Tariq Ali

China Mieville. October: The Story of the Russian Revolution. London: Verso, 2017; Tariq Ali. The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution. London: Verso, 2017. IN AN INTERVIEW HE GAVE to discuss his new book, October, China Mieville observed that to his surprise, there has been comparatively little published on the centenary of the Russian Revolution. This means that public commentary and reflection on the revolution is inevitably poorer as a result, and that more expectation is piled onto those books that have come out. [Read More]

LEADING PUBLIC MEMBER of the Socialist Workers Party of the United Kingdom, Richard Seymour, who made a name for himself with the book The Liberal Defense of Murder (2008), polemicizing against campaigns of “humanitarian” military intervention such as the Iraq War, recently released his book on the late Christopher Hitchens, Unhitched, demonstrating that Hitchens remains an enduring and indeed indispensable phenomenon in the present system of thinking on the “Left.” [Read More]

Part 1 of the Summer 2012 Platypus Affiliated Society Primary Reading Group Lecture Series: Trotsky and Trotskyism. Recorded on 16 June, 2012 at The New School, New York. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Week 1 Readings * recommended / * supplemental reading * Tariq Ali and Phil Evans, Introducing Trotsky and Marxism / Trotsky for Beginners (1980) * Leon Trotsky, Results and Prospects (1906) [Read More]

ONE FINDS QUITE A BIT OF NAME-CALLING among the innumerable articles and blog posts written in criticism of Hugo Chavez and his government. Although most of this invective is not very illuminating, one article by a young, Colombian, Trotsky-ish labor organizer describes Chavez perfectly in two words: a “postmodern Bonapartist.” Chavez, his Bolivarian Revolution, and his project of “21st Century Socialism” are postmodern in the sense that they exist in a discontinuity, in an amnesiac disconnect, with the modernist project of social and political emancipation that started with the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th century and withered and died sometime in the late 20th century. [Read More]

Interview with Tariq Ali on Iraq, the anti-war movement, and the state of the Left today conducted by Platypus member Chris Cutrone on October 15, 2007 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Audio Recording