Paulo Freire and Popular Struggle in South Africa

By Zamalotshwa Sefatsa

Republished from The Tricontinental.

Paulo Freire was a radical educator from Brazil whose work was tied to struggles for human freedom and dignity. He constantly experimented with and thought about how to connect learning and teaching among the poor and oppressed with the radical transformation of society. For Freire, this meant struggling for a world where everyone counts equally and is treated with dignity–a world in which economic and political power are radically democratised.

This dossier, which draws on interviews with participants in a range of struggles in South Africa, shows that Freire’s ideas have been an important influence in the Black Consciousness Movement, the trade union movement, and some of the organisations associated with the United Democratic Front (UDF). His ideas remain influential today, from trade unions to grassroots struggles.

From Brazil to Africa

Freire was born in Recife, a city in north eastern Brazil, in 1921. After his university studies, he became a schoolteacher and began to develop an interest in radical approaches to education, including projects to teach adult literacy. Freire saw the role of community and worker organisations and struggles as vital in the formation of the critical conscience that is required to overcome the domination and dependence of the oppressed.

In Freire’s early works, he wrote that the fundamental goal of radical pedagogy is to develop a critical conscience in individuals. The method of dialogical engagement that he developed from the 1950s onwards became an emancipatory and progressive alternative to the dominant school programmes sponsored by the U.S. government through agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an organisation that is notorious for backing coups against elected governments in Latin America and elsewhere.

In 1964, the Brazilian military seized control of the country with the backing of the United States and imposed a brutal right-wing dictatorship. Freire was among the many people arrested by the dictatorship. After seventy days in prison, he was released and forced to leave the country.

During his years in exile, he continued to carry out his practical work in other countries in Latin America, such as Chile, where he wrote his most important book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and developed adult literacy programmes. He also had significant contact with African freedom struggles. During this time, he visited Zambia, Tanzania, Guinea-Bissau, Sao Tome and Principe, Angola, and Cape Verde. He met with The People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo), and the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). He developed adult literacy programmes in Guinea-Bissau, Tanzania, and Angola.

Freire read extensively about colonisation and its effects on the people, including the writings of African revolutionary intellectuals like Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral. He felt a special connection to Africa and wrote that ‘[a]s a man from north-eastern Brazil, I was somewhat culturally tied to Africa, particularly to those countries that were unfortunate enough to be colonised by Portugal’.

Freire was also deeply critical of the capitalist system, which exploits and dominates the bodies and minds of the oppressed, and is a major force generating the material and ideological conditions that shape the domination of consciousness. This domination–which, of course, is entwined with racism and sexism–can seep into our being, our actions, and the way that we see the world. Freire argued that learning to fight to overcome domination is difficult but essential political work that requires constant learning.

Freire’s emphasis on the importance of dialogue as the basis for critical consciousness, and his stress on the essential role of popular struggle and organisation, both became important tools in grassroots struggles in Brazil during the 1970s and 1980s. In this period in Latin America in general, and Brazil in particular, popular education became synonymous with popular movements that used it as their main educational strategy, uniting political practice and learning processes.

In 1980, Freire returned to Brazil, where he became active in the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores). When the party took control of São Paulo (one of the largest cities in the world) in 1988, he was appointed as the city’s secretary of education. He remained in this position until 1991. He died in 1997.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

In 1968, whilst he was in exile in Chile, Freire wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed. During that year, youth revolts took place around the world. In France, where the revolt was most intense, many young people began to look at the intellectual work produced in the armed struggles against French colonialism in Vietnam and Algeria —including Fanon’s work on the Algerian revolution. This turn to Fanon influenced Freire too. In 1987, Freire recalled that ‘[a] young man who was in Santiago on a political task gave me the book The Wretched of the Earth. I was writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and the book was almost finished when I read Fanon. I had to rewrite the book’. Freire was deeply influenced by Fanon’s radical humanism, his thinking about the role of university-trained intellectuals in popular struggles, and his warnings about how an elite among the oppressed could become new oppressors.

Freire would write many books in the years to come, but it is Pedagogy of the Oppressed that quickly became and has remained a revolutionary classic. This book has had a powerful impact on popular movements around the world and remains the best introduction to Freire’s ideas.

In a talk given in Durban in 1988, Neville Alexander, who was an important radical intellectual in many fields, including education, explained that: ‘[f]or Freire, the decisive difference between animals and human beings consisted in the ability of the latter to reflect directly on their activity. This ability is, for him, the unique attribute of human consciousness and self-conscious existence and is what makes it possible for people to change their situation’. In other words, for Freire, all people are capable of thought, and critical thought, undertaken collectively, is the basis of organisation and struggle.

Freire argued that oppression dehumanises everyone–both the oppressed and the oppressor–and that emancipatory forms of politics–the strivings of the oppressed for freedom and justice–are, ultimately, a demand ‘for the affirmation of men and women as persons’. He would write that ‘[t]his, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well’.

But, for Freire, there is a danger that the person who is oppressed and wants to be free can come to believe that, to be free, she or he must become like the oppressor: ‘Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors’.(1) Freire believed that political education during a struggle is important in order to help prevent the elites among the oppressed from becoming new oppressors, warning that ‘[w]hen education is not liberatory, the dream of the oppressed is to be the oppressor’.

For Freire, the point of freedom is to allow everyone to be fully human; the struggle for freedom must end all oppression. It must be for the liberation of everyone, everywhere, and not just for some. But, he said, there are many different reasons why the oppressed do not always see this clearly. Sometimes the oppressed do not see that they are oppressed because they have been taught to believe that the way things are is ‘normal’ or is their fault. For example, they are taught to believe that they are poor because they do not have enough education, or that others are rich because they have worked harder. Sometimes, they are taught to blame something else (such as ‘the economy’) or someone else (such as ‘foreigners’) for their poverty.

True liberation must start by seeing clearly how things really are. For Freire, this is why radical and collective questioning, discussion, and learning are so important. He argued that, by thinking carefully and critically about how things really are (our actual lives and experiences), we can come to see oppression more accurately so that we can fight more effectively to end it.

The political work of encouraging critical thinking about our situation does not mean encouraging people to just criticise everything; it means always going beyond how things seem by constantly asking questions–especially by asking ‘why?’–to understand the root causes of why things are the way they are, especially things we feel strongly about. Asking questions allows people to draw on their own lived experience and thinking to find their own answers to the question of why they face situations of oppression or injustice. This is very different from traditional education that tries to fill the (apparently empty!) heads of the learners with knowledge that the powerful teacher thinks they need. Freire wrote that ‘[p]rojecting an absolute ignorance onto others [is] a characteristic of the ideology of oppression’. He called the model of education that assumes that the teacher has all the knowledge and the students have none the ‘banking’ concept of education and likened it to a teacher making deposits into an empty bank account. Freire wrote that:

The man or woman who proclaims devotion to the cause of liberation yet is unable to enter into communion with the people, whom he or she continues to regard as totally ignorant, is grievously self-deceived. The convert who approaches the people but feels alarm at each step they take, each doubt they express, and each suggestion they offer, and attempts to impose his ‘status,’ remains nostalgic towards his origins.

This is very different from many political education programmes organised by NGOs or small sectarian political groups which assume that the oppressed are ignorant and incapable of thought and that they will bring knowledge to the people. Freire argued that ‘[l]eaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organise the people–they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress’.

