Tariq Ali also appeared today on Air America’s Majority Report.
Do you agree with Ali’s analysis of the age we’re living in?
I think that is more difficult to evoke at the present time, where the victory of capital seems so total, except in Latin America [in] Venezuela [Bolivia and] Ecuador. I always say to activists [outside] Latin America, that is the laboratory. That’s where the key struggles are taking place today. . . . More below, including his views on Iraq
Who is Tariq Ali?
Tariq Ali, novelist, historian and political activist. He has written more than a dozen books on world history and politics, including, “Bush in Babylon: The Recolonization of Iraq” as well as five novels, and scripts for both stage and screen. He is one of the editors of New Left Review. An updated edition of his memoir, “Street-Fighting Years: An Authobiography of the Sixties” [and a] new collection of interviews with David Barsamian titled “Speaking of Empire and Resistance” [have been] published …
What does Tariq Ali say about Iraq?
AMY GOODMAN: Well, the latest on Iraq, your reaction, and I want to talk about your history of activism.
TARIQ ALI: Well, the savagery and the chaos in that country shows no sign of abating since the elections. The new president, who has been appointed, Talabani, he may be a Kurd, and … a Kurdish tribal leader, was on the payroll of the CIA, the Israelis, took money from Saddam Hussein, the Iranians. So, he will be a very willing president for Zalmay Khalilzad to run from the Embassy in Baghdad.
[W]hat that demonstration stressed a few days ago is that most Iraqis, whatever their ethnic origins, with the possible exception of the Kurds, want the occupying forces out of their country. It’s elementary.
And once these forces are withdrawn, then the Iraqi groups will have to sit down and talk to each other, the nonviolent resistance groups and the armed resistance groups, and see how to take the country forward. But as long as the occupation is there, it becomes very difficult for people to even talk to each other seriously about the future of that country.
[…….]
AMY GOODMAN: So, if they remain the same, you have been an activist for 40 years from Pakistan to Britain, Vietnam to Iraq, do you give up? Do you give up hope?
TARIQ ALI: One doesn’t give up hope … no one imagined that anyone would have the nerve to resist the occupation of Iraq. If you look back at what was being said, if you look at that incredible documentary made about Al Jazeera, The Control Room, when the fall of Baghdad is announced, 99 percent of the Western journalists covering the war rise to their feet and cheer. They didn’t know what was going to happen.
And the Iraqis took everyone by surprise, including some of us, who never thought that resistance would develop so quickly. And it exists now on several levels, and it’s pretty ugly at times … it’s a response to an ugly occupation. And until foreign troops remain there, it is not going to end.
… I think there is hope that the people of that country don’t like being occupied, and whatever their ethnic, they’re Shia, Sunni or whatever, they will want a free country without any foreign troops present.
What about Ali’s early years with Che Guevera, his participation in an unofficial war tribunal during the Vietnam years — inspired by Bertrand Russel and Jean-Paul Sartre, and the infamous Phoenix program:
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I’d like to talk a little bit about the memoir, Street-Fighting Years. Many people are familiar, obviously, in recent years with much of the work that you have been doing in terms of criticizing empire, but the long history that you have had as a political activist is perhaps not known by some of our younger listeners, and if you could talk a little bit about the book and why you decided to write it at this time?
TARIQ ALI: Well, this is a new edition … a lot more material has been added. … lots of young activists today want to know what the past was in relation to me. And so, there’s a lot of material in the book about Bolivia, about being mistaken for Che Guevara’s bodyguard and being arrested …
AMY GOODMAN: Where?
TARIQ ALI: In Camiri, where — not far from where Che was captured. We were there in 1967 to observe the trial of Regis Debray, who had been arrested, and I got picked up because I had long moustaches and long hair. They accused me of being a Cuban guerrilla. So I said, “If you torture me the whole night and I can speak Spanish in the morning, I’ll be grateful to you for the rest of my life.”
And then there’s a lot about Vietnam, which is the event which really shaped me and moved me.
I went to North Vietnam, you know, suffered heavy U.S. bombing, saw what was going on in the country, and then when we came back, Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, and Jean-Paul Sartre, his French colleague, decided to launch an unofficial war crimes tribunal, where we brought evidence from Vietnam at a time when no one was admitting in officialdom that atrocities were taking place.
