BOB PENNINGTON Fariq Ali, Street Fighang Years: Collins £11.95. FiRsT. Thad beter sound a warning If you prefer your politics dished up like a Presbyterian sermon on a dank Sunday evening, Tang Ali s Street Fighting Years in not fir you.
For the political calvinisrs — and we have more than cur Share un the left — this book conimits all the crimes going. Ir's far too anerdoral. Ir is very: personalived. And it commits the greatest sin of all, it is written in a racey style that the average Mary or Toc Soap ca understand. Yet its sryle of journalistic and political reminiscences gives rhe book a particular quality
When the author recalls his mectings and discussions with such diverse personalitics as Bertrand Russell, Marion Brando, the North Vietnamese: premiere: Pham van Dong, as well as Malcolm X and John Tennon you are given an insight into how people from all sides of the social spectrum reacted to events that were threatening to reshape society:
After 20 years of relative quiescence in the western world the 1960% exploded: By courtesy of television the Ter offensive burst into our living: rooms. Before our own. olter incredulous cycs, the Vietnamese liberation forces not only were lighting back against the unconquerable" US imperialists, but knocking the hell out of them, Just across that narrow stretch of water that divides Britain from Europe, in May 1968 thc French workers came out in a general strike and thr 38 barricades went up in the streets ol Paris
In the name year in an al too brief Prague spring, workers and intellectuals in Czechoslovakia tried to give socialism a 'human fice. Ticte was a reminder that the stalinist bureaucracies 0 morc spoke for sucialism and Ireedom, than die their social democratic counterparts. Onor again the tocsin of change was ringing out across continents.
Little or notbing renamed immune from questiobing or criticism. Social mores were affreted, ir hoosterl and aided the fight for women's emanciparion, its effects reacher into the arts. education and even the holy precepts.of.rhc bourgcois family. Tr was the time when the Rolling Stones, Thri Animals and The Beatles were at their most iconoclastic and vibraril. Above all, the events
An unrepentant rebel
of that period drew into their wuke hundreds and hundreds of thousands of young people But not just the young were inspired. They re-invigorated many nider militants restoring their confidence in their coninutment to socilism, and breaking down their isolation
Tania is in a unique position te chronicle those vears. 1le. more than anvohn, was the spokesperson in Britain for those that arguel that what mattered most was the controntation between the exploited and the oppressed and capital and its social democratic hungers on.
Ver, his impatience for quick results has now been tempered hy an understanding of the errors we all made in those years. He appreciates the marxists ulten got carried away on a cloud of euphuria. He knows that our desires often obscured our vision of what was possible But he still knows rhat it is hetter to suffer the faults ul revolutionary overopunusu, than the cowardly cautiousness that cornes from accommodating lo the established under.
There is another reason he is qualified to write much a book Sher all he ican атерептепт sinner who is at peace with his ideological past and has nothing but contempt for his nid romrades like David Horowiz and Rege Debray who have male their pence with imperialism
For the youth who have never seen ur been part of mass social and political revolt ticis a book to read. For the children of 68 and the prict gendrations il is niso to be read. Ir will remind them of the power of Lie international class struggic. It will remand them of whar was ther, and waat surely is coming again •
Jonuary/February 1988
TRACY DOYLE Alan Brien, Lemn: the nose!, Secker and Warburg, E11.95. 20_JUNE 1917 'Afterwards when we have won (as we will) or instead when we have been hunred down and exterminated historians will estahlish that the eyidence. shows. if we succeeded, that it was impossible to fail, or if we failed then it was impossible to succeed:
Reading the 700 pages of this imaginary diary (half