Freire also realised that people cannot change situations of oppression and injustice on their own. This means that the struggle for liberation must be collective. He suggested that what he called an ‘animator’ could help. An ‘animator’ may come from outside the life situation of the poor and oppressed but plays a role that helps to encourage the thinking and the life and strength of the people who are in that situation. An animator does not work to assert their own power over the oppressed. An animator works to create a community of inquiry in which everyone can contribute to developing knowledge, and the democratic power of the oppressed can be built. To do this effectively requires humility and love; it is crucial that an animator enters into the lives and world of the poor and oppressed and, in doing so, enters into a true dialogue as equals.

Freire wrote that:

[T]he more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.

In genuine dialogue, both the animator and the learners from among the oppressed bring something to this process. Through this dialogue, and through careful, collective, and critical reflection on lived experience, both the learners from among the oppressed and the animator come to be ‘conscientised’; in other words, they come to really understand the nature of oppression. But, for Freire, it is no good to just understand the world; ‘[i]t is necessary that the weakness of the powerless is transformed into a force capable of announcing justice’.

This action against oppression must always be tied together with careful thinking (reflection) on action, and what has happened as a result of action. Action and reflection are part of an ongoing cycle of transformation that Freire, following Karl Marx, called ‘praxis’.

The Importance of Freire’s Thought in South Africa

Paulo Freire was the key theoretician if you like. But we needed to bring Paulo Freire back from Brazil to the South African context. We knew nothing about Brazil of course except what we were reading. I don’t know of any similar text that we could have used in South Africa then as a way of understanding and engaging the South African context.

— Barney Pityana, a leading intellectual in the Black Consciousness Movement

Though Freire visited many countries in Africa, the apartheid state would not have allowed him to visit South Africa. However, he does discuss South Africa in his books and describes how South African anti-apartheid activists came to see him to talk about his work and what it meant in the South African context. Many of the organisations and movements involved in the anti-apartheid struggle used Freire’s thinking and methods.

The Black Consciousness Movement

Although the apartheid state banned Pedagogy of the Oppressed, underground copies circulated. By the early 1970s, Freire’s work was already being used within South Africa. Leslie Hadfield, an academic who has written about the use of Freire’s work by the Black Consciousness Movement, argues that the Pedagogy of the Oppressed first arrived in South Africa in the early 1970s via the University Christian Movement (UCM), which began to run Freire-inspired literacy projects. The UCM worked closely with the South African Students’ Organisation (Saso), which was founded in 1968 by Steve Biko, along with other figures like Barney Pityana and Aubrey Mokoape. Saso was the first of a series of organisations that, together, made up the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM).

Anne Hope, a Christian radical from Johannesburg and a member of the Grail, a Christian women’s organisation committed to ‘a world transformed in love and justice’, met Freire at Harvard University in Boston in 1969, and then again in Tanzania. After she returned to South Africa in 1971, Biko asked her to work with the Saso leadership for six months on Freire’s participatory methods. Biko and fourteen other activists were trained in Freirean methods in monthly workshops. Bennie Khoapa, a significant figure in the BCM, recalled that ‘Paulo Freire … made a lasting philosophical impression on Steve Biko’.

Between these workshops, the activists went out to do community-based research as part of a process of conscientisation. Barney Pityana remembers that:

Anne Hope would run what essentially was literacy training, but it was literacy training of a different kind because it was Paulo Freirean literacy training that was really taking human experience into the way of understanding concepts. It was drawing from everyday experience and understanding: what impacts it makes in the mind, the learning and understanding that they had.

For some of us, I suspect it was the first time that we came across Paulo Freire; for me it certainly was, but Steve, Steve Biko was a very diverse reading person, lots of things that Steve knew, we didn’t know. And so, in his reading he came across Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and began to apply it in his explanation of the oppressive system in South Africa.

Echoing Freire’s argument that it is only the oppressed who can liberate everyone, the BCM emphasised the importance of black people leading the struggle against apartheid. Freire had also stressed that, ‘[w]ithout a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle’. This, too, resonated with the BCM, which affirmed a proud and strong black identity against white supremacy.

The movement drew directly on Freire as it developed a constant process of critical reflection, part of an ongoing project of conscientisation. Aubrey Mokoape, who had a background in the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) and became an older mentor to the students who founded Saso, explains that the link between Black Consciousness and ‘conscientisation’ is clear:

The only way to overthrow this government is to get the mass of our people understanding what we want to do and owning the process, in other words, becoming conscious of their position in society, in other words … joining the dots, understanding that if you don’t have money to pay … for your child’s school fees, fees at medical school, you do not have adequate housing, you have poor transport, how those things all form a single continuum; that all those things are actually connected. They are embedded in the system, that your position in society is not isolated but it is systemic.

The Church

In 1972, Biko and Bokwe Mafuna (who had been part of the training in Freirean methods) were employed as field officers by Bennie Khoapa. Khoapa was the head of the South African Council of Churches (SACC) and the Christian Institute’s Black Community Projects (BCP) and had also been trained in Freirean methods. The BCP’s work was heavily influenced by Freire. Both the BCM and the Christian Churches in South Africa drew on liberation theology, a school of radical thought which Freire had both been influenced by and contributed to. Rubin Phillip, who was elected as deputy president of Saso in 1972, and went on to become an Anglican archbishop, explains that:

Paulo Freire is considered one of the founders of liberation theology. He was a Christian who lived his faith in a liberating way. Paulo placed the poor and oppressed at the centre of his method, which is important in the concept of the preferential option for the poor, a trademark of liberation theology.

In South Africa, ideas drawn from liberation theology were–together with the black liberation theology developed by James H. Cone in the United States–a powerful influence on various currents of struggle. Bishop Rubin recalls that:

The one thing I took away from our conversation was a need to be critical thinkers. … Liberation theologians allude that theology, like education, should be for liberation, not domestication. Religion made us subservient, has made us lazy to use our critical faculty and connect knowledge to our everyday reality. So, education for him is about …. a critical way of life and about connecting knowledge to how we live.

The Workers’ Movement

The Black Consciousness Movement included workers’ organisations like the Black Workers’ Project, a joint project between the BCP and Saso. The workers’ movement was also influenced by Freirean ideas through worker education projects that started in the 1970s. One of these was the Urban Training Programme (UTP), which used the Young Christian Workers’ See-Judge-Act methodology, which had influenced Freire’s own thinking and methodology. The UTP used this method to encourage workers to reflect on their everyday experiences, think about what they could do about their situation, and then act to change the world. Other worker education projects were started by left students in and around the National Union of South African Students (Nusas). Saso had split from Nusas in 1968 but, although largely white, Nusas was a consciously anti-apartheid organisation that was also influenced by Freire, primarily through members who were also part of the UCM.

During the 1970s, Wages Commissions were set up at the University of Natal, the University of the Witwatersrand, and the University of Cape Town. Using the resources of the universities and some progressive unions, the Commissions helped to set up structures that led to the formation of the Western Province Workers’ Advice Bureau (WPWAB) in Cape Town, the General Factory Workers’ Benefit Fund (GFWBF) in Durban, and the Industrial Aid Society (IAS) in Johannesburg. A number of left students supported these initiatives, as did some older trade unionists, such as Harriet Bolton in Durban. In Durban, Rick Turner, a radical academic whose teaching style was influenced by Freire, became an influential figure among a number of students. Turner was committed to a future rooted in participatory democracy and many of his students became committed activists.

