ANC legacies? Retrieving and deploying emancipatory values today

Raymond Suttner, The Daily Maverick

For many decades and for many people, the name “ANC” conjured up selflessness, sacrifice in the service of the oppressed people of South Africa and the meaning of freedom itself. People bent every effort to link themselves with the message of the ANC. They risked police attention and possible arrest by listening to the ANC broadcasts on Radio Freedom, beamed from Lusaka and other African states in the period of illegality. They read any scrap of paper or document or listened to any message broadcast from the ANC in exile, for the organisation represented their hope for freedom. It enjoyed great legitimacy and authority in the imagination of very many South Africans.

Liberation and Ethics: Is there a connection?

Raymond Suttner, The Daily Maverick

It is no exaggeration to suggest that the legitimacy not only of President Jacob Zuma and the ANC, but also the notion of the liberation Struggle itself is in shreds. For some of us, it was unthinkable that such an alliance of forces could degenerate into a moneymaking, lawless and violent operation represented by people who were prepared to trample on the values that we understood the movement to embody. Certainly, this did not happen overnight. The process leading to the present state of affairs has been long in the making.

Anne Hope (February 12, 1930 – December 26, 2015)

Sally Timmel, The Cape Times

Anne Hope, co-author and founder of the classic Training for Transformation books and training programmes, has passed on in an interfaith intentional community in Claremont, California.

Anne Hope was born and grew up in Johannesburg. She attended Rhodes University in Grahamstown and obtained a degree in English literature and history. She then received her Master’s degree in education from Oxford University in England. During her university days, she immersed herself in the Catholic Student Movement and not only became convinced of the horrors of apartheid, but became more and more committed both emotionally and spiritually to the struggle for liberation.

Seminar: Richard Pithouse on 'Frantz Fanon: Philosophy, Praxis & the Occult Zone'

Praxis & the Work of Building Counter-Power

Richard Pithouse

In the ‘70s and ‘80s the idea of praxis was often taken seriously in the process of building the organisations, movements and unions that undertook the work of developing the counter-power of the oppressed. Praxis was often understood as more than just the idea that effective political work required reflection on action, and action guided by reflection. It was also an idea with democratic and ethical dimensions.

Sylvia Wynter: Human Being as Noun? or Being Human as Praxis - Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn: A Manifesto

Human Being as Noun? Or Being Human as Praxis? Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn: A Manifesto by TigersEye99 on Scribd

Notes on Praxis for the RGS Panel on the Co-Production of Urban Contestation, London, August 2014

Notes on Praxis for the RGS Panel on the Co-Production of Urban Contestation, London, August 2014

Richard Pithouse

Rigorous ongoing reflection on praxis is an essential practice for all participants in any struggle. There can be no effective emancipatory political action on a sustained basis without this reflexivity. It is simultaneously ethical and strategic work. It is necessary to strive to ensure that this is a collective practice within struggles as well as taking it on as an individual obligation.

Frantz Fanon on Political Education

We often believe with criminal superficiality that to educate the masses politically is to deliver a long political speech from time to time. We think that it is enough that the leader or one of his lieutenants should speak in a pompous tone about the principle events of the day for them to have fulfilled this bounden duty to educate the masses politically. Now, political education means opening their minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence … it is ‘to invent souls’. To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a hero that will save them with his magic hands, that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the hero is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people.
- The Wretched of the Earth, 1961

Paulo Freire: it is necessary to trust in the oppressed and in their ability to reason

Paulo Freire

The insistence that the oppressed engage in reflection on their concrete situation is not a call  to armchair revolution. On the contrary reflection — true reflection — leads to action. On the other hand, when the situation calls for action, that action will constitute an authentic praxis only if its consequences become the object of critical reflection. In this sense, the praxis is the new raison d’être of the oppressed; and the revolution, which inaugurates the historical moment of this raison d’être, is not viable apart from their concomitant conscious involvement. Otherwise, action is pure activism.

