a life well-lived in the struggle

The following was sent to me by my old South African friend Enver Motala, himself a lifelong participant in the struggle for freedom and socialism in South Africa.  I post it as a model of how one ought to live one's life:

Tribute to Neville Alexander

(born 22 October 1936; died 27 August 2012)

 

Neville Edward Alexander meant many specific things to many different people. For the most part of his adult life, he grappled with life’s contradictions, its dilemmas, its twists and its beauty as a socialist intellectual and a revolutionary Marxist since his political baptism in the Non-European Unity Movement’s student wing, the Cape Peninsula Students’ Union. In the unfolding drama that captures his life’s work, Alexander eschewed the presumed impartiality of the scholar who pretends to stand “on the wall of a threatened city” and write about the oppressors and the oppressed. Like Antonio Gramsci, Amilcar Cabral, Che Guevara and Leon Trotsky, Alexander’s place has been “within the revolution’s threatened city”. His political and academic choices were ideologically inspired and his writings were crafted unambiguously to promote the interests of working people and their allies.

                Alexander was born in Cradock in the Eastern Cape on 22 October 1936. His father was David James Alexander, a carpenter, and his mother, Dimbiti Bisho Alexander, a school teacher. His maternal grandmother was enslaved as a child in Ethiopia in 1888, rescued on the high seas and eventually brought to Lovedale in the Eastern Cape. His formal schooling was at the Holy Rosary Convent, and his university studies were at the University of Cape Town and the University of Tübingen in Germany where he completed his doctorate on the dramatic work of Gerhardt Hauptmann in 1961.

                After Sharpeville in 1960 and after his return to South Africa in 1961, Alexander opened up a debate within the African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa (Apdusa) about the armed struggle. He formed the Yu Chin Chan Club which included Marcus Solomon, Kenneth Abrahams and Fikile Bam. This organisation was superseded by the National Liberation Front. He was arrested in 1963 and convicted in 1964. Alexander spent 10 years on Robben Island where he had an epic debate on the “national question”, first with Walter Sisulu and then with Nelson Mandela. In more ways than one, this exchange prefigured his own written exposition of this question in One Azania, One Nation, which was published in 1979. In this work, Alexander draws up a Marxist interpretation of nationalism, its limits and possibilities and its dire consequences. One Azania, One Nation is his philosophical and political template for much of his subsequent writings.

                In 1981, Alexander became Western Cape director of the South African Committee for Higher Education (Sached). Through Sached, he established Khanya College, an institution that was created to serve as a bridging organisation for black students en route to university study. He also established the National Language Project (1985) and the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (Praesa) in the 1990s.

                In June 1983, he formed the National Forum with Pandelani Nefolovhodwe, Saths Cooper, Lybon Mabasa and others, and which had as its patrons Desmond Tutu, Albertina Sisulu and Emma Mashinini. This forum drew up the Azanian Manifesto, a set of demands and injunctions calling for a socialist state in South Africa. For Alexander, this forum was an effort at a united front of oppressed people’s organisations, and had as its aim the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by a more equitable distribution of the country’s resources. In the early 1990s, he initiated a new political organisation called the Workers Organisation for Socialist Action and to which he has remained committed.

                Alexander’s literary output includes eight books and numerous scholarly articles that have been published in refereed journals, and through political and educational organisations with which he has been associated. One Azania, One Nation was followed by Sow the Wind (1985), Language policy and National Unity in South Africa/Azania (1989), Education and the Struggle for National Liberation in South Africa (1990), Some Are More Equal Than Others (1993), Robben Island Dossier (1994), and An Ordinary Country: Issues in the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy (2002).

                In his writings, Alexander rejected the notion of “’race” as a valid biological entity. While he accepted that racism exists as a social construct, and with the life-and-death consequences of the former apartheid regime’s Bantustan policies and Hitler’s delusions about a master race, he criticised the lack of a scientific understanding within the former South African liberation movement’s perceptions about the phenomenon of “race”. Instead, through his work, he experimented with notions of colour-caste, class and identities, and marshalled his thoughts to develop an indigenous theory of knowledge about humanity’s genealogy and evolving consciousness.