David Hemson, a participant in this milieu, explains that:

Two particular minds were at work, one [Turner] in a wood and iron house in Bellair; and another [Biko] in the shadow of the reeking, rumbling Wentworth oil refinery in the Alan Taylor residence. Both would become close friends and both would die at the hands of the apartheid security apparatus after bursts of energetic writing and political engagement. Both were influenced by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and these ideas and concepts infused and were woven into their writings striving for freedom.

Omar Badsha was one of the students who was close to Turner and participated in setting up the Institute for Industrial Education (IIE). He recalls that:

Rick Turner was very interested in education, and like any intellectual we began reading, and one of the texts we read was Paulo Freire’s book that had just come out not so long ago at the time. And this book resonated with us in the sense that here were some valuable ideas about teaching and an affirmative way of teaching–taking into account the audience and how to relate with the audience.

In January 1973, workers across Durban went on strike, an event that is now seen as a major turning point in worker organisation and resistance to apartheid. Hemson recalls that:

Out of the dawn they streamed, from the barrack-like hostels of Coronation Bricks, the expansive textile mills of Pinetown, the municipal compounds, great factories, mills and plants and the lesser Five Roses tea processing plant. The downtrodden and exploited rose to their feet and hammered the bosses and their regime. Only in the group, the assembled pickets, the leaderless mass meetings of strikers, the gatherings of locked out workers did the individual expression have confidence. The solid order of apartheid cracked and new freedoms were born. New concepts took human form: the weaver became the shop steward, a mass organised overtook the unorganised, the textile trainer a dedicated trade unionist, the shy older man a reborn Congress veteran, a sweeper a defined general worker.

After the Durban Moment

The period in Durban before and during the 1973 strikes came to be known as the Durban Moment. With Biko and Turner as its two charismatic figures, this was a time of important political creativity that laid the foundations for much of the struggle to come.

But in March 1973, the state banned Biko and Turner, along with several BCM and Nusas leaders, including Rubin Phillip. Despite this, as unions were formed in the wake of the strikes, a number of university-trained intellectuals, often influenced by Freire, began working in and with the unions, which made rapid advances. In 1976, the Soweto revolt, which was directly influenced by Black Consciousness, opened a new chapter in the struggle and shifted the centre of contestation to Johannesburg.

Biko was murdered in police custody in 1977, after which the Black Consciousness organisations were banned. In the following year, Turner was assassinated.

In 1979, a number of unions were united into the Federation of South African Trade Unions (Fosatu), which was–in the spirit of the Durban Moment–strongly committed to democratic workers’ control in unions and on the shop floor, as well as the political empowerment of shop stewards.

In 1983, the United Democratic Front (UDF) was formed in Cape Town. It united community-based organisations across the country with a commitment to bottom-up democratic praxis in the present and a vision of a radically democratic future after apartheid. By the mid 1980s, millions of people were mobilised through the UDF and the trade union movement, which became federated through the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) in 1985.

Throughout this period, Freirean ideas absorbed and developed in the Durban Moment were often central to thinking about political education and praxis. Anne Hope and Sally Timmel wrote Training for Transformation, a three-volume workbook that aimed to apply Freire’s methods for developing radical praxis in the context of emancipatory struggles in Southern Africa. The first volume was published in Zimbabwe in 1984. It was swiftly banned in South Africa but was widely circulated underground. Training for Transformation was used in political education work in both the trade union movement and the community-based struggles that were linked together through the UDF.

Salim Vally, an activist and academic, recalls that ‘literacy groups of the 80s, some pre-school groups, worker education and people’s education movements were deeply influenced by Freire’. The South African Committee for Higher Education (Sached) also came to be strongly influenced by Freire. The Committee, first formed in 1959 in opposition to the apartheid state’s enforcement of segregation at universities, provided educational support to trade unions and community-based movements in the 1980s. Vally notes that ‘Neville Alexander always discussed Freire in Sached–he was the Cape Town director–and in other education circles he was involved in. John Samuels–the national director of Sached–met Freire in Geneva’.

From 1986, the idea of ‘people’s power’ became very important in popular struggles, but practices and understandings of what this meant varied widely. Some saw the people as a battering ram clearing the way for the ANC to return from exile and the underground and take power over society. Others thought that building democratic practices and structures in trade unions and community organisations marked the beginning of the work required to build a post-apartheid future in which participatory democracy would be deeply entrenched in ordinary life–in workplaces, communities, schools, universities, etc. This was what was meant by the trade union slogan ‘building tomorrow today’.

Though there were strong Freirean currents in this period, they were significantly weakened by the militarisation of politics in the late 1980s, and more so when the ban on the ANC was lifted in 1990. The return of the ANC from exile and the underground led to a deliberate demobilisation of community-based struggles and the direct subordination of the trade union movement to the authority of the ANC. The situation was not unlike that described by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth:

Today, the party’s mission is to deliver to the people the instructions which issue from the summit. There no longer exists the fruitful give-and-take from the bottom to the top and from the top to the bottom which creates and guarantees democracy in a party. Quite on the contrary, the party has made itself into a screen between the masses and the leaders.

Paulo Freire Today

Freirean ideas continued to thrive after apartheid in some of the fissures of the new order. For instance, in the early years of the democratic dispensation, the Workers’ College in Durban, a trade union education project, included some teachers who were committed to Freirean methods. Mabogo More, a philosopher with a background in the Black Consciousness Movement, was one of these teachers. He recalls that he first came to know about Freire as a student at The University of the North (also known as ‘Turfloop’) in the 1970s ‘through Saso’s concept of “conscientisation” used during formation winter schools organised by Saso. Later, S’bu Ndebele, a Turfloop librarian at the time, smuggled a copy of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which, together with Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, we surreptitiously read among ourselves as conscientised students’.

In 1994, More was able to attend a lecture by Freire at Harvard University in the United States. He says that ‘Freire’s lecture was fascinating and helped in modelling my teaching practice in line with the precepts articulated in Pedagogy of the Oppressed’.

Today, a number of organisations remain committed to Freirean methods, such as the Umtapo Centre in Durban. The Centre was started in Durban in 1986 as a response to the rise of political violence within black communities. It has roots in the Black Consciousness Movement and its work is explicitly based on Freire’s methodology.

Another organisation that uses Freire’s ideas is the Church Land Programme (CLP) in Pietermaritzburg, which has its roots in the liberation theology tradition and is closely linked to Bishop Rubin, Abahlali baseMjondolo, and a number of other grassroots organisations and struggles. CLP was established in 1996 in response to the land reform process taking place in South Africa and became an independent organisation in 1997. By the early 2000s, CLP realised that the struggle against apartheid had not led to an end to oppression, that the state’s land reform programme was not taking an emancipatory direction, and that its own work was not helping to end oppression. Therefore, CLP decided to incorporate Freire’s idea of animation and enter into solidarity with new struggles.

Zodwa Nsibande, an animator with CLP, says that:

In our engagements, we let people think because we do not want to take their agency. We ask probing questions to get people to think about their lived experiences. We embrace Paulo Freire’s thinking when he said that ‘problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming’. When we engage with communities using problem-posing methodologies, we seek to give them their power. Sibabuyisele isithunzi sabo, ngoba sikholwa ukuthi ngenkathi umcindezeli ecindezela ususa isthunzi somcindezelwa. Thina sibuyisela isithunzi somcindezelwa esisuswa yisihluku sokucindezelwa [We restore their dignity, for we believe that when the oppressor oppresses, he takes the dignity of the oppressed. We restore the dignity of the oppressed that is taken by the cruelty of oppression].

