Tariq Ali Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

Page 6 of 6

Conclusions

If students were to watch this interview, how would you advise them to prepare for the future?

I would advise them not to trust their politicians. And I would trust them to doubt everything they see on the mainstream media and read in the press, to use their own brains and not accept what they are given as home truths, to ask themselves, "Could this possibly be true?" Always to question and to doubt.

We have a very clear-cut case in front of us. This government went to war to occupy a sovereign independent state, telling its people there were weapons of mass destruction, and that Saddam Hussein might give these weapons of mass destruction to al Qaeda. Sixty percent of the American population believed in the link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein where none existed. Anyone with the slightest bit of real knowledge would know that Saddam Hussein was a complete sworn opponent of Islamic fundamentalists. They hate each other. No one in the rest of the world believes this except in the United States. No one in the rest of the world believed the story of weapons of mass destruction to the same extent as in the United States. It's now turned out to be a lie: "There ain't any." And the neo-cons around Bush are saying, "Well, so what if we haven't found any? We got rid of him and brought freedom to the people of Iraq." But that "so what" is a very demeaning and debasing aspect of contemporary American politics. Unless the citizenry is vigilant and alert, they will carry on doing this. So my advice to students is, I know you're under enormous pressures -- financial pressures, pressures to find work -- I understand that. But if you're not engaged in challenging the lies of the system, what's the good of living in this society?

One final question. Looking at your intellectual journey, what one or two themes do you think emerge that pull the ideas together that you've grappled with and continue to grapple with?

One of the ideas which played a very big part in my own formation [I learned from] the ideas of Marx and Lenin and Trotsky and various others when I was very young. From them, one learned and understood that the capitalist system was inherently unjust. Even with the best will in the world, it couldn't become a just system, because it was based on the exploitation of the many by the few. That was its basis. We see this now reaching astronomical proportions, both inside the United States and globally. From that we learned that we have to have another system.

I was very critical of the Soviet Union from '56 onwards. I said, "This system isn't working." I was quite young, but I could see that this wasn't going to work. So what I learned from the failures and collapse of that system is that imposing that form of economic model without levels of accountability at every level, political and economic, is not going to work. So I became a believer in what I call socialist democracy. In my view, far from being the case that democracy is only compatible with capitalism, in fact, we see now that democracy is becoming incompatible with capitalism. Democracy will be only compatible with a system which is not based on exploitation. And that is something that I have believed in for a long time.

Tariq, thank you very much for sharing this time with us and sharing this account of your intellectual journey. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.

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