Beyond the Academy

Before going into more detail about his body of work, it’s worth taking a moment to consider what type of writer Marqusee was, and why he stood out among his contemporaries. In his essay “Renewals,” published at the start of the new century, Perry Anderson discussed the impact of academic culture on the anglophone left:

A major change of the past epoch, often remarked upon, has been the widespread migration of intellectuals of the Left into institutions of higher learning. This development — a consequence not only of changes in occupational structure, but of the emptying-out of political organizations, the dumbing-down of publishing houses, the stunting of counter-cultures — is unlikely to be soon reversed. It has brought with it, notoriously, specific tares. Edward Said has recently drawn attention sharply to some of the worst of these — standards of writing that would have left Marx or Morris speechless. But academization has taken its toll in other ways too: needless apparatuses, more for credential than intellectual purposes, circular references to authorities, complaisant self-citations, and so on.

For Anderson, “it should be a matter of honour on the Left to write at least as well, without redundancy or clutter, as its adversaries.”

Of course, it is quite possible to think of socialist writers based in university departments who have avoided these pitfalls. But Marqusee developed his profile as a left-wing intellectual from outside the field of higher education altogether — a rare achievement in his time. He wrote columns for a number of publications, notably Britain’s Red Pepper and the Hindu, one of India’s leading English-language newspapers, and wrote a series of books that were scholarly in the best sense of the term without being academic in style.

As his friend Achin Vanaik noted after his death, Marqusee combined this intellectual output with several decades of activism on the British left:

He was a gifted writer of many great, indeed path-breaking books, a powerful columnist, a fine speaker who graced innumerable platforms and causes but he also spent the greatest part of his adult life working in what can be called the trenches of everyday, routinised, time-consuming, tiring, repetitive, unglamorous left-wing political activity on the ground. This is a combination that is extremely rare on the left, let alone anywhere else.

Marqusee joined the British Labour Party when the left-wing tendency spearheaded by Tony Benn was at the peak of its influence. He spent the next two decades engaged with the rest of the Labour left in a long rearguard action against the party’s drift to the right under the guidance of Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair. Marqusee’s first nonfiction work, after publishing a novel in the late 1980s, was a withering account of Kinnock’s leadership after the election defeat of 1992.

After the experience of Blair’s first term in office, Marqusee argued that there had been a qualitative transformation of the party that meant socialists would have to look elsewhere for political spaces in which to promote their ideas:

The defeats of the working class in the 1980s and the apparent hegemony of “free market” norms and managerial prerogatives affected the character of virtually all our social institutions — from the BBC to the Football Association, from universities to housing associations — and the Labour Party was no exception. Its policies were radically revised to make them inoffensive to big business. Its official ideology was reconstructed around a commitment to “free enterprise.” Its internal democratic structures were effectively abolished. Its links with the trade unions were downgraded and a new (financial and political) relationship with the private sector was forged. As a result, the party that took office in 1997 was not the same as the party that took office in 1974.

While Marqusee acknowledged that Labour had never been a radical socialist force under any of Blair’s predecessors, he still insisted that the party’s character had been fundamentally altered since the rout of Bennism.

The Labour Party was certainly “reformist” in that its leadership always confined their ambitions well within the capitalist framework, and in that the vast majority of its members believed that socialism would be achieved gradually, and principally through the ballot box. But it was also always a composite and contradictory entity, embodying countless working-class struggles (and confusions) as well as relentless pressure from ruling-class ideas and the capitalist state. But as a result of everything that has happened inside and outside the party over the last 15 years, the admixture has qualitatively changed.

In the same essay, Marqusee warns against “assigning some single, eternal, unchanging and defining essence to ‘the Labour Party’ or even ‘labourism.’ Like all social institutions, Labour is a creature of history, shaped by the ever-changing society of which it is part.” His death came just a few months before history opened an unexpected door for the British left with the election of his old comrade Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party, thanks to a new voting system that made it possible for Corbyn to do an end run around the majority of Labour MPs and officials.

It appears safe to assume that Marqusee would have been one of the many socialists who joined or rejoined Labour to support Corbyn, without losing sight of the deeply entrenched barriers to socialist politics within the party. Corbyn’s accession to the leadership would have surprised Marqusee, as it surprised all of us. But he would surely have anticipated the scorched-earth resistance of the Labour right to the Corbynite agenda.

