real utopias

A leading figure of the British left since the 60s, Tariq Ali despairs of Westminster and the ‘extreme centre’ that dominates politics today. His solution?

At the end of the Left Unity founding conference last November, Richard Brenner of the Class Struggle platform (aka Workers Power) jumped up with a ‘point of order’ which turned out to be - to no one’s great surprise - not a point of order. We were, said Brenner, about to vote on a statement of draft aims which said there could be private enterprises in the economy we wanted . Therefore we were declaring our allegiance to a ‘mixed economy’ – and therefore we were declaring our support for capitalism! A more perfect example, of chop logic could not be imagined. Worse the post-conference issue of Workers Power promised that this ‘fundamentally reformist formulation’ had to be defeated ‘however long it takes’. (1)