I think that’s true. Living in Pakistan, I was completely obsessed from a very young age with reading all the magazines that came into the house. They were mainly communist magazines from the United States — Masses and Mainstream, Monthly Review — and then from Britain, the New Statesman, Labour Monthly, and only very late on the New Left Review. I read them because I was interested in the postcolonial situation. In Pakistan, we were going through a postcolonial phase, which seemed no different from what it was under the last days of British imperialism. Everything was run by the British, who then handed it over to the Americans.

When I read about Lumumba’s death, I was really enraged. We called a meeting at the college, and I said, “We can’t not go out into the streets.” But, according to an old British imperial law, it was punishable by heavy imprisonment to demonstrate as more than five people together. But we decided we’d do it and about two hundred showed up. We explained who Lumumba was and they said, “We’re marching to the US consulate because these are the people who had him killed.” One guy asked, “Is there any proof?” The whole place burst out laughing. No one doubted it was the Americans. We came back from the embassy, and we felt so strong and gutsy that we started chanting slogans against the military dictatorship in Pakistan. We did that and the country was bemused: Who are these crazy kids?

That was a memorable demonstration, because it took everyone by surprise. There had not been a single demonstration about Lumumba in the West or in India, in countries where it would be legal, with big communist parties. I still run into people who say, “I remember the Lumumba demonstration in Lahore.” I say, “Were you on it?” They say, “Yes, yes, of course. . .” So, it seems by now that the size of the demo has increased to 50,000 people! [laughs]

Then, the Chinese Revolution was taking place. The entire left-progressive movement — trade unions and peasant movements in the forefront — were constantly talking about China. When I was very young, my parents took me to the May Day meeting and the only talk was China: the slogan chanted was: “We will take the Chinese road, comrades.”

So, the whole notion of struggle and revolution came very early to me, and it wouldn’t have happened had I grown up in a different part of my own family. It was my parents being communist and people from that milieu coming regularly to our house — poets, radicals — that propelled me on that path. I remember when the French were defeated at Điện Biên Phủ, apolitical people were celebrating. A cousin of my mother’s, who was a film producer, rang her up to celebrate and said, “My son was born today, I’ve named him Ho Chi Minh.” My mother said, “If even these people are celebrating Điện Biên Phủ, we may not be so unlucky in this country.” It was a semi-nationalist but staunchly anti-European and anti-American anti-imperialist feeling among the people generally.

There’s an interesting contradiction here. I joined the Fourth International [FI, what was then known as the “United Secretariat”] because it was anti-imperialist and internationalist, and these were its most attractive features. I was quite shocked when they began to move away from that.

I remember meeting with Daniel Bensaïd in Paris in some café, and he said, “There’s the fortieth anniversary of 1968 coming up, what should we do? You always have good ideas on how to have big celebrations.” I said, “Daniel, internationalism, as we once understood it, is just creeping out of your own ranks. Back in 1968, you were renaming streets in the Latin Quarter ‘Heroic Vietnam Street.’” He said, “Okay, what are you suggesting?”

I said, “A huge celebration of the changes in South America. Let’s call the Zapatistas; it’s not impossible that Hugo Chávez will come. We will have Evo [Morales] from Bolivia. We will get the progressive left in this country: there are a few people still keeping on. They’re not revolutionaries like we were, but they are left social democrats. They’ve been propelled to power by mass movements.” Daniel said, “It’s a very interesting idea, but I don’t think anyone among the anti-capitalists will support it. It’s not because they are hostile as such, but it doesn’t interest them.” I said, “This is deeply shocking.” He said, “I can imagine that for someone like you, it’s even more shocking.”

He knew what was going on, as some other comrades from the old days were in denial.

At the time of the Iraq War, I had a big discussion with Catherine Samary of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire. Of course, she was against the war. But I asked her, “How do you explain the fact that in all the big countries in Europe, you had gigantic antiwar demos [on February 15, 2003]; millions in London, Rome, and Madrid, even the Germans managed 100,000. You, in France, managed nothing.”

They were comparatively small. Catherine’s argument was that [then president] Jacques Chirac opposed the war, and that’s why people felt they were represented. I said, “But hang on. Charles de Gaulle opposed the Vietnam War. That didn’t stop you. It’s a deep, fundamental structural problem in what’s happened to the French intelligentsia and the French left.” A bit later, when the French edition of my book on the Iraq War [Bush à Babylone: La Recolonisation de l’Iraq] came out with La Fabrique, I was going with Éric Hazan to bookshops in Paris and a couple of other places to give talks. At one event, I said, “I get the feeling that a section of the French intelligentsia, particularly around the Parti Socialiste and liberals, really would have liked to have been part of this war.” Éric interrupted me and said, “He is completely right on that.”

