Summary: Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), Chapter 1
Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire’s 1968 classic asked how a humane society might emerge from one where a dominating class reduces ‘everything to the status of objects at its disposal’.
For Freire, like Marx, such wholescale social transformation can only come from struggles waged by the oppressed. Unlike many other Marxist thinkers however, Freire recognised that this poses a problem. How can the oppressed achieve a humane society when they are equally immersed in ideologies of power and commodification?
The contradictions of revolutionary politics
Freire addresses two contradictions of revolutionary politics. First is the psychological condition of the oppressed. ‘Conditioned by the experience of oppressing others’, what happens when the oppressed themselves gain power? What prevents them from simply replacing their former oppressors?
‘A particular problem is the duality of the oppressed: they are contradictory, divided beings, shaped by and existing in a concrete situation of oppression and violence’
Second is the problem of vanguardism. How can an educational process that aims for liberation avoid mirroring the very power dynamics it seeks to overthrow? Does education not always presuppose an educator with greater awareness enlightening others with lesser awareness? Don’t we require some authority from the educator, whether in galvanising class consciousness or making the poor realise the authoritarianism latent in their psychological condition?
‘If the implementation of a liberating education requires political power and the oppressed have none, how then is it possible to carry out the pedagogy of the oppressed prior to the revolution?’
For Freire, the solution lies in regarding the oppressed not as objects swept along by material conditions but as potential subjects who become convinced of the necessity for struggle.[1] Education must aim to develop this capacity for autonomy and reason, not by explaining to but rather dialoguing with people: ‘a pedagogy.. forged with, not for, the oppressed’.[2]
Further, he rejects the idea that the oppressed are naturally enamoured with hierarchy and power. Rather, the problem is that the oppressed fear freedom so that ‘any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression’.[3] This is what critical pedagogy should seek to rectify.
Some discussion participants placed Freire’s ideas within wider left intellectual history, placing Freire’s understanding of the role of the intellectual in opposition to Lenin and in alignment with Mao. One participant noted that the 1911 Bolshevik split divided those who wanted mass political based on similar principles to Freire, versus Leninists who advocated propagandistic methods to foment revolutionary feeling.
One of our participants described how the text resonated with his own experience as a political educator. Freire’s idea of learning as dialogue made him recall how his own understanding of Marx was enhanced through discussions with his students. Another recalled how Freire was a revelation to him during a time when he had become disillusioned with ultra-left sectarianism, praising Freire’s emphasis on basic respect for people as something that marks its relevance beyond educational contexts.
The dialectic of oppressed and oppressor
Paulo Freire’s dialectical framework eschews a dichotomous split between oppressor and oppressed. Instead, oppressed and oppressor alike are locked in a dialectic that dehumanises both.[4] This dialectical framework also allows him to confront the fact of co-option where peasants that acquire land and workers become ‘as tough as the owner — and more so’.[5] This is because the oppressed often hold the oppressor up as a false ideal.
True liberation consists of transcending this oppressor-oppressed relationship altogether. It is the coming into being of genuinely new subjectivities and social relationships that do not allow one class the tools of domination. Liberation is not however simply the transfer of goods, knowledge or personnel from the oppressor class to the oppressed. For Freire, this would be mere ‘generosity’ or ‘humanitarianism’, gestures that leave the essential dialectic of the oppressed and oppressor intact. This false generosity characterises even those members of the oppressor class who join the oppressed in their struggle. Although they ‘truly desire to transform the unjust order…they do not trust [the people’s] ability to think, to want, and to know’.[6]
For all sides therefore, liberation from the de-humanising dialectic is ‘a childbirth, and a painful one’, an act of ‘labour’ to ‘bring into the world this new being’.[7] For Freire, action and learning are intertwined from the beginning. Indeed, his definition of knowledge is intimately tied to, and even identified with, acting upon it: ‘A mere perception of reality not followed by…critical intervention will not lead to a transformation of objective reality — precisely because it is not a true perception’.[8]
We can contrast Freire’s attitude to education and epistemology with enlightenment writings on these themes. His identification of knowledge with action upends enlightenment conceptions of knowledge as the passive apprehension of facts. For eighteenth century philosophers like Hume and Descartes, observing and understanding objective reality was a reflective practice that ultimately re-confirmed their privileged status, both as master observers of nature but also as elevated members of a class society for whom active intervention in the world is optional. In Freire, education is a painful process that ultimately reveals one’s disempowerment within class society while galvanising critical interventions upon this social reality: ‘Worlds and human beings do not exist apart from each other, they exist in constant interaction’[9]
As one participant noted however, Freire’s humanism and emphasis on human malleability also places him well within the enlightenment tradition. Its use of general analytical categories makes the text reminiscent of treatises on human nature and education that defined eighteenth-century moral philosophy.
