Only Freedom Can Quench the Thirst

Part of the work is going back to go forward, writes Vijay Prashad. Returning to the sources of tradition advances present struggles.

[consortiumnews.com]

{The oppressed, Freire wrote, did not want knowledge for its own sake; they expressed a range of desires for the world, including to create a world where they could live with dignity, including with shoes. Freire quotes Che Guevara’s powerful sentiment that “a true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love,” which forms the bedrock of Freire’s approach.

“The revolution loves and creates life,” Freire wrote, “and in order to create life it may be obliged to prevent some men from circumscribing life.” This was not “love” in the abstract but love in a very concrete way.

In Brazil, Freire wrote, there were “living corpses” or “shadows of human beings” who faced an “invisible war” of hunger and disease, illiteracy and indignity; their liberation from the structural domination of capitalism would require the defeat of the actual people who benefitted from the system which deprived the oppressed of basic needs.

The rising of the oppressed — in other words, the Revolution — was going to improve the life of the vast majority, but it would necessarily negatively impact the lives of the capitalists. There was no idealism in Freire — only the deeply practical appreciation of study and struggle within the actual world in which we live.}

{“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.”}

{To live with dignity and with love would mean to transform a system that is incapable of solving the problems it creates. Education — or “conscientization” — is precisely about the interrelated process of study and struggle in forming a consciousness and a conscience that demands more than moderate reforms. It was not about being given shoes but fighting for a system where a lack of shoes cannot even be imagined.}

As the Vice episode I spoke about yesterday suggests, our elite have no intentions of fixing the monster they created, but escaping it, leaving us as its victims. Its colonialization building war machine and criminal elements of law enforcement as the claws and teeth to tear us apart and devour us.

{It has to be us. We are waiting for no-one else. It can only be us. We will make our own shoes. It will be us. We will walk with dignity. We will prevail.}