The evolution in France was very disappointing. We had enormous faith in that group [the Ligue Communiste, later the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire] and its élan, in the 1960s and 1970s. It is slightly ironic that the “state capitalist” wing of the Trotskyist movement [the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and its international network, the International Socialist Tendency (IST)] turned out to be much sharper and much better, on Yugoslavia, on Iraq, and now on Ukraine. They opposed very strongly NATO and the US. One reason we used to criticize the IST group was because of its lack of internationalism.

But if you look now, it’s the Mandelite currents that have been found wanting and have sort of disappeared. Whereas without the handful of SWP Trotskyists like Lindsey German and John Rees, we couldn’t have built the antiwar campaign. Britain is the only country in the world where the Stop the War Coalition, even in bad times, survived. We didn’t let it go under.

Without any doubt. On Palestine, we’d had at least one demonstration every year, so the British progressive movement was ready when it came. These are the people who organize the Palestine demos, then the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. They came and it was fantastic, it got larger and larger. I warned them that sooner or later this will go down: we have to think of other actions. And then other actions began quite spontaneously by a new generation, fresh to politics, that we’d never expected. They are not attracted to small groups — the old way of doing things.

Here we come to the problem, which is that whereas in French politics you have Jean-Luc Mélenchon, here [in Britain] there’s no one else but Jeremy Corbyn. His weaknesses as a left-wing leader come to the fore. He’s hooked on Labourism even when he’s expelled from it.

Partly. That is what Ernest Mandel used to sometimes call — in relation to what he called “centrists” — the worshipping of faits accomplis.

Yes, and he was right. However, in Portugal, we came very close to a revolutionary dénouement, in my opinion, much closer than in France in May and June 1968, because there the French Communist Party was a huge bulwark, whereas in Portugal the Communist Party, whether we like it or not, was on the side of the far left. But they were totally outmaneuvered. I remember huge workers’, soldiers’, peasants’ demonstrations in Portugal where the chant was “Revolution, revolution, socialism.”

Then Mario Soares, the social democratic leader, came and said, “Yes, we will have socialism. But do we want the socialism of Eastern Europe? No. Do we want the socialism of the Russians? No. Then why does our dear comrade Álvaro Cunhal [secretary-general of the Portuguese Communist Party] constantly go on about the dictatorship of the proletariat? We’ve got rid of one dictatorship, and they want to bring another one on that model.” Cunhal could never answer that. Ideologically, we were defeated in Portugal.

Ernest [Mandel] was shaken because he was very excited, though the FI underestimated Portugal because [Mandel] was convinced that the revolution would break first in Spain. A number of us who knew Spain better, said to him, “There’s going to be a huge compromise in Spain.” He said, “You’re wrong. The traditions of the POUM [Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification], of anarchism etc. . . .” The Basque comrades [of ETA-VI], who were very sharp, said the post– [Francisco] Franco succession will be good because we’ll be legal, but nothing much will change. Portugal took the FI completely by surprise.

Yes, I think that was the case until 1975, the defeat of the Portuguese Revolution was the decisive factor.

The coup in Chile had, of course, a big impact. But there was huge sympathy for Chile, even among bourgeois circles, there was not a sense that the revolution had been defeated. I remember Hortensia Allende being welcomed by the then British prime minister and leader of the Labour Party, Jim Callaghan, who embraced her in public. She addressed the Labour Party conference saying, “Comrade Allende has been murdered,” and the whole conference stood in silence. Fidel Castro felt very strongly that we’d now been defeated for generations to come, but that was not the sense we had in Europe. In Europe, the crucial test was Portugal, and the Americans knew that. NATO money was poured into Soares and his [reformist] party.

I was quite clear on this question in The Clash of Fundamentalisms. Who was the big winner of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Chinese turn to the capitalist road? It was the United States. American capitalism remained the strongest capitalism, not just militarily, but economically and technologically. It’s no accident that the Internet emerged on the west coast of the US, not the west coast of China. US ideological domination was virtually unchallengeable. We had to challenge it, of course, but we wouldn’t be able to do so if we stopped saying that America was an imperial power.

It doesn’t make sense to say that because the Soviet Union imploded and China went capitalist that there is no longer an imperial power. I was very strongly against that view, but people were very reluctant to counter it. At academic conferences, when I talked about “US imperialism,” there was a slight shudder, meaning we thought we’d lost all that world. No, you didn’t lose that world, you lost another one. When I was in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s talking to senior party intellectuals, what was driving them mad was that Mikhail Gorbachev couldn’t see that they were going to be crushed by these bastards unless we had something. Yevgeny Primakov in particular feared that Gorbachev was preparing a capitulation.

