radical left - book - 1969 - The New Revolutionaries: A Handbook of the International Radical Left

The New Revolutionaries: A Handbook of the International Left
Tariq Ali (editor)
McClelland and Stewart Ltd.
1969
319 pages

    Tariq Ali is a notable historian and an editor of the New Left Review, one of the journals that established a new direction for leftist politics in the 1960s.  Ali has recently increased his status as a voice against empire through the publication of a number of books criticizing American and European foreign policy towards the Middle East.  The New Revolutionaries, one of Ali’s first books, is a survey of worldwide radical left thought dating from the mid to late 1960s.  

    This book is edited by Ali however it also contains two writings by the well known activist, written while he was a student at Oxford University.  The first of his pieces, titled 'The Extra-Parliamentary' Option, seeks alternative forms of social organization and governance to the parliamentary model.  His second piece, the final essay of the book, ‘The Age of Permanent Revolution’, takes a brief survey of the radical-left activity in the world during the 1960s and also takes a survey of the material conditions that inspire such activity.  Aside from Ali’s own pieces, there are eighteen other texts contained in this collection.  These other texts are of various forms, for example a transcript of the court martial testimony by French rebel of the Bolivian Civil War (and professor of philosophy) Regis Debray is featured.  Also featured is a letter by Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver, written from prison, and republished from Ramparts magazine.   Also included are brief pieces by Stokley Charmichael and Fidel Castro.  Additionally a number of other essays are included by authors who examine the situation of the radical left movement in a number of countries (Italy, Poland, China, Japan, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, and others).

Not much additional information is given regarding each written piece.  The book contains an ‘about the authors’ section which gives a few details about each contributor and their commitment to the left, although it would be preferable if these brief biographical statements appeared as preambles to each essay.  Futhermore Ali's introduction states that many of the pieces are republished from other journals and it would have improved the book to have listed each essay's original publication details.  These simple changes and additions would have helped the reader (me) contextualize these writings and situate their writers.  The book attempts to map out a global radical left and the inclusion of such information as the publication details may have underscored such a mapping by pointing to a global publication network of the left in addition to the global leftist will to action that these pieces describe. Despite such shortcomings, the book is, however, a handbook to a socio-political phenomena, and adequately notes the movement’s situation as of the late 1960s, during its peak.