, the use of political connections and the value of personal confidence in tricky situations takes up only a couple of pages towards the end of a very long book. But it’s a telling glimpse of the perils and benefits of being one of the world’s best-known left-wing activists and intellectuals during a period when the left has mostly been in retreat, often barely tolerated by the state. This loose and digressive book is many things: a history of a left-wing elite and its enemies since the 1980s; a settling of old scores; a tribute to old allies; an attack on America’s global dominance and its foreign enablers; a travelogue about places that resist that dominance; a diary, a family history and an autobiography. But above all it is an account of how Ali – who, like comrades such as Perry Anderson, Richard Gott and Robin Blackburn, is now in his eighties – has sustained a particular kind of political life, which younger leftists are unlikely to be able to enjoy.

Ali’s first volume of memoirs, Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties, was published in 1987, when Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and their free-market disciples were at their zenith. It ended on a downbeat note: ‘Most of the world is passing through bad times, but … hope itself cannot be abandoned.’ Yet much of the preceding narrative was about Ali’s involvement in radical struggles that either succeeded or, for a time at least, felt promising and thrilling. He described flying into a bombed and blacked-out Hanoi to support the North Vietnamese against the Americans and being interrogated by soldiers at gunpoint during a Bolivian insurgency. In London, he helped run a new countercultural newspaper, the Black Dwarf, whose offices were ‘a regular port of call for visiting revolutionaries from all over the world’. During his teens, twenties and early thirties, he was considered such a troublemaker that the governments of Pakistan, Britain, France and the US, among others, either banned him, considered deporting him, or threatened his personal safety. Street Fighting Years turns all these adventures into a (relatively) concise and pacy story, with a clear arc: from a politically precocious adolescence in Lahore, where he was born and organised his first demonstration as a 14-year-old, at a time when protests were illegal in Pakistan, to his later global status as one of the half-dozen subversives whom unpolitical people may have heard of.

You Can’t Please All, from its less dramatic title on, is a different kind of book. Twice the length, covering almost half a century, from the final years of the Cold War to the current era of less predictable disorder, it is partly about remaining politically engaged in middle and old age. It sometimes has a nostalgic, scrapbook quality – it includes bits of old newspaper columns, transcripts of ideological discussions, accounts of comrades’ funerals and visits to past haunts. In 2007, Ali returned to the Bolivian city where he had ‘holed up’ in the 1960s after the soldiers had released him:

Richard Gott and I wandered around Cochabamba. The Paris Café on the Plaza de 14 Septiembre was still there, looking much less dilapidated. The Roxy Cinema where I watched Lee Marvin and Jane Fonda in Cat Ballou in 1967 has also survived, although it is now an evangelical church. Gott insisted that we visit La Cancha … the indigenous market opposite the old railway station … Little has changed since 1967, though the quality seems to have declined a bit. I bought two cheap tin plates painted with flowers, which turned out to have been made in China.

In these memoirs, as in the 1960s, Ali is always travelling. But rather than making flying visits to support or try to spark revolutions, here he is usually on the move for more outwardly respectable reasons: attending conferences, having long lunches with fellow activist-intellectuals, being interviewed about his huge output of political biographies, polemics, plays, historical analyses and novels. ‘Once Clash of Fundamentalisms and later Bush in Babylon were published’ in 2002 and 2003 respectively, he writes, ‘there was a point … when I counted almost fifty invitations per month to different continents.’ He relishes this life and status: ‘I am a rootless cosmopolitan.’ The network of contacts he has built up sometimes comes in handy when the travelling threatens to become onerous. ‘Land in Beirut for a meeting,’ he writes of a visit in 2006. ‘An old Palestinian friend, Fawaz Trabulsi, picks me up at the airport. Notices that I am in a very long queue. I see him on the phone. Ten minutes later a security officer emerges, calls my name, has my passport stamped and escorts me out to where Fawaz is waiting.’

Ali’s knowledge of left-wing groups around the world, of their local and global struggles and the way these struggles relate to the strategies being pursued by the US and other major powers, is encyclopedic and in wide demand. The evening after arriving in Beirut he has ‘supper with Syrian oppositionists of the left’. The following day, ‘a car is waiting to drive me to Damascus. A lunch is being laid on by the UK ambassador … As I arrive at the embassy, he greets me warmly: “Not a free lunch, I’m afraid. I’ve invited various representatives from different political currents to question you.”’ For a lifelong opponent of the establishment, Ali gets on strikingly well with some of its members: those diplomats, spooks and former spooks who think seriously, as he sees it, about the arrangement of power in the world. Sometimes, he suggests, they even agree with him: ‘Western intelligence services regularly tell their leaders that the radicalisation of a tiny sliver of young Muslims … is a result of US foreign policy.’

