The Extreme Centre: A Second Warning

Description

In this fully updated edition of his coruscating polemic, Tariq Ali shows how, since 1989, politics has become a contest to see who can best serve the needs of the market. In this urgent and wide-ranging case for the prosecution, Ali looks at the people and the events that have informed this moment across the world. This reaches its logical conclusion with the presidency of Donald Trump, the success of En Marche in France and the dominance of Merkel's Germany through Europe. But are we starting to see cracks within the fabric of the extreme centre? In a series of new chapters Ali suggests that there is room for hope. He finds promise in developments in Latin America and at the edges of Europe. Emerging parties across Europe, Greece and Spain, formed out of the 2008 crisis, are offering new hope for democracy. In the UK, the rise of Jeremy Corbyn indicates that the hegemony of the centre may be weaker than imagined.

Tariq Ali has written more than two dozen books on world history and politics the most recent of which are The Obama Syndrome, The Extreme Centre and The Dilemmas of Lenin as well as the novels of his Islam Quintet and scripts for the stage and screen. He is a longstanding member of the editorial committee of New Left Review and lives in London.

Ali remains an outlier and intellectual bomb-thrower; an urbane, Oxford-educated polemicist. * Observer *