This was prior to the My Lai Massacre and Sey Hersh’s reports … it was impossible to find space for the tribunal … the Swedish prime minister said come and have it in Sweden. …
AMY GOODMAN: [W]e want to actually go back in time to a video clip from decades ago. This is you, Tariq Ali. We go back now to you as a political activist in 1967. Maybe you can set the scene for us.
This is from that tribunal that you talk about. It took place in Stockholm, Sweden, where the legendary British pacifist Bertrand Russell had organized representatives from 18 countries to participate in war crimes on Vietnam.
Among the dozen judges on the Russell Tribunal, as it would later be called, were the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, leading feminist intellectual Simone de Beauvoir, and distinguished radical historian Isaac Deutscher. …
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go now to that videotape.
TARIQ ALI: The town was on fire; incendiary bombs had been used. When we walked in, we had to walk, in most cases, over embers which had been lit, and we had to walk fast because our feet, while walking in these embers, were feeling hot. It had been impossible to visualize the agony of those under attack from a cozy office or from a cozy home in Western Europe. One was face-to-face with a situation which the Vietnamese told us has existed ever since the United States first started the bombing. They said, “Tell us, comrade, do you think what the United States is doing to us today, do you think the use of napalm, of phosphorus, of fragmentation bombs, of all of the other insidious devices they have invented, do you think that the United States would use them in Europe today?” And it was extremely difficult to reply in the affirmative.
AMY GOODMAN: A young Tariq Ali, testifying in front of the Russell War Crimes Tribunal in 1967, talking about a village you visited where a U.S. raid destroyed 200 homes.
TARIQ ALI: It doesn’t stop. And what we also talked about at the tribunal were the incredible number of instances of torture used by U.S. troops against the Vietnamese, which no one even bothers to deny any longer. So, what happened in Abu Ghraib was not new. It’s just that people have very short memories and forget what happens when a colonial war is being fought.
JUAN GONZALEZ: The tortures and the assassinations in the Phoenix Program, right?
TARIQ ALI: Exactly. Very carefully targeted, orchestrated. …
Full interview: Tariq Ali on Political Activism from Pakistan to Vietnam to Iraq
capitalism per se that is gaining the total victory, but feudalism.
In order to work, capitalism requires that no matter who you are, or what you do, the market value of a day of your labor is GREATER than the market value of a day’s survival, not only for you, but at least one or two dependents.
And it doesn’t stop there. Capitalism says that in addition to that, employers should reward workers who increase the employer’s profits. That way, the employees have the possibility of amassing capital, too. That’s the idea – capital for lots of people. increasing the number of people with capital, who then go forth and produce goods and services, compete, hire people to help them, and so the cycle goes.
Capitalism is NOT about concentrating all the capital into as few hands as possible and devaluing the worker’s labor to below the cost of survival for the worker alone, forget about dependents, and you can damn sure forget about incentives or upward mobility.
That’s not capitalism, it’s feudalism. And it is a great system for the lords, but a terrible system for the serfs, and since serfs vastly outnumber lords, hence the negilible value of their labor, it is also a terrible system for any society that aspires to be anything more than a feudal state overrun with hordes of desperate poor ruled over by thugs with guns.
This is not to say that “socialism” has no place. If you accept the principle that the purpose of a state, of a government, is to benefit the populace, socialism is the only reasonable way to ensure that no matter what happens to them as individuals, that populace will always be able to count on certain life-sustaining things, like housing, medical treatment, food. If they want caviar and truffles, a giant TV screen in their hospital room, and a 20 room mansion with a heart shaped swimpool, then they can go amass some capital for all that. But either way, they will get their broken arms set, they will get some good, healthy nutritious food, and they will get clean, sturdy safe housing.
Sorry for length. I am brevity challenged.
