The Urgent Need for Conscientização

[Note: For much of the last two years, I have been posting to this blog on a once-per-week basis.  Lately that has changed to posting once every two weeks.  For the next several months, I will remain on my current blogging schedule as much as possible, so I will continue to post once every two weeks.]

The end of a year is often a time in which people project their hopes, aspirations and fears onto the future.  Those who have become accustomed to easy, privileged lives tend to be on the hopeful side of the forward-lookers; those who have had experience of hard times tend to look forward more soberly.  Certainly the last few years have given the world an abundance of reasons to approach the future soberly and cautiously - even in the privileged nations of the Global North.  In the United States, for instance, we have seen the erosion of civility and safety for many groups of people.  We have also experienced widespread environmental catastrophes such as the wildfires of 2020, and the explosive growth of tent cities comprised of the recently disenfranchised.  We have seen the beginning of the breakdown of those supply chains which nourished the consumerism of the nations of the Global North.  We have witnessed the hyper-concentration of the world's wealth into the hands of an ever-shrinking number of so-called "owners".  We have witnessed the emergence of a pandemic whose consequences will be with us for decades into the future.  We have witnessed the undeniable  accelerating consequences of the destruction of the earth's environment, the increasing loss of safe and healthy habitats for the world's biosphere.

And we have witnessed another loss, namely the global loss of safe spaces for democracy.  Consider the following reports:

• "Freedom In The World 2021: Democracy Under Siege", Freedom House
• "'An Urgent Matter': Biden Warns Democracy Is Under Threat At Summit", The Guardian
• "Democracy Slipping Away At Record Rate, Intergovernmental Body Warns", Reuters

The series of posts I wrote on strategic nonviolent resistance and on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy have been my response to this loss of safe spaces for democracy, and especially the damage done to American democracy during the regime of Donald Trump.  Among the themes discussed in those posts, the last theme discussed was the theme of the organic, grassroots, bottom-up building of a society by the oppressed and for the oppressed in order to displace and neutralize the society constructed by an oppressive regime.  To quote Gene Sharp once again, "As the civil institutions of the society become stronger vis-a-vis the dictatorship, then, whatever the dictators may wish, the population is incrementally building an independent society outside of their control...in time, this combination of resistance and institution building can lead to de facto freedom, making the collapse of the dictatorship and the formal installation of a democratic system undeniable because the power relationships within the society have been fundamentally altered."

What does it look like to build an "organic, grassroots, bottom-up society by the oppressed and for the oppressed"?  It starts when local, small groups of the oppressed organize themselves into groups to provide the things they need for themselves which the rulers and owners of their society refuse to provide, or which they will only provide by charging a price which ordinary people can't afford.  These groups which are formed by the oppressed become the parallel institutions of the parallel society by the oppressed and for the oppressed.  And organizing these groups is like organizing a potluck - not like hosting a free lunch for free riders.  Moreover, these parallel institutions become a base of strength for the oppressed which enables them to organize the sustained collective withdrawal of economic and political cooperation from the oppressor's society.  It is this sustained, collective withdrawal of cooperation which shatters the oppressor's power and control.  

History is full of examples of this process in action, from the "constructive program" of Indian self-reliance organized by Gandhi against the British empire to the preparations for strikes and boycotts by the Black majority of South Africa which helped to end the apartheid regime in that country to the parallel institutions organized by the Polish against conquerors and oppressors in the 19th and 20th centuries.  Indeed, I might suggest that one sign that oppressed people have become liberated in their minds is that they begin to organize ways of taking care of themselves without relying on their oppressors, in order that they might then withdraw their labor from the continued support of the oppressor in order to break the oppressor.

We see far too little of this kind of organizing nowadays.  (It would be good to ask why.  More on that later.  Let's just say that this kind of organizing is the hardest kind there is at present.)  What we see instead among the oppressed are either masses of people who are apathetic and fatalistic in the face of their suffering, or we see people who put their hopes entirely in elections, even though they now live in countries in which the electoral process is breaking or has been broken.  Among those who trust in elections, there are "organizers" who seek to stand for the oppressed or for the environment or for something better than unrestrained predatory capitalism.  Their ethics are indeed worthy of praise.  But their strategy and tactics revolve around trying to organize political campaigns to get the right sort of people elected.  And their story of self/story of us/story of now dialogue with the people they try to recruit focuses on the short-term transactional goal of merely getting people to vote a certain way.  Their "dialogue" thus degenerates into a manipulative, slogan-laden monologue.  So the "collective action" of the people is reduced to merely casting a ballot once every few years, and once the ballot is cast, the "collective action" goes away - and has to be rebuilt almost from scratch during the next election cycle.  And the battle between the oppressors and those who seek change by means of political action becomes merely a battle between dueling emotive slogans.

