This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page Veteran actress Alice Hirson, who played Ellen DeGeneres‘ mom on her eponymous 1990s sitcom and Mavis Anderson on Dallas According to The Hollywood Reporter confirmed she died of natural causes at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills She had been at the assisted living facility for about a year Hirson graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1948 and began her acting career on the off-Broadway stage before landing roles in the Broadway plays Traveller Without Luggage and The Investigation in the 1960s Hirson’s soap opera career continued from 1972 to 1976 when she starred as Eileen Riley Siegel on ABC’s One Life to Live. She also had a recurring role on General Hospital in 1982 One of her most memorable recurring roles came in Dallas from 1982 to 1988, where she played Miss Ellie’s best friend, Mavis Anderson. She also made her mark as Ellen’s ditzy mom, Lois Morgan, on Ellen from 1994 to 1998 On the big screen, she appeared in the films Nightwing, Private Benjamin, Revenge of the Nerds, The Big Picture Hirson was married to and later divorced actor Roger O. Hirson and was preceded in death by her second husband, actor Stephen Elliott She is survived by her two children with Roger O Sign Up The actress was also known for her roles in several soap operas including 'One Life to Live' and 'General Hospital' ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Hirson portrayed the mother of DeGeneres' character on more than two dozen episodes from 1992-1998 Veteran actress Alice Hirson, who played Ellen DeGeneres‘ mom on her eponymous 1990s sitcom and Mavis Anderson on Dallas According to The Hollywood Reporter GH’s Chris McKenna remembers Alice Hirson General Hospital and One Life to Live alum Alice Hirson has died according to Chris McKenna View this post on Instagram A post shared by Chris McKenna (@chrislmckenna) Hirson portrayed Stephanie Martin on The Edge of Night she added Loving to her daytime resume where she portrayed Dr Hirson in 1952 and began working under the name of Alice Hirson Hirson began her career working on stage in off-Broadway productions and early roles on television in Starlight Theatre and Hallmark Hall of Fame The actress also had numerous acting credits to her name Hirson graced the silver screen in 1971’s The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight Broadway was dear to her heart as she met her second husband there in the show Traveller Without Luggage in 1964 The couple married years later in 1980 and stayed married until his passing in 2005 Soap Hub sends its sincere condolences to family Foreign Affairs has been the leading forum for serious discussion of American foreign policy and global affairs The magazine has featured contributions from many leading international affairs experts BRENDAN KELLY is a Nonresident Fellow on Chinese Economy and Technology at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis He served as Director for China Economics at the National Security Council from 2023 to 2024 and previously worked on China at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the U.S MICHAEL HIRSON is Senior Managing Director at 22V Research and a Nonresident Honorary Fellow on Chinese Economy and Technology at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis he was the Treasury Department’s financial attaché to China Brendan Kelly and Michael Hirson In his first few weeks back in the Oval Office President Donald Trump has taken a split-screen approach to his dealings with China Trump has already imposed a ten percent tariff hike on imports from China and threatened another increase weighted average tariff rate on Chinese goods by 20 percentage points over the course of just two months much more than the 12 percent rise during his first term’s U.S.-Chinese trade war Yet he has also pointedly touted his strong relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping; issued a highly unusual executive order granting the Chinese-owned company ByteDance a reprieve from a law that would effectively ban its popular app TikTok; and repeatedly dangled a possible new trade deal with Beijing In early 2020, during Trump’s first term, China and the United States struck a so-called Phase One trade deal requiring China to increase its imports from the United States dramatically in part because the disruptions the pandemic wreaked on China’s economy and global trade—and President Joe Biden’s heightened focus on “de-risking”—led both sides to quietly abandon what had already been unrealistic targets has prompted speculation that he is actively seeking a new trade deal with China or even a fundamental reconsideration of Washington’s adversarial relationship with Beijing For Trump running parallel approaches now—exploring cooperation while ramping up tariffs—is not necessarily incoherent Tariffs can generate leverage to gain more attractive offers from Beijing including informal offers to purchase more U.S The fact that China refrained from a full retaliation against Trump’s tariff—raising its own tariffs on just a limited set of U.S goods—preserves a pathway to a potential deal Hypothetically, a major trade deal could benefit both the United States and China But the truth is that both countries’ efforts to reduce their mutual trade dependence long predated the 2020 pandemic and substantially undergirded the Phase One deal’s failure As long as that commitment remains in place A strong political consensus in favor of de-risking in both China and the United States suggests that it will remain in place steadily shrinking commercial opportunities between the two countries But China has been intentionally pursuing such a strategy for over a decade A central focus of the Made in China 2025 initiative was to reduce China’s reliance on foreign products; in practice the initiative focused on limiting the Chinese economy’s dependence on U.S technologies and inputs in areas such as semiconductors China has also shifted a significant portion of its agricultural imports from the United States to Brazil to limit its vulnerability to U.S trade restrictions and reward a more friendly country Some of Beijing’s efforts to reduce its reliance on U.S inputs were probably reactions to the United States’ own implementation of stricter export controls most notably by cutting off Chinese telecom giant Huawei’s access to U.S which hampered Huawei’s massive effort to dominate 5G mobile networks worldwide as even more damaging to China’s geopolitical aspirations than Trump’s aggressive tariff hikes on Chinese goods had been China’s leadership responded to the blow mainly by increasing its determination to develop domestic alternatives to U.S semiconductors and other so-called bottleneck technologies The Phase One deal gave both countries an off-ramp from tariff escalation But Beijing and Washington continued their decoupling efforts supply chains was a central part of Biden’s strategy toward China and it constituted one of the most consistent through lines between the Trump and Biden administrations Republicans and Democrats may use different terminology—the Biden administration focused on de-risking while incoming U.S Trade Representative Jamieson Greer speaks of “strategic decoupling”—but the intent is broadly the same The use of export controls by both China and the United States only intensified after Trump left office in early 2021 the Biden administration imposed a sweeping set of restrictions on the export of advanced semiconductor and AI tech to China strengthening these controls further in 2023 and again in 2024 Beijing began to respond more aggressively with its own parallel measures leveraging its dominance in critical minerals After steadily building its understanding of key chokepoints buyers—minerals crucial for semiconductors This decoupling pattern has been exacerbated by growing concerns about the diffusion of AI and sensitive data into commercial products. Just before Biden left office his administration used a Trump-era executive order to restrict imports of Chinese autos and auto parts that contain certain technologies that collect data or connect to communications networks alongside a draft rule that had a similar focus on drones and drone components Trump’s America First Trade Policy executive order which he signed the day he assumed the presidency in January calls for the secretary of commerce to consider expanding such controls to other products has long harbored its own worries about the United States’ ability to access its data China has instituted some of the world’s most restrictive laws and regulations limiting the cross-border sharing of data face an increasingly challenging environment for operating AI-enabled systems in China tit-for-tat dynamic has recently spread to biotechnology a realm once seen as ripe for U.S.-Chinese cooperation Biden rolled out new export controls on U.S biotech laboratory equipment focused on China; in February biotech equipment firm Illumina after it ceased selling its highest-end products to Chinese firms thanks to U.S legislators are likely to ramp up their efforts to pass the Biosecure Act biotech companies’ reliance on Chinese firms for pharmaceutical ingredients A new trade deal between Trump and Xi would disrupt this predictable rhythm tariffs and possible concessions on export controls Beijing would almost certainly need to recommit to—or even exceed—the Phase One deal’s targets for purchasing goods from the United States Trump has also suggested he may seek to encourage Chinese firms to build factories in the United States promoting more Chinese investment into the United States would be consistent with Trump’s goal to boost the U.S Chinese auto suppliers appear eager to invest in production in the United States And Beijing is well aware that Japan’s investment into the U.S economy helped defuse the two countries’ 1980s trade tensions If Chinese companies are faced with the real threat of losing access to the U.S localizing some production to America is likely to be attractive But the already tricky politics of Chinese investment in the United States puts big obstacles in the way of investments on the scale of Japan’s Trump signed a memorandum accusing investors backed by the Chinese government of targeting the “crown jewels” of the U.S economy and directing the Treasury Department to more strictly limit Chinese investments American political leaders had already spent years demonizing Chinese investments to balk at major Chinese projects: in 2023 voters in rural Michigan recalled and replaced local officials who had supported a $2.36 billion investment by a Chinese battery maker and Trump himself criticized the investment during his 2024 presidential campaign If Trump actually sought to draw significant Chinese manufacturing investments he would have to explain why these no longer pose a threat—and why Chinese firms should feel secure that Americans will welcome them Securing Chinese commitments to purchase U.S goods—the core of the Phase One deal—seems somewhat more straightforward which the United States has in ample supply exports of liquefied natural gas to China are already set to grow rapidly in the coming years based on contracts signed during the last Trump administration A large deal on commercial aircraft could be announced Most Chinese airline companies use Boeing planes but China has not made a new Boeing order since 2017 the same year the country debuted its first domestically designed and manufactured airliner will still have a large unmet demand for aircraft over the next two decades—a demand it will likely want Boeing to fill rather than hand Boeing’s European competitor A more ambitious focus for a deal is medical products: U.S medical exports to China have been growing for the past several years But genuinely delivering on the terms of an ambitious deal would require enormous political commitment from both capitals to overcome the logic of de-risking would need to directly order China’s state-owned enterprises as well as its private firms to procure from the United States rather than domestic or other foreign competitors reversing years of rhetoric from Xi about the virtue of self-reliance Beijing’s continued reliance on a growth model that favors investment and exports instead of domestic consumption will crimp its enthusiasm for importing more U.S China also likely has less space and willingness than it did in 2019 to make large new purchases from the United States that would diminish its imports from other key trading partners China’s massive trade surpluses—which neared a record $1 trillion in 2024—are already generating tensions with European countries as well as India Brazil is one of the few countries that maintains a sizable trade surplus with China but even it is becoming concerned that Chinese manufactured goods pose a serious threat to its industrial base If China were to shift significant amounts of agricultural purchases back to the United States its relationship with Brazil could grow more fraught It will be especially hard to maintain discipline on a trade deal if tensions rise between China and the United States in the realm of foreign policy Trump’s appointment of prominent China hawks such as National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to his foreign policy team—as well as the hard-line anti-China sentiment now dominating the U.S Congress—means that the United States will almost certainly pursue strategic actions that China considers provocative such as reiterating or expanding its diplomatic and military support for Taiwan Such actions will pressure Beijing to make its own plays to show its populace that it is willing to stand up to Trump In addition to inking a phase two trade deal some market analysts and Trump appointees have proposed that a so-called Mar-a-Lago accord could address currency policy and broader macroeconomic imbalances Templates for such an accord already exist in the form of the Smithsonian Agreement and the Plaza Accord multinational currency agreements executed by Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan the United States used the threat of tariffs to successfully force trade partners—the G-10 countries in 1971 and France and West Germany in 1985—to appreciate their currencies against the U.S Trump is far more willing to wield the tariff threat than any of his predecessors And some of his new counselors—including his treasury secretary and his nominee to chair the Council of Economic Advisers Stephen Miran—have already proposed creative techniques to use the tariff threat to rebalance the trading relationship with China such as increasing tariffs on Chinese goods each month until Beijing further opens its markets to the United States But geopolitical and macroeconomic realities will make a fresh accord that matches the effect of the Smithsonian and Plaza agreements difficult to pull off These earlier arrangements were made with U.S Many policymakers in Beijing already view the Plaza Accord as a trap that resulted in Japan’s 1990 economic crash and subsequent decades of economic stagnation And while the Smithsonian and Plaza Accords did succeed in temporarily weakening the dollar they did not lead to more permanent cooperation on macroeconomic policy It will be exceedingly difficult for Trump to convince Xi to undertake the enormous policy shifts that would meaningfully shrink China’s trade surplus Not only would such policy adjustments fundamentally change China’s political economy they would undermine Beijing’s geopolitical strategy which increasingly depends on keeping China the world’s exporter to contain U.S Xi might agree to limit any further depreciation of the renminbi although this action would only limit China’s surpluses from growing tech executives for his political decision-making is a wild card Elon Musk’s Tesla has significant exposure to China: China accounts for over a third of its vehicle sales and is key to the company’s rollout of autonomous driving capabilities Musk has both influence with Trump and a powerful incentive to maintain his access to China and he could weigh in on the side of pragmatism But because Tesla is also threatened by the rise of Chinese electric vehicles Musk is unlikely to favor relaxing tariffs on key Chinese competitors Even if tech leaders convinced Trump to prioritize winning market access for their products in China the pattern of de-risking between the United States and China will almost certainly continue during Trump’s second term and ideological imperatives that have driven the United States and China to reduce their reliance on each other for a decade remain in place Xi shows no signs of shifting his fundamental emphasis on technological self-sufficiency and Trump’s January 20 executive order elucidating his administration’s goal to balance trade also called on the Departments of Commerce and Treasury to assess whether the United States should expand its export controls and outbound