Tariq Ali: Where Did the Left Go? | On Civil Society | October 26, 2018

and it's given an enormous boost to the right and far right all over the world France so it's a very real problem and who cannot simply deal with it by saying these people are awful which they are for me and we should try to stop them stating their beliefs and thoughts that I think is wrong for the introduction it's I personally feel very honored to be able to be here in conversation with partically I had also prepared an introduction so I won't that has been covered so so I'll just say a couple of things which is that there may be less known to people you know the one of the things that comes up in his memoirs is that tardik met Malcolm X at Oxford of all places a few months before Malcolm X's assassination and I found this to be particularly important to think about now because of the inspiration that I think a lot of people on the Left are drawing from anti-colonial movements and for the movement for black lives and so I'm hoping that that's one of the things that will come up in this conversation the other thing that may be less known to some people is the tonic to use a sort of euro expression was a red diaper baby his parents were communists and his father was the editor of a prominent left daily in Pakistan and he still continues to do a regular program for atella Seward in Venezuela so so welcome again Tata so I had mentioned as we were talking coming in that the first question I was going to pose is concerns the rise of the right and I'll say imposing these questions that I've consulted with a few friends I'm in developing the questions allankapoor I as Malick we're at akamonkai and just in poder so you can blame them if you don't like the line of questioning no I'm joking no you can't blame them but and also Nigel briefed and so one of the things that many people who are organizing on the Left in Toronto have been concerned with just immediately is the upcoming debate between Stephen Bannon and David from a week from today the monk to organize through the Munk debates is a very exclusive of antics I'm not sure how many hundred one hundred a few hundred dollars a ticket but it's obviously a debate debate between a very narrow contingent of the right and in the 60s of course you know there was a strong support for free speech and I think the way the language of free speech has been co-opted by the right in our provincial government here is something that's worrying but it's also something we need to reflect upon critically as to you know at what how do we organize around right-wing voices finding specific space so you know given the concerns people have about Brazil given the rise of the right nationally and internationally which I think you've been somewhat ambivalent about you know naming is a big problem maybe because you're concerned that it would attract distract from organizing against neoliberalism I wanted to start with a question about how serious you think the right-wing surge is for the left I think it's very serious there's no question about it I think it's linked to the vacuum created by neoliberalism after The Wall Street Crash of 2008 in places in some places the left was there could offer an alternative I mean if you wanted to talk about the left in a very broad sense I would say that the campaigns waged against neoliberal capitalism by jean-luc mélenchon in France by Jeremy Corbyn in john mcdonald in britain to a certain extent by the whole sanders phenomenon in the united states or attempts to varying degrees to grapple with that where there was no left or left incapable of playing any meaningful role the right went ahead unchallenged in france Melancon challenged marine lepen the leader of the far-right party at a time when liberal politicians of the center of france central power couldn't take her own effectively he challenged her he took her on he showed her to be what you are but she still got millions of votes so the Trump phenomenon is very much part of the right wing crimes probably it's the greatest victory of the right and far right I say far right very deliberately because the white supremacists train in France campaign and in those of his supporters not that it's new in American politics it's never been so open for a very long time and that is what is quite frightening how should this be taken on how should this be confronted and confronted and attacked it should be and many people are doing it but not the Democrats they're doing it in my opinion in a very stupid way if you read the New York Times and other liberal organs of they do it without under Strine to understand or to explain how Trump got where he is because in order to do that you have to understand that what made this victory possible were the failures of the Democrats including Obama identity politics on its own the fact that Obama has a sort of dark brown face answers nothing just doesn't dance in the same way as many feminists socialist feminists were arguing that having Hillary Clinton as a president carrying out near liberal policies in bombing large parts of the world wasn't going to do the trick for anyone and actually would be very discrediting so it was the big problem in American politics was the failure of what I call the extreme center the people who impose austerity who fight wars who are no different really from the Republicans on many many levels this is a pattern now in many parts of most parts of Europe and the globe so it was those failures you know you yes Trump is a white supremacist yes he he harbors these people in his administration in the Supreme Court on many levels one of the problems with the questioning of that embassy who's been nominated to the Supreme Court is not what he did it seventeen awful though it was it's the fact that he participated in a government helping to define the torture policies of the Bush administration not a single member of that committee asked him about torture not an unimportant question in the United States so it's politics has become very strange and all I'm saying is that if it carries on like this if the Democrats have no effective candidate who tries to grapple like Sanders does with the problems and why the Krampus got so many votes he'll win again so this whole and it's it's becoming normalized even when he talks now to people in