My view about China and Russia is that they are essentially nationalist, that they will defend their nationalism, or national sovereignty if you want to call it that. The Russians said this includes not having NATO surrounding us, or NATO trying to break us up into little bits. And the Chinese say similar things. Leave us alone, don’t provoke us with Taiwan. The Americans could have done this, it was there for them to grab, but they did exactly the contrary.

Perry [Anderson] and I had this discussion in private and my view was that the debate between Karl Kautsky and [Vladimir] Lenin on ultraimperialism versus interimperialist contradictions seems to have been solved in favor of Kautsky. For most of the twentieth century, Lenin was more or less correct, but now after the fall of the Soviet Union, it looks as if we’re going to get an ultraimperialism in some form in which all the European powers would more or less capitulate. There’s no question of them fighting back. I felt that even more strongly now, during the assault on Palestine.

In the 1990s, the Russians and the Chinese were prepared to go along with US ultraimperialism and the Europeans, but they were too huge to be swallowed up like Europe has been, especially China. There was a big debate within Chinese economic circles on whether they should just cave in to the neoliberal way of going to capitalism. Then there came a big backlash from inside the Communist Party of China saying, “No, we can’t go like that, we can’t make the Gorbachev mistake.” Deng Xiaoping had advised Gorbachev that perestroika [restructuring] is fine, but you can’t do perestroika properly unless you forget about glasnost [openness and transparency]. From a purely cynical standpoint, he was not so wrong.

The whole strategy of the US and of the thinkers and military specialists who run that country is that the only way to maintain its hegemony is by breaking everything up into little bits, so that no country emerges that can ever challenge it, till the end of humanity. That’s what the US has been doing wherever you look. That’s what they did in Yugoslavia, albeit unthinkingly. [Bill] Clinton told an audience in some American town that the war in Yugoslavia was in the interest of the US. And they’ve done the same in the Middle East: to break it up, divide the three countries that had huge armies that threatened Israel and the American hegemony in the region.

It could, if the United States provokes them. I don’t deny that possibility. The Americans had two big plans for destabilizing China: Tibet and Taiwan. Tibet is now integrated by a mega-influx of Han Chinese migrants. They’ve done this also by modernizing Tibet and making lots of jobs available for Tibetans. The result is quite astonishing: it’s a classic, imperial-style operation, but not like what the Brits did when they took a place like India. They are building infrastructure, not just trains and things for supply routes.

Concerning Taiwan, any attempt by the West to encourage any provocations by the government in Taipei is unlikely to work since trade between the two regions is intense and any armed adventures would be totally counterproductive for Taiwan and its citizens. So how is this going to shake out? It is difficult to predict. But if the Americans try and break China into tiny parts, the Chinese could do anything. They will not take it lying down.

That brings us back to what these Soviet comrades were telling me: that Gorbachev is giving all this away without even a written treaty, that previous semi-capitulations or whatever have always had a treaty, and the Germans were prepared even to offer one. The Americans weren’t. They gave verbal assurances: “not one inch eastward” as explained in Mary E. Sarotte’s book. She’s a right-wing liberal but her book gives a solid account of how the Americans operated and what they did from the beginning when Gorbachev asked mildly, “What do we get in return for handing over East Germany to you?” He was given an assurance by the Americans, not one step eastward with NATO. And Gorbachev believed it. This should have been enshrined in a treaty — which could have been disregarded, of course, but still, it would have been there and given some legal basis.

So then they started moving NATO regularly [eastward] till they landed in Ukraine. William J. Burns, who’s now head of the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], was ambassador to Russia between 2005 and 2008. When he got back to the United States, he wrote a paper to Condoleezza Rice, [then secretary of state], saying very clearly the one thing we shouldn’t provoke them on, which they regard as a red line, is incorporating Ukraine into NATO. He now, of course, says: “I warned them in private and I was proved right.”

Personally, I didn’t think Putin would invade. He took everyone by surprise. Of course, we have strongly criticized him and he should get out. But the only way now is to come out [of the war] via negotiations. One of his senior advisers told a friend of mine: “Putin kept this as a total secret. But, when I later asked about the mounting casualties, etc., he said, ‘Don’t be too critical of me. We are the last generation who could take on the Americans. If I hadn’t done this, the next generation would never have done it. They sort of half live in that world themselves.’”