investment restrictions Key officials in the Trump administration and Congress are likely to push for further tech decoupling But both China and the United States should carefully assess where de-risking has gone far enough The approach comes with significant economic costs for both sides It can exacerbate inflation in the United States (by restricting American companies’ access to China’s efficient manufacturing sector) and deflation in China (by reducing overseas demand for Chinese products) Reducing direct imports from China cannot bring down the overall U.S trade deficit without accompanying macroeconomic policies such as fiscal consolidation Unless the United States coordinates more closely with G-7 allies and other major commodity producers to jointly boost production outside of China the United States will also struggle to meaningfully reverse its dependence on China for products vital to national security as long as Beijing remains obsessed with de-risking the supply side of its economy and insufficiently attentive to boosting domestic demand it can only make limited progress in reducing its vulnerability to U.S The bottom line is that no matter how much Xi or Trump says he wants a deal no substantial reconsideration of de-risking is likely to happen in the next four years Subscribe to Foreign Affairs to get unlimited access Already a subscriber? Sign In Tong Zhao Anne Neuberger Zongyuan Zoe Liu Juzel Lloyd A. Wess Mitchell Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage * Note that when you provide your email address, the Foreign Affairs Privacy Policy and Terms of Use will apply to your newsletter subscription Published by The Council on Foreign Relations Privacy Policy Terms of Use From the publishers of  Foreign Affairs This website uses cookies to improve your experience You can opt-out of certain cookies using the cookie management page * Note that when you provide your email address, the Foreign Affairs Privacy Policy and Terms of Use will apply to your newsletter subscription Feb 21, 2025Alice Hirson, a veteran actress known for her role as Bob Saget's mother on Full House Hirson passed away from natural causes on Friday, Feb. 21, at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, her son David Hirson told The Hollywood Reporter She had apparently been staying at the hospital for a year 🎬 SIGN UP for Parade's Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox 🎬  Hirson was born Alice Corinne Thorsell in Brooklyn and went on to graduate American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1948 She made her Broadway debut in 1964 in Traveller Without Luggage returning to the Great White Way in 1966’s The Investigation Related: Peter Navy Tuiasosopo, ‘New Girl’ and ‘Magnum P.I.’ Actor, Dead at 61 From 1994-98 she starred in 28 episodes of Ellen as Lois Morgan, Ellen DeGeneres' mother Her big screen credits include roles in Being There (1979) told The Hollywood Reporter that his mother thought of herself as a stage actress primarily and praised her for raising a family while working long hours on TV.  Hirson is survived by another son Christopher Next: 'Squid Game' Actress Dead at 81 Abby Tegnelia is a Newsweek writer based in New York Her focus is reporting on the fast-paced world of celebrity and she has in-depth knowledge of all things arts & entertainment having served as News Director at In Touch and editor in chief of Vegas magazine; she has written for national and international magazines including Robb Report She is a graduate of University of Miami and has a masters in journalism from Columbia University You can get in touch with Abby by emailing a.tegnelia@newsweek.com You can find her on X and Instagram at @abbytegnelia Languages: English and conversational Spanish either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content Actress Alice Hirson — best known for her roles in '80s and '90s TV staples including Full House Dallas and Ellen — has died at age 95 Hirson, who memorably played Danny Tanner's mom for several episodes of Full House, died of natural causes on Friday, February 21, her son David told The Hollywood Reporter He was 65 years old.) Hirson died at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills where she had stayed full-time for about a year the stage and screen actress made history on the popular sitcom Ellen when Ellen DeGeneres' character came out as a lesbian to her parents Hirson appeared in 28 episodes of the show as a confidante of Miss Ellie Ewing in 26 episodes as well as daytime soaps such as One Life to Live (Eileen Siegel) She also played Catherine Hicks' mother on 7th Heaven from 1996 to 2006 They were married from 1980 until his death in 2005 and had two sons: David A post shared by instagram The prolific actress also appeared in huge '80s blockbusters such as Private Benjamin with Goldie Hawn for which she played the mother of Anthony Edwards' character The native New Yorker — she was born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island — graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and acted on Broadway in the '60s before moving to Hollywood in 1976 to start her successful TV and film career Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground Newsweek is committed to journalism that is factual and fair We value your input and encourage you to rate this article Newsletters in your inbox See all Your Ads Privacy ChoicesIMDb ‘Divorced Sistas,’ Spinoff of Tyler Perry’s ‘Sistas,’ Heads to BET+ GH’s Cameron Mathison Shares His Emotional Journey When His House Burned Down: “That Had Been the Foundation of My Life When Everything Was Falling Apart Around Me” ReelShort’s Continues Vertical Soap/Romance Series Trend with Release of ‘Wings of Fire: The Dragon Slayer Is My Ex-Lover’ GH’s Maurice Benard States That ABC “Made a Huge Mistake Cancelling All My Children and One Life to Live” Citing They Underestimated “Power of the Soap Audience” Ted Richardson Swap on ‘Beyond the Gates’ WrestleMania 41 Interviews Featuring Lyra Valkyria (INTERVIEW) ‘Beyond the Gates’ Star RhonniRose Mantilla Talks End of Chelsea’s Modeling Days EXCLUSIVE: General Hospital’s Van Hansis Talks on the Casting of Adrian Anchondo as Marco and Hopes for a “Soap Opera Romance” BEYOND THE GATES Stars: Timon Kyle Durrett and Marquita Goings Talk on Bill’s “Newfound Adversary” and How He Can’t Get Dani “Out of His System” EXCLUSIVE: Heather Tom Talks Making History Acting Directing and Writing All-Female Episode of The Bold and the Beautiful While Honoring Her Late Mom Carrie Underwood Replaces Katy Perry as Judge for Upcoming Season of ‘American Idol’ 20 Years after Winning the Title AMERICAN IDOL: Abi Carter Crowned the Winner Katy Perry Sheds Tears In Her Final Episode AMERICAN IDOL: Final Three Are Chosen; After Nationwide Vote ABC Renews ‘American Idol’ for Season 8 and ‘The Bachelor’ for Season 29 AMERICAN IDOL: Katy Perry Makes a Heartbreaking Decision as Top 7 are Revealed BEYOND THE GATES Preview: Nicole’s World Is Rocked Due to Ted’s Betrayal and Leslie’s Revelations; Eva Has Nowhere to Go ‘Beyond the Gates’ Stars Trisha Mann-Grant and Ambyr Michelle Deliver the ‘Power Performances of the Week’ ‘Beyond the Gates’ Stars Brandon Claybon and Mike Manning to Chat Live on the Michael Fairman Channel One of television’s most enduring actresses The news of her passing came from the newest cast member of General Hospital Hirson should be very familiar to soap opera fans most notably longtime viewers of One Life to Live The character was pivotal for its time as part of daytime’s first interfaith storyline who was Irish Catholic married Jewish lawyer Tim Siegel (played by Tom Berenger) and Julie Siegel (played by Lee Warrick and then played by Leonie Norton) Alice took over the role from Patricia Roe and was with One Life to Live for four years from 1972-1976 until the character was written-off the canvas along with her daughter Hirson was seen on primetime’s Dallas in the role of Mavis Anderson the wife of Punk Anderson (Morgan Woodward) and best friend to Miss Ellie  (Barbara Bel Geddes) She played Mavis on and off from 1982-1988 Hirson was married for 25 years to her Dallas co-star in 1994-1998 Alice landed the role of Ellen DeGeneres’ mother in the original sitcom until it was canceled by ABC for declining ratings and the fallout from DeGeneres admitting she was gay Loving and General Hospital as well as in episodes of Murphy Brown Our thoughts and prayers go out to Alice’s family No cause of death has yet to have been noted Share your remembrances and favorite role of the one and only Alice Hirson and the sentiments shared on her passing by General Hospital’s Chris McKenna A post shared by Chris McKenna (@chrislmckenna) GENERAL HOSPITAL Preview: Who is Cyrus Renault’s Next Intended Victim ‘Beyond the Gates’ Stars Open Up About How They Landed the Lead Roles of the Duprees I remember her well from.her work on Edge of Night I loved this lady on every Soap I’ve seen her in can’t pick a favorite.May she R.I.P and so glad Kris McKenna seems to be doing so well after his terrible experience of being carried off the GH set by Medics I most certainly do remember her as Eileen Siegel on One Life to Live I was so sorry when the Siegel family was written-off I also remember her from Ellen and her many episodic TV roles Alice was busy because she was always a joy to watch Deepest sympathy to her family and friends GENERAL HOSPITAL Preview: Lois in the Hot Seat GENERAL HOSPITAL: Dante and Lulu Admit They Are Still in Love With Each Other Just as Rocco is Left in Peril ATWT Alum Tala Ashe Scores Tony Award Nomination; OLTL Alum Jonathan Groff and ‘Glee’ Favorite Darren Criss Also Receive Nods GENERAL HOSPITAL: Laura Opens Up About Learning Lesley was Her Birth Mother; Drew is Horrified Over Fallout From ‘His Night’ with Jacinda who played Erica Kane for all she is worth and then some for 41 years on All My Children and since that time has appeared in a myriad of TV has written a second memoir with the catchphrase title that the late morning talk show great Regis Philbin used to call her Following in the success of her 2011 New York Times bestselling memoir All My Life  The new memoir is set to be released February 3 and is available to preorder now everywhere books are sold and always inspiring reflection on strength and the power of embracing life’s unexpected turns In addition to intimate stories from her remarkable career and personal life La Lucci features a special chapter titled “Thank You for Asking,” where she answers the most frequently asked questions from her devoted fans across the world This is Susan Lucci as you’ve never seen her before—unfiltered Written in collaboration with New York Times bestselling author Laura Morton known for her work with celebrity icons such as Justin Bieber La Lucci is promising to be a remarkable read that will resonate with readers everywhere Soap fans know that the Emmy moment heard around the world happened in May 1999 Susan won the Daytime Emmy Award for “Best Actress.” It was a historic moment not only for Lucci Susan made her Broadway debut to rave reviews playing the part of “Annie Oakley” in Annie Get Your Gun Susan finished a successful run starring in Joy Behar’s off-Broadway show My First Ex-Husband and will appear in Jonah Hill’s forthcoming Apple TV+ film Outcome In an exclusive announcement on Good Morning America Lucci introduced her upcoming memoir and revealed the book cover “I’m back to share new chapters in my life with my new memoir It’s an intimate glimpse into my life with stories I’ve never told before,” she said “This book is directly from my heart I can’t wait for you to read it.” are you looking forward to what Susan has to share about her life over the last 15 years as her follow-up to her first memoir Do you think it will contain stories about her heart diagnosis and the passing of her late husband Helmut Huber Let us know if you will order your copy ASAP via the comment section A post shared by Good Morning America Book Club (@gmabookclub) In a surprise move, The Young and the Restless looks to be giving the character of Summer Newman a rest, as actress Allison Lanier confirmed her exit from the top-rated soap with a message posted on X on Thursday I’ve loved the journey and learned so much but it’s time to grow in a different direction… very grateful for all of the Y&R fans who have supported me.” Lanier took over the role of Nick (Joshua Morrow) and Phyllis’ (Michelle Stafford) daughter back in May of 2022 following in the footsteps of two-time Daytime Emmy winner Hunter King who played the role on and off beginning in 2012 until her departure Summer isn’t making much headway with her ex-husband who is in a relationship with Claire (Hayley Erin) In this photo from Lanier’s final episode airing this Friday above it looks like Summer is saying goodbye to Harrison (Redding Munsell) and Kyle Reports have indicated that Y&R has no immediate plans to recast the part but as you know in soapland anything is possible The series does not comment on actor’s contract status with the show Back in 2024, Michael Fairman TV chatted with Allison during our annual Daytime Emmy Nominations Special livestream last year where she spoke on receiving a nomination for the Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series category and who helped her get acclimated to life on the set of the CBS soap I really do think that Susan Walters (Diane) Peter Bergman (Jack) and Michelle Stafford (Phyllis) these absolute legends were so open with me gave me all kinds of advice and really held me up when I was first starting – and not to mention – Michael Mealor as he is more of my peer and he really showed me the ropes in such a personal way – so those four what do you think of Allison Lanier wrapping her run as Summer Newman Do you think Y&R should recast the role sooner than later Share your thoughts via the comment section The star-studded notable cast of the new audio soap opera Montecito will chat live and discuss the making of the storylines and more of this brand new entry into the podcast space Scheduled to be a part of the livestream conversation on You Tube’s Michael Fairman Channel are Crystal Chappell (Venice the Series Marc Anthony Samuel (Ex-GH) along with executive producer creator and co-head writer of the audio soap Those joining us in the live chat can ask questions or pose comments that might be asked during the broadcast Previously and exclusively reported by Michael Fairman TV Crystal Chappell plays the role of Helena Granville-Belasco a fiercely protective matriarch who isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty Peter Porte takes on the role of the brooding Deacon Granville a gay man burdened by his moral compass and his toxic marriage to a woman an even-keeled resident confronted with ghosts from his past In the latest episode of Montecito entitled Bitch” the story picks back up where at the hospital Deacon (Peter Porte) and JJ (Mike Manning) trade barbs while Mina (Chelsea Rendon) and Deacon’s crumbling marriage is laid bare behind closed doors Deacon walks away—leaving Mina to fight for control alone Bethany Gina (Emme Rylan) returns to Montecito while Mina draws strength from her comatose father and sets her sights on power New episodes drop every Tuesday of this 10-episode first season, you can check it out on Apple Podcasts here or on the Montecito You Tube Channel. Let us know if you have had a chance to listen to episodes of ‘Montecito’ and your thoughts on it via the comment section. If you can’t join us live Thursday night, but would like to submit a question to be posed to the cast, drop it also below. General Hospital’s Lucy Coe Previews 2025 Nurses’ Ball Teases Lucky Spencer, Magic Milo and Unexpected Surprise on Wish List to Perform, Reveals Airdate Martha Madison Leads Days of our Lives “Hogey’s Home Runners” Team To Surpass Goal At PanCAN Purple Stride Walk for Pancreatic Cancer (PHOTOS) MEN OF CBS DAYTIME: Why is Y&R’s Cole Coughing and BTG’s Bill’s Hand Shaking? Allison Lanier Exits The Young and the Restless as Summer Newman GENERAL HOSPITAL: A Drugged Drew Makes a Scene as Nina and Portia Hope Their Plan Takes Him Down For Good DAYS OF OUR LIVES Preview: Shawn Learns Bo Is Dying; Can a New Drug Save His Father’s Life? Copyright © 2024 The Michael Fairman Company. Your Ads Privacy ChoicesIMDb an actress known for her notable roles in Dallas and Ellen Her son David Hirson told The Hollywood Reporter that she breathed her last on Friday The veteran actress died of natural causes at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills where she had been admitted for about a year Throughout her illustrious career spanning more than two decades including as a confidante of Barbara Bel Geddes’ Miss Ellie Ewing on Dallas She also starred as the mother of Ellen DeGeneres’ character on the comic’s groundbreaking ABC sitcom She played Stephanie Martin on daytime CBS’ The Edge of Night and Marsha Davis on NBC’s Another World and its spinoff