other parts of the world they accept him in some level and it's given an enormous boost to the right and far right all over the world Trump's so it's a very real problem and you cannot simply deal with it by saying these people are awful which they are for me and we should try to stop them stating their beliefs and thoughts that I think is wrong you know in the United States and elsewhere in the 60s we used to fight these people by challenging them and taking them on I don't know how many of you the gray heads will know this but some younger people might not that we were the ones from the progressive side who developed the idea of the teaching to take on those who supported the Vietnam War to say we will debate you in public you think we're scared you think we have no ideas we are going to debate you in public on all these issues and we won gradually more and more people to the side of those who opposed that appalling criminal war in Vietnam I'm not saying so I don't want to be misquoted then we should do the same with Steve Bannon and these rogues but I'm just saying that one has to understand that whenever the left has supported banning free speech even for the worst people except for those people I would make an issue who are organizing a meeting to propose violence against women against black people against whoever when we know they're doing that then we should try and you know picket disrupt etcetera but by and large when they're debating discussing with each other or with people we don't like we should we should we should demonstrate but we shouldn't say the meeting shouldn't take place because given who runs the state think about it it's not people who are on our side usually it's people who tend to be with those who you're trying to stop to speak and they will use if these arguments to try and stop the left it's happened before you'd say we ban X&Y and said and they end up banning a B and C as well saying you called for it as far as we're concerned the state will say you're no different just cause you're on the Left those people are saying things in their way so I'm extremely nervous and this doesn't apply to every single case there's no such thing obviously in extremists we have to do what it needs to be done but by and large it shouldn't be a left thing to say that we don't we will fight to prevent a B or C from making their voices heard whether it's Israel Palestine whether it's any other movement trying to do good by stopping others from speaking it never works and I think it is by and large except in rare cases it is wrong that's my opinion okay so so following from that [Applause] following from that I think you know it's it's a very I mean it's it's a it's a issue that is to some extent divisive in certain branches of the left right now as you know well and and on that point I want to raise you know with the specter of the right also comes various sorts of discussions about United fronts and so they've been various academic discussions about this here in Toronto over the past year and of course there's various organizing discussions around this in terms of who do we try to get elected instead of a far-right candidate and I wanted to ask you about that sort of dangers maybe that's a bit of an extreme term but the the pitfalls of organizing with sort of more liberal progressive forces for those on the Left against you know far-right discourse and what what we need to be sort of aware of when we decide to take on you know to develop those kinds of relationships specifically against far-right discourse I think it depends on the situation I mean let's discuss Brazil which is probably going to elect a fascist president in day after tomorrow now the Brazilian patei the party which lost out completely Lula's party and many other people left-wing intellectuals have been making a call for a united front to stop both scenario coming to power and I think that's a hundred percent correct because the the dangers by this guy who says he wants to wage war on Venezuela who says he wants to the PT should be exterminated wiped out this exterminate Rick we haven't heard publicly for a very long time in South America even Pinochet never said people should be exterminated he just did it but this guy is actually saying that he is going to do it and so a united front with everyone to try and stop him coming to power in my opinion is perfectly legitimate the tragedy is that people who should know better like the former president before Lula Fernando Henrique Cardoso who is a liberal has come out publicly and said he is not going to call for a vote for Haddad which is deeply shocking because he knows better than most what the military dictatorship did to Brazil a military dictatorship that both scenario supports so I think that that is correct there are other cases where it may not be correct you have to judge each situation on its own merits I have always been nervous of saying that one should vote for a US Democrat to stop sort of awful Republican from getting in I'm nervous because actions like that basically extend the illusion that the Democrats are fundamentally different some are individually they may be more than a few but the experience of the Obama period in the White House which you know I see often gets mythologized shows us the exact opposite I mean he was a weak president he could have had a Supreme Court judge but he didn't want to upset the applecart legally technically constitutionally he could have appointed or pushed through the appointment or appointed himself a judge to the Supreme Court when the vacancy came up didn't do it the workers in the old Rust Belt states who voted for Obama twice turned to Trump so it's calling them racists is not sufficient in fact it's wrong since most about it for Obama anyway so one has to go beyond simple questions of identity and cry and see what the real problems and it's not easy to do that in this world where a lot of one single issue campaigns are mounted so you know we will see I mean a worried Sanders were but they're a Sanders candidacy I personally would say I would vote for him aybe his sort of espouses a form of social democratic politics on some internal domestic issues and it would be a big shift and you know he'll be denounced as a commie I read this that and the other so will he to be the candidate and when I