In recent years, connections to the Landless Workers’ Movement, or the Movimento Sem Terra (MST), in Brazil have reenergised the potency of Freire’s ideas in South Africa. Formed in 1984, the MST has mobilised millions of people and organised thousands of occupations of unproductive land. The organisation has built close relationships with the National Union of Metalworkers in South Africa (Numsa), the largest trade union in South Africa, and with Abahlali baseMjondolo, the country’s largest popular movement. This has meant that a number of activists from Numsa and Abahlali baseMjondolo have been able to participate in the programmes at the Florestan Fernandes National School (ENFF), the MST’s political education school.

There are direct connections between activists’ experiences at the ENFF and the establishment of political schools in South Africa, such as The Frantz Fanon Political School built and managed by Abahlali baseMjondolo on the eKhenana Land Occupation in Durban.

Vuyolwethu Toli, who is the Numsa JC Bez Regional Education Officer, explains that:

The schooling systems in South Africa and throughout the world use the banking method of education where there aren’t reciprocal or mutual learning processes. The teacher, or whoever is facilitating, positions themself as the dominant knowledge disseminator where they see themself as having a monopoly of wisdom. As comrades responsible for popular education in the trade union, we do not operate like this. We make sure there is collective knowledge production and that all sessions are informed by workers’ lived experiences. Our point of departure is that worker knowledge informs the content and not the other way around. We don’t believe in the banking method of education.

Freire’s ideas, first generated in Brazil, have influenced struggles all over the world. Almost fifty years after they began to influence intellectuals and movements in South Africa, they remain relevant and powerful. The work of conscientisation is a permanent commitment, a way of life. As Aubrey Mokoape said, ‘[c]onsciousness has no end. And consciousness has no real beginning’.

Acknowledgements

This dossier was researched and written by Zamalotshwa Sefatsa.

We would like to thank the following people for agreeing to be interviewed for this dossier:

Omar Badsha, Judy Favish, David Hemson, Aubrey Mokoape, Mabogo More, Zodwa Nsibande, David Ntseng, John Pampallis, Bishop Rubin Phillip, Barney Pityana, Patricia (Pat) Horn, Vuyolwethu Toli, Salim Vally, and S’bu Zikode.

We would also like to thank the following organisations for contributing to the research that informed this dossier:

Abahlali baseMjondolo, The Church Land Programme, Levante Popular da Juventude (‘Popular Youth Uprising’), The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, The Paulo Freire National School, and The Umtapo Centre.

We would also like to thank Anne Harley, whose pioneering work on Freire’s ideas in South Africa opened the door for much of the work done here, and who offered generous support to the production of this dossier.

Further Reading

Biko, Steve. I Write What I Like. Johannesburg: Raven Press. 1996.

Friedman, Steven. Building Tomorrow Today: African Workers in Trade Unions, 1970-1984. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.1987

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin. 1976.

Freire, Paulo. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin. 1993.

Freire, Paulo and Macedo, Donaldo. (1987). Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. Routledge. 1987.

Hadfield, Leslie. Liberation and Development: Black Consciousness Community Programs in South Africa. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. 1996

Macqueen, Ian. Black Consciousness and Progressive Movements under Apartheid. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008

Magaziner, Dan. The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968-1977. Johannesburg: Jacana. 2008

More, Mabogo. Philosophy, Identity and Liberation. Pretoria: HSRC Press. 2017.

Pityana, Barney; Ramphele, Mamphele; Mpumlwana, Malusi and Wilson, Lindy (Eds.) Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko & Black Consciousness. David Philip, Cape Town. 2006.

Turner, Rick. The Eye of the Needle: Towards Participatory Democracy in South Africa. Johannesburg. Ravan Press. 1980.

Notes

1. In reading Freire’s writings and his use of gendered language such as ‘men’ to mean ‘human’, which was still common in the late 1960s, we must undertake the intellectual exercise of entering into dialogue with his gendered forms of expression with the aim of critical reflection and developing emancipatory alternatives.

About The Tricontinental

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is an international, movement-driven institution that carries out empirically based research guided by political movements. We seek to bridge gaps in our knowledge about the political economy as well as social hierarchy that will facilitate the work of our political movements and involve ourselves in the “battle of ideas” to fight against bourgeois ideology that has swept through intellectual institutions from the academy to the media.

Late-Stage Capitalism and the Pedagogical Resurgence of Anti-Fascism

By Colin Jenkins

This essay originally appeared in Keywords in Radical Philosophy and Education: Common Concepts for Contemporary Movements (2019, BRILL)

Social unrest is a daily part of American life. Between the alarming regularity of mass killings and school shootings and the violent street clashes between right-wing fascists and left-wing anti-fascists, it seems as though America’s chickens are finally coming home to roost. Despite its uniqueness, the United States is heading down the same path as so many hegemonic empires of the past, quickly approaching its demise through a combination of exhaustive military campaigns abroad and chronic neglect of a majority of its citizenry at home. Mainstream American culture is inadvertently responding to its empire’s demise. Dystopian-based “entertainment” is on the rise again, millennials are abandoning the traditional American lifestyle en masse, virtual lives based in gaming culture and social media have seemingly grabbed a hold of many wishing to escape and withdraw from the drudgery of real life, and political poles are becoming more polarized as extremist centrism intensifies to protect the status quo.

While many recognize that something is wrong, most have difficulties pinpointing what it is, let alone what is causing it. The pronounced social unrest and emergence of mainstream nihilism have sparked a cavalcade of typical, cutesy, click-bait articles online, claiming “millennials are killing [insert here]” and pushing for “minimalist lifestyles” while hawking shipping-container homes, and superficial corporate news analysis which resembles more of tabloid “journalism” than anything approaching substance. Even so-called “progressive” movements that have formed within this climate, such as Black Lives Matter, the Poor People’s Campaign, and the Women’s March, have failed to reach a substantive level of resistance by ignoring the roots of the people’s problems while insisting on operating within the narrow confines of the mainstream political arena.

The good news is that these social phenomena are not mysterious forces rising out of thin air. They have roots. They have causes. And with multiple political forces coming to a head, many are starting to not only search for these causes, but are starting to identify them. The sudden resurgence of socialism in the United States – after laying dormant since the counterinsurgency of the US government during the 1960s, which resulted in violent state repression against radical resistance groups, the subsequent “Reagan revolution” and rise of the neoliberal era, and Francis Fukuyama’s infamous suggestion that “history had ended” — signifies a much-needed counter to capitalist culture. The wave of counter-hegemony that has come with it defies capitalism’s insistence that we are nothing but commodities — laborers and consumers born to serve as conduits to the rapid upward flow of profit — and has begun to construct a wall against the spread of fascism that is inevitable with late-stage capitalism, as well as a battering ram that seeks to bring this system to its knees once and for all.

Capitalism’s Destructive Path

Humanity has been on a collision course with the capitalist system since its inception. While Marx’s famous prediction that capitalists would eventually serve as their own gravediggers has been delayed by a multitude of unforeseen forces, most notably the overwhelming power and adaptability of the imperialist and capitalist state, it is nonetheless charging toward fruition. As the term “late-stage capitalism” has become widely used among the American Left, it is important to understand what it is referring to. This understanding may only come through systemic and historical analysis, and especially that of the basic mechanisms of capitalism, the social and economic conditions that birthed capitalism, and the subsequent stages of capitalism over the past few centuries.