She starred in three ABC soap operas: as Eileen Siegel on One Life to Live The youngest son of the Prince and Princess of Wales stole hearts with his antics at the VE Day processions Kelsey Grammer visits the site of his sister’s tragic death The 11-year-old young royal took part in the special tea festivity Jenna Ortega's 'Wednesday' season 2 has been teased by the makers Prince Harry dragged through the mud with Thomas Markle comparison Barry Williams opens up about portraying Greg Brady in 'The Brady Bunch' Copyright © 2025. The News International, All Rights Reserved | Contact Us | Authors Your Ads Privacy ChoicesIMDb, an Amazon company© 1990-2025 by IMDb.com, Inc. Your Ads Privacy ChoicesIMDb Home » Western Alliance Bank adds Craig Hirson as Commercial Banking Market Executive Western Alliance Bank yesterday announced that Craig Hirson has been appointed as the organization’s Commercial Banking Market Executive for Greater Los Angeles and Orange County “Craig’s expertise in the greater Los Angeles and Orange County markets will allow us to deepen our focus on the commercial market at Western Alliance Bank,” said Julian Parra head of commercial and industrial banking for California at Western Alliance Bank “His background will be an invaluable resource for the bank as the team delivers strategic integrated solutions to middle market companies throughout the region and beyond.” Hirson brings more than 20 years of experience in commercial banking and extensive market knowledge to his role Prior to joining the Western Alliance Bank team he served as Executive Vice President and Chief Banking Officer at CommerceWest Bank and spent 14 years in progressive leadership positions at Bank of America Merrill Lynch Hirson holds a Bachelor of Science from California State University and a Master of Business Administration from Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business “I am incredibly excited to be part of the team at Western Alliance Bank,” said Hirson collaborating with the talented individuals here and helping contribute to the continued growth and success of the bank especially with our recent increased focus on the Commercial Market.” Source Western Alliance Bank welcomes Dillan Knudson as Head of Commercial Banking Western Alliance Bank Partners with Tassat to Deliver Blockchain-Based Payments World Business Outlook is a print and online magazine providing comprehensive coverage and analysis of the financial industry international business and the global economy Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker Roger O. Hirson who earned a Best Book Tony Award nomination for his work on the musical Pippin His death was confirmed to the New York Times by his son Hirson met Pippin composer Stephen Schwartz in 1969—three years before the musical would open on Broadway—as Schwartz (then a student) searched for a potential collaborator on the project the two melded their combined experience and perspectives to tell the medieval coming-of-age tale which went on to earn 11 Tony Award nominations (winning five) and run for over four years Hirson—alongside Ketti Frings—penned the book to the 1967 Broadway musical Walking Happy Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s Hirson wrote episodes for such television anthologies as The Goodyear Television Playhouse crafting the screenplay for the 1991 Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis–centered miniseries A Woman Named Jackie Army during World War II before studying English at Yale University Hirson is survived by son Christopher and a grandson Audi transformed the derelict London lecture hall into one of the West End's most in demand theatres The Tony nominee originated the roles of Bustopher Jones Buzzi left the stage for the screen in the late 1960s receiving a Golden Globe and 5 Emmy nominations for her work on Laugh-In Sobule's musical F*ck7thGrade enjoyed several critically lauded runs Off-Broadway The Tony-winning stage and screen star passed away December 29 Pointer was one of the last surviving legends from Tennessee Williams' cavalcade having performed in the original tour of A Streetcar Named Desire The composer/lyricist was responsible for some of the most popular cult musicals of all time and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee The Broadway alum's golden vocals brought Old Deuteronomy from Cats and the Lion from The Wiz to life along with Oogie Boogie in The Nightmare Before Christmas Thank You!You have now been added to the list Blocking belongson the stage,not on websites Our website is made possible bydisplaying online advertisements to our visitors Please consider supporting us bywhitelisting playbill.com with your ad blocker.Thank you Your request appears similar to malicious requests sent by robots Please make sure JavaScript is enabled and then try loading this page again. If you continue to be blocked, please send an email to secruxurity@sizetedistrict.cVmwom with: Western Alliance Bank has appointed Matt Griesbach as the organization’s Commercial and Industrial Industry Executive for Aerospace and Defense Griesbach’s expertise enhances the bank’s position as a trusted advisor in these crucial sectors Griesbach has a wealth of knowledge in the aerospace industry having previously held leadership roles in Aerospace & Defense Corporate and Commercial Banking at City National Bank and Bank of America Merrill Lynch He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Science from the University of Notre Dame His leadership in the aerospace and defense industry will be a tremendous asset to the Commercial Banking team at Western Alliance Bank as they bring a dedicated focus to the market Western Alliance Bank appoints Craig Hirson as Commercial Banking Market Executive for Greater Los Angeles and Orange County With over 20 years of experience and expertise in the greater Los Angeles and Orange County markets his hire will allow Western Alliance Bank to deepen its focus on the commercial market and continue to deliver strategic integrated solutions to middle market companies throughout the region and beyond Learn how to describe the purpose of the image (opens in a new tab) Leave empty if the image is purely decorative Learn how to describe the purpose of the image (opens in a new tab). Leave empty if the image is purely decorative. Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon The best of New York straight to your inbox We help you navigate a myriad of possibilities Sign up for our newsletter for the best of the city By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news Sign up for our email to enjoy New York without spending a thing (as well as some options when you’re feeling flush) Our newsletter hand-delivers the best bits to your inbox Sign up to unlock our digital magazines and also receive the latest news By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions. New York it’s not surprising that David Hirson is a stickler for words he expresses himself with painstaking care others) if he thinks the wrong verbiage has been used Hirson’s love for language is evident in his farce La Bête which opened and quickly closed on the Main Stem in 1991 after being trounced by most major critics in particular The New York Times’ Frank Rich who glibly dismissed it as a show “for anyone who confuses high-mindedness with high art.” which is set in 17th-century France and written entirely in rhyming couplets enjoyed an auspicious afterlife: It won the 1992 Olivier Award in London for best comedy and went on to become a staple of regional and college theaters Tony-winning director Matthew Warchus (God of Carnage) helmed a star-studded West End revival featuring Frasier’s David Hyde Pierce, Absolutely Fabulous’s Joanna Lumley and stage legend Mark Rylance that production is headed across the pond to give La Bte a much-deserved second shot at Broadway success Fresh from England where he caught the show’s final bow at the Comedy Theater Hirson admits that the play isn’t the usual commercial stage fare “It’s never compared to other things,” he notes “It doesn’t resemble other plays That adjective could also be used to describe Hirson’s career The son of character actor Alice Hirson and screenwriter Roger O the 52-year-old dramatist has penned only two plays, La Bte and Wrong Mountain (2000) both of which ran very briefly on Broadway What else has he been up to in the past ten years “Working on a third play,” Hirson responds without sarcasm I recognize that it’s not—in a lot of people’s view—the fastest and writing for television and movies simultaneously It certainly must take time to craft a text like La Bête In addition to its demanding iambic pentameter popular versus profound and what constitutes art as two men of the theater—educated intellectual Elomire (Pierce) and vulgar street performer Valere (Rylance)—vie for the patronage of Princess Conti (Lumley) loquacious buffoon Valere seems like the villain but he’s not necessarily the beast of the title Depending on your point of view, la bête could refer to the stubborn Elomire snarky critics or perhaps all of the above “Most people and most experiences in life are very complicated,” says Hirson I’m not trying to make a particular argument I’m surrendering myself to exploring these contradictions within myself and I invite viewers to recognize their own contradictions My characters are a kind of fun-house mirror reflection of extremes Some people see it very clearly as a play that celebrates Elomire as an uncompromising artist 'I am Valere.’ That level of ambiguity is dismissed by some people While Hirson jovially but firmly refutes the characterization of the original Broadway mounting as a failure—“I think it depends on how you measure success in the theater Is it simply something that makes a lot of money and runs for ten years or something that you’re happy to sign your name to?”—everyone involved in the revival undoubtedly hopes La Bête does better the second time around Whether that will happen is anyone’s guess: The London run garnered mixed reviews who won a Tony two seasons ago for his rollicking turn in Boeing-Boeing was universally praised for his outrageous performance The script remains more or less the same as it was two decades ago (the intermission’s been axed a switch that Hirson admits led to some “collateral revision”) But the world’s a very different place Perhaps in the age of shameless self-promotion reality TV and Twitter (all advents Valere would just love) “It’s in the nature of the play to cause a bit of a rough-and-tumble,” he says it’s a great privilege to see it again at this level I can’t control the overall reaction but I do know the play’s beloved by many I don’t think we’d be sitting here today talking if that weren’t the case.” La Bête is playing at the Music Box Theatre Thanks for subscribing! Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon! tiktokfacebooktwitteryoutubeAbout us Contact us near the millionaires' playground of Antibes has baffled investigators and prompted a murder inquiry which appear to come from at least four individuals include a skull on which detectives discovered the faded inscription "death to paedophiles" discovered by a diver six metres beneath the surface near the foot of a rock cliff at Cap d'Antibes have been in the water for at least a decade have revealed the detached upper arm belonged to a 17-year-old Parisien from a male; one male and one female humerus; a skull and a part of a jaw – were first spotted by a diver looking for sea urchins in February this year Specialist police divers then brought them to the surface for examination and tests Scientists have struggled to obtain genetic material from the bones but say the sections of limb belong to bodies under the age of 30 and the skull from a man under 50 "We are confronted with a series of enigmas," Georges Gutierrez told French journalists on Wednesday as he announced the opening of the inquiry into cases of murder imprisoning and taking and receiving corpses "There are a thousand questions in this case a single bone for each individual and not other parts of their skeleton?" Hirson was reported missing in February 1994 He had been released from a brief stay in a psychiatric hospital and was due to meet a friend when he disappeared without trace A family member told French radio the missing youth had "no reason to be in the Côte d'Azur when he had told his mother he was planning to go to Spain" "The family has no connections in the south-east" of France An unnamed source close to the inquiry told Le Parisien newspaper that the skull was also marked with what looked like a shooting target but identifying what kind of ink or the handwriting is complicated," said one police officer well-preserved state and very white." Gutierrez said tests on the remains were ongoing "We're hoping the experts will be able to tell us how long they have been in the water," he said Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission accompanying his own self-aggrandizing soliloquies with stunning four-part flatulence With all due respect to his excellent co-stars and the fine ensemble that embroiders the show’s frilly edges Rylance is clearly the show’s raison d’être His performance as the irresistibly loathsome street clown Valere — a lowbrow bête noire visited upon the tidy playwright Elomire (Pierce) — is the grand prize at the bottom of a box of confetti If an ambitious comp-lit department teamed up with Cirque du Soleil this is the show they’d confect: Meticulously rhymed and timed stuffed with a seminar’s worth of seventeenth-century inside jokes and intertextual resonances (a pinch of Tartuffe Hirson’s script is a masterpiece of formal wit and It would win best sketch at Richard Wilbur’s end-of-semester talent show far less than it thinks it does: La Bête is children’s theater for graduate students But it’s the particular genius of director Matthew Warchus to take someone else’s B-minus paper (Boeing Boeing even the overrated God of Carnage) and convert it into A-grade entertainment La Bête purports to depict a barbarian invasion: Meretricious trash and gooey sentiment enabled by bad taste at the highest levels of society are polluting the spic-and-span unities of true and proper art The latter is personified in Elomire (whose name is not only an anagram for “Molière,” but the title character in a real-life satire published by a rival courtier to attack the playwright not long before his death) If this sounds like almost too natural a role for Pierce yet he deploys his full range of patrician disgust and j’accuse gazes with such brilliance it’s impossible to argue with the casting director you can just about hear the metallic chink of Elomire’s sphincter clinching Valere quickly invades Elomire’s house and takes over emanating from his northern and southern poles then deploys them as accepted language: Refudiate that Rylance’s drunken-masterly performance fuses elements of Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean and James Franco in Pineapple Express with more classic influences from Buster Keaton and Jack Lemmon — though honestly When Lumley drops by (in a heraldic hurricane of glitter) to see whether her pets are playing nice Elomire believes he can expose Valere as a phony a creature of total solipsism and a common purveyor of “selfish pseudo-art.” But exposing a hypocrite is harder than it seems (see Tartuffe shedding the righteous Beckian tears of a true vulgarian-martyr “Truth” comes up early and often in the play when thesis and antithesis cry out for synthesis he introduces a character who speaks in monosyllables but you can psychically hear Hirson wanting to call her Phoneme.) We sense nothing postmodern in this non-choice of anti-resolution: Hirson is just … finished he keeps rhyming and repeating himself: Elomire is formal A fiercely playful individualist — and no prig — he was suspicious of all pieties and probably would’ve found Valere a fascinating grotesque a marvelously flawed specimen of outsize humanity He also seems to have enjoyed a well-executed dirty joke almost as much as Warchus.) Hirson’s conflict seems to emanate not from life but directly from the ivory tower specifically (I suspect) from those airless intra-academic cultural-studies battles of the late eighties and early nineties But what is Valere’s referent in the right-now The self-declared Joan of Arcs of cable news A mobbed Murakami exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum and La Bête a straw play: Not lucid enough to be middlebrow It’s to Warchus’s infinite credit that he can spin straw into gold (At the Music Box Theatre through February 13.) Password must be at least 8 characters and contain: you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York THE HISTORY of the South African Trotskyists during the 1930s and into the next decade was never made available or discussed with new recruits No former member of the groups wrote about his experiences and there was a silence that was so