mean it would be an intro it would create open up a completely new space in France to give you another example there was a choice between macro a total and complete neoliberal creature of the French technocracy in the French establishment and the French banking system quite a clever operator was the became the candidate because lots of French people thought he would be a better bet against marine lepen forgetting that had they voted many on the Left had they voted for melanoma and the final fight had been between jean-luc mélenchon and macro the debate would have been of a totally different character and helped to politicize the consciousness of large large parts of France because the battleground would have been different and we know perfectly well the mini in macro wanted independence the candidate so they used the media to marginalize melon Chow present him as a sort of guy whose ideas were being used by lepen etc so you know these are sort of tactical questions but in the big strategic issues if there's a fascist candidate I think the largest possible United Front has to be created as in the as in the case of both scenario I just wanted to push you this wasn't the question I was going to ask next but since you raised the issue about those who vote though some of those voting for Trump having voted for Obama I wanted to ask you about that because this is something that comes up in in both of the books that this discussion sort of pivots around and I'll admit that I'm not sure that I feel that this in itself is sort of a repudiation but the fact that people voted for Obama I think is not an expression of people not being racist I think you know whatever many people on the Left might have a critique of some of his analysis but I do think that doneghy Singh Coates actually had a pretty persuasive argument for why various white Americans who might Harbor extremely racist positions might still have voted for Obama and so and I say that to sort of bring the point home to Canada where I feel that you know the underlying current that allows for anti-immigrant sentiment and that might have allowed for instance Quebec solidaire to be elected recently in Quebec or for to be elected here in Ontario that there is this underlying you know current of pretty deep racism that animates people who vote on the right and you know no matter whether they may at some point have voted for somebody who wasn't white and so I you know I think that this is something that the sort of current and you left has sometimes taken the sort of old left to task for right is not sort of talking about that explicitly so I just wanted to ask you you know as far as Obama is concerned I don't know how many people are aware of this but as president he separated children immigrant children seeking refuge from their families as well Trump has done it in a more grandiose way and sort of boasted about it Obama did it quietly but he did it lots of migrants were deported from the United States by Obama Obama sent more people to Guantanamo than Bush Obama increased the American presence in Afghanistan sent many many more troops than Bush did and fall from his point of view as a as an imperial president which every President of the United States is whether people like it or not I mean the Americans don't want to leave Afghanistan because they fear not that they fear they don't want to leave a country which borders on China where they can have permanent military bases that's the big reason nothing to do actually but of very little to do with Afghanistan itself because they've been negotiating behind the scenes with the Taliban for years and some deal is possible so one just has to think a bit more deeply before jumping to what seemed to be obvious conclusions and you know how many races voted for Obama is an interesting question it's not the most important question in my opinion you know there are other things to consider when someone is made elected president of the United States the fact is as I said earlier in the vacuum that exists and what happened after the crash of 2008 people do not accept the system as it is they are nervous they are not sure it will deliver the goods they got a big shock after 2000 to date they don't like the austerity measures that are being proposed they don't like the fact that the since 2008 the rich and the level of the rich has reached astronomical levels in terms of wage differentials or salary differentials or whatever you want they don't like it they are not totally convinced by the left and so in this case this is not a new thing when people come demo goats etc and said the problem is immigration like the problem was Jews in Germany etc people get taken in sometimes I mean you know we can't forget that Hitler got a large popular vote I mean mainly because the Left failed to unite in Germany the Social Democrats and the Communists but he did and an element of that is visible in the situation today but not on such a drastic level so this turn to the left or to the right in the former Eastern Europe it's not a huge surprise it had to happen after you have the events in the 90s where the West was supporting all these people now in power in one way or the other or supporting liberals Center liberals extreme centre people who couldn't deliver the goods these guys are now going minimis the way they all members the European Union by the way and this whole notion in Europe that somehow the European Union is the new gold standard and if you oppose it you it's ridiculous the European Union has been a machine for implementing neoliberal economics in in Europe and so when people get taken up by it because it believes in the freedom of movement within Europe it's I mean I'm like that freedom of movements like anyone else but it's restricted to Europe be all the refugees coming from the walls created by of the United States the Syrian refugees for instance sometimes are let in sometimes or not thousands have died in the Mediterranean which has become a graveyard for many refugees because they've not been let in by European Union governments and even in a country like Germany where Merkel agreed on the spur of a moment to let in a million refugees we see the backlash now against it you know so all these things are related I mean my view is you know slightly satirical on this but whenever the