Batting to the Left

While he was engaged with these debates over the future of the British left, Marqusee was also establishing himself as one of the Left’s best cultural analysts. He started off with two books about cricket in the 1990s, Anyone But England and War Minus the Shooting. The first was a study of the sport and English society from the origins of the game to the present day; the second was a political travelogue about South Asia during the World Cup of 1996, which was jointly hosted by India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

You wouldn’t need to be a fan of cricket, or even sports in general, to enjoy reading either of these books. Marqusee was a stylish writer who used cricket as a window into major political and social questions. Anyone But England tackles the British class system and the impact of racism on the game, from hostility to Afro-Caribbean immigrants who supported the West Indian team at London’s Oval to the extreme reluctance of England’s cricket establishment to accept the sporting boycott of apartheid. War Minus the Shooting deftly captures a particular moment when India had embraced neoliberal globalization and some of the new wealth was flowing into cricket; Hindutva nationalism was on the rise but had yet to become a hegemonic force.

In the second book, Marqusee playfully links his support for the Sri Lankan underdogs who eventually carried home the World Cup trophy with his life on the Left in an age of conservative retrenchment.

I backed them more out of perversity than perspicacity. Now, to my amazement, they were in the final. In my years as a political activist, I hadn’t had the good fortune to pick many winners, and in recent days I had found myself dreaming what it would be like to come out on top, for once. To be vindicated. I was asking a lot of Arjuna Ranatunga’s team.

As a Marxist writing about cricket, Marqusee was consciously following in the footsteps of C. L. R. James. In a celebration of James’s work Beyond a Boundary on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, Marqusee credited James with opening up entirely fresh terrain: “The book had to create its own subject, define a new field of intervention. James aimed to establish cricket as worthy of serious study and to expose the failure to study it as an unacceptable omission.” Anyone But England and War Minus the Shooting measured up to the high standard that James had set.

One proof of that was the enthusiastic reaction to Marqusee’s work from the world of cricket, regardless of political commitments. The front cover of Anyone But England came with an enthusiastic commendation from Imran Khan, who was then best known for his role as Pakistan’s cricket captain (War Minus the Shooting has some interesting material about the early political ambitions that would eventually lead Khan to become his country’s president). In the past few years, the Indian cricket journalists who host the podcast 81 All Out arranged for War Minus the Shooting to be republished with a generous endorsement from another former captain, England’s Mike Atherton.

Marqusee continued to write about cricket in subsequent years, from individual stars like Sachin Tendulkar and Shane Warne to the political economy of the Indian Premier League (IPL):

Cricket’s strange fate is to find itself at the epicentre of burgeoning Indian economic power. And the IPL version of the game seems an apt reflection of the “aspirational” culture of a self-aggrandising wealthy minority in a society still saddled with mass poverty. It is the celebration of a global elite whose services are contracted to the highest corporate bidder, slickly packaged and easily digestible.

He would probably have found the synergy of high-level Indian cricket with the premiership of Narendra Modi over the last decade horrifying, if not surprising.

Recovering the ’60s

For his next two books, Marqusee shifted his focus to iconic figures of the 1960s Muhammad Ali and Bob Dylan. Redemption Song placed Ali in the context of black radical politics and the movement against the invasion of Vietnam, building up to a triumphant conclusion with his comeback victory against George Foreman in Kinshasa. Marqusee explained his motivation for adding to the vast literature on Ali’s sporting career:

Working my way through the innumerable books about Ali, I found that the political dimension had too often been played down or misrepresented, and in the innumerable books about the “sixties” (the black freedom struggle and the anti-war movement in particular), Ali’s role rarely merited more than a footnote. That wasn’t how I remembered it.

Wicked Messenger argued that Dylan’s shift from acoustic folk to heavily amplified rock music was not a straightforward retreat from political engagement, as most critics had assumed. Rather, Dylan had opted for a more oblique and surreal approach to social commentary in the second half of the 1960s, after the agitational clarity of his early work.

For Marqusee, writing about figures like Ali and Dylan was, at least in part, a way of bringing political ideas to people who might not be inclined to pick up a book filed under “History” or “Current Affairs” from the library shelves. He described the experience of speaking about Ali at a lunchtime meeting in an East London community college where most of the audience was black or came from other ethnic-minority backgrounds:

The discussion ranged from Patrice Lumumba to the situation currently facing asylum seekers. These young people wanted to talk about politics, but I don’t think so many would have been willing to come forward if the politics had not been located within a realm of popular culture in which they felt at home.

In one of his final articles, published in advance of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, Marqusee discussed the contemporary relationship between capitalism and sport. As he noted, “one of the hallmarks of the neo-liberal age has been the exponential expansion of commercial spectator sport — in its economic value, political role and cultural presence.” This was not simply a question of the profits derived from the sports industry and associated sectors like footwear, soft drinks, and broadcasting. As he pointed out, sports have also become a vehicle for neoliberal ideology, “used to promote a competitive individualism in which the pursuit of victory and success is presented as the purest form of personal self-expression.”

For some left intellectuals, this is reason enough to condemn sport altogether (the thesis of Marc Perelman’s book Barbaric Sport: A Global Plague should be apparent from its title). Marqusee did not agree that there was a necessary affinity between sporting and commercial forms of competition.