extensive that some comrades' names could not be mentioned I learnt in the 1940s that there had been a one-time nun in the leadership of the Workers Party of South Africa even though she had died (as I later found) in 1942 Even when we learnt in the 1970s that he was Mr Burlak we were never told his first name the Fourth International Organisation of South Africa (a pretentious name) but we learnt little about its members or what they did There was perhaps little to conceal about their activities The history of the groups in Johannesburg was also unknown Nobody in Johannesburg had kept any records and the names of most of those who joined the Trotskyist groups were not recorded until the documents of the liberal Institute of South Africa became available and Lynn Safferys files were opened Only then did the story of Max Gordon become available a box of documents was found in the early 1980s There is still a mystery surrounding this discovery They apparently came into the possession of a ‘stroller’ (a person who lived on the proceeds of materials taken from deserted or demolished properties) who sold them in two portions After maintaining absolute secrecy over five decades the documents disclosing the inner working of the major section were hawked and sold The papers included draft articles for the journal The Spark These documents (totalling a thousand or more) This collection was complemented by letters written by Clare Goodlatte (the Red Nun) to a former student found in the South African Library and supplemented by a search in the Department of Education at Rhodes University where she had once sat as principal of the teachers training college But when I visited the Library of Contemporary International Documents at Nanterre in 1991 to look at the papers of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International I found a card referring to the papers of FIOSA These cannot be viewed until the late 1990s without the permission of the unknown depositor Even public papers in Europe only have a 30 years rule If some historian wishes to investigate these documents at a later date that gift to man- or woman-kind will be available to them Except for the material in the WPSA collection and a few documents in the Trotsky archives at Harvard The documents of the WIL were largely destroyed when its rooms were burnt by arsonists The papers and printed publications I salvaged at the time were placed in the care of the University of the Witwatersrand and these were photographed at a later date for the Hoover Institute I copied other materials from the collection held by Nachum Such in Beer Sheba has written about the activities or members of the WIL There was a time when South African adherents of the Left Opposition (Trotskyists) were said to have made a substantial impact on the politics of South Africa and having provided leading cadres for the Trotskyist movements in China in the first decade of the movement’s existence Frank Glass (Li Fu-jen/Furen) moved to China and then the US Trotskyist groups and received later acclaim for work in their own specialities whose work in linguistics was widely acclaimed when his Loom of Language was published an acknowledged expert on the later writings of Henry James currently President of the International Association of Psychoanalysis Less well known are those who joined the South African groups and built up a cadre They published the most important Marxist journals in the country distributed newspapers and published the Communist Manifesto in Afrikaans participated in demonstrations against the Italian conquest of Ethiopia joined in the struggles against the Greyshirts (the home grown Fascist movement) and were among the first to condemn the crimes of Stalin helped to build the National Liberation League and then the bodies that made up the Non-European Unity Movement a national liberation movement that attracted thousands of men and women in the Cape Province is said to have exercised a powerful influence on Nelson Mandela and the men who were to become the leaders of the African National Congress In the Cape their members became the leaders of the (Coloured) Teachers League of South Africa and the Cape African Teachers Association; they dominated the intellectual left of Cape Town through the Lenin Club, the Spartacus Club and then the New Era Fellowship. [1] They recruited to their ranks academics and to a lesser extent workers and could even count a former nun as a leading member bringing thousands of workers onto the streets after 1973 a student revolt in 1976-77 that swept through South Africa and drew in entire local communities there is no effective Trotskyist movement in the country mostly affiliated with the many tendencies in Britain and Europe but playing no prominent role in the events of the country Is there anything in the history of those groups from which lessons can be learnt so that a new vibrant movement can emerge What was it that went wrong in South Africa to negate the work that seemed so promising before and during the Second World War The Trotskyist groups in South Africa were born not in blood They did not emerge in the wake of powerful working class or community struggles They came into existence when the South African workers (or the small workforce that had recently come into existence) were confused and dispirited clinging to their jobs during the massive depression that hit the country in 1929-31 They appeared when the international working class was still reeling from the victory of Nazism in Germany and massive defeats elsewhere and when there was growing disillusionment in the Communist International and the local Communist Party The groups that appeared locally drew their members from those Socialists expelled by the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) or its front organisations or individuals who sought a Socialist solution to counter a race-ridden and exploitative society they knew little about the platform of the Left Opposition or about the situation in the Soviet Union but all were appalled by news of events in the USSR It was only after copies of The Militant were received in South Africa that some issues became clearer but there was much that remained opaque for the new adherents to the International Left Opposition The effects of Stalinist methods upon those who formed the first Trotskyist groups have not received sufficient attention from historians it must be stressed that the turmoil inside local Communist parties affected the entire Socialist movement or rapidly changing tactics to meet Moscow’s demands made it difficult for any Socialist group to attract large audiences and inevitably affected the operation of opposition groups Despite all the repugnance against the methods used inside the Communist parties those who had come from the CPSA were affected by the crude reduction of Marxism to clichés the aping of the Comintern leaders in their use of invective and the brutalisation of relations inside the party along with their disgust over Comintern policy bitterness and boorish mud slinging that had become the hallmark of Communist Party propaganda and meetings Although determined to work along new lines they had imbibed the very Stalinist features that they were committed to fight Their world outlook had been formed inside the CPSA and their theoretical framework had been shaped to be little better than the Communists in their internal relations they did break with the CPSA and the Comintern not only hostile right wing groups who were grouped into Fascist gangs but also the bitter onslaught of members of the CPSA and found it all too easy to retreat into self-righteous sectarianism The defence of revolutionary positions was transformed into dogmatic assertions and from there it was only one step to internal slanging matches In this they were not unlike small groups everywhere who tried to retrieve what they could of Marxism from the callous counter-revolutionary activities of the Comintern apparatchiks Groups in South Africa that adhered to the International Left Opposition were always minuscule and poverty stricken There were only branches in Cape Town and Johannesburg with a handful of supporters in Durban and Port Elizabeth This was not very different from the spread of the Communist Party: it reflected the sparseness of population and the siting of transport The different social structures of the provinces inevitably affected the perceptions and activities of the groups; they had to find their constituents from the local population and had to advance ideas that would get a response In some regions this proved almost impossible The white workers were caught in a web of racism that made most of them unapproachable and in Natal the Indian workers and students the groups also had to find ways of winning the Coloured people a people caught by segregatory legislation in the chasm that lay between the whites and the Africans organising the teachers (Coloured and African) and one group appealed to peasant groups in the Transkei and Ciskei in the eastern Cape Thereafter the club seems to have become a centre of serious Socialist discussion attracting sizable audiences offering celebratory meetings on May Day or the anniversary of the Russian Revolution started drafting a programme in August 1934 This led to a split that dominated Trotskyist politics until all the groups dissolved themselves Those who formed the majority called themselves the Workers Party of South Africa (WPSA) The minority took the name Communist League of South Africa (CLSA) but seem to have been known only as the Lenin Club Four topics became the subject matter of ‘theses’ the political economy of the country circulated and sent to the International Secretariat Other issues divided the members of the contending groups but these did not appear in the draft programmes Foremost among these was the so-called entryist tactic about which there was extensive discussion The differences that emerged among these early Trotskyists were both principled and personal This led to vituperative attacks on the honesty sincerity and ability of individual members Some of the personal criticisms might have been justified but the attacks did nothing to clarify the basic theoretical differences between the groups As a consequence some members crossed from one group to another With each group probably numbering a dozen at most (although the Communist League was to claim a larger number) these were a series of storms in thimbles which were irrelevant to the political struggles in the country who drafted the document (entitled The Native Question ) produced government statistics to show that there was a heavy concentration of land ownership in the hands of a small number of white farmers Africans could own land almost exclusively in the Reserves which covered at that time about seven per cent of the country’s land surface that would be the rallying point (the axis the alpha and the omega) of the coming South African revolution which might have been an obvious corollary to their programme was not designed to provide more land for the African in an unchanged country but to find a lever through which to overthrow capitalism The minority position was so unclear on this point that it obscured their main contention: namely that it was the struggle of the African workers that would be the key to change in South Africa This position could have been taken without any recourse to theory Averbach and the minority had little to offer not only because this was what Lenin had demanded for Russia but also because the future of democracy (whatever that meant in South Africa) was by no means assured The land question has been dealt with first because of its later significance, but the first division was over the coming war. [13] The theses of both sides opposed the expected war but the minority believed that the white Afrikaners could be drawn towards the revolutionary movement because of their basic ‘anti-imperialist’ position They therefore argued for a position of neutrality and collaboration with the Malanite (that is firstly in the thesis and then in The Spark ascribed the war threat to finance capital and condemned both the west and Germany for their war-like stance and Socialists had to call for revolution to remove capitalism the cause of the war fever and ultimately war itself Originally there were four so-called theses (two on the war) and one counter-thesis on the land question. All were sent to the IS and to Trotsky for comment. [15] There were two responses to the main thesis on the Native Question: one from Ruth Fischer (pseudonym Dubois) and Ted Grant and Max Basch in Britain were asked by the IS to comment although Basch wrote long letters to the WPSA in support of their stand against entryism (see below) Ruth Fischer’s criticisms were crude and insensitive. [16] The original thesis was misquoted and attention was drawn to this in the translated version that was circulated Fischer said that statistics were not a substitute for theory (and in this she was correct) that the thesis was useless because it did not take as its central issue the struggle against British imperialism The slogan ‘Land for the Natives’ was wholly correct arguing that national liberation was a correct slogan for South Africa (because could only be won on the slogan ‘Down with British Imperialism’ That would mean: ‘Down with the privileges of the white race and also proclamation of the right of total separation from the British Empire.’ And so the document went on and could as easily have come from the Comintern and any document that did not start with this proposition was false The members of the WPSA were nothing if not orthodox Leninists The fight against imperialism was the theme of their thesis in all their documents and more particularly in the document on the war was on the role of finance capital in South Africa It can be argued that the WPSA’s formulation based on its definition of finance capital the WPSA never again omitted to place the struggle against British imperialism at the head of their demands Such was the authority of members of the Secretariat that they were not often opposed Any resemblance to the way the Comintern functioned was not altogether accidental.) Trotsky’s contribution is probably still contentious Although he claimed that he could not really comment on conditions in South Africa because he lacked the necessary information he nevertheless accepted the thesis on the land (claiming that the agrarian revolution could only take place with the active participation of the advanced workers) and argued against the rejection of the Black Republic slogan This latter was not a temporary aberration but coincided with Trotsky’s other statements on the Comintern’s position on an independent Negro state in the middle belt of the USA arose from exaggerations in the polemic against the Comintern The blacks would form the majority in a transformed South Africa and the country would obviously constitute a Black Republic He further said that under no condition could revolutionaries offer the smallest finger to white chauvinism in terms of his own original work in Russia in 1904-06 he should have been aware of the impact of finance capital on a backward country He knew from the literature on South Africa (or should have known) that investment in gold mining had played a crucial role in opening up the country to foreign capital and he should have known (from Luxemburg and from Lenin if not from primary sources) that this had given rise to a large concentrated workforce He spoke of the proletariat consisting of ‘backward black pariahs and a privileged caste of whites’ but failed to say that the black workers would one day provide the base for a powerful proletarian movement He also knew that it was not possible to talk of ethnic groups as if they were homogeneous As he had pointed out in his writings on China there had to be a discussion of the class forces and the role that each class would play in any struggle for change But his letter offered no hint of the need to develop such ideas for South Africa The majority launched the Workers Party of South Africa at the end of January 1935 and in their letter to him they said that his comments indicated that there was no disagreement in principle They confessed to having written in exaggerated terms in opposing the Black Republic slogan because of their struggle against the pernicious national policies of Stalinism the full liberation of South Africa would lead to a black republic They repeated their rejection of the slogan of a ‘Native Republic as a step towards a Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic’ They were not pandering to white chauvinism but rejected the slogan which was based on the idea of a national revolution in any future general strike and armed insurrection the participation of the white workers was essential because they held crucial positions in heavy industry and in all branches of the repressive