As a British reading group, it was perhaps inevitable that we read the text through our contemporary national politics. How would Corbyn and other left-wing parliamentarians be classified under Freire’s categories of oppressed and oppressor, given their often privileged class backgrounds and institutional credentials? Our participants often noted that parliamentarians display different levels of true solidarity with the oppressed, as defined by Freire, at different moments in their career. Participants concluded that rising through the party ranks correlates with a reduced capacity to engage non-paternalistically with the class struggle.
Paulo Freire on violence
Freire’s strong commitment to humanism and authentic selfhood was a hallmark of the mid-century Latin American New Left. The issue of violence does emerge in his work however.
Freire says that violence is any act which prevents an individual from pursuing self-actualisation. This obviously hangs on a humanistic notion of a clear human essence negated by oppressive social conditions. Still, it gives wide interpretative room for what exactly it would constitute.
As for the role of violence in revolution, Freire writes that when the oppressed ‘take away the oppressor’s power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression’. This suggests he regarded some forms of violence as necessary to dissolve class society. Further, although Freire never holds violence up as a revolutionary ideal, he says that violence wielded by the oppressed does not share the same moral status as violence wielded by the oppressing class. The former is forgivable and permissible, if not morally commendable, while the latter is always unjustified: ‘Whereas the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human’.[10]
Our discussion noted that Freire’s first chapter is vague in defining violence and its role in revolutionary praxis. One participant argued that Freire’s vagueness leaves open dangerously expansive interpretations of what kinds of violence are justified in the pursuit of liberation, but that this is perhaps Freire’s aim: to offer a method for arriving at answers fitted for particular contexts, rather than giving direct solutions.
Paulo Freire’s Latin America
Freire’s critique of ‘false generosity’ is indicative of the political conditions his text was responding to. This idea of oppressive paternalism echoes the arguments of Kaylan Sanyal, a previous writer we have discussed. Kaylan Sanyal’s 2007 work ‘Rethinking Capitalist Development’ argues that development discourse and humanitarianism maintains an expendable population at the limits of global capitalism that cannot enter the economy even as wage labourers.[11] Sanyal was critiquing older Latin American dependency theories of ‘underdevelopment’ originally written during Freire’s time. Latin American dependency theory embodied the intellectual issues which preoccupied Freire as well as wider Latin American political discourse during the 60s.
Indeed, the political situation of wider Latin America formed the immediate context for Freire’s work. He relocated to from Brazil to Chile between 1964 and 1969. During this time, the Chilean government was purchasing irrigated land, organising peasants into rural trade unions and cooperatives and preparing peasants for technological change. Freire worked in these programmes, developing adult literacy training materials and training teaching staff. This Chilean movement for nationalised economic modernisation was at odds with the Washington-based ‘Alliance for Progress’ and its insistence on development through private capital.[12] How might autonomy be cultivated when exploiter and exploited are locked into a dualistic relation of dependence and de-humanisation? This question was a natural adjunct to mid-century Latin American modernisation efforts set within tense Cold War relationships with North America.
[1] Paulo Freire, trans. Myra Berman Ramos, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary Edition, New York, London, 2005, 67
[2] Paulo Freire, trans. Myra Berman Ramos, 2005 48
[3] Ibid., 67
[4] Ibid., 57
[5] Ibid., 46
[6] Ibid.,60
[7] Ibid., 49
[8] Ibid.,52
[9] Ibid., 51
[10] Ibid., 56
[11] Kalyan Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-colonial Capitalism, 2007
[12] Theodore H. Moran, Multinational Corporations and the Politics of Dependence: Copper in Chile, 2004
