Mike Marqusee: a creative, brilliant analyst, activist and friend

Mike Marqusee (1953-2015) became a contributor to TNI through the book 'Selling US Wars' and was a valued friend. Please find the details of his funeral here.

TNI Fellow Achin Vanaik was a personal friend of Mike and wrote the following obituary:

"I received the news of Mike’s death with shock even though I had known it was imminent. Diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2007 when he was 53 and given around 4 years more, he still managed – true to his life’s pattern –to defy the odds by living twice as long. I had just got a British visa and had booked my ticket to see him in London in early February so as to present in person the copy of my latest book critiquing India’s nuclear weapons trajectory since 1998, that is due for release by January end, and is dedicated to him for all that he has meant to me and my family. It was not to be.

            I first met Mike in 1990 when he looked me up after having read my first book on India’s polity, economy and society published simultaneously in UK and India. We hit it off immediately. I had spent my higher education years and more, in England where I had been part of, and radicalized by, the anti-racist and anti-Vietnam War movements. One of my early inspirations was the US Black Power Movement.

Mike, an American school student of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry had himself been influenced by Malcolm X and the black resistance of those times and was so disgusted by the Vietnam War that he shifted soon to England effectively making that his home base and travelling as much as he could in Europe and Asia but carrying a special affection for India. If in the UK he was active in the campaign to defend Rushdie against the Iranian fatwa, he was also shaken and angered by the communal upsurge expressed by the campaign to destroy the Babri Masjid.

            Whenever he came to Delhi he (and later his remarkable companion Liz Davies) would stay with us even as they travelled to different parts of the country. If at one level his curiosity would drive him at a late age (to our amazement) to listen, absorb and delight in the intricacies of classical Carnatic music, at another level he connected easily with the widest cross-section of youngsters everywhere because of his passionate interest and appreciation of mass popular cultural as expressed in music, film, TV serials of all kinds, and sport.

He looked at all this with a sharp political and critical eye fully aware that such forms of entertainment and the administration of major sports usually went hand-in-hand with the promotion of demeaning cultural stereotypes, of sexist and racist attitudes, and the reinforcement of the self-serving values of the rich and powerful. Precisely this capacity to genuinely share in the viewer’s ‘enjoyment’ without feeling or instilling any sense of guilt and yet be able to criticize these forms with such authority and knowledge enabled him in the most non-didactic and unassuming way to leave a powerful political impress on young minds.

I still remember his lively interactions with my two sons on the merits and limitations of both Sholay and Garam Hawa. What he conveyed was that one can share in the joys of ordinary and fun-loving existence and also commit oneself to that most difficult of tasks of trying to change the world for the better.

            In Britain Mike was known for both his writings and his activism – he was the main Press Officer for the Stop The War Coalition that organized the over a million people march in London against the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. He was an anti-Stalinist, anti-bureaucratic, libertarian socialist working within the Labour party because of its strong links to the mass of working people, to oppose those pushing for authoritarian involution of decision-making as the necessary prelude for carrying out its rightward neoliberal shift.

One co-authored book of his was on how the Kinnock leadership of the Labour Party prepared the ground for this shift, aptly titled Defeat from the Jaws of Victory. What was special about Mike was that his writings were deeply integrated with his passionately lived preoccupations – explorations of the mind and heart. He was blessed in that he could combine sophisticated functionality of analysis with a great creativity of expression that made him a delight to read.

            He for one saw nothing odd about a white writing one of the best books on Muhammad Ali the boxer and the anti-racist struggles of that time, titled Redemption Song, the reference being to Bob Marley’s reggae classic. That book made the New York Public Library’s list of the 25 best books of that year. Nor would it have crossed his mind as to why an American reared in his youth on baseball should even attempt to write what many would call the best book Anyone but England on cricket since Beyond the Boundary by CLR James whose politics Mike’s own so closely mirrored. The book was shortlisted as one of the three best sports book of the year in UK and received, among others, very warm reviews in India from Ramchandra Guha, the historian, Prabhat Patnaik, Professor Emeritus JNU, Rudrangshu Mukherjee, currently VC of Ashoka University, Gulu Ezekeil, the poet, as well as the admiration of newscaster and journalist Rajdeep Sardesai.

This was the work, followed by a book length account War Minus the Shooting of the 1996 Cricket World Cup held in South Asia (in the finals he naturally rooted for Sri Lanka) that he is best known for here. He also penned a terrific chapter for a book I edited for the Transnational Institute, a remarkable collection of progressive intellectuals-activists based in Amsterdam. It was called Selling US Wars and published in South Asia as Masks of Empire. Mike’s contribution was a searing critique of the arrogances of ‘American Exceptionalism’.  

But his most lyrical works were yet to come – Chimes of Freedom (titled Wicked Messenger in USA) on the political enigmas of Bob Dylans’s art; a collection of his poems; and the intensely personal If I Am Not For Myself that wove the history of Jewish radicalism in New York with his own personal experiences in the British left to trace his evolution as an internationalist, secular, anti-Zionist Jew deeply committed to the struggle for justice for the Palestinian people.

            Even after his cancer diagnosis, he continued to fill his life -- despite periods of intense pain and hospitalization -- with political activism in Britain interspersed with travels to Morocco, Spain and Portugal to savour its architectural and other cultural delights, to immerse himself in the study of their respective histories and politics.

Whenever he could, he came to India to renew older friendships while always making newer ones. On his return to UK he nonetheless for a long time contributed a fortnightly column to The Hindu on everything under the sun and was a regular columnist for Britain’s largest circulation resolutely leftwing magazine Red Pepper edited by the indomitable Hilary Wainwright.

            His very last set of writings (2014) was The Price of Experience: Writings on Living with Cancer on the British NHS that was treating him. To give a sense of the person he was, I would like to leave the reader with three snippets from this short book. In the face of proposed government cuts, NHS staff threatened strike action to which much of the mainstream media and others reacted as expected  calling this a betrayal of their vocation of priority to patient care.

This is what Mike said: “Finally, an appeal to NHS workers from one very grateful patient: the government takes advantage of your sense of commitment to your patients, but by letting them do so you are doing no favour for those patients…….We need you to take action on our behalf, action that is a necessary extension of the sense of dedication that guides you in your daily work.”

In another piece, Mike rails against Pharma firms that use their licensed monopoly over certain drugs to charge exorbitant prices when the cost of production is very low. One such US firm Celegne, he says “claims its high prices are necessary to pay for research and development, but frankly that’s crap. It spends more on marketing and lobbying than on R&D. Plus it boasts an extraordinary 26% profit margin, way above the already exorbitant pharma-industry average of 17%.......One of the reasons I am glad to be alive is that I can have a go at these bastards.”

Heinrich Heine when gravely ill wrote “Thank God that I have a God again so that in extreme pain I can allow myself to curse and blaspheme. The atheist is denied such solace.” Mike consoled himself otherwise – “I’ve sometimes regretted not having a divine power I can curse and blaspheme. The powers of the world will have to suffice.” "

Achin Vanaik

picture by Felix Clay