In the article I posted earlier today on the demise of the ANC, I said the ANC’s loss of connection with its constituency, its indifference to the fate of the poor, could not be explained by the analytical tools of Marxism, though I said that Marx himself demonstrated great passion for the plight of the poor and the cause of workers in some of his writings. I had in mind, at this point in time, the final words of his Civil War in France, paying tribute to the Paris Commune:
“Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be for ever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them.”

http://www.polity.org.za/article/demise-of-the-anc-a-tentative-understanding-2016-09-19

http://www.polity.org.za/article/we-need-an-inter-generational-dialogue-on-legacies-and-meanings-of-freedom-2016-09-14#disqus_thread

http://www.polity.org.za/article/exchange-between-raymond-suttner-and-edna-molewa-2016-09-12

http://www.polity.org.za/article/building-our-political-future-in-a-time-of-anc-disarray-2016-09-05#disqus_thread

https://theconversation.com/new-move-against-gordhan-suggests-south-africas-laws-are-under-threat-64459

http://www.polity.org.za/article/does-the-anc-face-defeat-in-2019-what-are-the-implications-2016-08-22

The moment when one becomes newly curious about something is also a good time to think about what created one’s previous lack of curiosity. So many power structures-inside households, within institutions, in societies, in international affairs-are dependent on our continuing lack of curiosity. ‘Natural,’ ‘tradition,’ ‘always,’ each has served as a cultural pillar to prop up familial, community, national, and international power structures, imbuing them with legitimacy, with timelessness, with inevitability. Any power arrangement that is imagined to be legitimate, timeless, and inevitable is pretty well fortified. Thus we need to stop and scrutinize our lack of curiosity. We also need to be genuinely curious about others’ lack of curiosity-not for the sake of feeling self-satisfied, but for the sake of meaningfully engaging with those who take any power structure as unproblematic. –Cynthia Enloe, The Curious Feminist (2004, 2-3).

Heschel, “Religion and Race,” Speech Text

Gupta access to the president
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In the Sunday Times, Business Times Page 4 in an article on Reuel Khoza Ajay Gupta is quoted as telling the SABC at a breakfast sponsored by his [the Gupta’s] company that meetings were held the first Sunday of every month at the presidential guesthouse. “We all sit together and discuss the country and what best we can do for the country.”
Do other business people have similar access?

The concern for others is not an extension in breadth but an ascension, a rise. Man reaches a vertical dimension, the dimension of the holy, when he grows beyond his self-interests, when that which is of interest to others becomes vital to him, and it is only in this dimension, in the understanding of its perennial validity, that the concern for other human beings and the devotion to ideals may reach the degree of self-denial. Distant ends, religious, moral and artistic interests, may become as relevant to man as his concern for food. The self, the fellow-man and the dimensions of the holy are the three dimensions of a mature human concern.

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Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, was the first white religious figure to respond to Martin Luther King jr’s call for white people to join the Montgomery march. He remained close to King. Cornel West describes Heschel as one of the great prophetic figures of the 20^th century. He died in 1972,

There are dead thoughts and there are living thoughts. A dead thought has been compared to a stone which one may plant in the soil.   Nothing will come out. A living thought is like a seed. In the process of thinking, an answer without a question is devoid of life. Continue reading →