'The exact instant at which I began to slip' - Frantz Fanon, 'Black Skin, White Masks'

I myself have been aware, in talking to certain patients, of the exact instant at which I began to slip.... Examining this seventy three year old farm woman, whose mind was never strong and who is now far gone in dementia, I am suddenly aware of the collapse of the antennae with which I touch and through which I am touched. The fact that I adopt a language suitable to dementia, to feeble-mindedness; the fact that I "talk  down "to this poor woman of seventy-three; the fact that I condescend to her in my quest for a diagnosis, are the stigmata of a dereliction in my relations with other. What an idealist, people will say. Not at all: It is just that the others are scum (1967, p. 32-33).[1]

[1] There is a similar sense of an ongoing striving in Nomboniso Gasa’s recommendation that we “listen, listen very hard to what is said and to that which remains unmentioned, unmentionable and has been rendered invisible” – a commitment that, she stresses, may place one “in a vulnerable position in relation to established academic voices” (2007, p. 132). 

Peter Hallward: Continuing the Revolution: Rousseau through Gramsci

Archbishop Romero's Pastoral Letters

The Archbishop Romero Trust

These letters are written by a bishop to his people and, as their title suggests, their nature is primarily pastoral. They are, however, works of great theological importance and situate Archbishop Romero amongst the great teaching bishops of the Church.

The first four letters below come from his time as Archbishop of San Salvador - these are his best known pastoral letters and they are published in English under the title Voice of the Voiceless by Orbis Books.

The fifth letter has only recently come to light. It is from an earlier period of his ministry when he was Bishop of Santiago de Maria - readers will note the difference in style and content - we include this letter below for the sake of completeness.

Wherever a human collective is working in the direction of equality, the conditions are met for everyone to be a philosopher.

“Wherever a human collective is working in the direction of equality, the conditions are met for everyone to be a philosopher.” (Alain Badiou, Philosophy for Militants, 2012, p.37)

The radical, committed to human liberation .....

“The radical, committed to human liberation, does not become the prisoner of a 'circle of certainty' within which reality is also imprisoned. On the contrary, the more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can better transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.”

― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Down a New Road: Thoughts on Fanon’s Revolutionary Praxis

Bring the Ruckus 

The following theoretical work by Arturo, a member of BtR-Philly, examines the concepts of praxis, spontaneity, cadre and humanity in the work of revolutionary thinker Frantz Fanon. It is accompanied by a piece of visual art by Lainie, a member of BtR-NYC, which places Fanon within a historical trajectory of mass struggle from colonization to the present.

Enrique Dussel: The Underside of Modernity

The underside of modernity:

Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor and

the philosophy of liberation

Enrique Dussel

(translated and edited by Eduardo Mendieta)

 

1993

 

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Editor’s Introduction [enter]

PART ONE

Arundhati Roy on the academic inability to grasp popular agency

The tenacity, the wisdom and the courage of those who have been fighting for years, for decades, to bring change, or even the whisper of justice to their lives, is something extraordinary. Whether people are fighting to overthrow the Indian State, or fighting against Big Dams, or only fighting a particular steel plant or mine or SEZ, the bottomline is that they are fighting for their dignity, for the right to live and smell like human beings. They are fighting because, as far as they are concerned, “the fruits of modern development” stink like dead cattle on the highway….

Feminist Praxis and the Politics of Literacy: A Conversation with bell hooks

Audio Interview
 

Interviewed by Gary A. Olson and Elizabeth Hirsch, The Theory Project

Feminist and cultural critic bell hooks is resolutely committed to promoting literacy. For hooks, literacy is essential to the future of the feminist movement because the lack of reading, writing, and critical skills serves to exclude many women and men from feminist consciousness. Yet, as hooks argues in the interview that follows, “The class standpoint of much feminist theory leads to a deprivileging of and a disrespect for the politics of reading and writing.” She makes a cogent case for encouraging “every feminist thinker in the academy” to acknowledge literacy to be “an important feminist agenda,” and she expresses “anguish” over the neglect of literacy among feminists: “If we truly want to empower women and men to engage in feminist thinking, we must empower them to read and write, but I really don’t see any large group of committed feminists making that a central agenda.”