Unpredictability and spontaneity are at the heart of sports, and they are at odds with the capitalist drive to maximise profits and eliminate variables. An extreme example is bookmakers who seek to fix results, thus guaranteeing the return on their investment. But sponsors too would prefer some WWE-like scripted entertainment: no annoying upsets or injuries or mysterious losses of form to compromise their projections. The problem for them is that their property would forfeit all value should it be seen to be scripted.

So there’s a tension between capitalist imperatives and sporting imperatives. In fact, the whole idea of sports competition as a mirror or metaphor for capitalist competition is misconceived. The “level playing field” in sport is constituted by a rigid scaffolding of rules without which the competition dissolves. Capitalism’s version is a deregulated arena of limitless accumulation. The aim of capitalist competition is to eliminate (or acquire) the competitor. In sport, you need the opponent to survive and return for the next match or season, which always begins the contest afresh.

Marqusee praised the work of Dave Zirin, which showed the 2014 World Cup to have been “a carnival of state-sponsored neoliberalism, characterised by mass evictions, gentrification, increased repression and surveillance, vast expenditure on redundant facilities and corporate plundering of public funds.” Since then, we have seen one World Cup hosted by Qatar and another handed to Saudi Arabia without a semblance of real debate. Marqusee’s observation about the need for a political perspective on the world of sport is more valid than ever today: “Engaging critically with sports, seeing them as part of the broader human current, becomes a necessary subversive act. FIFA and its corporate partners have a vested interest in promoting tunnel vision, but the rest of us do not.”

Not in My Name

The last book Marqusee published during his lifetime was a powerful blend of family history and political analysis. If I Am Not for Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew tackled the relationship between Israel and Jewish identity. Marqusee sought to explain why so many Jews in Europe and North America had developed a strong attachment to the Israeli state, without pulling any punches as he exposed the violent dispossession of the Palestinian people upon which that state was founded, from the Nakba to the second intifada of the 2000s.

In part, this involved recalling the hostile reaction he faced from his family as a teenager when he extended the anti-racist philosophy of the US civil rights movement to the oppression of the Palestinians. But the core of the book is a fascinating biographical sketch of Marqusee’s grandfather, a lawyer and would-be liberal politician who had been on friendly terms with the Communist Party during the time of the Popular Front. Using a family archive of letters, newspapers, and other documents, Marqusee reconstructs a lost world of left-wing Jewish politics in New York during the first half of the twentieth century and traced his grandfather’s path toward an ardent embrace of Zionism.

In 2006, Marqusee launched a withering attack on Britain’s Orthodox chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, when he enthusiastically supported the Israeli attack on Lebanon, claiming to speak in the name of the entire Jewish community as he did so:

Rabbi, if Israel’s record makes you proud, then you have either forgotten or perhaps never really absorbed traditional Jewish ethical teachings. In their place you have embraced the racism and neo-colonialism that have turned the Zionist dream into a global nightmare. When you say that the Israelis “have taken a desolate land and made it blossom and bear fruit,” you deny the very existence of other peoples who cultivated Palestine for generations before the arrival of the first Zionist colonists in the nineteenth century.

It seems to me that the Chief Rabbi and others who speak as he does have drawn a tragically perverse lesson from the Holocaust and the wider history of antisemitism. They appear to believe that this history has endowed Jews — or rather those claiming to represent Jews — with special prerogatives denied to others: the prerogative to invade and occupy other lands, to deny others elementary human rights. For me, the lesson of our Jewish history is quite different: it’s that when any group of human beings are subject to persecution and injustice, all human beings must stand in solidarity with them.

Marqusee’s premature death in January 2015 deprived us of future contributions he would have made to the Left. He left behind an unfinished manuscript for a joint study of Thomas Paine and William Blake; you can find embryonic sketches of what the book might have been in an excellent posthumous collection of his journalism, which also touches on a wide range of other topics, from prehistoric cave paintings to the cinema of John Ford. But the greatest loss may have been the fact that we didn’t have his voice during a period when the conflation of antisemitism with support for Palestinian human rights became one of the chief ideological weapons deployed against the Left, not least in Britain.

It has also, of course, been the main weapon used to legitimate the oppression of the Palestinians, which has escalated to a genocidal slaughter in Gaza since October 2023. Ephraim Mirvis, the man who succeeded Jonathan Sacks as chief rabbi, recently denounced Keir Starmer’s government for announcing a partial limitation on the sale of British arms to Israel for use against the Palestinians. According to Mirvis, this minimal breach in the wall of complicity “feeds the falsehood that Israel is in breach of International Humanitarian Law, when in fact it is going to extraordinary lengths to uphold it.” The best way of honoring Marqusee’s work today is to challenge such grotesque casuistry with all the ethical passion and empirical precision he would have brought to the task.