Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Our society urgently requires that citizens become more conscious of their enslavement by corporate government and thereafter engage in a political revolution to reduce corporate control of the levers of democratic government. Bernie Sanders gets this and has since forever.
His campaign is directed at a bottom-up, grassroots development that would help him first win the nomination and general election and thereafter help him by placing populist pressure on the corporate old guard, both conservative and liberal. Bernie will not ditch the grassroots organization as Barack Obama had done, but use it to pressure for real democratic change.
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The Sanders campaign is indeed spreading like wildfire at the grassroots. The key to his growing success is that Bernie both preaches and practices personal empowerment. The corporatist agenda of both conservative and liberal wings during the 2016 election campaign will gradually be forced to yield before the explosive growth of people power.
Where does this approach of the Sanders campaign originate? All of American history consists of the relentless corporate drive to power. The founders envisaged a society based not on the Athenian democracy, but on the Roman model of an aristocratic republic with limited government and free commercial reign. There is nothing in the American elitist culture that would promote personal empowerment for all, grassroots democracy, and people power.
Nothing extraordinary, and certainly nothing exceptional, such is the way of the world. Perhaps we’ll do a diary one day on the 150-year history of the corporate takeover of the Supreme Court, which created the legal (ahem) framework for corporate government. Today though, we’ll do a bit of a historical review in order to understand the people power of democratic socialism.
The roots of the personal empowerment model of democratic socialism lie in the social history of southern Europe and Latin America during the 20th century. The 60s and 70s brought social foment to new heights across the globe. It gave rise in Latin America to Catholic liberation theology. This movement was staunchly opposed by the Vatican under conservative papacies, especially that of the Polish Pope, and the U.S.-led fascist dictatorships of the time in southern Europe and Latin America. Remember all the names?
Do you remember democratic-led Allende lost to a CIA coup in Chile, which gave us Pinochet’s horrors (not to mention the CIA coup of democratically-elected Mossadegh in Iran, which caused the eventual Islamic revolution)? Do you remember the conservative-corporatist dictators like Franco in Spain, Stroessner in Paraguay, Torrilos in Panama, Salazar in Portugal, and so forth? All the U.S.-led banana republics in Central America? Now, to be sure, the Soviets were just as busy installing dictators, but they’re not our concern, are they? Our concern is our societies.
Liberation theology pushed strongly for personal empowerment and people-powered, socialist democracies against the overwhelming power of the fascist dictators supported by the U.S.A. The primary method for progressive Catholics of engaging with peasants was conscientization. And this, they learned from Paulo Freire.
Paulo Freire
Paulo Freire (1921-1997) was a Brazilian educator; whose early work in the late 1950s and 60s gave the world the unpronounceable term “conscientization”, a direct translation of the Portuguese term
conscientização. A longer, but more pronounceable English translation is ‘consciousness-raising.’
Freire’s focus was literacy training for peasants in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco. During that period, adult literacy was a prerequisite for being allowed to vote in Brazil. As such, literacy was mostly used by the elites as a political tool. A U.S. comparison would be the segregationist education and Jim Crow laws.
Freire questioned the assumptions of traditional literacy training that treated adults exactly like children by giving them the Brazilian equivalent of “Dick and Jane” reading materials. Freire made the novel assumption that the peasant students were in fact intelligent adults who merely lacked the linguistic tools needed for reading and writing. So he used words and images from the peasant world in his literacy training courses. These referred to things like crops, tools and customs, but also to conflict-laden issues like land tenure and worker-supervisor relationships.
A typical literacy training session would begin with a picture of a scene from a typical life situation; for example, peasants harvesting a crop. The leader would simply ask, “What do we see here?” and encourage observations from the group. A facilitated discussion would develop, in which the participants would decode for themselves this pictorial codification of their life situation. After such a decoding session, the session would move to reading skills.
This was based on a series of generative words fundamental to their life situation. These words were elementary and it helps that Portuguese is a highly syllabic language. From a word such as papa, they would begin to build their own words by changing letters and syllables, for example pipa, which means pipe. The generative words were also related to generative themes – visual representations with strong emotional content, rooted in the life experience of peasants. These generative words and themes enabled people to open up and speak out on socio-political issues that mattered to them.