My response is that the last elections in Ukraine before the “Euromaidan revolution” returned an overtly pro-Russian candidate, Viktor Yanukovych. That president was removed by an American “color revolution,” i.e., a regime change that they organized. Who believes that they would ever support anything like genuine democracy? Putin destroyed his own chances, because even people who were very pro-Russian can’t have anything to do with him now.

So, it’s a mess. I’m in favor in general of having referendums, but let’s have them openly. Let’s have no military presence in that country at all and let the fascist wing of the [Ukrainian military] be completely disarmed. Otherwise, how can you have the proper conditions for a referendum? The Ukrainians may then vote for [NATO], which I doubt since lots of reports and articles that Volodymyr Ishchenko is writing indicate a growing dissatisfaction.

I would say that it’s an attempt to move to a multipolar world that would never have happened without the Chinese. It is a sign that the Chinese are serious in at least pushing back on American plans. But I don’t think that of the Global South as such. They can obviously resist on Palestine, as it’s so blatant what the Americans and the West are up to. But the notion that they would do it on everything . . . that I doubt very much. Most of the bourgeois forces in these countries can be bought off. It’s really not so much about ideology as of who pays out more cash. It’s the same with Pakistan. India is obviously different, but even in Brazil some pressure has been exercised on [Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva] to pull back from his initial position, which was very strongly against the United States and in support of the Palestinians.

Lula used to say, “They’ve taken me for a fool.” Once he was tricked by Barack Obama, who flattered him and he fell for it, he said, “This will never happen again.” It’s not a personal thing. It’s American interest, US support for Jair Bolsonaro and involvement in the parliamentary coup against Dilma Rousseff. So, he hasn’t gone back, but he has been playing with them. He’s also nervous that the military is still infected with Bolsonaro.

I think that each country is playing things according to its own interests. There’s no overriding theme of opposing the United States. We had a better version of it in the 1960s with the Bandung Conference.

I agree, there’s no social project now at all, which is why it’s so easy to dismantle if the Americans wanted to do it.

There are several things to be said on this. First, it is not like the Vietnamese movement and the solidarity movement with Vietnam because that movement for most of us who participated in it had a very clear social content. It was not just for national liberation. However faulty, it was led by a communist party whose central leader was a Comintern guy, Ho Chi Minh. That had a big impact all over, especially where there were mass communist parties. It created tensions within these parties, with the leaderships who were saying, “We support the Vietnamese, but don’t say it too loudly.” It was [a conflict of] “peace in Vietnam” versus “victory to the Vietnamese.” That enabled us to divide these parties, in particular their youth wings, all over Europe.

Here, in Britain, the far left combined was larger than the Communist Party’s youth wing. The far left and its periphery hegemonized the youth very quickly. That’s why we organized university occupations. The SWP [at the time, called International Socialists] and the young International Marxist Group played a big role in that, even if numbers were small. It varied from country to country, but it happened at the height of the twentieth century.

Then, the way the Vietnamese struggle was carried out, the way the Vietnamese called for internationalism, was absolutely crucial. I recall once in North Vietnam, when I was with the North Vietnamese prime minister, Pham Van Dong, I said, in front of lots of people, “Comrade, time for International Brigades.” He took me aside and said, “Look, I’ll tell you what the problem is. This isn’t Spain, which is part of Europe. This is a country far away. So, just transporting you guys over for political propaganda would cost us a lot of money, and we don’t have that much. Then, we have to make sure that you guys are protected. Because this isn’t a war fought with rifles, the Americans are bombing us all the time, they will kill some of you.”

I said “So what? Your people are dying.” He said, using these words, “No, it’s not a good idea. A better idea is to go back and build mass movements in solidarity with us. Much more useful than a tiny show.” I said, “The British consul general in Hanoi, who fought in World War II, told me over tea three days ago that when he heard the bombers coming, he felt like grabbing a gun and going out onto the ceiling and firing at them.” Pham Van Dong said, “Well, why doesn’t he? We won’t stop him.” He meant: you guys are sweet and nice and we appreciate it. He hugged me very warmly and said it would not be useful because times have changed.

The other reason Pham Van Dong gave me for not having volunteers was that they were on a very tricky path between the Russians and the Chinese: “If we make a big appeal, we know thousands of people will come from Europe and elsewhere, but we’ll be summoned by Chairman Mao and the Russian leadership, saying, ‘What do you want? Why let these crazy people in? Are you saying we’re not giving you enough arms?’ So, we don’t get into that. It’s just easier.” So, the FI decided that building the solidarity movement with Vietnam was a central priority — one of the best things they ever did.