                What separated Alexander from many other academics and intellectuals is that his pursuit of knowledge was anchored in the existential imperative to act in the “here and now”. He stood on the shoulders of equally agile and committed writers and thinkers such as Ben Kies and Isaac Bangani Tabata, who were leaders in knowledge production outside the academy. His interrogation of contemporary debates and conversations on language and nation-building places him among the leading scholars and committed writers on the future of humanity. His synergy with former SACP stalwart Harold Wolpe’s Race, Class and the Apartheid State (1988) is not accidental.

                Neville Alexander was a radical participant in the making of South African history. In his own words, written in 1995 after the democratic elections in 1994: “The nation is being imagined, invented, created before our eyes. Indeed, we are extremely fortunate to have been afforded ringside seats by Clio enabling us to observe in the most concrete manner possible the contest between the nation conceived as a community of culture and the nation as a political community. As organic intellectuals, however, we resemble Brechtian rather than Aristotelian theatre-goers. Like every other would-be mother or sire of the nation, we want to be involved in its conception even if only as midwives to the wondrous fruit of the womb of our struggle. At worst, we are willing to be mere critics, those (usually tired old) men and women who stand around in the labor ward admiring or bewailing the features of the new-born infant.”

 

Written By: Na-iem Dollie, Hamied Mahate, James Marsh, Enver Motala, Jean Pease, John Samuels, Marcus Solomon, Salim Vally and Crain Soudien

27 August 2012

SONG OF MYSELF

'I celebrate myself," as Walt Whitman famously began his poem.  If Whitman can do it, why can't I?  [The obvious answer is, because Whitman was a great poet, and I am no poet at all.  Oh well.]  More than a year ago, I wrote a short book, posted on this blog in segments as I wrote it, called "The Use and Abuse of Formal Models in Political Philosophy."  It now resides on box.net, along with much else that I have written.  Having nothing better to do this afternoon, while the oven heats up to receive a cornish hen, I decided to re-read some of that little book.  I was delighted to discover that it is really very clear, very readable, and a splendid introduction to collective choice theory, rational choice theory, and Game Theory, as well as an acerbic debunking of the so-called Prisoner's Dilemma.  Having long ago learned, though not actually from Walt Whitman, that if you do not sing a song of yourself probably nobody else will, I heartily recommend my web-book to anyone who has a serious interest in the formal side of political theory but has somehow managed to reach this point in life without mastering the technical materials that others deploy with such insoucience and self-confidence.  I can say with serene confidence that you will enjoy it more than watching the Republican Nominating Convention.

DRAMATURGICAL MUSINGS

An odd turn of my mind this morning led me to recall the opening line of the great speech with which Shakespeare brings Henry IV, Part II to a close:  "I know thee not, old man" etc etc.  [Spoken by the newly crowned Prince Hal to his old tutor and drinking companion, Sir John Falstaff.]  Google quickly supplied me with the entire speech, which I read through, tears forming in my eyes.  This took me to Kenneth Branagh's much acclaimed film re-make of Henry V, and courtesy of Netflix, I watched Derek Jacobi deliver Prologue's opening speech.  I am of that generation that fed on the theatrics of Lawrence Olivier's classic film versions of  Shakespeare's plays, including, of course, Henry V, and I quite naturally felt a certain disappointment at Branagh's distinctly low-key approach to that best-loved of Shakespeare's history plays.  But then I called to mind something said to me by a student of literature who was, a lifetime ago, a good friend --  Richard J. Onorato. 

As I have recounted in my Memoir, Richard and I were members of the Winthrop House Senior Common Room at Harvard at the end of the 50's.  Richard was a handsome, incredibly fit man with a wry sense of humor and a picture-perfect tennis playing style, who was then engaged in writing a doctoral dissertation on Wordsworth that eventually became a very well-received book.  One day I was going on about how wonderful Olivier was in his film version of Henry V, when Onorato broke into set me straight.  What you don't realize, he said, is that Olivier has just one acting trick that he uses in every scene.  He conveys intensity by making his voice rise to a higher and higher pitch, making you think that he has grasped the emotional essence of the speech, when in fact he might just as well be reading the telephone book [we still had telephone books in those days.]  He then proved his point irrefutably by imitating Olivier perfectly. 