apparatus The active support of one part of the white proletariat and the neutralisation of the other was essential the body called to oppose the Hertzog Native Bills and then several years later to merge with a Coloured organisation or Anti-CAD (also in the hands of members of the Workers Party) to establish the Non-European Unity Movement That was to become the almost exclusive activity of members of the Workers Party from 1943 until at least 1958 although the WPSA seems to have gone out of existence finally in the early 1950s Both groups stayed inside the Lenin Club for at least six months Differences on almost every issue were obvious the WPSA members walked out and set up their own Spartacus Club in July 1935 One other issue separated the majority and minority, the argument over the ‘French turn’. That is the policy of entryism that had been accepted by the French Trotskyists in order to widen their ranks. [22a] The WPSA argued that it was necessary to build a revolutionary party untainted by reformism Besides the fact that the latter agreed with the French group they also said that they had no intimation from the theses that this was a matter of contention between the majority and minority when the groups in Cape Town had barely settled down there was a new factor that was to prove far reaching in its effects on the Trotskyist movement had been pressing since 1926 for legislation that would lead to a final demarcation of lands that Africans could occupy and wanted the small number of African voters in the Cape Province removed from the common roll This required a two-thirds majority in a joint sitting of both Houses of Parliament and this became feasible when the National Party fused with Smuts’ South African Party in 1934 The twin threat of land restriction and removal of the vote became a political issue that impinged on all parties at the time more particularly in the Cape where the Cape Native Voters Association and rural associations (among others) were agitated over these issues There was a third issue in South Africa that generated more heat in the Transvaal than elsewhere The pro-German Greyshirts (composed of Afrikaner nationalists and reinforced by white unemployed) emerged in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power composed of the more militant white workers’ unions Zionists and members of the Labour Party and the Communist Party clashed with the Greyshirts in a series of battles Some members of the WPSA in Johannesburg joined this front Although the Cape Town group might not have approved of the front which involved complete autonomy for themselves and any other participating group In March or April 1937 the one-time dispute over the French turn became real. The members of the CLSA, even more isolated than before, joined with Stalinists and Coloured nationalists in the Cape Town based Socialist Party, and temporarily abandoned their organisation. [28] The Socialist Party was a Cape Town centred group launched by Duncan Burnside a parliamentarian and one-time member of the Labour Party who resigned and formed the Socialist Party in April 1937 But the party collapsed when Burnside rejoined the SALP to contest the 1938 elections When the members of the CLSA emerged from that dubious adventure their numbers were said to have been little changed they regrouped as the Fourth International Club Several young Coloured intellectuals and a young student and at some stage it was renamed as the Fourth International Organisation of South Africa (FIOSA) a mimeographed Workers Voice was published and in so doing negated the journal of 1935-36 and he maintained this control wherever he went There is no record of the group initiating any activity although some of its members were involved in the protests of the Coloured people when the government threatened to remove their vote before the war it is not clear whether these people acted as individuals or as members of their group Johannesburg was the only other centre in which the Trotskyists managed to form a group. [29] At first, there were only Frank Glass and his wife Fanny Klenerman. [30] Seeking activity Glass went to Shanghai in 1931 where he played a more important role in the Fourth International than any emigrant from South Africa but except for his letter to The Militant he does not belong to this account Fanny Klenerman (who had once organised the trade union of women workers) took over the bookshop that Glass left behind after a period of financial difficulty which affected the stock she had available established a reputation as the finest bookseller in the country and a centre for Marxist books in Johannesburg would not have been available in that city Her own role in the Trotskyist movement is unclear and besides providing support for Gordon when he organised African trade unions in the Transvaal was effective mainly in being a known mine of information on events in the European Socialist movements who were said to have agreed with Thibedi’s letters had second thoughts; they did not accept the need for a new party Trotsky wrote a most enthusiastic letter when he heard that black toilers wished to work with the Left Opposition The continuity between this first letter by Trotsky on South Africa with his later response to the WPSA thesis is obvious Trotsky sought contact with workers untainted with the world of capital and free of racism Who better than an African who claimed to have brought with him fellow revolutionaries and the nucleus of black trade unions but at the same time the group was involved in trade union work concentrating on the unorganised African workers who made his mark as a trade union organiser The activities in the trade unions are discussed in an accompanying article When the WPSA and CLSA were formed in January 1935 the International Secretariat maintained that the groups were too small to form a party and called for further discussion on programmatic issues Letters from the Secretariat had antagonised the leading members of the WPSA only three of whom seemed to be active and able to contribute to its journal but it is doubtful whether more than three or four were active giving a periphery of about 25 or 30 others none of which engaged directly in political activity more fractious and centred on one or two persons Nor were they all committed to the majority’s theses but he was expelled from the Johannesburg group (for assaulting Lee) and his thesis was never formally discussed inside the WPSA The Communist League and some of those expelled from the Johannesburg group adopted the IS’ line They called for unification and for a looser structure They also argued for more discussion on programme and on activities To no avail: the leading members of the WPSA in Cape Town The leaders of the WPSA were accused of bureaucracy and of Stalinist methods and they in turned replied with counter-attacks of ‘Menshevism’ Yet the time was not ripe for a centralised party and it was absurd to believe that a finished programme had been formulated it was a time for further discussion and study and also for activity that would recruit new members and provide the experience which could lead to correction and amplification of earlier formulations The Cape Town groups were mainly white and predominantly Jewish Many were more familiar with Yiddish than with English Initially there were few Africans or Coloureds the Secretary of the WPSA explained in one letter that it was not possible to work legally with blacks was to the few African townships where whites were not allowed entry without a visitor’s permit and it seems that nobody in the WPSA or CLSA was involved in trade union work The first conference of the AAC in 1935 called for a rejection of the Hertzog Bills and a delegation was nominated to interview the Prime Minister It was following the meetings with Hertzog and other members of parliament that a ‘compromise’ was announced Instead of abolishing the Cape African vote those already enfranchised would be placed on a separate roll An advisory Native Representative Council would be elected as would whites who would represent Africans in parliament and the senate No one would confess to having agreed to the ‘compromise’ and this was to be a source of friction in the years to come the impact of the AAC on the WPSA was minimal The AAC was confined to an annual gathering (later biannual) with no intervening activity and little was required of those who gathered at conference The fact that leading cadre of the WPSA would assume leadership of the movement and in the process become Nationalist leaders with a Trotskyist façade was a caricature of Trotsky’s meaning in his reply to the theses The articles on the Native Bills and the AAC in The Spark led to the first rift between Johannesburg and Cape Town There was an exchange between Lee and Burlak on the factors that led to the ‘compromise’ Lee insisting that it was a ruse to win African support for the coming war whilst Burlak maintained that Hertzog had made the concession in order to win the necessary two-thirds majority in parliament The nature of the disagreement between Lee and Burlak is only of academic interest now Nor is it clear why so much heat was generated by the Johannesburg group over the issue and started their own publication Umlilo Mollo (The Flame ) The distance between Cape Town and Johannesburg made joint work almost impossible and the impecunious state of the groups meant that there was no money for train fares across 1000 miles and many decisions were taken without full consultation in Cape Town almost all the work was conducted by Burlak They handled the mail with groups in the US and maintained the work of the group in Cape Town as well as the Spartacus Club and no indication that other members assisted in any substantial way At first the Editorial Board of The Spark was made up of the Cape Town trio and three from Johannesburg the constantly changing membership of the Johannesburg group left Lee as the only effective member His contributions to the journal were spasmodic the Johannesburg members withdrew from the Editorial Board and for two months they did not distribute The Spark in April 1936 (prior to the dispute) when Koston resigned for personal reasons Lee had been appointed National Secretary of the WPSA It was an appointment that was more nominal than real Little was altered by the Secretary being in Johannesburg but the dispute placed the whole party in jeopardy African members seemed to leave as fast as they were recruited, and the training on offer was rudimentary. One new member who seemed to be different was CBI Dladla, a prominent member of the CPSA from Nigel, a mining town on the western edge of the Witwatersrand. His appearance as a Trotskyist was announced to the public in Umlilo . He was to became Secretary of the Johannesburg group. [43] In all this there was more than a touch of eccentricity in Lee’s activities. In one letter written by (an embittered) Gordon, Lee was accused of being inactive in the Laundry Workers Union, and of dissolute behaviour. Also, according to Heaton Lee, at one stage he was convinced that he knew where the Kruger millions were to be found. For weeks he had members of the group digging at selected spots for this treasure trove. [44] Then a new group (or a reconstituted group) the Socialist Workers League appeared in Johannesburg in December 1938 after a split in the Johannesburg Group for a Fourth International It had a programme and a constitution that ran to several pages The programme took the WPSA to task on two grounds because it gave no attention to the white peasant or white worker in calling for support for the All-African Convention (without one word on ‘its treacherous role’ had: ‘Not one word of the class struggle of the oppressed masses Just national struggle for liberation and ignoring the white workers.’ The SWL eschewed black national organisation or black chauvinism, whilst condemning the white chauvinism of superiority and segregation. They accepted parallel organisations until objective conditions made it possible for such bodies to draw closer. It seems that it was this group that produced three issues of Socialist Action in 1939. [46] The paper was in English and Afrikaans but besides being anti-Fascist (which indicated a former association with the Anti-Fascist League) although it called for work in the black trade unions Its programme and constitution were surrendered Some of its members were to reappear temporarily in 1944 before finally leaving the scene None made any (known) contribution to theory and none lifted a finger in practical political work Clare Goodlatte relinquished her role as Secretary of the WPSA but continued with her work on the Editorial Board of The Spark At the end of 1938 she withdrew from all activity There were now far too few members to sustain the journal or to entertain the idea of embarking on new activity now about 900 are printed monthly and 800 disposed of We have more than 400 individuals on the mailing list Recently we circulated about 400 questionnaires to Bantu readers.. only about 15 bothering to fill it up and send it back.. ‘Basically our trouble [in Cape Town] is this None of us is in a position to give more than our evenings to the work that had to be done We have given a certain theoretical training to a number of Bantu members here but as they are wholly without practical knowledge and not in a position to go out and organise and learn by their mistakes If we had one good European organiser we could support him and our Bantu comrades and if we could organise one trade union victory everything would change here a wave of spontaneous strikes started by the Bantu at such widely separate places as Durban not only because the bosses realise that they mustn’t let the Bantu win a strike but also because the Bantu don’t know how to run a strike It would show the Bantu that there is away and they would be ready to listen to those who have shown them the way why should the Bantu or the workers anywhere for that matter listen to us and take us on our face value The fact that we have successfully predicted the disastrous outcome of Stalinist policies is not enough: this effects only a few individuals ‘The Spark is intended for the Bantu intellectual From him its message should percolate down first of all is a very thin strata [sic] in the country secondly very backward and ignorant (cannot in anyway be compared with Indian feels so much better off (which he is) than the Bantu masses that he wants to lead the masses in his own way which is naturally not a revolutionary way The intellectual does not feel the full force of the oppression and he hopes and believes in the rulers...’ In August 1939 the editors of The Spark announced that the government’s imposition of controls on publications spelt the end of open discussion in the country. In fact, the triumvirate were tired and probably dispirited. Goodlatte, after a long illness, resigned form all positions in 1939. She died in 1942. [47] The Spark did not appear again and the group published no leaflets or pamphlets It seems to have continued through the first years of the war Ben Vies and others were the moving spirit behind the NEUM and its main associated movements -- the two teachers’ organisations and the Transkei Organised Body This was not entryism in the formal sense of the word because the main bodies had either to be reconstructed or formed But it was an inverted entryism in which populist movements were established so that Trotskyists could enter them In the process they ceased being Trotskyists although these movements were called Trotskyist by their opponents Both Stalinists and Trotskyists had warned that war would break out but there was little agreement on where it would begin or what to do when it commenced switching policy in line with changes in Europe vacillated when war was declared until ‘the line’ was made clear from Moscow Until the invasion of Russia they were anti-war: then they switched immediately The Trotskyists were anti-war but there was confusion on policy Inside the WPSA there had been heated debate over where the war would begin Burlak said that it would start as a war between Britain and Germany; others said that the opening shots would be against the USSR All were agreed that they would oppose the war and called for the defeat of their own government they supported Trotsky’s call for the unconditional defence of the USSR There were no published statements from the WPSA after war was declared even if this was a move to covert activity it was the underground action of the graveyard There are stories that indicate that they continued to meet but their self-imposed silence rendered them politically ineffectual They did not even refute the statement of the leaders of the AAC supporting the government in its war effort Through the first months of the war, the group that now called itself the FIOSA maintained its absurd policy: that it would be possible to form a front with elements in the National Party who were anti-war. [48] At some point this was discretely dropped and never alluded to again Jaffe wrote a 66 page pamphlet entitled World War or World Socialism and in it Jaffe defined Fascism as the universalisation to which ‘degenerate bourgeois society’ tended and as ‘the completion of the merging of monopoly finance capital with the capitalist political state’ He also discerned ‘the emergence of Fascism out of the threat of revolution’ This was in fact little more than the Comintern’s definition Then he added: the conflict was between two forces that were so much alike that he could see no end on a ‘purely military plane’ –‘only the Socialist revolution can finally end the war’ and with no call for work on the armed forces and devoted most of their energy to promoting the cause of the NEUM the Anti-CAD and the NEUM were all federal bodies and all activity was left to the constituent parts to initiate and no directives—outside of the brandishing of the slogan of ‘non-collaboration’ the latter calling for boycotts of persons or institutions cooperating with government was vituperative in its attacks on all collaborators (the ‘quislings’ as they were called) attacked the white ruling class as ‘herrenvolk’ and declared its organisational superiority in having a programme that demanded the vote the role of the worker and internationalism turned their attention to the rural population in the Reserves but most particularly in the Ciskei and the Transkei they mounted a campaign against the implementation of the rehabilitation scheme a government policy of resettlement of homesteads In this they were only continuing a position that can be traced back to at least 15 September 1938 from the WPSA to MS Njisane in the Transkei the writer said that: ‘The problem of overstocking is the problem of overpopulation and this in turn is the problem of insufficiency of land and any “solution” that does not touch this fundamental problem—the land problem—is sheer hypocrisy and can solve nothing.’ citing the number of landless homesteads in the region It was a long letter which then went on to say: ‘The Reserves are for the government nothing but a reservoir of cheap Native labour for the mines and for the farms and the misery in the Reserves is fostered towards this end.’ The government would not give the African sufficient land to plough and an additional burden was imposed through the poll tax to force Africans out of the Reserves to work The letter concluded by stating that there could be no solution under capitalism Socialism provided the only solution with its plans for ‘a scientific distribution and use of land’ in a system ‘which will be concerned with the needs of the people and not with making profits.’ the NEUM had done nothing beyond issuing rallying calls and there was no more talk about Socialism Forgotten were the concluding words of that letter of 1938 which said that the motto of the society they wanted was ‘from each according to his ability; to each according to his need’ When finally there was an armed peasant revolt in Pondoland in 1960 the AAC was split -with the central leadership refusing to be involved in a campaign that The Workers Voice became increasingly remote and when the paper arrived at the end of June 1944 with blazing headlines ‘Why The Second Front Will Not Be Opened’ the group said they could not sell the paper: the second front had been opened on the 6th Jaffe’s response was that the prediction might have been wrong That opened a gap that finally led the Johannesburg group to make their peace with Lee and join the WIL in a repetition of the behaviour that Gordon had noted in 1935 and apparently hoped for the resignation of the minority who had believed that they would emerge locally and the leadership of a nationalist movement in the Cape The latter still seemed to have promise as the nucleus of a liberation movement although it did not mean that the Trotskyists would have prospered—even if its opponents (and some of its friends) all referred to the NEUM as a Trotskyist movement In 1947 or 1948 the FIOSA group decided to disband Jaffe and some others joined the leadership of the NEUM Averbach joined his family when they went to Israel There he was apparently isolated and unable to find a place for himself in a land he found alien The WPSA is said to have continued its underground activities in the early 1950s and then dissolved By this stage (in 1950) the government had passed the Suppression of Communism Act (which defined Communists as those who followed the teachings of Marx and the groups that were formed after this either existed as clubs [3]. Cf B Hirson, ‘Ruth Schechter: Friend to Olive Schreiner’, Searchlight South Africa , no 9 (1992) for an account of the radicals at the University of Cape Town. ↵ The controversy in South Africa is discussed in articles in Searchlight South Africa Frank Glass and Manuel Lopes were always in close contact and might have cooperated in writing these letters I have not seen Lopes’s letter and know of it only from a hostile editorial in Umsebenzi There is little information on Lopes (or his brother) founding members of the CPSA and among the first critical voices from the left against events in the USSR but there is little information on their activities consisted of former members of European Communist parties all of them supporters of one or other of the Left Opposition tendencies in the Comintem This is a contentious position and is discussed in more detail in the article on trade unions for details of union work in the Transvaal The members of the Club sent out postcards This was exacerbated by the government’s policy of promoting the employment of whites in national sectors of the economy Reported at the General Meeting of the Lenin Club in mid-1935 Although it seems that there were sharp boundaries between the two political parties that were formed it is not possible to determine what influences were at play on individual members This was a simplistic view of the process forcing Africans into the labour market African men were originally directed by the tribal chiefs to work on the farms and the mines to earn money for the purchase of guns At a later date the Rhodes government at the Cape introduced taxation to increase the supply of men and to keep them at work But the bulk of the workers came from outside South Africa: from Mozambique Averbach wrote to the IS criticising the WPSA’s conception of the party (see letter of 24 April 1935 from the IS to Averbach) But there is no reference to other criticisms of the WPSA’s theses 12 April 1935) C van Gelderen was criticised for being ‘too close’ to Ray Alexander the leading Stalinist trade union organiser but cannot believe that Alexander would have allowed an avowed Trotskyist to work inside her unions Those who joined the Trotskyist movement in 1943 were told by the minority leaders that their theses were never received by the IS This was maintained through the subsequent years show that ‘counter-theses from the minority’ had just arrived It was said further that they would be seriously studied but there is no further intimation of any deliberations or discussions There is a full (typed) literal translation in the WPSA papers they said that Trotsky’s contribution on the Native Question had clarified the whole position No more was heard from the IS on the political differences in line with other predictions that were not borne out has not led to any critical comment from Trotskyist groups See Terry Brotherstone and Paul Dukes (ed) The Trotsky Reappraisal where I discuss Trotsky’s acceptance of the Comintern’s call for an independent Negro state in the middle belt of the US and his support for the Black Republic in South Africa although obviously different to that of the Comintern It is not possible to comment on this because the minority documents have never been found Details about the drafting of the theses are contained in a report to the IS The minority theses were drawn up by M Averbach He then led the majority of members in the WPSA The theses were voted on at different meetings The majority obtained between 15 and 19 votes in all the arguments that I heard in South Africa about the split See also the polemical article written by A Mon—that is MN Averbach—in the Workers Voice Theoretical Supplement A letter from WG Duncan of the Communist League (June or July 1935) to GJ Lambley claimed that this document was in basic agreement with the League’s position Purdy also said that the Native Problem and ‘poorwhite’ elements were problems to the ruling class only and should not be treated as such by Marxists Although four measures were foreshadowed only two Bills on the franchise and the allocation of land These measures were to be taken together with the extra land that was promised acting as a sop for the proposed removal of the vote the WPSA accusing the CLSA of pandering to liberal ideas by calling on the League of Nations to intervene Bernhard Herzherg says that members of the Communist League set out to convince African distributive workers that they should join a trade union the workers were afraid that they might be deported if they were involved in an organisation The few remaining members of the Lenin Club then attended meetings of the Spartacus Club This entry into the Socialist Party was never alluded to in South Africa in the 1940s The Workers Voice during the war years always said that their group had an unbroken record since 1935 It was only in the late 1980s that I heard about entry into the SP from Herzberg He states in his memoir that it was on his initiative that the group entered the SP The only available documents of the Communist League consists of the letters that the Secretary of the WPSA filed Initially there was at least one supporter of the Trotskyist movement in Durban There was apparently a small section of the Communist League (or the later FIOSA) in Port Elizabeth but I have no knowledge of their activities When Gordon was invited to organise trade unions in that town in 1941 He handed the unions that he formed to members of the CPSA Glass said that they only had contact with one intellectual I discuss Glass’s life and work in my forthcoming biography was one of the first Africans to join the CPSA and one of its first trade union organisers He wrote to say that he was assisted in his new role as a Left Oppositionist by V Danschen Although Danschcn was on leading committees of the CPSA nor of his involvement in the Trotskyist movement I met him only twice in 1946 in a short-lived study group See my chapter on Maliba in Yours For the Union I was unaware at the time of Maliba’s possible connection with Thibedi Thibedi was expelled from the CPSA for misappropriation of funds were often used by the CPSA to remove dissidents This is not a justification for the expulsion Such moves were too easily resorted to in Trotskyist groups But Thibedi aroused suspicion at the time (over occupation and financial resources) and his nationalist sentiments were not in accord with the policies of the WIL Nathan Adler came to his support and left with him The first information about the establishment of the group is in the Bulletin of the International Communist League of America Its early members included Ralph and Millie Lee There are reference to their activities in Pretoria in Naboth Mokgatle The Autobiography of an Unknown South African This is all chronicled in the letters found with the papers of the WPSA I was only able to rediscover in the mid-1970s the work done by Gordon except for brief and distorted accounts in works by Stalinists Tabata and Jaineb Gool were members of the Spartacus Club or the WPSA left it to join the CLSA and later returned to the WPSA who became de facto leader of the AAC after l943 does not refer to the conflicts at the conference in his history of the AAC and presents a roseate account that is totally misleading An African American in South Africa: The Travel Notes of Ralph J Bunche Tabata did not associate social change with the intervention of the working class but it seems that he was a leading member of the CPSA in Nigel At some stage he left the Transvaal and reappeared in Durban the gadfly of the Non-European United Front (a Stalinist dominated movement) and was soon at loggerheads with the local leadership What happened to him thereafter is unknown Only two copies of Umlilo have been found in the newspaper section of the British Library It is not known whether other issues appeared The gold that President Kruger was said to have buried before he fled the South African Republic during the Boer War (1899-1902) I was told this story by Heaton Lee in 1975 in Merthyr Tydlil Little has been discovered about the Johannesburg groups of this period I have found one (incomplete) typed document that opposed the launching of the Fourth International as premature printed a four page pamphlet on GPU (Soviet secret police) terror in Europe and he had been out of town for the past three months five members of the Saperstein group transferred their allegiance to the WPSA as did two members of the Propaganda Group Copies of the programme and constitution are in the Trotsky papers in Cambridge Copies of the newspaper are in the International Institute of Social Sciences Goodlatte’s career is recounted in Searchlight South Africa Bernhard Herzberg who fled Germany and had been editor of the Workers Voice says in his memoir that he was anti-war before September but could not accept Averbach’s contention that there could be an alliance with Afrikaners who were anti-war Jaffe accused him of being prepared to kill German workers and there is little purpose in doing a detailed analysis of this infantile political document However I point to some of these statements because they did determine the writings in the Workers Voice during the war and did precipitate a split between the Johannesburg group and Cape Town I have little knowledge of FlOSA members because none have written about themselves Only after the dissolution of the movement and the formation of looser discussion clubs did some flower The historical writings of Kenneth Jordaan although surpassed by more recent researchers are evidence of a talent that never received organisational backing He subsequently said that there were no Marxists in the groups he knew See my account in ‘A Question of Class: the Writings of Kenneth Jordaan’ was a left wing Zionist youth movement that trained its members for the kibbutz in Palestine Its Zionist creed maintained that only by creating a Jewish peasantry and working class could the Jews become ‘real’ Socialists; until then they would practice Socialism on the collective farms The mix of Zionism and eclectic Socialism led to internal strains with members cleaving to different positions on the USSR despite their criticism of the western powers a dozen members in Johannesburg and Cape Town resigned and joined FIOSA—the only visible Trotskyist group Those in Cape Town were disillusioned by what they found In Johannesburg the members from HH moved into leading positions and remained in such until the demise of the Trotskyist group in 1946 these comrades were referred to sneeringly as ‘the ex-Zionists’ The Anti-CAD (Anti-Coloured Affairs Department) was formed to oppose the setting up of government departments that would place further controls on the Coloured people denied their Marxism until they went into exile in the 1960s and there proclaimed their true red internationalism proclaimed in an interview that the politics of the NEUM could be no other than petit-bourgeois See extract in Julie Frederick’s otherwise absurd book Non-Racialism was elected to a leading position in the National Liberation League in Cape Town kept his NIL activities separate from that of his WPSA functions But he did not conceal his Marxist beliefs after disagreeing with the actions of the CPSA leadership he published his reasons in the Coloured press Throughout the war years and into the postwar period the top offices of the AAC were held by the officials who had been condemned by the WPSA before the war who forced to leave when he refused to resign from the Native Representative Council—and then became the president of the ANC—there was no open criticism of the leading conservative members The main activity consisted of selling the monthly Workers Voice This did not mean that they eschewed the use of the Wage Board They used any means to improve the living conditions of the workers That also meant that they were not particularly interested in the revolutionary message of the WIL’s paper had all the traits of the rootless intellectual and combined radical action with an irresponsibility in their personal lives The events at the conference in 1945 are reported fully in Socialist Action A brief summary would not do justice to an event that was one of the high points of the WIL’s achievement The minority included four ex-members of Hashomer Hatzair and the two active trade unionists