The other big difference was that unlike the Palestinians, the Vietnamese had a state in the North and huge material support from the Soviets and the Chinese. They scored more and more victories on the ground. I attended a talk in Hanoi by their top military commanders, where some of us were allowed in. A high-ranked officer explained how they were going to crush the Americans.

I was skeptical. I said, “Crush the Americans? Look what’s going on.” The colonel said, “We have a plan, a combination of guerrilla attacks and sudden mass attacks on them to take them.” He basically described the Tet Offensive. So, they were very convinced, and we said, “We might actually win this one. That would be a huge blow against the Americans.” And they did. That was the atmosphere.

Palestine is also different in the sense that for the younger generation — not for the previous ones — the war in Gaza came as a huge shock. At the beginning, the good elements reacted to it like they would react to Black Lives Matter: occupy the parks and all that. But gradually it deepened, and something happened that didn’t happen with all these Black Lives Matter–style movements: they began to read and to ask questions. A very important element in the United States was the entry of young Jewish people into the movement. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw that the anti-Zionist young Jews had occupied Grand Central Station and said to the rest of the movement, “This is our business, just let us do it alone.” In Britain, too, they had their own banners, but they never did independent things like young American Jews did.

That shook the Israelis and the AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee], but it didn’t touch the politicians, of course. My own feeling is that this created a new consciousness. If we can’t describe it as totally anti-imperialist, it’s not that far from it. People realize that is what the Israelis are doing with our money, with our bombs, in some cases with our soldiers, and it’s unacceptable.

I’m optimistic that something will come out of it. There is admiration for the Palestinians who do fight back and total disgust for the soldiers they see muttering Nazi-style obscenities against the Palestinians like “Our children need protection because they’re not like Arab children.” These sort of “Kill the Arabs” chants are repeated by their supporters here. This has created a strong feeling that all institutions created by the United States after World War II are useless unless the Americans support them, starting with the great so-called United Nations, and all the international courts that they’ve tried to sabotage.

The effect on the new generations is very positive. Ironically, the American state will soon realize this. Any other country can now say: “Who are you to tell us anything? We can go and do our own atrocities like the Israelis did. Why should we listen to you?” Actually, the whole structure of international relations has been dented by this particular war. The Israelis, backed by the West, have waged a genocide against the Palestinian people and its consequences will be with us for a long time. This is a memory that will not go — and wherever else the US does it now, people will react saying, “Go away! Don’t do it. We don’t believe you.” And I think it also has had an effect, whether people like it or not, on perceptions of Ukraine: “You say Ukraine is sacred, you defend them. We can’t do this, we can’t do that, because it might offend them. And in Palestine, you just watch freely.”

There is no cause for celebration when these acts are carried out by Western imperialisms under the leadership of the United States. When they are toppled by their own people, I celebrate. The West removes the people it doesn’t like at a particular moment. Saddam [Hussein] of Iraq was a hero when he acted for the US and started a war with Iran. He became a “Hitler” only when he invaded Kuwait, imagining he had a green light from the US. Then after 9/11, they finished off him and a million other Iraqis. Five million orphans. Then they lynched Saddam. Cause for celebration? I wrote against him and produced a documentary mocking him when he was alive.

In Libya, NATO killed over 30,000 Libyans to push through regime change and lynch Muammar Gaddafi. “We came, we saw, he died” was Hillary Clinton’s celebration. French and British politicians took money from Gaddafi. The [London School of Economics begged for a big donation and its professors wrote young Gaddafi’s PhD for him. Lord Anthony Giddens [the theorist of Tony Blair’s “Third Way”] compared Libya to a “Norway of North Africa.”

The same people supported NATO’s assault. I criticized him severely for many years. I did not celebrate his death. What is there to celebrate in the antics of Western imperialism? The same for Syria. Iraq has not yet recovered. Libya is a wreck, ruled by rival jihadists. Syria has already been divided. The huge triumph of the West is still playing itself out.

They are no longer ashamed of displaying their double standards as we observe with the Israeli genocide in Palestine, but NATO’s useful idiots in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, adornments of the bourgeois media and their supporters in the barely existent left, still pretend that advances are being made. In one of his remarks on theater, Bertolt Brecht stressed that he was interested in the “new bad days, not the old good ones.” There are no longer any good ones left. Centuries before him, Baruch Spinoza — who has just had his sentence of expulsion rescinded by the Synagogue in Amsterdam — offered his own advice: “Neither to laugh nor to cry but to understand.” NATO liberals should reflect on it.