[How can Paulo Freire, who would have turned 100 this year, help
us think the limits that Occupy encountered ten years ago?]
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PEDAGOGY OF THE OCCUPIED  
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Rodrigo Nunes
September 30, 2021
Verso Blog
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_ How can Paulo Freire, who would have turned 100 this year, help us
think the limits that Occupy encountered ten years ago? _

,

 

The little remarked coincidence that put the beginning of Occupy Wall
Street just three days before the birthday of Paulo Freire became very
visible this year when the former’s tenth anniversary and the
latter’s centennial were celebrated in quick succession. This
proximity invites us to think the two in connection, and allows us to
find in the Brazilian educator elements with which to overcome some of
the impasses that have beset Occupy and other movements since.

Most people remember Freire as someone who had a political lesson to
teach about pedagogy. If education is treated as the transmission of a
set of contents, he warned, it does not truly emancipate, but rather
reproduces a division between those who know and those who do not.
Liberation supposes the capacity to think the world afresh, and an
education that does not awaken that capacity cannot be called
liberating.

To stop there, however, is to overlook another aspect of Freire’s
thinking: he also had a pedagogical lesson to teach about politics.
The latter, which followed from the first, was that the dialogical
method was the only one suitable for a "revolutionary leadership".
This expression, which recurs a total of 31 times in _Pedagogy of the
Oppressed_, probably sounds jarring to everyone whose image of Freire
is that of a fierce enemy of vanguardism who was critical of the very
idea of leaders. After all, what place can leadership have in a method
that assumes the equality of all? To understand this, it is necessary
to understand both what Freire means by equality and what he
understands as leadership.

Equality is, first of all, the equality of a potential: everyone is
capable of learning and thinking critically, everyone is endowed with
the capacity to become a conscious participant in the construction of
the world. But this does not exclude actual differences. On the
contrary: precisely because everyone can learn and everyone will find
themselves in different situations, different types of knowledge
exist. Yet this also means that some essential skills and knowledge
about the way the world is structured are unequally distributed. If
equality is not to remain just a potential, the conditions that create
that unequal distribution of opportunities to actualize it must be
changed. The goal of realizing the first equality therefore supposes
the goal of realizing another one: material equality among people.
Now, the awareness of this necessity is itself badly distributed; so,
if those who have it wish to share it with others, what are the
different theoretical alternatives through which they can understand
their position in relation to others’? 

The first is to conclude that those who have more must teach those who
have less, full stop. Freire rejects it because, even if well
intentioned, it slips into the paternalistic division between those
who know and those who do not and treats liberation as a transfer of
knowledge from one group to the other. “Attempting to liberate the
oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of
liberation is to treat them as objects which must be saved,” and
thus also “masses which can be manipulated.” 

The second is to deny that there are any differences between
knowledges: all knowledge about all things is equally valid. This is
very tempting, as it creates in a single gesture the equality that one
had as a long-term goal. But it has a problem: it limits our ability
to refer to a shared world, which is indispensable to the very
possibility of a political practice. For if you think I am exploited
and I do not, you cannot appeal to my objective interests as opposed
to my subjective perception, because neither you nor I have a
privileged access to objectivity. My interests are whatever I identify
as such and nothing more. Any attempt at persuasion is thus
presumptuous, disrespectful of difference and, ultimately, a form of
violence. 

The third alternative is to reverse the game: yes, there are knowledge
differentials, but they travel in the opposite direction; it is the
oppressed who know everything and the oppressors, including those who
fancy themselves as revolutionaries, who know nothing. Again, the
appeal of this (mental, if not material) redress of the world’s
injustices is obvious. The cost of following it, however, is that we
must essentialize the oppressed: they all think the same (at least
tendentially), and what they _really_ think stays the same
regardless of their interactions with the world. In doing so, besides,
we implicitly make the same kind of claim that we criticize would-be
leaders for: we are the ones who _really_ know what the oppressed
think, and we know that it _really_ is the truth. Finally, it was
the unclear what kind of political interventions follow from it apart
from boosting the voices of people who correspond to our idea of what
the people think.