Thereafter, I was never able to watch Olivier on the screen without thinking of what Dick had said.  It spoiled a number of movies for me.

WHERE IS PAT ROBERTSON WHEN WE NEED HIM?

Pat Robertson has made a good living explaining natural disasters as God's punishment for such sins as homosexuality, abortion, socialized medicine, and same sex marriage.  Now, as the Republicans gather for their national convention in Tampa, a storm threatening to become a hurricane is approaching Florida, and looks to have a good chance of hitting Tampa itself.  It is just our luck that when we need him the most, Pat is reported to have checked into a hospital.  I guess the line of Jeremiahs has run out.

PASSING -- AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL MEDITATION

Shortly after I joined the UMass Afro-American Studies Department, I was chatting with the Chair, Esther Terry [now the Interim President of Bennett College] about the famous novel by James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-White Man.  It is a novel about the phenomenon of passing, which is to say the practice of a very light-skinned Black man or woman passing for white, and transitioning into the White community.  "There are people on this campus who are passing," Esther said.  "We know who they are," she went on, meaning "we African-Americans."  But the rest of the UMass community, which included me of course, did not know that they were passing, and since neither Esther nor the other Black faculty and staff were going to say anything, we never found out who they were.

At roughly the same time, I went to New York to visit my younger son, Tobias, who had just graduated from college and was working as a paralegal at a big Manhattan law firm before beginning his legal education.  As we were taking a walk, he told me about an evening he had spent at a gay dance club with a friend [Tobias had by this time come out to me, and to the world.]  At the club, the two of them met a regular who was dressed quite strikingly in an outfit heavy on leather and chains.  When he had moved on, Tobias' friend said, "Do you know who that is?  He is the general counsel for" -- and then he named an extremely prominent large corporation with headquarters in the city.  "But, did they know that he is gay?" I asked -- this was at a time when that knowledge could easily get him fired.  "Oh no," Tobias said.  "Everyone in the gay community knows, of course.  He is totally out.  But no one in the straight community has any idea."

These two conversations, occurring at more or less the same time, started me thinking about some widely held and rarely challenged assumptions in the philosophical field of Epistemology.  A little background is called for to set the context for my reflections.  Back in the 40's and 50's and 60's, when I was a philosophy student and young philosophy professor, the subject of sense data and private languages was a hot topic in Epistemology.  A lot of ink was spilled over questions of the logical relationship between the immediate data of sense -- of sight, sound, tough, taste, and feeling -- and judgments about physical objects.  A number of writers speculated on the possibility of an individual forming and then using a private language, known only by him or her, to describe and think about these immediate data of sense, which, because of the hermetical nature of consciousness, could not then be communicated to anyone else save by a series of analogies or evidentiary leaps -- claims that what one person experienced as an object of direct awareness was identical with, or appropriately similar to, what another person experienced.  This became folded into the old debate, going back at least to Descartes' Meditations, about whether it was possible to prove the existence of the eternal world [external to subjective consciousness, that is.]

The problem had an extremely important correlate in the fields of ethics, political philosophy, and Welfare Economics, arising out of Jeremy Bentham's insistence, in his 1789 Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, that each person's pleasures and pains were to be given equal weight in any social calculation of the desirability or undesirability of a proposed piece of legislation.  The manifest difficulty, not to say impossibility, of what came to be called "interpersonal comparisons of utility" forced mathematically inclined economists to restrict themselves to ordinal, rather cardinal, measures of utility and Pareto partial orderings of alternative social states, leading to some very fancy byplay with indifference curves and the like.

