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The Extreme Centre:A Second Warning
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Paperback (2015)
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Britain’s leading radical updates his attack on the failures of the political centre ground
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.
Reviews
Ali remains an outlier and intellectual bomb-thrower; an urbane, Oxford-educated polemicist
It will not open doors at the White House because it makes for uncomfortable reading ... a wide-ranging and powerfully argued critique, that gives pause for thought
Tariq Ali has not lost the passion and vim which made him a symbol of the spirit of ‘68 ... has not seen fit to join forces with the terminally cynical, or set up a graven god that can be accused of failing ... Ali has spent much of his life documenting America as the arsenal of counter-revolution.
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For years, left-wing critics have framed the debate. Angela Davis, Ruthie Gilmore, Marc Mauer and, more recently, Michelle Alexander gave us the terminology to speak about all this: the prison industrial complex, abolition, non-reform reform and The New Jim Crow…. [Ali’s theorized term “extreme center”] provides us with a new language to describe our problems…[O]ne of the key tasks of the extreme center is to take center stage, to ensure that no alternative seems either reasonable or possible.
James Kilgore, author of Understanding Mass Incarceration: A People’s Guide to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of our Era, CounterPunch