Referring to capitalism as being in a “late stage” is based on the understanding that the system – with all of its internal contradictions, its tendency to concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a few, and its increased reliance on imperialism and domestic control – is nearing an inevitable implosion. However, the implication that capitalism naturally develops on a path toward fascism is both accurate and potentially misleading. On one hand, this idea suggests that capitalism, in its most basic state of operating, does not already possess inherent fascistic qualities. This is incorrect, and it’s important to understand this. Capitalism, in its orthodoxy, is a system that relies on authoritative, controlling, and exploitative relationships, most notably between that of capitalists and workers. The latter, in its need to survive, must submit itself to wage labor. The former, in its wanting to accumulate a constant flow of profit, uses wage labor as a way to steal productivity from the worker in a perpetual cycle that moves wealth upwards into a relatively tiny sector of the population, while simultaneously impoverishing the masses below. Scientific socialists have always known this to be true, and now that the trickery of “trickle-down economics” has been exposed, many others are beginning to realize it.

Capitalism’s authoritative tendencies are far-reaching throughout a society’s development. Because of this, the system has relied upon and reproduced social inequities that fortify its economic woes. Friedrich Engels touched on its effects for the family unit in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Silvia Federici brilliantly illustrated its reliance on patriarchy in Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, the emergence of social reproduction theory has provided insight on the layers of exploitation that effect women in the home, and many have written about the cozy relationship between capitalism and white supremacy, most importantly noting that the system’s birth in the Americas relied heavily upon the racialized chattel slave system. In fact, it is impossible to accurately discuss the inherent problems of capitalism without discussing its propensity to drive social oppression in a variety of forms. If oppression can be defined as “the absence of choices,” as bell hooks once said, then our default status as members of the proletariat is oppression. And when compounded with other social constructs such as patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and able-bodiedness, this oppression becomes even more pronounced and marginalizing.

The inherent fascism built into capitalism is rooted in wage labor, which is maintained through coercive means. This coercion that drives capitalism comes from the dispossession of the masses of people from not only the means of production, but also from the means to sustenance and land. The Enclosure Acts tell us all we need to know about this foundation. The fact that feudal peasants had to be forced to participate in wage labor through a legislative destruction of the commons, which kicked them off the land and immediately transformed human needs from basic rights to commodities, says a lot about the requisite landscape of a capitalist system. As such, feudal peasants in Europe viewed capitalism as a downgrade. They were consequently prodded into factories and mills like cattle. In many other parts of the world, stripping entire populations of sustenance for the sake of private property was unheard of. Yet capitalism required this mass dispossession in order to proceed on its desired path. Thus, “between 1604 and 1914, over 5,200 individual enclosure acts were passed, covering 6.8 million acres of land,” all designed to systematically erase the idea of common land. (Parliament of UK)

Understanding that capitalism is a system built on a foundation of oppression, and that it operates on natural internal mechanisms of coercion and exploitation, allows us to also understand that its development has not created these qualities, but rather intensified them. Therefore, the idea of “late-stage capitalism” makes sense from an analytical point of view, as it simply refers to an evolutionary path that has brought its nature to the forefront and, most importantly, in doing so, has resulted in severe consequences for the majority of the global population. And whether we’re talking about late-stage capitalism, or monopoly capitalism, or corporate capitalism, or “crony capitalism,” it all refers to the same thing: capitalism’s natural conclusion. A natural conclusion that is a breeding ground for fascism.

Realizing Fascism

“When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto its privileges.” - Buenaventura Durruti

There are many definitions and aspects of and to fascism, but perhaps the best way to identify it is as an effect. In terms of capitalism, the development and strengthening of fascistic tendencies are tied directly to the sociopolitical structures that form in its defense. Or as Samir Amin puts it, “Fascism is a particular political response to the challenges with which the management of capitalist society may be confronted in specific circumstances.” (Amin, 2014) But this only describes one of the major aspects of fascism – that being the systemic and structural; or more specifically, the capitalist system and the capitalist state that naturally forms to protect and promote it. There is also a cultural aspect to fascism that forms from within the populace. It is shaped by structural operations, being the main force of culture, and it manifests as an emotional and defensive response from individuals within this system that naturally coerces, exploits, and dispossesses them from their ability to sustain. In other words, the mass insecurity that stems from capitalism naturally produces reactionary responses of misdirected angst from the people it serves, or rather disserves.  

During these late stages of capitalism, “fascism has returned to the West, East, and South; and this return is naturally connected with the spread of the systemic crisis of generalized, financialized, and globalized monopoly capitalism.” (Amin,2014) The reactionary, right-wing response to the capitalist degradation of society is to target the most vulnerable of that society, viewing them as “drains” on public resources without realizing that such resources have been depleted by the pursuit for profit from those above, and most intensely during the era of neoliberalism, which opened the door for rampant greed to extract nearly everything of value from society in the name of privatization. In this structural sense, fascism comes to its complete fruition through a blindness that develops under capitalist culture, whether intentional or subconscious; a blindness that seeks every type of remedy imaginable for the problems created by the system without ever questioning the system itself.

The fascist regimes that surface during these times of crisis “are willing to manage the government and society in such a way as not to call the fundamental principles of capitalism into question, specifically private capitalist property, including that of modern monopoly capitalism.” (Amin, 2014) And that is why fascism intensifies under this pretense of “managing capitalism” and not simply in “political forms that challenge the latter’s legitimacy, even if ‘capitalism’ or ‘plutocracies’ [are] subject to long diatribes in the rhetoric of fascist speeches.” (Amin, 2014) This shows how the fascist tide is fundamentally structural; and the cultural developments that parallel it do so as a byproduct of capitalism’s systemic failures. Because of this, analyses “must focus on these crises.” And any focus on these systemic crises must also focus on the fundamental coercion inherent in the system’s productive mechanisms — that which former slave and American abolitionist Frederick Douglass once referred to as “a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery,” and “a slavery of wages that must go down with the other.”

The notion of wage slavery has been all but lost over the course of the last century. Once understood among the masses as a common-sense recognition of capitalist coercion, it has given way to the insidious nature of capitalist propaganda, which intensified in a very deliberate way after the cultural revolution of the 1960s, culminating in a neoliberal wave that has dominated since. While the originators of anti-capitalist theory and scientific socialism had exposed this form of slavery inherent in the system – with Marx referring to workers as “mere appendages to machines,” and Bakunin illustrating its ever-shifting nomenclature, from “slavery” to “serfdom” to “wage earners” – there was a brief resurgence of this analysis in the 1960s and 70s, from a variety of leftist radicals. One of the most under-appreciated of these analyses was the one provided by the imprisoned Black Panther, George Jackson, who in his extensive works made reference to the condition of “neo-slavery” that plagued the working-class masses. In a rather lengthy excerpt from Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, Jackson uncovered the forgotten importance of this coercive element that drives capitalism:

“Slavery is an economic condition. Today’s neo-slavery must be defined in terms of economics… [in the days of chattel slavery], the slaveowner, in order to ‘keep it (the slave) and enjoy all of the benefits that property of this kind can render, he must feed it sometimes, he must clothe it against the elements, he must provide a modicum of shelter.’ The ‘new slavery (capitalism), the modern variety of chattel slavery updated to disguise itself, places the victim in a factory or in the case of most blacks in support roles inside and around the factory system (service trades), working for a wage. However (in contrast to chattel slavery), if work cannot be found in or around the factory complex, today’s neo-slavery does not allow even for a modicum of food and shelter. You are free – to starve.