Occupy and the whole cycle of struggles that began in 2011 were
haunted by the specter of a double democratic deficit: the one that
turned left and right-wing parties in several countries into mere
vehicles for the interests of finance after the 2008 crisis, and the
one at the center of the left’s traumatic authoritarian experiences
in the 20th century. In the large general assemblies that began to
sprout in squares all over the world, those movements found a
counterpoint, perhaps even an antidote, to that predicament. Yet while
those assemblies were hugely significant in giving a voice to those
who felt like they had none and making audible realities that had been
silenced, they were noticeably less successful when it came to
building consensus, constituting new identities or forging shared
directions. In part this was because many people believed that the
only way to avoid the mistakes associated with the first of the three
alternatives above was to opt for a combination of the other two, and
saw any deviation from this as intrinsically suspicious. No doubt
there were even those who invoked Paulo Freire to justify that
choice. 

Yet Freire’s alternative is in fact a fourth one. It consists in
saying that knowledge differentials exist, but they are distributed in
such a way that there is no great division between those who know and
those who do not. It is not that all knowledges are equal, but rather
that different groups and individuals have more or less, better or
worse knowledge about different things, and so everyone has something
to learn from everyone, and everyone has something to teach. Since
political processes demand knowledges of different kinds, and “not
even the best-intentioned leadership can bestow independence as a
gift,” they cannot be a simple transfer of knowledge from one group
to another; they require autonomy and dialogue. This is quite
different from saying that “the people already know” or
“everyone has their own truth”. As Freire summarizes it, the point
is rather that “no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught.
People teach each other, mediated by the world.”

What is the notion of leadership that follows from this? It is not a
position belonging to a fixed group –– the vanguard that knows
better than others in every situation and department –– but a
function that can be exercised by anyone who, in a given context,
possesses a knowledge differential that makes them capable of
triggering a collective learning process. This can come from inside or
outside a social group, it can be individual or collective,
short-lived or long-lasting; since no-one is self-taught, without this
initial difference, nothing would ever happen. 

As we celebrate the achievements and assess the shortcomings of Occupy
and the “movement of the squares”, it is important to remember
this Freirean lesson: the potential for equality among people cannot
be actualized by either pretending that differences do not exist or by
absolutizing them to the point that questioning or trying to persuade
others become suspicious, virtually violent acts. On the contrary, it
is by starting from existing differences, but without giving up on
dialogue or resorting to manipulation and imposition, that an
emancipatory process can take place.

Yet are we not then making Freire into a counterintuitive bedfellow of
those who lamented at the time that what Occupy lacked was a proper
revolutionary leadership? Again, it all depends on how one understands
those words. People who want and believe themselves qualified to lead
are never lacking, and there certainly were plenty around the
“movement of the squares”. The question is, of course, that this
is not what constitutes a revolutionary leadership for Freire. What is
it, then? Fundamentally, the capacity to make oneself followed, that
is, to point a direction which others regard as valid, useful,
important; and to do so without imposing or manipulating, through open
dialogue, reciprocity and persuasion.

If this is so, the first quality that leaders need is knowing how to
listen. Not to repeat what is already being said, but to know where to
introduce a different note, where to put the tension that might spark
a collective learning process –– and when to stay quiet. If the
movements of the past decade were so allergic to leadership, it is
because they did not think that it could also mean this. As a
consequence, they were often left with an impoverished notion of
democracy: one that made it into an arena for the expression of
individual differences treated as absolutes, rather than a space for
mutual influence and exchange –– in which people enter to change
others and be changed in turn.

_RODRIGO NUNES IS A PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AT THE PONTIFICAL CATHOLIC
UNIVERSITY OF RIO DE JANEIRO (PUC-RIO), BRAZIL, AND AUTHOR OF NEITHER
VERTICAL NOR HORIZONTAL: A THEORY OF POLITICAL ORGANIZATION._

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