The epistemic relationship of the gay community to the entire sexual community and of African-Americans to the entire multi-racial community mirrors the epistemic structure of a tribe I read about some while ago in which the women spoke among themselves a language that the men did not speak.  The women, of course, also spoke the common language of the tribe, shared by men and women alike.  This created a striking cognitive situation, perfectly exhibiting the epistemic structure of ironic communication, in which one part of the group [the women] understood everything that was being said, by men and women alike, while another part of the group [the men] understood only what was said in the common language.

All of these thoughts, going back more than half a century, popped up in my mind as I read and watched on television the unfolding story of the appalling remarks by Missouri congressman and senate Republican candidate Todd Akin.  All of my American readers, I am sure, are aware of this kerfuffle, but my overseas readers may not be, so I will simply say, briefly, that Akin, an opponent of all abortion even in the case of a pregnancy resulting from rape, explained to a sympathetic interviewer that in the case of what he called "legitimate rape," by which he now says he meant "forcible rape," the woman's body secretes a substance that kills the sperm, so that she does not in fact get pregnant.  The clear implication was that any woman who got pregnant during a supposed rape was not really opposed to the sexual congress, but was, as they say in the neighborhoods that Akin frequents, "asking for it."

The initial response to Akin's remark was explosive, and within twenty-four hours every major Republican figure, including even the flaccid Romney, was calling for Akin to step aside and allow some less objectionable candidate to run for Claire McCaskill's easily winnable senate seat.  But as the commentariat began to focus its fickle attention on  the story, tape began to surface going back thirty years of many, many other anti-abortionists saying essentially the same thing.  Apparently, in anti-abortion circles, it is a commonplace that the woman's body has this ability ["God's little gift," as it is sometimes called] to produce a spermaticidal liquid when she is being forced to engage in sexual intercourse by someone other than her husband [marital rape is, in these circles, considered a contradiction in terms, like round circle of married bachelor.]

Now, I like to think of myself as a reasonably attentive and perceptive observer of the ;passing scene, but until Akin shot his mouth off on tape in the middle of a senate campaign, I had not the slightest inkling that sizable numbers of Americans -- perhaps scores of millions! -- believe this appalling nonsense about a sperm-killing fluid triggered by "legitimate rape."  It is not as though the people who believe this nonsense try to keep their beliefs to themselves, any more than the gay legal counsel concealed his sexual preference.  To one part of the American community, this bit of noxious folk wisdom is a commonplace.  To the rest of us, it was utterly unknown until Akin let the rat out of the bag.

I know that scores of millions of Americans believe that the earth is no more than ten thousand years old, and that humans walked the earth with dinosaurs at roughly the time the Odyssey was being composed.  I know, too, that a sizable fraction of these hordes expect the End Times and the Rapture very soon now, at which time they will be taken up to heaven sans clothes, sans crowns, inlays, and fillings, and sans hip replacements.  But not in my most fevered dreams could I have imagined this story about a decent woman's natural protection from unwanted pregnancy.

ROMNEY'S TAXES

It is a lazy Sunday here in Chapel Hill.  I set out on my morning walk rather late, at 6:44, having slept in, but about the time I was powering alongside the UNC golf course [where, on a good day, I see the resident Blue Heron], it began to rain really hard, and I turned back.  No point in getting totally soaked.  Having some extra time on my hands, I decided to think about Mitt Romney's taxes.  After struggling with Harry Reid's marvelous charge that he has paid no taxes for ten years, Romney finally responded in classic schoolyard fashion:  "I did too pay taxes, so there!"  Indeed, Romney says that he went back and checked, and found that he has paid at least 13.6% in taxes every year.  How do we know this is true?  Because he says it is.

Oddly enough, I suspect he is actually telling the truth, sort of.  Let me explain.  What follows should be obvious, because most Americans pay income taxes, and absolutely all newspaper and television commentators pay income taxes using the long form 1040, so everyone who has ventured an opinion about Romney's taxes knows what I am about to say.  But for some strange reason, when these bloviators mouth off about public affairs, they seem to go into a fugue state in which they forget everything they know about the world.  Perhaps what follows will be of interest to my overseas readers.