While the tone of much of the book is quite cool and aloof, there is an enthusiastic chapter called ‘The Art of Spying’. ‘I have been fascinated by espionage from a very young age,’ it begins. For readers who might worry he is about to reveal a grudging respect for MI6 or the CIA, the example he gives is reassuring: ‘The first Soviet spies were not technicians or trained killers. In the 1920s, spies were above all political people, chosen for their ability to grasp, analyse and connect events that appeared to be unconnected. Above all, Soviet spies in those days of hope saw themselves as foot soldiers of the world revolution.’ Effective secret agents also know how to collect gossip and distribute it to their advantage; have unusually capacious memories, and a capacity to hold grudges; show a keen awareness of political and bureaucratic hierarchies; and possess a certain mischief and charm. In this book’s best sections, Ali shows all these qualities.

Invited to a conference in Soviet Tashkent in 1985, he soon slips away with his interpreter and a few other delegates to an open-air market. There they find a bottle of Moldavian red on a tiny stall:

No label, no price. The seller insisted it was a remnant from the tsar’s cellar, which is why the price tag was on the high side ($30) … I took the risk. Loaded with goodies we repaired to Igor’s apartment. I cooked the meal: lamb in garlic and dried apricots, fresh coriander and thyme … The dinner became an animated discussion on history till the early hours. The Moldavian red was without doubt from the tsar’s cellar.

Connoisseurship, conviviality, exotic locations, encounters and debates with other worldly individuals: left-wing politics as presented here is often far from the grind of cold picket lines or meetings in draughty halls. Back in London, Ali is invited to Private Eye lunches – its then editor, Richard Ingrams, is ‘Ingo’ in these pages – and talks to fellow Hampstead and Highgate lefties about ‘new additions to our libraries’ of political first editions. Some of his other allies in the capital are more surprising. Shortly after 9/11, he gets a phone call from ‘a friend belonging to the upper reaches of Saudi society’. Over lunch, she tells him that her family in Riyadh are thrilled at ‘what we did’ to the US, supposedly Saudi Arabia’s close ally. In 1983, he talks to Indira Gandhi, India’s then prime minister, while researching a book about her family. ‘After the formal interview,’ he writes, ‘Mrs Gandhi turned to me: “Now my turn to ask some questions. I read your new book [Can Pakistan Survive?]. You know these [Pakistani] generals and how they think and operate. I’m being told by my people here that Pakistan is preparing a surprise attack on us in Kashmir. What do you think?”’

Connectedness, confidence and dissent run in Ali’s family. One of his grandfathers was ‘the elected premier of the Punjab’. His father was an anti-imperialist, a leftist, a fiercely independent newspaper and magazine editor, and ‘the All-India backstroke champion’ before his part of Punjab became part of Pakistan. Ali’s mother was expelled from boarding school for insisting at morning assembly that Jawaharlal Nehru, then in prison for his part in the Indian independence campaign, be invited to address the pupils. That afternoon, ‘a chauffeur duly arrived with a maid in tow to pack her clothes and books.’

Ali spends half a dozen chapters laying out his family history. But insecurity runs through this saga as well as privilege, with rebellious family members, like Pakistan’s dissidents and its democratic system in general, living under the threat of authoritarian military interventions, often backed by the Americans. Thus Ali’s perpetual opposition to Washington’s foreign policies – sometimes dismissed by his enemies as radical chic, an eternal political adolescence – is shown to be rooted in something real and personal. During the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, protesting against the Vietnam War was the clearest expression of his anti-Americanism; during the period this book covers, it’s his work against the ‘liberal interventionism’ led by the US in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. In 2001, when he became one of the co-founders of the Stop the War coalition, his political life intensified again. ‘From 1984 to 1999,’ he writes, ‘I had largely concentrated on a cultural resistance, making films, writing novels and plays and giving the odd political lecture,’ but now this life was replaced by a ‘near total immersion in the political crisis’ of which 9/11 was both symptom and cause. On marches, at rallies and in public meetings, he became, as he remains, a regular presence, making pithy anti-war speeches, often spiced with telling facts picked up from his establishment sources. For all the individually gratifying, high-status political activities described in this book, he is still prepared to do his bit for less glamorous, more collective struggles.

