Power - Obama's bio

As a youth, Obama was taken to Indonesia when his mother married an Indonesia student who was then recalled back home after the coup in the 1960s. This extract comes from the realisation of political realities, making passive acceptance the only way to live safely.

"Power. The word fixed in my mother's mind like a curse. In America, it had generally remained hidden from view until you dug beneath the surface of things; until you visited an Indian reservation or spoke to a black person whose trust you had earned. But here power was undisguised, indiscriminate, naked, always fresh in the memory. Power had taken Lolo and yanked him back into line just when he though he'd escaped, making him feel its weight, letting him know his life wasn't his own. That's how things were; you couldn't change it, you could just live by the rules, so simple once you learned them."
Barack Omama, Dreams From My Father, p.45.

The socio-political status quo acts as a powerful block to free enterprise. It blocks opportunity for all, and replaces it with opportunity for those favoured. We need to did out who benefits from the status quo. There are cases where that benefit can be removed (as in the recent case of banker's bonuses) and others when benefits need to be spread more fairly. Power and its benefits is therefore a powerful problematic in the analysis of society and social institutions.

Also some thoughts from The Audacity of Hope (2006):

"I find the President and those who surround him...possessed of the same mix of virtues and vices, insecurities and long-buried injuries, as the rest of us. (p.48)

He goes on to talk about values and empathy, the importance of trying to see things from someone else's point of view even when (or especially when) you disagree with them. It strikes me also that this is an agenda for personal reflexivity, that is, evaluating one's own position and life journey. We might think of our contribution to life, the world, and to knowledge; our attitudes and prejudices and were they come from; our feelings of threat, the borderlands where our comfort zone ends; and life traumas that may have an impact on out thoughts and feelings. For work in education, how we ourselves were 'injured' by the system may affect our current views, just as the winners, the minority, those who succeeded and went on to hold political or economic power, are concerned to maintain whatever helped them succeed, even when it failed the other 80%. And working out our values is one thing, distinguishing between reality and rhetoric is another. Obama adds: what is it you actually spend your energies, time and money on? This is what we really values and may be consequential or inconsequential.

On his induction to the Senate, he cites the octogenarian Senator Byrd with general approval despite his once belonging to the Ku Klux Klan. He says,

"I wondered if it should matter. Senator Byrd's life - like most of ours - has been the struggle of warring impulses, a twining of darkness and light" (p.75)

He sees this as an analogy for the senate, over time supporting both civil rights and slaveowner rights. "Struggle of warring impulses" points in all of us to those tensions which pull us in different directions - the pull of greed over the nag of altruism; the joy of power over the benefits of cooperation. For teachers, the imperative for order over the freedom of creativity. Identifying our own tensions and ambiguities is part of reflexity in action. Which we call darkness, and which light, is also not unproblematical.

Finally here, talking about the Constitution as a defence againse absolutism and tyranny, he says,

"we must test out our ideals, vision, and values against the reality of a common life, so that over time they may be refined, discarded, or replaced by new ideals, sharper visions, deeper values" (pp.94-5)

This also is reflexity in action, the process of probing, checking and testing. It puts one's life on the line, exposing some things we hold dear as empty, some gods as idols, some certainties as delusions. If research does not do this, I for one would find it not deserving of my time, and not worth the candle.

Gramsci, hegemony and social complexity

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was born in Sardinia and his work focused on Italy. A marxist, he was co-founder of the Italian Communist Party, working on their newspaper Unita. He was imprisoned by Mussolini from 1928-33 where he produced 'Prison Notebooks' which have turned him into a marxist theorist of some note. On release he continued writing until his death in 1937. A selection in English was edited by G Nowell Smith and Q Hoare in 1971, with a useful introduction. There is also a helpful discussion by Stuart Hall, reprinted in Stuart Hall: critical dialogues in cultural studies, ed David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, Routledge 1996.

He is known for developing the concept of hegemony - that is the authority that sustains people or groups in power. He identified a continuum between hegemony by control/ constraint, and by social agreement. His analysis was at the practical level of everyday life and national policy rather than a high abstraction. He recognised that real life is complex and was against the oversimplifications of scientism, economism, empiricism and positivism, that is that easy answers cannot be produced by science, economics, measurement or sense-evidence. Reality is much more complex, with all these areas, and others, all contributing. Such complexity needs to be factored into our research and analysis of life. He complained constantly that marxism was oversimplifying Marx.