West wage is a war the anti movement where it exists should say okay well how many refugees are you going to take and we want to guarantee first you're going to wage a war against Libya against Syria against here and there million let's then take into account put into the balance sheet how many of the refugees created by those walls you're going to let in at least make it an issue linked to war and not something that these people who are poor are running to take steal our money in social services and all this crap that goes on so on that point I think I want I want to return a bit to this question about the divisions between the old and you left you know that I was hoping we could we could broach a bit and I guess you know reading your text when I'm thinking about the old and you left I realized that the you know the these definitions of course have changed with the decades right so you just court you describe a debate between the old and then you've left in in Britain in 1969 in Westminster where you know your party was calling for revolution and the sort of old left of the time was calling for reform and I think about how in Canada I think some of the really vibrant social movements in the last decade has been no one is legal which is an explicitly you know Pro no borders kind of a migrant justice movement and more recently black lives matter and I don't know more which is an explicitly sort of anti colonial indigenous resurgence movement and so how how can the you know the the left of of your generation that has been very influential in global debates for the last number of decades in what ways can that group work working working sort of equal partnership with organizations that are framing the concerns less specifically around class and how do we sort of frame everything in a form that also gives representational value to to the new generation of activists who I you know we're now taking I think direct action as a significant part of their repertoire of of ways of confronting power well direct action was very much a thing of the sixties and seventies I mean you know we were in some cases very old for left on that not having anything to do with mainstream political parties or even mainstream politics so there is nothing new about yes campaigns against racism in the 70s feminist campaigns in this late 60s and 70s very common very popular but we couldn't ignore the fact that the feminist movement in Britain for instance was triggered off by the Ford women workers strike how can you ignore something like that when the Ford women are coming out for unequal pay pressures on the job in some times harassment on the job by people in charge including male trade union shop stewards that came out in the 60s so I don't see the difference I see with the period when my generation was young and very actively engaged and now is the overall political conjuncture that that was a time when you know the Vietnamese were fighting the Americans into the ground that's why the women's movement called itself the women's liberation movement because the Vietnamese had a movement which was fighting the Americans called the national liberation movement that was the fight for gay rights the name of the organization was the Gay Liberation Front because they were linked to a much much broader politics than simply the single shoo and most of them were on marches with their own slogans but part of a big movement so in my opinion what is divisive is a certain dogmatism and a failure to understand that the only way movements can be successful is if they go beyond their own particular ghettos you will not be successful you know in a meaningful way outside that but I always smile when people say you lot were so different well we were and we weren't we learnt a lot the anti-racist campaigns that did the fight to defend immigration immigrants coming in and this was in a Europe which had actually sent a lot of migrants out to the rest of the world I mean it's a joke for me that lots of people in this country are hostile to immigrants when they themselves are immigrants I I honestly can't understand the mentality or in Australia you know it's a total country of migrants who went and butchered large numbers of indigenous people or in the United States walk right in for citizens of these countries to talk about migration when these countries were created by migrants you now say enough we want to stop because we don't like the color of the skin of those who are coming in but you know quite a lot of people in Australia the Aboriginal peoples the indigenous peoples in the United States and no doubt in Canada didn't like the color of the skin of the people coming in they made lots of [Applause] they made lots of jokes about it this is attested and written and how they refer to them these filthy dirty whites who came in Whiting white man so there should be some sense of reality and this is where the mainstream political parties have totally abdicated all responsibilities in order to try and come to power by the lowest common denominator in in politics that is effectively what happening the generational divide is I don't think as important as some people make it out to be because when I hear debates but on the me to issue between women you know they remind me of debates we had in the 70s between radical feminists and socialist feminists very similar to that actually and I'm happy to be saying this in Toronto because the feminist movement in Canada grew very sharp radically in the 70s these issues which are now being discussed were being discussed in the 70s I remember marching on a pro-immigration demonstration in Toronto with lots of people from the city from all groups and I'm trying to remember the slogan which I thought at the time was quite imaginative it'll come to me in a minute which linked immigration it went like this unemployment unemployment inflation are not caused by immigration are not caused by immigration the enemy is profit we're a single slogan encapsulated the reality of what the debate is all about and no one will shine people are listening on those sidewalks here in Toronto before these often ugly big buildings were constructed I mean so young might like to think they're new but in reality they aren't there are old debates and will be carrying on unless anything good happens in debating