Mike Marqusee

Five Leaves is sorry to read that Mike Marqusee has died, aged only 61, after being ill for several years with cancer. He was a great supporter of the NHS and in his writings often talked about the number of people who'd kept him alive and the way the NHS is being abused by this government.
Mike could be correctly described as unique in that he was the only London-based American Jewish Marxist who wrote about cricket, including for the Indian newspaper The Hindu.
Though I knew of his political, music and sporting writing I'd never met him until he rang to ask if I could put together a team of people to help him leaflet Trent Bridge announcing the formation of an anti-racist cricket organisation. I was happy to help as long as nobody asked about cricket! Later Mike came to Lowdham Book Festival, then jointly organised by Five Leaves, to talk about Bob Dylan, the subject of two of his books.
His other books included the important If I Am Not Myself: journey of an anti-Zionist Jew and, recently, The Price of Experience: writings on living with cancer.
Mike was a committed socialist activist, involved in the anti-war movement who went public on how the Socialist Workers Party abused their position within the Stop the War group. His socialism was ethical, inclusive and visionary. I was pleased, then to include his essay Let's Talk Utopia as the editorial essay in the Five Leaves publication Utopia. In that essay he wrote "We need to find ways to connect to the utopian yearnings that move millions of people, and which the right-wing and the advertising industry know too well how to exploit. We have to offer something more participatory, concrete and the same time more dynamic, more of a process, a journey than an end product polished by the intelligentsia. In doing that, we can draw on a rich tradition going back to the Biblical prophets and found in almost every society." In a sentence he summed up his argument "We need the attraction of a possible future as well as a revulsion at the actual present. ... we don't 'talk utopia' nearly enough."
Mike helped make the left more inhabitable and his influence was widespread.
Typically he asked for contributions in his memory to go to Medical Aid for Palestine and to St Joseph's Hospice which looked after him towards the end.
Our condolences to his partner, comrade and co-thinker, Liz Davies.

Two cheers for Utopia

One day last week, reviews of the Five Leaves Utopia issue of our annual journal turned up in Anarchist Studies and the Communist Party's Communist Review. I imagine it would be hard to find two journals further apart but still on the left. Communist Review (CR) is still debating what went wrong in the former Soviet Union (though it has a good poetry section) while Anarchist Studies' (AS)  lead article is "Toward a Peak Everything Postanarchism and Technology Evaluation Schema for Communities in Crisis". Yes, it can be that kind of academic journal. Both took Utopia seriously, devoting a lot of space to it.
AS would perhaps be expected to review favourably as many of the writers - as the CR was quick to pick up - were from a libertarian background and the reviewer Diogo Duarte finds that many of the shorter pieces "written like chronicles, often starting from personal experience or a biographical episode of the author that could be as different as a coastal walk... a journey to Patagonia" which "offer us uncommon approaches to the topic or reflections on how utopia can be found in banal actions or habits" are the most entertaining reads but at the same time "utopia is used in such a broad way that it becomes impossible to discern what the criterion was behind the inclusion of the text." As editor of the work, I am not sure what my criterion was either, so the point was fairly made. I suppose that I wanted exactly that - well written pieces including those AS described as having "historical depth" as well as the more personal approach.
Over at CR Steve Johnson finds the book very readable and you can tell in his review that he found the book a pleasurable read, yet noticed that what was not on offer was any idea or strategy on how to reach utopia. I'm still looking for those. Steve also cleverly picks up that much of the utopian language of the libertarian left has been picked up by the right "with its talk of free schools and alternative education" suggesting that "anti-statism without a wider political strategy can have deeply reactionary consequences. Big Society anyone?
As editor, the pieces that bookended Utopia were, for me, the most important. The first was by Mike Marqusee (a Marxist), a piece which AS described as making "a short but strong claim on the importance of utopian thought and the consequences of its absence". The last was the picture, reprinted here from the (Marxist) Country Standard where, prefiguring the work of the anarchist illustrator Cliff Harper's famous sequence of illustrations in Undercurrents and elsewhere (which should have been included in the journal!), the unknown illustrator imagines how we will live in a better society. Good to see the reading room there.
Does this mean that there is more in common between anarchist academics and members of the Communist Party than we thought? Maybe. Just don't mention Kronstadt.