Outtakes from a story of defeat

Tariq Ali's radical winter

WHEN THE TIME CAME, too many good people gave up too easily. In the doldrums of the Cold War, when the wind seemed to be going out of the revolutionary left, a large number of people who really should’ve known better turned their backs on the movement. They went over to the right, or to human rights, or environmentalism. Everywhere there was a softening, even as the victorious power hardened.

Not Tariq Ali, though. He softened only slightly, but kept his radicalism well stoked. His new memoir You Can’t Please All is a story of disillusion and defeat spanning 1980 to 2024. For all his stark recognition, the veteran streetfighter is a good case study of never losing faith, even in the lowest waters:

Ali tends the flame so well that he does not stop to wonder why it flickered. How did his enemies triumph? The most immediate answer is the most unpleasant: because loss was handed out in episodes of grotesque violence in every political theatre from Santiago to Jakarta to Orgreave. This is why radicals have martyrs, not living idols, and why rebels end up with plaques, not pensions. Still, to escape all of this with your principles mostly intact, your rage undimmed – that too is a kind of virtue, and its own monument.

Read the full review here at the TLS: Revolution postponed