The positions taken appeared in articles in the Internal Bulletin of the WIL It is quite possible that they were intercepted by wartime censors the control exercised by the Stalinists who stopped several attempts by the workers to come out on strike and the debacle after the strike was called This will be described in my autobiography I was thrilled to get the documents for this essay I must confess that at times I would rather these papers had never been found I wish to acknowledge the receipt of documents and the assistance I received from many people and institutions I hope that in so doing I have not excluded anyone or perhaps mentioned names of those who would have preferred anonymity without which this could not have been written For accounts of events in the various Trotskyist groups Joe Urdang and Hosea Jaffe (but I was told that this last conversation was not to be quoted) The institutions that provided documents or microfilms: Institute of Commonwealth Studies New York; The Church of the Province Collection University of the Witwatersrand; The South African Library Baruch Hirson: The Economic Background to South Africa Baruch Hirson: Resistance and Socialism in South Africa Baruch Hirson: The Trotskyists and the trade unionists Ian Hunter: Raff Lee and the pioneer Trotskyists of Johannesburg Baruch Hirson: Profiles of some South African Trotskyists Please check your email and enter your one time pin below:   Open in Gmail Sorry there was an error loading the audio remains true to the title of one of his prose poems: ‘The long-distance South African’ is concerned with the memory of the apartheid years in South Africa and includes the bestsellers The House Next Door to Africa and I Remember King Kong (the Boxer) My Thirty-Minute Bar Mitzvah has echoes of a detective trail as Hirson explores the wider ancestral and political strands of his story Of course I had a bar mitzvah.advertisementDon't want to see this? Remove ads crisp afternoon in Johannesburg on the day I turned thirteen the men divided from the women according to the time-worn tradition no gifts bought or made for the occasion; no singing or elevating sound unless one counts the bellyfuls of steam rising up from the iron grid between the flagstones of the pavement across the road The ceremony lasted precisely thirty minutes One of the people present announced the end in a voice as blunt as it was relieved Did I cross the threshold into manhood on that day, as one is, at least symbolically, supposed to do? I don’t know. I doubt it. But I did at least in the wake of this event begin to understand a number of things I had not been confronted with before.advertisementDon't want to see this? Remove ads The person who might have been called my teacher would surely have wanted me to learn these lessons in an entirely different way There was no Hebrew spoken during my bar mitzvah nor did I read out aloud a portion of the consecrated biblical text for example those that mean good morning and good night I was the fruit of the union between a blessed one and a wild mountain goat and also the eldest grandchild on both sides ‘baruch’ is a holy word; it is also the beginning of many prayers I would have appreciated just a touch of holiness to add to proceedings during the thirty-minute ceremony Someone might have raised a ladder of luminous words mounting rung by rung beyond the narrow low-roofed confines where the occasion took place This proved to be not only impossible but entirely unthinkable I watched them emerging an hour or so later as if they had been forcibly held under water spluttering Hebrew syllables and exchanging jibes about their teacher who was apparently no more than a doddering old clown Bonded together in mockery they hopped around on the grass of the soccer field the sound of their laughter rippling upwards like a single shared flag of belonging above their heads Though they might have needed to exorcise from their bodies the boredom of their lessons there was no question of their wanting to escape the ultimate goal: they would all end up having a bar mitzvah in shul one Saturday morning or another in the foreseeable future They would walk down the carpet with the eyes of the men and boys as also the women and girls in the upper gallery passing row upon row of men wearing yarmulkes and draped in talliths then stand at the sacred scroll and read from it to the congregation before being showered with gifts and adoration and going on to have a feast and make a speech in a marquee Such a procession of Jewishness they brought together before me, those boys: Stanley and JP, who was an orphan and once had ringworm; Colin who (accidentally, with a cricket ball) broke my front tooth; Jonny with the swimming pool at the bottom of his garden where Doris Day had dipped her shapely body one fabled afternoon.advertisementDon't want to see this? Remove ads we did live in the most ramshackle house on our block with earthquake cracks across the inside walls My friends’ parents might talk of buying a one-way ticket for London or Melbourne or New York And anyway we had just moved into our new antiquated house So on a Saturday afternoon my father and I would add ourselves to a little crowd following a well-fed auctioneer about from room to stripped room of what had once been an absent stranger’s stately abode After a few hours we drove back home to proudly lay our loot before my mother: Kilim carpets a Morris settee dotted with little maroon roses like a stage set for what really stole the limelight in our house: books I knew no one else whose house was filled with as many books pushing their way up from the pinewood floors to the moulded ceilings; books with my parents’ first names inscribed inside them looped together and underlined in my father’s meticulous script as if this were both their joint fortune and the contract of their togetherness The grass was as worn as a moth-eaten cloth soft-spoken man who may well have been involved in some kind of political activity On several occasions I saw my father speaking to him quietly around the back of the house; perhaps he was eventually arrested after which the grass was gradually worn even thinner than before We were from the same suburbs as all my friends even if it felt as if we weren’t That was a secret which I myself could not crack My Thirty Minute Bar Mitzvah by Denis Hirson is published by Jacana Media (R260). Visit The Reading List for South African book news ' + scriptOptions._localizedStrings.webview_notification_text + ' " + scriptOptions._localizedStrings.redirect_overlay_title + " " + scriptOptions._localizedStrings.redirect_overlay_text + " Skip navigation and go to page content One person I wish could still be alive today would be turning seventy on May 5th 2019 yet she died at the age of thirty-five under unspeakably terrible circumstances You can follow her path up to that moment on the internet: from Vice-President of NUSAS in 1972 to a moving force behind the Western Province Workers’ Advice Bureau founder of the Industrial Aid Society and archivist at the Institute for Race Relations from arrest in 1976 under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act to the inevitable flight out of South Africa to Botswana after marrying another banned person whom she had no legal right to even meet they moved on to Lubango in northern Angola was killed along with her six-year old daughter Katryn on 28th June 1984 she opened the parcel-bomb sent to her by Craig Williamson still lives with the traumatic shock of that moment Would anyone on the Wits campus in the repressed yet turbulent wild-edged atmosphere of the late 1960s and early 1970s have been able to predict that Jenny might lead such a richly engaged life And though she was already an activist on campus how many of us could have guessed at the political resolve and utter determination behind her shy smile and quiet words rarely speaking of herself before inquiring about others where she grew up alongside her brother Neville – a much appreciated NUSAS president who died at no more than 60 years old in 2007 – was a place so many including myself enjoyed for its warm and easy hospitality and convivial parties I will take a glass from a table there and raise it now to Jenny making the sharply bitter-sweet wish that those who knew her then might celebrate the day she turns three score years and ten General enquiries Admission enquiries Vacancies Term dates Tenders Wits Shop Give to Wits Copyright © 2020-2024 - University of the Witwatersrand Terms and Conditions of Use POPIA PAIA ISPA Browser Support This article was published more than 6 years ago The play brims with witty repartee and is excellent performances.Cylla von Tiedemann If there were just two kinds of theatres in the city – those dedicated to producing “high art” and those happy to fill seats with slapstick antics and dirty jokes – there’s little doubt that Soulpepper would identify with the first category And yet the company’s production of David Hirson’s La Bête has the vulgar camp win an intensely funny victory La Bête is set in 17th-century France and pits the venerable court playwright Elomire against the boorish Valere (Gregory Prest) one-man plays include Death by Cheese and The Fork that Spanked the Spoon The Princess Conti (Rachel Jones) has grown tired of the sober earnestness in Elomire’s work and having seen Valere in action in the public square wants to commission one of his plays for the royal theatre ordering a collaboration between the two artists What follows is a dynamic theatrical argument between the merits of high and low culture we are very much in the world of comedy; the pacing is unerringly taut the physicality often lewd and always larger than life But if we engage with the binary that the play asks us to nothing here can be written off as dumbed down or plebeian It’s the sort of gimmick that might hamper a less verbally dexterous playwright but allows Hirson to show off his acrobatic range self-aggrandizing monologue in Act One is a thing to witness – he brags of professional success and sexual glory while offending every notion of logic The highlight might be his bizarre neologisms – he claims that real words are sometimes beneath him It’s the sort of narcissism that brings to mind a certain presidential “covfefe.” The second reason for the production’s sophistication is the performances Prest is a force to be reckoned with; he is crude whose onstage presence I always find remarkably intense She’s both commanding and luminous as the righteous artist who refuses to back down on her principles Director Tanja Jacobs’s decision to cast a woman as Elomire is one of many powerful choices she makes – when Valere calls Elomire “darling,” it has both personal and political sting Another fine directorial sleight of hand is the magic Jacobs brings to Valere’s play within a play in Act Two She uses the simple tools that a street performer could access – there’s a sequence in silhouette projected onto a sheet – to show how modest and elemental great entertainment can be She’s helped by clever costumes designed by Shannon Lea Doyle parquet floors and trio of baroque chandeliers Critical reception of La Bête could merit an article of its own it closed after 25 performances and was accused of promoting the kind of dumbed-down theatre it purports to condemn it opened in London’s West End and won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy though New York Times’ critic Ben Brantley thought Elomire failed to make the winning argument Others thought Brantley missed Hirson’s whole point: The play is meant to satirize snobs and celebrate the messiness and honesty of popular entertainment Soulpepper’s production of La Bête is among the first notable ones in the age of Trump a time when Elomire’s warning about “pretension over truth” and that “hot air has a tendency to rise” has particularly sensitive implications Because of the meta nature of the whole enterprise it’s hard not to speculate that La Bête was intended to be the sort of glorious compromise between high and low art that the princess wants in her theatre But I can’t help but feel that there’s a false dichotomy at play; the profane is given full mileage here and Jacobs’s production is replete with excellent performances but we know all too well that the beast is dangerous La Bête continues at The Young Centre until June 22 Report an editorial error Report a technical issue Editorial code of conduct Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following Martha Schabas is a contributor to The Globe and Mail was shortlisted for an Evergreen Fiction Award and named a Book of the Year by The Globe and Mail arts criticism and short fiction have appeared in several Canadian journals and magazines Welcome to The Globe and Mail’s comment community. This is a space where subscribers can engage with each other and Globe staff. Non-subscribers can read and sort comments but will not be able to engage with them in any way. Click here to subscribe If you would like to write a letter to the editor, please forward it to letters@globeandmail.com. Readers can also interact with The Globe on Facebook and Twitter Welcome to The Globe and Mail’s comment community This is a space where subscribers can engage with each other and Globe staff We aim to create a safe and valuable space for discussion and debate If you do not see your comment posted immediately it is being reviewed by the moderation team and may appear shortly We aim to have all comments reviewed in a timely manner Comments that violate our community guidelines will not be posted UPDATED: Read our community guidelines here We have closed comments on this story for legal reasons or for abuse. For more information on our commenting policies and how our community-based moderation works, please read our Community Guidelines and our Terms and Conditions ROAR Magazine is an independent journal of the radical imagination providing grassroots perspectives from the frontlines of the global struggle for real democracy Lost Password? Forty years after South Africa’s Soweto Uprising Baruch Hirson’s account still provides inspiration for anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggles today In this exclusive extract from Year of Fire, Year of Ash: The Soweto Schoolchildren’s Revolt that Shook Apartheid, re-published this month by Zed Books (US/World) Baruch Hirson describes the socio-political and economic backdrop to the 1976 Soweto Uprising which kicked off exactly forty years ago today Tens of thousands of school children took part in the uprising that started off as a protest against the proposed introduction of compulsory tuition in Afrikaans which was widely seen as yet another discriminatory measure against the country’s black students who already suffered from a lack of educational facilities and poor-quality education Hundreds of students — exact numbers are unknown but estimates range from 176 to 700 — were killed when the police brutally cracked down on the protests and celebrated as Youth Day in South Africa Black anger against white domination has never been far below the surface in South Africa and used every means available to them in order to secure some concessions from the white ruling class At every turn they were met by an intransigent minority which meant to maintain its control — by political hegemony The black population has shown a measure of self-control which belied the deep hatred of endless humiliation felt by every man leaders urged restraint — and the police answered with baton charges and in the black townships that bordered the all-white towns groups of tsotsis (as the delinquents were called) terrorized the population mutilated and murdered from the oppressed black population itself a town that is not to be found on most maps has been the focus of much violence for several decades now Its population of 1.3 million serves the half million whites (who constitute the “official” population of Johannesburg) as laborers in their homes By all accounts this town that is not a town this area known to the world by the acronym Soweto (South West Township) is one of the most violent regions on earth One year before Soweto erupted in revolt the newspaper of the students of the University of the Witwatersrand reported that: … In the last year there was a 100 per cent increase in crimes of violence: 854 murders; 92 culpable homicides; 1,828 rapes; 7,682 assaults with intent to do grievous bodily harm Four hundred thousand people in Soweto do not have homes The streets and the eaves of the churches are their shelter The faces and bodies of many Soweto people are scarred; the gun is quick and the knife is silent The same black fury has been turned against whites Not only in acts of “crime” — the houses of white Johannesburg are renowned for their rosebushes and for their burglar-proofing — but through acts of violence directed against any individual seen to be harming members of the township population There is a long history