Now I do believe that one of the duties of citizenship is to participate in the electoral process.  It is partly because of decent people who did not vote in 2016 that we had to suffer four years of Trump.  But voting is not the only characteristic of good citizenship.  And to rely on voting alone as a means of positive change is a grave mistake.  In democracies whose democratic processes are being sabotaged or have become broken, election seasons have become downright nasty.  (To me as a citizen of the United States, the last several election cycles have not been a time of hope or of joy but rather like a paroxysm of coughing during a long bout with pertussis or like one of the paroxysms of fever and chills which characterize a long bout of malaria!  Except that in this case, it's the Global Far Right that is the infectious agent.  And next year, here we go again...)

The kind of organizing which liberates the oppressed in their minds so that they begin to collectively take charge of their own destiny - this is the kind of organizing which truly transforms.  To quote Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, the true organizer must labor with the oppressed to forge a pedagogy of liberation - "a pedagogy which must be forged with, not for, the oppressed (whether individuals or peoples) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity.  This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation."  (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 48).  In other words, the organizer engages with the people he or she is trying to organize, in order to collectively create a "story of us" and a "story of now" by which the people thus organized begin to change their world.  

The organizer's task is to engage his or her people in an act of what Freire calls "problem-posing education", where "...people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation.  Although the dialectical relations of women and men with the world exist independently of how these relations are perceived (or whether or not they are perceived at all), it is also true that the form of action they adopt is to a large extent a function of how they perceive themselves in the world.  Hence, the teacher-student and the students-teachers reflect simultaneously on themselves and the world without dichotomizing this reflection from action, and thus establish an authentic form of thought and action."  (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 83)  To break this down into simpler pieces, the education of the oppressed should do the following:

• It should show the oppressed that the world is not just some static thing over which they have no control and to which they have no choice but to submit.
• It should enable the oppressed to see themselves and their relation to the world more accurately - not as mere objects acted upon by forces over which they have no control, but as people who have the power to act to change their reality.
• It should move the oppressed to begin acting on their reality, both as individuals and collectively, as a logical consequence of beginning to see themselves in the world more accurately.
• As part of this movement toward activity, it should lead the oppressed to more clearly see the present intolerable reality of their oppression.  To quote Freire (who quotes Marx), "Hay que hacer al opresion real todavia mas opresiva anadiendo a aquella loa conciencia de la opresion haciendo la infamia todavia mas infamante, al pregonarla."  ("It is necessary to make real oppression even more oppressive by adding to it the awareness of the oppression...")

And this change in consciousness is not something which the organizer shoves ready-made down the throats of his or her people, but something that arises as a result of dialogue as organizer and people engage in common reflection upon the world.

It is this patient work of consciousness-raising which is lacking from the work of many organizers who seek to reverse the rise of oppressive autocracy in the world today.  And while I have enjoyed my contact with the Leading Change Network over the last year or so, it seems to me that the members and teachers in this network have a surprisingly weak knowledge of this kind of organizing.  (For that matter, so do I.  But I do want to get stronger!)  This weakness of knowledge has led the LCN increasingly to organizational efforts which focus solely on electoral politics and whose tactics seem at times to be shifting away from bona fide organizing to mere mobilizing. 

It is because I want to strengthen my ability to do this consciousness-raising work that I am thinking of writing a series of blog posts exploring Paulo Freire's book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  This may be my next series.  Those who want to read along with me will, I am sure, be able to find online versions of the book if they want.  Otherwise, the book itself is not that expensive.  The aim of my exploration of this book will be to answer the question of how to lead oppressed people from passivity to the kind of activized consciousness that causes the oppressed to collectively take charge of their own destiny.  This movement is the beginning of any true liberation struggle.