Periodization: Gramsci recognised that there are periods of stability and periods of unheaval. Therefore a long view charts relations between structure and superstructure (that is, how local upheavals affect the social and political structure of the whole. These upheavals are similar to what Kurt Lewin called 'unfreezing'; changes to the superstructure of the organisation or society resembles Lewin's 'refreezing'. For Gramsci, forces are in relationship. The marxist revolution will not be sudden and total but a gradual process over time. A class, whether workers or bourgeoisie, is not united but very varied. Moving either class towards the other is a process of small steps.

Whichever is in control has hegemony and holds it either by force or by agreement, usually a mixture of the two. The ideal is to move strategies towards consensus and away from force. His examples focused on Italy with different hegemonies exerted by Mussolini and the Catholic church, each with privileges and self-seeking agendas. His campaign therefore was to move closer to the hegemony of the people.

This leads to the distinction between state and civil society. Civil society (the accumulation of all non-state activity) provides the way to neutralise any excessive hegemony by the state. In other words we all need to play our part, in our own way and our own fields, in social change.

Stuart Hall took these principles and applied them, as Gramsci had never done, to issues of race, racism and anti-racism. The long view shows gains and losses, and the best we can hope for is gradual progress, so long as everyone with a stake plays their part. The revolution from racism to antiracism creeps therefore along the continuum; racists will stop affirming their racism long before they change their attitudes, if ever they do.

This idea of slow revolution (non-marxists tend to call it improvement or progress, without always defining the criteria) is one we can apply to many aspects of education, attitude and practice. The 'intellectual world' is inclusive of everyone who thinks and articulates clearly, which should ideally be everyone. 'Thinks' means to think about life, experience, society, community, politics, justice and democratic empowerment. That is a challenge, and alas runs counter to the concept of intellectual found in the Academy.
Link: http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-gram.htm

Barack Obama

Today of all days, and this hour of all hours, noon in the USA on 20th January, 5 p.m. in the UK, the time of the inaugural presidential speech in Washington DC, I would like to welcome the presidency of Barack Obama in the USA. It will be good to have a world leader who appreciates and treasures words, and reads. Also who cares.

Obama has a big job. The USA is in a mess, in crisis, and therefore the world is in trouble. Today, the USA is a little less divided about skin colour, but the gulf between rich and poor remains cavernous. The USA today renews its vows with democracy, we hope sincerely. In Britain, we pride ourselves about our openness, but we are not unprejudiced ourselves. Prejudice and discrimination remain, and scratch the surface a little, people and institutions are happy to connive. Our poor need opportunities too, and our helpless need support. The time for complacency is not yet. We are all at the beginning of a long and winding road, on which we will struggle to go uphill, and hope our brakes work on tight downhill corners. And there will be bandits. A door has been opened, but paradise is not yet.

Today is a threshold, a turning point. Endless possibilities lie ahead, so long as we have the vision and wisdom to see them.

The speech (click for full text).

...For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus - and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

...Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.

I discover this below from the Illinois Center for the Book, and am pleased with the accidental congruence of the words with my ambitions with this blog:

The Hall Branch Library, located in historic Bronzeville, was named in honor of Dr. George Cleveland Hall, a renowned surgeon, social activist and civic leader who was the second African American to serve on the Chicago Public Library Board of Directors. Dr. Hall played a vital role in connecting the African-American community with resources needed to learn, live, thrive and work by convincing a generous philanthropist to support the library by donating funds to purchase the property for a proposed library to serve a predominately large African-American community located on the south side of Chicago. The Hall Branch opened to the public on January 18, 1932, under the direction of Vivian Harsh, the first African American librarian in the Chicago Public Library. During the 1930's and 40's Hall Branch served as a meeting place for young writers such as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston and Claude McKay. FOLUSA and Illinois Center for the Book designated the library a literary landmark because of its close association with distinguished African-American authors and writers.