…The sense and meaning of slavery comes through as a result of our ties to the wage. You must have it, without it you would starve or expose yourself to the elements. One’s entire day centers around the acquisition of the wage. The control of your eight or ten hours on the job is determined by others. You are left with fourteen to sixteen hours. But since you don’t live at the factory you have to subtract at least another hour for transportation. Then you are left with thirteen to fifteen hours to yourself. If you can afford three meals you are left with ten to twelve hours. Rest is also a factor in efficiency so we have to take eight hours away for sleeping, leaving two to four hours. But – one must bathe, comb, clean teeth, shave, dress – there is no point in protracting this. I think it should be generally accepted that if a man or woman works for a wage at a job that they don’t enjoy, and I am convinced that no one could enjoy any type of assembly-line work, or plumbing or hod carrying, or any job in the service trades, then they qualify for this definition of neo-slave.

…The man who owns the [business] runs your life; you are dependent on this owner. He organizes your work, the work upon which your whole life source and style depends. He indirectly determines your whole day, in organizing you for work. If you don’t make any more in wages than you need to live (or even enough to live for that matter), you are a neo-slave.” And most of us who find ourselves in this precarious position as a working-class person under capitalism have no mobility, whether in a literal or figurative sense. We are “held in one spot on this earth because of our economic status, it is just the same as being held in one spot because you are the owner’s property.” (Jackson, 1994)

The era of neoliberalism, with its insistence of re-imagining laissez-faire economics, has revved up the authoritarian and oppressive underpinnings of the capitalist system by loosening historical constraints stemming from the age-old social contract — the idea that bourgeois governments had a minimal degree of responsibility for the well-being of their citizenries. In the United States, this has amounted to private entities (individuals, corporations, conglomerates) accumulating unprecedented amounts of wealth and power over the course of a few decades, while the majority of people have been thrown to the wolves. During this process, the structural basis of fascism – the merger of corporate and governmental power – has been fully realized, buoyed by the internal coercion of the capitalist system.

The Pedagogical Resurgence of Anti-Fascism

As capitalism’s internal contradictions continue to drive us deeper into a fascist reality, counter-hegemonic movements have aptly pivoted into anti-fascist forces. The most visible of these forces has been the anarchist-led “antifa,” which cracked into the mainstream-US consciousness during its numerous street clashes with reactionary groups during and after Donald Trump’s electoral rise. By heeding to a strategic tactic known as “no-platforming,” these black-clad resistance fighters deploy offensive attacks against both fascist speakers/leaders and marches to prevent them from gaining a public platform and, thus, legitimacy and momentum.

In a 2017 piece for In These Times, Natasha Lennard explained the philosophy behind no-platforming, how it extends from an all-encompassing radical abolitionist movement, and how it differs from liberalism:

“While I don’t believe we can or should establish an unbendable set of rules, I submit that a best practice is to deny fascist, racist speech a platform. It should not be recognized as a legitimate strand of public discourse, to be heard, spread and gain traction. And we must recognize that when the far Right speaks, the stage becomes an organizing platform, where followers meet and multiply. For this, we should have no tolerance.

No-platforming is only useful if it is contextualized in a broader abolitionist struggle, which recognizes that white supremacy will not do away with itself by virtue of being ‘wrong.’ Surely by now liberals have realized the folly in assuming justice is delivered by ‘speaking truth to power’? Power knows the truth, and determines what gets to be the regime of truth. The ‘truth’ of racial justice will not be discovered, proved or argued into lived actuality, but fought for and established.” (Lennard, 2017)

The physical tactics carried out under “no-platforming” are only a small part of a broader movement. While anti-fascists continue to confront fascists in the streets, a pedagogical resurgence of anti-fascism must continue to guide the movement as a whole by providing an intellectual, philosophical, and strategic battle plan. This plan must include: (1) a deep understanding of systemic forces generating from capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy; (2) an understanding of power dynamics and the need to form and deploy power effectively; (3) an understanding of the two major fronts of the anti-fascist war, which include the systemic and upward-focused class war and the anti-reactionary, horizontally-focused culture war; (4)an understanding of anti-capitalist ideology, including but not limited to Marxism, socialism, and anarchism; and, most importantly, (5) a mass push for class consciousness.

Class Consciousness

Building class consciousness is the most crucial task of our time, being citizens within the capitalist and imperialist empire that is the United States, facing down the impending fascist tide, and attempting to confront and defeat this tide along with the capitalist and imperialist systems as a whole. Recalibrating a working class that has been deliberately detached from its role is imperative. Regardless of how one prefers carrying out this task, whether through the formation of a vanguard of trained cadre or a direct engagement toward mass consciousness, it must be carried out within the proletariat itself, where much of capitalist and reactionary culture has become blindingly influential. This must be done not by rejecting theory and deeming it “too elite and alien for the masses,” but rather by embracing the organic intellectualism that is inherent within the masses and serving as facilitators to awaken this abundance of untapped potential. This must be done by realizing the working class is more than capable of thinking, understanding, and comprehending our position in society, if only given the chance to do so, free from the capitalist propaganda that drowns and consumes us.

In creating a working-class culture that not only embraces its inherent intellectualism, but does so in a way that explicitly challenges the dominant intellectual orthodoxy that fortifies capitalist relations, we may look to Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who provided a clear and convincing relationship between counter-hegemony and working-class, or organic, intellectualism that is rooted in “spontaneous philosophy”:

“It is essential to destroy the widespread prejudice that philosophy is a strange and difficult thing just because it is the specific intellectual activity of a particular category of specialists or of professional and systematic philosophers. It must first be shown that all [people] are ‘philosophers,’ by defining the limits and characteristics of the ‘spontaneous philosophy’ which is proper to everybody. This philosophy is contained in:  (1) language itself, which is a totality of determined notions and concepts and not just of words grammatically devoid of content; (2) ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’; and (3) popular religion and, therefore, also in the entire system of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, ways of seeing things and of acting, which are collectively bundled together under the name of ‘folklore.’” (Gramsci, 1971)

The formation of class consciousness, therefore, rests on this notion, sprouts from the lived experience of proletarian life in the capitalist system, and may essentially replace Gramsci’s already-existing third parameter of “popular religion,” by simply substituting “folklore” with a materialist perspective. This process reminds us of Fred Hampton’s insistence that we proceed in “plain, proletarian English,” which is not to say that revolutionaries must “dumb down” their message in order to appeal to the masses, but rather return revolutionary theory to where it belongs: within working-class culture. Prior to Gramsci and Hampton, Marx had already gone through this process of realizing the existence of organic intellectualism. This process, the subsequent views that developed within Marxist circles throughout the 20th century, and the sometimes-regressive ideology that formed from such is effectively illustrated by Raya Dunayevskaya’s critique of Jean-Paul Sartre in her book, Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre, and from Marx to Mao:

“Methodologically, Sartre’s organic petty-bourgeois inability to understand what it is that Marx meant by praxis has nothing whatever to do with the Ego, much less with not being able ‘to read’ Marx. It has everything to do with his isolation from the proletariat.