Since all politics is local, as Tip O'Neill said [ungrammatically, "politics" being plural], let me explain myself by talking about my own tax returns.  On Page 1 of Form 1040, I list our various sources of income.  Since Susie and I are retired, we do not have wages and salaries, which is for most ordinary people the principal source of taxable income [leaving to one side the dollar a year I am to be paid by Bennett College, if they ever get around to asking me for my social security number.]  Most of the joint income Susie and I report comes from my two pensions [UMass and TIAA-CREF] and our Social Security [only 85% of which is taxable, for some odd reason.]  But we have some interest income from our bank accounts [not much, alas], and Susie has some income from investments that she inherited from her mother, so all of that gets listed on page 1.  In addition, I get royalties from those of my books that are still in print.  Now this is actually listed on Schedule C, where I am permitted to deduct from the total amount a number of business-related expenses.  The net amount, after those deductions, is listed on page 1 of Form 1040.  The total of all these sources of income is our "gross taxable income," and that is reentered at the top of page 2.

Now come the allowable deductions:  two exemptions, for me and for Susie, and then the itemized deductions from Schedule A, including interest on the mortgage on our condo, and the real estate taxes we pay [far too much, since we live in upscale Chapel Hill], charitable donations [but not the rather large amount that we give to political campaigns], and even the excise tax we pay on my 2004 Camry and Susie's 2011 Yaris [a very snappy little red car.] 

When all those deductions have been subtracted from our gross taxable income, we are left with our net taxable income, and that is the figure on which we calculate our taxes.  The tax rates are progressive [though not nearly progressive enough], so we pay different percentages on different components of our net taxable income.  Our top marginal tax rate is 25% [which tells you that Susie and I are quite comfortably well-off], but of course we do not pay that on all of our taxable income, and certainly not on all of our income [which is not at all the same thing], only on the part of our net taxable income that is over $69,000.

The situation for someone like Mitt Romney is structurally the same but in reality vastly different.  I would be willing to bet that he regularly rakes in millions of dollars on which he pays no taxes whatsoever, thanks to a variety of perfectly legal deductions, dodges, finagles, and finesses put into the tax code by earnest Senators and Representatives to benefit their smiling campaign contributors.  Mitt Romney could easily have twenty million dollars in gross income, and yet end up with a small amount of net taxable income on which he actually pays 13.6%.  What proportion of his total income does he pay in taxes?  We shall never know, because he has clearly decided it is in his interest to take the heat rather than release his taxes.

Does any of this matter?  Only politically, which is to say yes.  Mitt Romney's taxes are a perfect symbol of the deep structural unfairness of American society.  They are as perfect a symbol as the Occupy Movement's one percent.  This is the first time in many decades that income and wealth inequality has become a hot button political issue in America.  Socialists like me have been dreaming of this for generations, crying in the wilderness.  I do not know how long the issue will remain alive, and I am virtually certain that regardless of the outcome of the election, there will be no serious effort fundamentally to alter the structure of American capitalism.  But you have to take what you can get in this life and enjoy it while you can, so I plan to groove on Romney's taxes for the time being.

SAD NEWS

I was deeply saddened to learn, just a few moments ago via Brian Leiter's blog, that Hugo Bedau had passed away at the age of 85.  Hugo was an old, old friend -- in 1953, when as a senior at Harvard I took C. I. Lewis' great course on THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, Hugo was the graduate assistant who graded my Kant Summaries.  I still have those summaries, with his marginal notes and corrections.  Hugo was a dear, sweet, incredibly decent and morally admirable man who devoted his professional life to a number of important issues in applied ethics.  On my bookshelf here in Chapel Hill is perhaps his most important work, THE DEATH PENALTY IN AMERICA, along with several other books that he wrote or edited.  Five years ago, Susie and I attended a delightful eightieth birthday party for Hugo at which each of us was called on to rise and say something personal and particular about our relationship to him.  The range of remembrances, and the warmth of the testimony, said a great deal about his qualities as a man.  I suppose eighty-five seems like a ripe old age to my younger readers, but it is only seven years away for me.  Let us hope that when I too pass from the scene, I will leave a fraction of the many fond memories and admiring mourners that Hugo leaves today.