You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024 
Tariq Ali, Verso, £35

HAVING thoroughly enjoyed Tariq Ali’s earlier autobiographical book, Street Fighting Years, and having more than appreciated many other works such as his widely read and timely The Clash Of Fundamentalisms, it’s nice to report that this latest momentous tome was in no way a disappointment.

That said, it’s very different from Ali’s earlier life story in that it is a huge, unwieldy and somewhat chaotic collection. It is fair to say that Ali is not without a shortage of interests — or a shortage of words for that matter — and I won’t even attempt to list the number of subjects covered in an account by no means chronological and seamless in treatment.

Ali’s movement away from more overtly ideological forms of Trotskyism is documented by notes on internal struggles within the International Marxist Group which he left to join a leftwards-shifting Bennite Labour Party, and by his relationship with key international figures such as Ernest Mandel.

As one might expect there is a fair amount of material culled from decades-long involvement with the hugely influential New Left Review, and with well-known writers such as Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn and Tom Nairn. There is also a fair bit of material on the satirical magazine Private Eye and his collaboration with Richard Ingrams and the SWP’s Paul Foot, journalism I was not aware of until now. Nice to read, too, is expression of Ali’s total disillusionment with the pro-Establishment and stridently neoliberal Guardian newspaper, something which he does not mince words about. 

Unlike the B52 liberals who cheered on the bombing of Yugoslavia, Ali consistently refused to stay silent about what was a Nato-led forcible dismemberment of the progressive federal republic. On a more contemporary note, he is equally insistent upon the need to defend the right of Palestinians to resist ongoing zionist occupation, and his earlier contact with Ghassan Khanafani and Edward Said amply demonstrating a long-term interest in developing solidarity.

Culturally, Ali’s contribution to Channel 4’s ground-breaking current affairs/documentary series The Bandung File is covered in depth, as are countless meetings, conferences and articles drawn from the arts to which he brings an abidingly informed and nuanced approach. 

In terms of global politics Ali evidently isn’t averse to the lure of international travel, albeit with a political bent. His country of birth, Pakistan, often features in this respect in which notes on  everything from the beauty of Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s work to the cricket and later politics of figures such as Imran Khan quickly take on an autobiographical edge given the importance of his own family to Pakistan’s history, both prior to and following the tumultuous years of partition.

If all of this sounds remarkably earnest, it is not. For someone who spent years in ultra-leftist politics, Ali can be refreshingly funny, gossipy and personable, just the activist you would want to sit down and have a chat with. 

I am not aware of whether Ali maintains his past political associations and the love/hate analysis that Trotskyism has often brought to actually existing socialism, but other than a fairly cursory few pages there is very little on the end of the Soviet era. Given how his own tradition’s endless debates around whether to characterise the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state, as state capitalist or as bureaucratic collectivist often more resembled the arguments of medieval theologians about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, this was a very striking omission.

Also, the emergence of Chinese socialism onto the world stage is rarely mentioned, if not dismissed altogether. North Koreans are mocked for alleged attempts to fund the magazine Black Dwarf on the basis that they did not seem to understand that it was Trotskyist in orientation. The Vietnamese revolution, something that Ali was closely associated with in Britain, appears to be of no interest at all as if support ends when victorious communist state power begins.

Ali’s response to the Cuban experience is far more sympathetic, even though it had many similarities to all the previous revolutions and indeed continues to do so. Similarly, I found myself agreeing with much of his work in and around the Bolivarian movements and the need to create, in the words of Hugo Chavez, a socialism of the 21st century.

Lots to think about, maybe too much at times. The jury is out as to whether it really constitutes a memoir in the traditional sense but personally I loved it, warts and all. A great new year read, though you might want to wait for the more affordable paperback.