The very point at which Sartre thinks that Marx, because he had to turn to ‘clarifying’ practice, stopped developing theory is when Marx broke with the bourgeois concept of theory and created his most original concept of theory out of ‘history and its process,’ not only in the class struggles outside the factory but in it, at the very point of production, faced with the ‘automation’ which was dominating the worker transforming him into a mere ‘appendage.’ Marx’s whole point what that the worker was thinking his own thoughts, expressing his total opposition to the mode of labor instinctually and by creating new forms of struggle and new human relations with his fellow workers. Where, in Marx, history comes alive because the masses have been prepared by the daily struggle at the point of production to burst out spontaneously, ‘to storm the heavens’ creatively as they had done in the Paris Commune, in Sartre practice appears as inert practicality bereft of all historic sense and any consciousness of consequences. Where, in Marx, Individuality itself arises through history, in Sartre History means subordination of individual to group-in-fusion who alone know where the action is. Sartre the Existentialist rightly used to laugh at Communists for thinking man was born on his first payday; Sartre ‘the Marxist’ sees even as world-shaking an event as the Russian Revolution, not at its self-emancipatory moment of birth with its creation of totally new forms of workers’ rule – soviets – but rather at the moment when it was transformed into its opposite with Stalin’s victory, the totalitarian initiation of the Five-Year Plans with the Moscow Frame-Up Trials and forced-labor camps.” (Dunayevskaya, 2003)

Organic Intellectualism and Political Consciousness

The process of tapping organic intellectualism is perhaps best described by Paulo Freire in his crucial text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. To Freire, revolutionary class consciousness can only be realized through an embrace of radicalism, or as Angela Davis once phrased it, “simply grasping things at the root.” Applying our intellectualism and relating it to our lived experiences is only a partial awakening on the revolutionary path. To complete the transition, understanding the roots, or systems, that represent the foundational causes of our problems is crucial, not only for identifying the magnitude of the ultimate solution, and thus avoiding spending time and energy on inconsequential activities, but also for understanding that there is a solution. “The more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it,” Freire tells us. “This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.” (Freire, 2014)

With this realization in mind, we can better understand the four levels of consciousness and identify the pedagogical route, or remedies, that can be applied to ourselves and others. From the “magical consciousness,” where political impotence is maintained by inconceivable forces like gods and mythology, through the “naive consciousness,” where the material world becomes realized, and our interactions with others, with nature, within society, begin to take on some semblance of control, to “critical consciousness,” which introduces four distinct qualities that may be applied to this material reality: power awareness, or knowing and recognizing the existence of power and who possesses power in society; critical literacy, which leads to the development of analysis, writing, thinking, reading, discussing, and understanding deeper meaning; de-socialization, which allows one to recognize and challenge forms of power; and self-organization/self-education, which amounts to taking initiative to overcome the anti-intellectualism and indoctrination of capitalist “education.” (Wheeler, 2016; Daily Struggles, 2018) And, finally, the realization of a “political consciousness,” or class consciousness, which brings us to the understanding of a shared reality with most others, as well as the need for collective struggle to break our interlocking chains of oppression.

Ultimately, the path through these levels of consciousness are about power; moving from an impotent position to a powerful position — a powerful position that can only be forged through the realization of collective struggle. Freire describes this transition as a break from the “banking concept of education” that is designed to perpetuate ignorance to a critical pedagogy that is designed to empower the oppressed; a pedagogical process that, again, can only be carried out in a proletarian environment:

“In their political activity, the dominant elites utilize the banking concept to encourage passivity in the oppressed, corresponding with the latter's ‘submerged’ state of consciousness, and take advantage of that passivity to ‘fill’ that consciousness with slogans which create even more fear of freedom. This practice is incompatible with a truly liberating course of action, which, by presenting the oppressors slogans as a problem, helps the oppressed to ‘eject’ those slogans from within themselves. After all, the task of the humanists is surely not that of pitting their slogans against the slogans of the oppressors, with the oppressed as the testing ground, ‘housing’ the slogans of first one group and then the other. On the contrary, the task of the humanists is to see that the oppressed become aware of the fact that as dual beings, ‘housing’ the oppressors within themselves, they cannot be truly human.

This task implies that revolutionary leaders do not go to the people in order to bring them a message of ‘salvation,’ but in order to come to know through dialogue with them both their objective situation and their awareness of that situation—the various levels of perception of themselves and of the world in which and with which they exist. One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.” (Freire, 2014)

And this task must be done in a collective manner, with the clear intention of not only challenging power, but creating our own collective, working-class power that has the potential to destroy the existing power structure emanating from authoritative systems like capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. After all, “freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift,” and “nobody liberates themselves alone; human beings liberate themselves in communion.” (Freire, 2014)

Understanding Collective Power, Separating Radical from Liberal, and Exposing Centrist Extremism and Horseshoe Theory

“There is a whole apparatus that controls the presidency that is absolutely resistant to change. Which isn’t to excuse Obama from taking bolder steps. I think there are steps that he could have taken had he insisted. But if one looks at the history of struggles against racism in the US, no change has ever happened simply because the president chose to move in a more progressive direction. Every change that has happened has come as a result of mass movements – from the era of slavery, the Civil War, and the involvement of Black people in the Civil War, which really determined the outcome. Many people are under the impression that it was Abraham Lincoln who played the major role, and he did as a matter of fact help to accelerate the move toward abolition, but it was the decision on the part of slaves to emancipate themselves and to join the Union Army – both women and men – that was primarily responsible for the victory over slavery. It was the slaves themselves and of course the abolitionist movement that led to the dismantling of slavery. When one looks at the civil rights era, it was those mass movements – anchored by women, incidentally – that pushed the government to bring about change.” (Davis, 2016)

This excerpt is from an interview with Angela Davis, where she shares some knowledge on how to deal with power. Davis’s point is that people create and force change, collectively and from the bottom. This is an inherently radical perspective that comes from a development of political consciousness and the realization that representative democracy, in all of its supposed glory, is a reactionary system that has rarely if ever carried through on its “democratic” advertisement. It is a radical perspective that comes from a place of understanding why and how the founding fathers, in all of their land-owning, slave-owning elitism, chose this system of governing: “to protect,” as James Madison put it, “the opulent of the minority against the majority.” (Madison, 1787)

Davis’s point is reiterated by Noam Chomsky, in his peculiar declaration that Richard Nixon was “the last liberal President” of the United States — a statement that also comes from a radical perspective which realizes the systemic influence of capitalism and, more specifically, of the intensified capitalist period known as neoliberalism. And it comes from an understanding that Nixon the man, cantankerously racist and temperamentally conservative, did not create the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), set employment quotas on affirmative action programs, propose employer-funded healthcare, sign the Fair Labor Standards Act, and approve a series of regulations on big business because he personally championed these causes, or even believed in them. (Conetta, 2014; Fund, 2013) Rather, he was pressured from below, in the same way that Reagan, the Bushs, Clinton, and Obama have been pressured from above to enact and maintain the corporate stranglehold on politics ever since.