You wrote:
Maybe that’s your vision of a “kinder, gentler” version of capitalism, but it’s not inherent to the notion itself. There are many definitions of the word, but I favour the simple one provided by the Cambridge Dictionary of American English:
This does not in any way require increasing the number of people with capital. In fact, as I see it capitalism is about an amoral quest for maximum profits and market share, and as such it is helpful to the capitalist to have a large number of people who are desperate for a paycheck and not too picky about wages. High unemployment is thus a great boon to a capitalist, up to a certain level at least.
Of course, it can be argued that spreading capital around creates more consumers that can buy more products and thus help capitalists make more money. But capitalism almost by definition is not about the greatest good for the greatest number of people. It thus suffers from a classic “tragedy of the commons”. While it might be good for the economy as a whole (and thus the individual businesses within that economy) to have higher than subsistence wages so workers can buy the products the businesses make, it is not helpful for any one company to raise wages while its competitors do not, unless there is a tight labour market or the products made by that company require especially skilled workers.
Now let me be clear: I’m not arguing that the U.S. has anything like pure capitalism. Democrats have instituted a number of constraints on the “free market”, and Republicans tend to simply engage in “crony capitalism”, distorting the market by using the coercive powers of government to make the playing field “more level” (a little variant on Orwellian language there) for their friends than for others.
Alan
Maverick Leftist
They’re like frozen dinners. Once they are out of the package, nuked up, and set on the table they don’t look like the picture anymore, and they sure don’t taste like you’d hoped.
Isms are intended as a means to an end, and when they are turned into the end itself, or warped sideways to fit a different end than they are supposed to accomplish, or just plain allowed to take precedence over the well being of the people, they are useless.
My favorite illustration is to compare it to a healthy diet. If you feed a 4 year old nothing but cake, he will get fat and sick at his stomach. If you feed him nothing but broccoli, he will soon become listless and fail to thrive because he no longer has the incentive of the cake if he eats the broccoli.
Greed is human nature, and there is no ism on earth that can annihilate it. What human beings can do is put a leash on it.
Remember greed started out as a useful thing. It was greed that kept primitive man hunting even when his stomach was full so he could have some berries to stash away for the winter.
Now that so many people have access to refrigeration, or at least man-made structures, that old instinct sends our hunter’s descendant off to steal your berries, even though he now has enough berries to last several lifetimes, and an all season unlimited supply berry tree outside his window.
Capitalism can be a fine thing, within the context of a society that has collectively ensured that everyone has what they need to survive.
Then they can go out and establish the free market value of iPods and designer jeans, and let their greed run in the park, but not without a leash.
Guess I feel a bit less comfortable with capitalism than you do, Ductape. I want to see the state/society guarantee that people have more than just what they need to survive. And I want to see capitalism properly regulated to ensure genuine competition and wipe out misleading and deceptive practices.
BTW, did you interview my 7yo about diet – she eats a lot of brocolli and cake!
Unless the “minimum” wage is a “living wage,” and by living wage I mean what I referred to in the original post, it must exceed a day’s survival, not only for the worker, but for a couple of dependents, then you are right back to feudalism!
And that includes regulation against fraud, too. You can sell your designer jeans, but you cannot advertise them as preshrunk unless they are.
Maybe your daughter will grow up to be an economist 😀
Please, anything but an economist!
When I think about the struggles and achievements of the 1960s, I also think that it couldn’t happen today. The fight to give blacks the right to vote. Legislation such as the Marine Mammal Protection Act and other radical environmental measures. The power of the anti-war demonstrations to affect policy.
Of course, a fallacy of that era is that everybody was involved. Even on the most active college campuses, for example, most students ignored the protests and went about their lives of studying and drinking on Friday nights.
I loved the description of the Bertrand Russell war crimes tribunal.
Cool. I had heard this man’s name before, but never really knew who he was. Thanks for bringing him up.
I think that the same sort of thing could happen today. In different ways, no doubt, especially with the advent of the internet and other things. And indeed will be happening soon… right now many people are flying off in every which direction, or circling in the air looking for a place to land. The time is near, I think, when all that will change and there will be more people knowing where they are going and focused on how to get there.
When I read the first part of the quoted text, I was practically screaming “What about South America?!?” Then I saw that he addressed that. Thank goodness for them, or we might have no hope at all!
Alan
Maverick Leftist