He is dismissive of the leftists and literary types who gave up on these struggles or even went over to the dark side, such as Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis. ‘The useful idiots of the empire’, ‘the empire loyalists’, ‘the belligerati’: Ali’s contempt has the fluency of someone who has taken part in factional battles for decades. Hitchens is a particular target, for supporting the invasion of Iraq and the recklessly bellicose presidency of George W. Bush. ‘What happened to make him a Bush apologist?’ Ali asks. He suggests that Hitchens was warned by one of his editors that if he remained a critic of America ‘his career and bank balance might suffer.’ It’s a typical Ali attack: part analysis of an enemy’s place in the system, part gossipy speculation. But as he says more about Hitchens’s break with the left his tone becomes more melancholy: ‘From then on he and I debated in public but we never spoke.’ Like Ali, Hitchens was a writer and talker of great fluency and charisma, who agitated all over the world and became a radical celebrity. Perhaps his abandonment of the cause was, and still is, a little haunting.

More upbeat passages cover the left’s revival as a governing force in South America, and in particular the rule of Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013. ‘What appealed was his bluntness and courage,’ writes Ali with uncharacteristic gushiness. ‘Chávez lit up the political landscape.’ Interestingly, Ali admires him not as a left-wing purist but as a redistributive populist who transferred some of the country’s oil wealth to the poor. ‘I don’t believe in the dogmatic … Marxist revolution,’ Chávez tells him. ‘I believe it’s better to die in battle, rather than hold aloft a very revolutionary and very pure banner, and do nothing.’ After so long agitating and organising for defeated or endlessly deferred revolutions, Ali is excited that in Venezuela a radical programme is actually being implemented. He is also thrilled that Chávez turns out to be a fellow bibliophile. In an anecdote that is almost too perfect, the president tells Ali that, ‘like me, Fidel [Castro] is an insomniac. Sometimes we’re reading the same novel. He rings at 3 a.m. and asks: “Well, have you finished? What do you think?” And we argue for another hour.’

Ali suggests that Chávez, who officially died of natural causes, may in fact have been murdered by the Americans. Chávez died during the presidency of Barack Obama, admired by liberals the world over for his supposedly sophisticated moderation, but condemned by Ali as a representative of ‘the extreme centre’, along with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. A near rant from 2011 reprinted here describes them as ‘hollow men who rule over a hollow system where money overpowers all and the much maligned state is used mainly to preserve the financial status quo and fund the wars’. He goes on: ‘Serious debate and openness have virtually disappeared from mainstream political life in the United States … and Europe.’ He considers the ‘banana monarchy’ of Britain one of the most degraded democracies. By the time of Blair’s third consecutive election victory in 2005, he writes, British life was characterised by ‘a “model” neoliberal economy … an authoritarian social agenda; a conformist media … the broader homogenisation of national culture … the ghettoisation of all thought that does not produce quick profits; and the takeover of the universities by assessment-driven management dogma’.

This bleak, contemptuous view is one long associated with the New Left Review, with which Ali has been closely involved for decades: there are several lengthy sections here about its complex and sometimes fractious internal politics. NLR’s usually elegantly expressed and well-evidenced pessimism can be very persuasive: many of the bad things Ali saw in Britain in 2005 have got much worse. And his argument that centrists often do terrible things in office, partly because they see themselves, and are seen by centrist journalists, as reasonable people who would never do such things, or would only do them as an absolute last resort, is a strong one. Yet sometimes his disdain for centrists, just like NLR’s merciless cataloguing of their failures in office, leads him to treat more right-wing governments less harshly, as if he prefers their more consistent and unashamed nastiness. ‘Trump is a disruptive novelty,’ Ali writes, in a piece from 2022 reprinted here, while Johnson is ‘more of a louche old-school politician with a popular touch’. That seems to underestimate the damage they have done, and may do in future.

In general, Ali plays down the rise of right-wing populism. In that article from 2022, he describes the MAGA counter-revolution as ‘something like a political movement’ and ‘numerically quite small’. Elsewhere, with typical contrariness, he gives almost as much space and closer attention to Edward Gibbon, the historian of Roman imperialism and its fall, whom both Ali and his father loved for the ‘varied shadings’ of his prose, ‘his rousing challenge to … official historians’ and the ‘splendour of his intellect’. He shows even greater enthusiasm for another fogey icon, Anthony Powell, whose Dance to the Music of Time ‘remains a work of literature without equal in modern English letters’. Readers of Ali’s stirring calls for revolution in the Black Dwarf, half a century ago, probably didn’t see that one coming.

Ali’s instinct to rank people, to respect and seek out only the writers, activists and politicians whom he considers of the highest standard, is both a product of his family background and a characteristic of some of those who led the radical left in the 1960s and its long aftermath, in Britain and far beyond. That left was less concerned than today’s with checking its privilege, more comfortable with personal myth-making and heroic individuals, and, to judge from this book, a lot more fun.