The power of conscientization was such that peasants often learned to read within a few weeks. Freire proved and extended his methods through Recife University and grassroots activists began to adopt conscientization as they organized communities for various causes. The 1964 Castelo Branco’s military coup in Brazil, however, cut short the literacy training programmes. As one can imagine, in the midst of the Cold War most such programmes were branded as Marxists, fairly or not. Freire went into exile to Chile, where he continued to work with a UNESCO agrarian reform programme. However, his ideas and methods spread across the continent until he was eventually able to return to Brazil in 1980 and continue his work in a more amenable setting.
The novelty of Freire’s approach lay in its philosophical reversal of the traditional, top-down approach in which the teacher, who “knows,” imparts knowledge to those who are presumed ignorant. In his influential book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972), Freire contrasted his methods with what he called the “banking” concept of education, which approached peasant learners as empty recipients into whom knowledge must be deposited. The book went through numerous printings, despite being subject to embargoes by many Latin American governments, as well that that of Spain and Portugal.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Freire’s literacy training, on the other hand, not only taught peasants to read, but also simultaneously enabled them to name and to characterize their life situation. Maria Berman Ramos, the translator of
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, defined it as follows:
Conscientization is learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality.
One can see why his book was often banned by repressive regimes from Spain to many South American conservative-corporatist dictatorships.
Freire insisted that the experience of injustice, exploitation, and violence dehumanized both oppressed and oppressor. The challenge for oppressed people, he said, is not to become that which they oppose as they struggle to overcome injustice. Freire said it is the great task of the oppressed “to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well.”
He cautioned those who looked to violence as a solution:
Many of the oppressed, who, directly or indirectly participate in revolution intend – conditioned by the old myths of the old order – to make it their private revolution. The shadow of their former oppressor is still cast over them.
(1972, p.30.)
Paulo Freire’s philosophy of education profited from the work of Erich Fromm, the humanist psychologist, and that of Frantz Fanon, the French psychiatrist who had fought in the Algerian war of independence against colonial France. Freire aimed to help people confront their fear of freedom and “discover that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization.”
Frantz Fanon
Freire’s work was also influential amongst the progressive segment of the Catholic Church in Latin America. For example, in
The Militant Gospel: A Critical Introduction to Political Theologies, the Spanish theologian Alfredo Fierro discussed the “many affinities” between conscientization and liberation theology.
Author Phillip Berryman was a pastoral worker in Panama during the 1960s and a social justice worker in Latin America during the 1970s for the Quaker organization called the American Friends Service Committee. Berryman described in one of his books, Liberation Theology: Essential Facts about the Revolutionary Movement in Latin America and Beyond (1987), the power of conscientization.
It provided a model in which outsiders - such as church people, social workers, as well as labour and political organizers - could interact with the local population in a non-paternalistic way, as Berryman said, “whether directly through literacy classes or in helping a community to come together, articulate its needs, and become organized.”
Paulo Freire was focused on non-violent resistance to injustice through the unlimited power of conscientization. His educational work was grounded in his progressive Catholic spirituality. He inspired numerous others, made a difference in many communities, and energized one segment of a Christianity that had long ago lost the vital connection to its countercultural origins.
Freire’s own personal commitment to becoming, in Thoreau’s immortal phrase, a “counter-friction to stop the machine” was based on his convictions as a freethinking follower of Jesus of Galilee. Freire once gave a radio talk in Rome in 1970, subsequently published in a booklet called “Conscientization as a Way of Liberating” (1971).
There he displayed a poignant humility, saying that he was "not yet completely a Catholic, but I keep on trying to be one, more completely, day by day.”
He said something that reverberated through my being when I read the interview transcript back in the day.
Conscientization was a summons for a church that must not forget that it is called by its origin to die shivering in the cold.
Paulo Freire lived a consequential life and grassroots democratic movements owe him a debt of remembrance. His influence reached small proportions of North Americans through the progressive segments of the Catholic Church, academia, and Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking immigrants. Conscientization and liberation theology lay dormant in progressive subcultures such as worker’s movements, civil rights movements, and democratic socialists like Bernie and other progressives. Today, the Bernie Sanders campaign practices conscientization for Americans and is a model for the world to follow.
Now that everyone can see Bernie is for real, the concern trolls in the media ponder wistfully about Bernie’s infrastructure deficiencies, such as money and staff and whatnot. Supposedly, Clinton II’s massive infrastructure and institutional support, not to mention the inevitability fairy, makes it impossible for Bernie to win the nomination. None of them seriously entertain people power created by conscientization, personal empowerment, and grassroots community support.
Heh, heh, heh.
Thanks for reading. I look forward to any comment you may have and a conversation about the potential of people power, personal empowerment, and conscientization in the 2016 election.