Systemic pressure always supplants personal philosophies, beliefs, ideologies, and preferences; and our systemic default, which is predetermined by the capitalist order, will always prevail over electoral and representative politics. Political consciousness exposes this fact, separating radical from liberal. The cases of Lincoln and Nixon, while signifying how pressure from below can force change, are outliers. They were chinks in the system. And since Nixon, these chinks have seemingly been fortified by the “whole apparatus that controls the presidency that is absolutely resistant to change.” The legislation passed by Nixon, as well as the legislation that came about through the New Deal era, the “Great Society,” and Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, have all been tamed by this apparatus. Our environmental crisis has intensified, white-supremacist terror remains prevalent in American streets, economic inequality has reached unprecedented levels, and our racialized prison industrial complex has grown by a rate of over 600 percent since the Civil Rights movement – all realities suggesting that “progressive” legislation is ultimately toothless. Thus, any reforms that develop through the electoral system, as a result of pressure from the bottom, are ultimately curtailed and circumvented by capitalism’s economic base, which always seeks to undermine a common good in the pursuit of never-ending growth and profit. The so-called “liberal reforms” that occurred during the Nixon years were largely rendered useless during the proceeding neoliberal era, which represents a deliberate plan to unleash the capitalist system.

This fact does not render grassroots power useless; it merely suggests that it needs to be redirected. Returning to Davis’s comments, the case of Abraham Lincoln is perhaps one of the best examples of the impotence built into the political system. Lincoln the individual had vacillated on his stance regarding slavery, expressing personal “dislike” for the institution and even displaying empathy for slaves (Lincoln, 1855) during a time when such empathy was often lost on many Americans. At the same time, Lincoln the president recognized his duty to protect the rights of slaveowners as the executive administrator of the United States and its constitution, and ultimately admitted that his institutional duty, which was to “save the Union” and maintain the power structures as created by the founders, even if it meant that slavery would stay intact, far outweighed any personal misgivings he may have had toward slavery. The same logic, when coming from cogs within the power structure, can be applied to capitalism and imperialism, and has been for centuries.

Both Nixon’s and Lincoln’s yield to external pressure illustrates two important points: (1) the personality, ideological leanings, and personal beliefs of a politician, even if the most powerful politician, have no real consequence within the US political system; and (2) the foundation of US politics and government, as arranged by the founders of the country, will never allow for genuine democratic elements to materialize. The first point often represents the most telling demarcation between radical and liberal, with the former realizing this fact, and the latter unable to realize and thus placing focus on individual identity. Because of the liberal’s inability to understand this systemic reality, damaging electoral strategies such as “lesser-evilism” have established a firm place in the American political arena, inevitably causing a gradual deterioration toward more reactionary political platforms designed to protect the decaying capitalist system, which in modern times translates to a very real fascistic slide. Hence, we now have modern Democratic Party politicians that resemble 1970s/80s conservatives, and Republicans that continue to push the envelope of fascism.

Since Nixon, the flock of modern presidents who have bent the knee to multinational corporate and banking power further illustrate the utter insignificance of identity; ironically, during a political era where “marketing personalities” is usually the only determinate for “success.” This contradiction cannot be understated, and it is an accurate barometer that can be used to measure class/political consciousness in the United States, or the lack thereof. Ironically, the fact that voter turnout throughout the country has maintained such low levels during the tail-end of the neoliberal era and late-stage capitalism is a sign that class and political consciousness are actually rising. For when the working class realizes en masse that there is no change coming through electoral politics, and thus have shed the capitalist elite’s “banking concept,” we know that revolutionary change is on the horizon. And any such period must include mass education and a mass movement toward political consciousness – an understanding once echoed by Lucy Parsons: “[radicals] know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals.” (Lewis, 2017) Self-thinking, in this case, simply means realizing our inherent political consciousness that is based in our material position in the socioeconomic system beyond the construction and obstruction of capitalist ideology and culture.

As we collectively separate ourselves from a mainstream political arena that has been established to ensure our continued demise as working-class people, we also must be wary of blowback from the system. The most common response to a delegitimizing of the power structure is an appeal to authority, safety, and stability. This defensive posture forms from within the power structure, with corporate-political unity between both major political parties, in an attempt to construct an extremist center. At this stage, the extremist center has one task at hand — to protect the status quo at all costs. In the US, this means keeping the white-supremacist capitalist/imperialist system intact, as well as the bourgeois class that both maintains these systems and benefits from them. To do so, this extremist center exploits the fear of instability in order to build mass support, labels both fascist and anti-fascist ground movements as enemies of the state (although does not necessarily respond to them in the same ways), indecipherable from one another in their mutual “extremism,” and proceeds with an all-out attack on civil liberties in order to suppress popular movements that may challenge the embedded systems.

We have seen this response materialize over the past decade. In the aftermath of 9/11, civil liberties have been systematically removed from members of both political parties. During the street clashes between white nationalists and anti-fascists, we witnessed politicians from both parties as well as media denounce “both sides” as extremists, creating a convenient false dichotomy that completely ignores the most common-sense discussion – what the two sides actually believe in or are trying to accomplish.  And we have seen “horseshoe theory” enter into the mainstream arena as “philosophical justification” for this false dichotomy.  “In the current state of things, the electoral successes of the extreme right stem from contemporary capitalism itself. These successes allow the media to throw together, with the same opprobrium, the ‘populists of the extreme right and those of the extreme left,’ obscuring the fact that the former are pro-capitalist (as the term ‘extreme right’ demonstrates) and thus possible allies for capital, while the latter are the only potentially dangerous opponents of capital’s system of power.” (Amin, 2014) The result of this has been a strengthening of the system as we know it, a virtual circling of the wagons around our reality of corporate politics, inequality, joblessness, homelessness, racism, misogyny, and all of the oppressive social phobias that accompany them.  Still, the resistance looms, it is radical in nature, and it is growing.

Conclusion

The current state of the world — socially, politically, economically, and environmentally — indicates that we have entered the late stages of the global capitalist system. In the heart of the capitalist empire, the United States, social unrest has become the norm. Capitalism’s systemic contradictions, as well as its coercive and authoritarian core, have become increasingly uncontrollable for the country’s capitalist political parties. Social inequities are becoming more pronounced, the political arena is showing irregularities like never before, and an overtly fascist tide is starting to rear its ugly head.

The American working class has responded in various ways. On one side, reactionary mentalities have intensified among hordes of newly-dispossessed whites, thus leading them into the arms of the state’s fascist slide. On another side, a mass awakening has developed among many who have decided instead to tap into our organic intellectualism, turn to radical analysis, and return to anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist class politics. In response to the fascist tide, a formidable wave of anti-fascist action has sprung to life. To bolster this, a pedagogical resurgence of anti-fascism has formed both organically and through the forging of this new collective political and class consciousness. Rosa Luxemburg’s 1916 ultimatum has suddenly reached the ears of many within the American working class – will we transition away from capitalism and toward socialism, or will we regress further into barbarism?

Capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy know where they stand. Politicians from both capitalist parties have regrouped to form and extreme center. Corporate executives, bankers, bosses, business owners, arms manufacturers, hedge-fund operators, landlords, military officials, police, and the prison industry have all placed their bets on barbarism. The ball is now in our court. The time is ripe for the people to seize power, but the process of a political awakening, anchored by a mass shaping of class consciousness, must gear up. And, most importantly, our army must be built from the ground-up, from within the proletariat, with the understanding that we are all leaders in this struggle.

A war for consciousness must continue, and must be won, while we proceed in building mass political power. And this must be done with an all-out rejection of capitalist culture and the conditioned mentality that comes with it, because the people’s struggle is doomed to fail if it does not develop “a consciousness of the insidious promotion of capitalist individualism.” In doing so, “it is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize our potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle.” (Barat, 2014) We are on the precipice. The world and its future literally rest on our collective shoulders.

All power to the people.

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