November 2000

In memoriam:

Harry Else, revolutionary fighter, thinker

Harry Else met Marxist-Humanism when he was already close to 50 and immediately brought to News and Letters Committees both a multitude of talents and a rich life of experience. Born and raised in Tyler, Texas where he played football for Tyler College, he came North as a young man. He took a job as a steelworker before being hired as a chemist for the Chicago water purification department, where he worked for some 30 years until his sight failed and he was forced to retire. Along the way, he got to know and be known by "everybody in Chicago." What animated him and became his life as soon as he heard a talk by Raya Dunayevskaya and immediately joined News and Letters Committees in the mid-1970s was the idea of Freedom he found in Marxist-Humanism.

Two aspects dominated that life for Harry. One was his deep understanding of what the "Boss and Black" relationship signified-his profound understanding that overcoming racism was inseparable from overcoming capitalism. Harry called Chicago the "plantation up North," and dubbed it the city that was a "single party state." In 1983, when Black Chicago stunned the world by electing Harold Washington mayor, Harry wrote in N&L about the significance of that victory, achieved by the more than 90% turnout of Black voters, augmented by nearly 80% of the Hispanic vote and a critical 18% of the white vote. He described how the system had worked before:

"When the precinct captains in the Black wards had to carry their votes to City Hall, they were supposed to get jobs in return. But most of the jobs went somewhere else and the ones they got were the most menial. The system was like the sharecropper arrangement. You were supposed to split 50-50, but it didn't work like that, and come harvest time you wound up broke. This kind of thing has been built into the fabric of Chicago politics over the years. It's what I call the Boss-Black relationship. The Harold Washington election was the first substantial challenge to that form of racism."

The other dominant aspect of Harry's activity for Marxist-Humanism was his love for philosophy. There was rarely, if ever, a meeting he attended where he did not take the floor to put the discussion in the dialectical context he saw in the ideas under discussion. In a discussion on overcoming racism, Harry put it in the context of what Hegel called "Science":

"'Science' is the universal experience that has occurred through the discovery of the Self. What the Self recognizes through this process is that I cannot be what I want to be unless you can be what you want to be. Racism is a backward step for humanity because it breaks this relation apart. The Self cannot self-develop."

To express this notion more concretely Harry continued:

"The 13th through 15th Amendments to the Constitution set out certain principles. But they are not enforced. What Black Americans are lacking are real citizens' rights. When we talk about the permanence of racism today we need to know that it's due to all the incomplete revolutions we have suffered through, from 1776 until today. Marxist-Humanism becomes crucial here as the 'negation of the negation' which shows that to reach the new society we have to begin with the total uprooting."

At his funeral, where a number of his friends and family rose to pay tribute to all that they had learned from Harry throughout his life, what speaker after speaker stressed was that he was able to inspire them because he always wanted to know what they thought and truly listened to what they told him. One of his most outstanding characteristics was his passion to involve everyone he knew in the struggle for Freedom that permeated his life.

It is why he refused to allow his loss of sight to isolate him or force him to lose his independence. To the very end of his life, he read voraciously by means of audiotapes and a computer scanner, keeping up with every struggle anywhere in the world against capitalism while he continued to introduce everyone he metto Marxist-Humanism, which he saw as crucial to help a new world come to be. We deeply mourn his passing and honor his life.

--Olga Domanski