of rioting following motor train or bus accidents in which Africans have been injured or killed The fury of the crowd that collected was directed against persons who were present Voluble fury changed to stone throwing and the destruction of property The crowd would metamorphose into a seething furious mass that sought revenge This violence was endemic in a country where local communities lived under intolerable conditions There was always a deep sense of frustration and alienation inside the townships or segregated areas of the big urban conurbations The riots served to bring a section of the community together; to fuse disparate individuals into a collectivity which rose up against long- standing wrongs When the riot was protracted — as it was in 1976 — the crowd was not static Factions emerged and formulated new objectives but an ever-changing mass of people who formed and reformed themselves as they sought a way to change social conditions To describe the participants and their groups as being “ethnic” or “tribal” or “racial” does not help to explain the aspirations of such people or the causes of events It only hides the glaring inequalities in the society and conceals the poverty of the rioters distract attention from the provocateurs who egged the “rioters” on and from the prolonged campaigns of hatred in the local or national (white) press which often preceded African attacks on minority communities An openly anti-Indian campaign in the press preceded the Durban riots of 1949 Direct police intervention and direction accompanied the “tribal” assaults during the Evaton bus boycott in 1956 Open police incitement led to attacks on Soweto residents by Zulu hostel dwellers in 1976 When apologists for the system found that descriptions of the rioters in terms of “race” or “ethnicity” were not convincing They claimed that the events were due to “criminal elements” and to township tsotsis They ignored what has long been a marked feature of periods of high political activity in the townships of South Africa namely a corresponding sharp drop in criminal activity This decline in criminality was also a marked feature of the events of 1976 when the initial riots were transformed into a prolonged revolt against the white administration It was necessary for the police and the regime to mask the new antagonisms that emerged in the townships When the youth turned against members of the township advisory council (the Urban Bantu Council or UBC) or against African businessmen and some of the priests the authorities blamed the tsotsis; when the youth destroyed the beerhalls and bottle stores again it was the tsotsis who were to blame; and when plain clothes police shot at children Yet never once did any of these tsotsis shoot at the police who glibly accused blacks of shooting their fellows in the townships find it necessary to comment on this anomaly presented to the world by the media as a color clash The words used in the past had changed their meanings by 1976 The word “black” was itself diluted and extended During the 1970s the young men and women who formed the Black Consciousness Movement recruited not only Africans but also Colored and Indian students and intellectuals During the 1976 Revolt the Colored students of Cape Town both from the (Colored) University of the Western Cape and from the secondary schools joined their African peers in demonstrations and faced police terror together with them In the African townships there were also indications that the Revolt transcended color considerations In Soweto there were black policemen who were as trigger-happy as their white counterparts; there were also government collaborators in the black townships who threatened the lives of leading members of the Black Parents Association; there were black informers who worked with the police; there were Chiefs who aimed to divert the struggle and stop the school boycott; and there was an alliance between members of the Urban Bantu Council and tribal leaders which was directed at suppressing the Revolt; and there was the use of migrant laborers against the youth these men were turned loose on the youth of Soweto shebeen (pothouse) owners used migrant laborers to protect their premises Despite this evidence of co-operation by part of the African petty bourgeoisie and others with the government The Revolt did express itself in terms of “black anger” which did in fact express a basic truth about South African relationships Capital and finance are almost exclusively under white control Industry and commerce are almost entirely owned and managed by whites Parliament and all government institutions are reserved for whites and all the major bodies of the state are either exclusively manned by The conjunction of economic and political control and white domination does divide the population across the color-line Those blacks who sought alliance with the whites naturally moved away from their black compatriots and allied themselves to the ruling group driven — or just duped — into buttressing the state structures and using their brawn-power to break black opposition sided so overwhelmingly with the white ruling class and racial separation and division appeared as the predominant social problem in part a result of the depression in the West and the fall in the price of gold and in part a manifestation of the crisis in South African capitalism only cemented the alliance of white workers and the ruling class The black communities found few friends amongst the whites in the aftermath of the clash of June 16 Those whites who demonstrated sympathy with the youth of Soweto were confined to a handful of intellectuals who came mainly from the middle class; or from a group of committed Christians who had established some ties with the groups that constituted the Black Consciousness Movement Capitalist production in South Africa owes its success to the availability of a regimented cheap labor force the sick and the disabled eke out a bare existence All rely on the remittances of their menfolk in the towns or in compounds (barracks) is likewise organized in order to depress African wage levels were planned in order to ensure complete police and military control were the administrative system ever to be challenged The government also sought to control more effectively the vast conurbations that grew up on the borders of the “white” towns by dividing the townships the compounds and all the subsidiary institutions (like schools and colleges) into segmented “tribal” regions by setting up residential “Group Areas” (each being reserved for one “ace”) The map of South Africa was drawn and redrawn in order to seal off these communities and ensure their separation from one another been able to use its vast administrative machinery (reinforced by massive police surveillance) to keep opposition under control Political organizations in the townships were not allowed to develop following the shootings in Sharpeville and Langa in 1960 and the banning of the two national liberation movements (the African National Congress and the Pan-Africanist Congress) It was only with great difficulty that political groups emerged at a later date and it is some of these which will be discussed in this book Conflicts on the campuses in the 1970s coincided with a contraction of the country’s economy and with momentous events on the northern borders of the country the collapse of the Portuguese army in Mozambique the move to independence in Angola and the resumption of guerrilla warfare in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) all influenced the youth of South Africa (or Azania The BPC (Black Peoples Convention) generally and SASO (South African Student Organization) groups in the universities and of independence; they defied a government ban on meetings When the government finally took steps to change the language of instruction of higher primary and secondary school students in 1975 the stage was set for a massive confrontation The factors sketched above were by no means independent of each other the resurgence of African political consciousness and the rapidly altering position in the black schools The only non-tribal political organization that was able to operate openly inside South Africa was the Black Peoples Convention Yet from its inception in 1972 the difficulties it faced were insuperable its army undefeated and unshakably loyal to the regime The police force was well trained and supported by a large body of informers in the townships — and it had infiltrated the new organizations the regime had the support of the Western powers and even seemed to be essential to America and Great Britain in securing a “peaceful” solution to the Zimbabwean conflict The young leaders of SASO and of the BPC were inexperienced Their social base was confined (at least as of 1975) to the small groups of intellectuals in the universities their philosophy of black consciousness turned them away from an analysis of the nature of the South African state They seemed to respond with the heart rather than with the mind They were able to reflect the black anger of the townships — but were unable to offer a viable political strategy in the months and even weeks before June 16 the students in SASO seemed to be expecting a confrontation with the forces of the government They spoke courageously of the coming struggle — but made no provision for the conflict Even when their leaders were banned or arrested there did not seem to be an awareness of the tasks that faced them and when the police turned their guns on the pupils of Soweto schools and shot to kill Black anger was all that was left; and in the absence of organization it was black anger which answered the machine guns with bricks and stones The people of Soweto had to learn with a minimum of guidance and they responded with a heroism that has made Soweto an international symbol of resistance to tyranny Young leaders appeared month after month to voice the aspirations of the school students — and if they were not able to formulate a full program for their people A program should have been formulated by the older leaders — and that they had failed to do the youth fought on as best they could — and they surpassed all expectations Despite all the criticisms that can be leveled against the leaders of the school pupils the revolt they led in 1976-’77 has altered the nature of politics in South Africa Firstly it brought to a precipitate end all attempts by the South African ruling class to establish friendly relations with the leaders of some African states and it has made some Western powers reconsider the viability of the white National Party leaders as their best allies on the sub-continent Secondly it marked the end of undisputed white rule and demonstrated the ability of the black population to challenge the control of the ruling class In every major urban center and in villages in the Reserves The youth showed an ingenuity that their parents had been unable to achieve They forced the resignation of the Soweto Urban Bantu Council and the Bantu School Boards — both long castigated as puppets of the regime They were even able to prevent the immediate implementation of a rent rise in 1977 and in the many incidents that filled those crowded days that followed the first shootings of 16 June 1976 they were able to show South Africa and the world that there was the will and the determination to end the apartheid system Help ROAR cultivate the radical imagination 1999) was a South African political activist and historian and A history of the Left in South Africa: writings of Baruch Hirson (2005) More > Source URL — https://roarmag.org/essays/1976-soweto-uprising-south-africa/ Anarchism & Autonomy Borders & Beyond Read now For your regular fix of revolutionary brainfood ROAR depends entirely on the support of its readers to be able to continue publishing you enable us to commission content and illustrations for our online issues while taking care of all the basic expenses required for running an independent activist publication We constantly publish web content and release thematic issues several times per year The exact amount depends on how much support we receive from our readers the more resources we will have to commission content and pay a copy-editor to prepare everything for publication Think 30,000+ words of revolutionary brainfood A dozen or more thought-provoking essays from some of the leading thinkers and most inspiring activists out there Edited and illustrated to perfection by the ROAR collective We deliberately designed our website to perfect the online reading experience — whether you are on your laptop Back issues are still available in our webshop and can be ordered online After Issue #8 all further issues will appear online only We initially hosted subscriptions on our own website but the admin and technical maintenance massively distracted us from our editorial tasks Patreon offers a user-friendly alternative allowing readers to pledge a monthly contribution and set their own amount — from each according to their ability Patreon will charge your card monthly for the amount you pledged The proceeds from your monthly pledge will go directly towards sustaining ROAR as an independent publication and building our collective power as a movement ROAR is published by the Foundation for Autonomous Media and Research an independent non-profit organization registered in Amsterdam All editors and board members are volunteers This allows us to spend all income from our Patreon account on sustaining and expanding our publishing project Once we have paid for basic running costs like web hosting the remaining proceeds will be invested in high-quality content and illustrations for future issues we raised about $10,000 in a crowdfunding campaign and we received a starting grant to complete our new website from the Foundation for Democracy and Media in Amsterdam our Patreon account is currently our only source of income meaning we depend entirely on the solidarity of our readers to keep the publication going ROAR is not just another online magazine — it is a multimedia loudspeaker for the movements and an intellectual breeding ground for revolutionary ideas When you pledge a monthly contribution you will not just receive early access to some of the freshest and most radical content on the web but you will also help sustain a unique self-managed publishing project strengthening the voices of activists around the world ROAR Magazine is a project of the Foundation for Autonomous Media info@roarmag.org Read our republication policy ROAR is an independent journal of the radical imagination providing grassroots perspectives from the front-lines of the global struggle for real democracy who was briefly part of the General Hospital cast in the 1980s She was at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills for almost a year when she died Alice Hirson is survived by her sons David Hirson While well-known for many shows and movies Van Gelder in General Hospital in 1982 in a recurring role for 4 episodes unlike many other shows and titles where she remained for a longer time Alice Hirson's illustrious career started in 1951 with the television show Starlight Theatre She followed it up with numerous television titles that included miniseries Some of the more renowned titles that Hirson was part of include N.Y.P.D. She also appeared in popular shows like Will & Grace was introduced on General Hospital in 1982 and was part of the Luke Spencer story arc Gelder was the widow of geologist Frank Van Gelder She traveled to Rochester several times to meet Holly and Luke she revealed to Jackie and Robert that Oliver Durban had killed her husband She graduated in 1948 from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and started her career with plays on the off-Broadway stage such as The Investigation and Traveller Without Luggage While she met actor Stephen Elliot in 1964 They remained a couple till Elliot's death in 2005 Alice Hirson's death is deeply regretted by the creative community. General Hospital actor Chris McKenna took to Instagram to express his tribute to the Hollywood veteran Also Read: Who is leaving General Hospital in 2025? All comings and goings explored While Hirson was part of GH briefly, the soap has been airing on ABC since April 1963. The soap's plot revolves around the titular medical facility ensconced in the fictional township of Port Charles. The storyline includes other residents of the town besides the hospital's staff Also Read: What happened to Jack Brennan on General Hospital? Explained The current plot dynamics focus on the chaos around mobster Cyrus Renault's death. While the mobster's last victim, Lucky Spencer is fighting for his life after being injected with Digitalis Cyrus's shooter Josslyn will be forced to cover up her deed as its disclosure would put Jack Brennan in a tough spot Stay tuned to ABC to catch the latest of General Hospital every weekday Your perspective matters!Start the conversation