them in 40 years time and then the young of today can say to the young generations then hey but we were discussing all this in 2018 or 2017 you know you've just come to it afraid so fair enough in street-fighting years you have a very kind of nuanced account of some of the divisions the left sectarianism of that period but I think it's actually quite important I think also for the Toronto left which is also experienced I think it's share of sectarianism I was surprised actually at that when I first moved here which wasn't that long ago really ten years ago the extent to which some of that was still apparent and so I was wondering your perspective on how the current Left might learn from the way in which sectarianism has prevented sort of bold action especially because another crisis along the lines of 2008 is probably or law too far you know we can expect one to come fairly soon how can we be ready given you know all that you learned through through those decades and it's the present it's a very difficult question actually because you know the big difference as I said it's not just generational but it is what has happened to the world since the 90s and I think that the total collapse even though many of us on the Left had no time for this way the system was organized in the Soviet Union nonetheless the existence of that country and allied countries created a space which enabled us who were some of its fiercest critics to exist in function and when the Soviet Union collapsed even some right-wing politicians in South America said oh my god the Americans have now got us by the throat they understood what had happened it was a tectonic shift in world politics an American hegemony controlled domination which some people try to deny exists a very good book by my old friends Leo panitch and Sam Gindin prove the exact opposite in this city that the American Empire is a very powerful enterprise it's still very dominant it suffered a few blows but no blow as serious as the defeat in the Vietnam War and it's strong dominating and it dominates Europe and this combination of the United States and Europe is a very strong thing with which the Chinese cannot compete the Chinese are like Britain if you like in the 19th century the early Industrial Revolution they produce commodities on a mega scale but the most important things the spare parts the technology all that is controlled by the United States Brian large and and and and the Europeans and we can't forget it either that American capitalism took over the biggest and most important invention of this century which is the World Wide Web to produce by kids in the on the west coast this didn't happen in China or anywhere else that so writing off all the American elements of American domination of the world economy it's easy to do it's just not factually accurate and so for you know if we see another financial crash in the next few years in the next decade what what sort of strategy should we be taking I mean considering debt strikes you know things that are somewhat more radical that would really shake the system what what do you see as the alternatives available of course yeah I have to say that the only alternatives available today what happens in 20 years time is unpredictable but the only alternatives that are available today and which are coming up in different forms are if you like what köppen is called radical social democracy this is not new of course as we know but it challenges the neoliberal order and it attempts to regain some of the stuff done by real Social Democrats immediately after the Second World War very interesting a conversation I had with Cobain soon after he was elected leader of the Labour Party which none of us including him as he admitted had thought was possible we thought the Labour Party was dead and gone and great we could start something new but ultimately when we had a political insurrection largely of young people between the ages of 18 and 25 half a million of them joined the Labour Party in propelled co-op into power something none of us had thought possible and why I'll tell you why it's not a big secret in the campaign's he waged to try and win the leadership which he thought was a hopeless cause and at that time they let him on television a lot just for some you know he said when they asked what are you going to do he said we're going to realize the railways railway nationalization privatization has been a total disaster 60 to 70 percent of the country wants to renal eyes them my Labour government will do it we're going to restore free higher education for the entire population we're going to abolish student loans as a result and you know work out a way in which you can repay some of those who've been a charge that we're going to stop the creeping privatization of the National Health Service well this was not been heard in Britain because of the grip of the extreme centre politics Blair and Thatcher so people said well this doesn't sound a bad idea and köppen said to me that one of the meetings he went to he was mobbed by young people students and they said we can't believe some of the things you said and he said why they said was higher education everfree so you have a memory loss imposed by neoliberalism as well on the ideological front that people have forgotten that some of these things existed so that I think you know whether it's Venezuela Mexico now or Britain is the way in which things are probably going to go and you know of course many of us want them to go further and want a systemic challenge to capitalism but till it comes until it happens at least let's create some space in which these new ideas that are bubbling up and coming up can be discussed especially on ecology a huge debates going on within the ecologists movement on what to do about climate change zero growth no growth a form of growth all these things and are being discussed extremely important things and they're very important for politicians and the new political movements as well so I am moderately optimistic that some of this will begin to have an impact on national politics provided the left doesn't lose its nerve

Channel: Toronto Public Library

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Length: 41min 48sec (2508 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/KawaiiSkelli]

maybe TOS at 30:52