Pedagogy of the Oppressed 30th Anniversary Edition

The correct method lies in dialogue. The conviction of the oppressed that they must fight for their liberation is not a gift bestowed by the revolutionary leadership, but the result of their own conscientization.

When men are already dehumanized, due to the oppression they suffer, the process of their liberation must not employ the methods of dehumanization.

To achieve this praxis, however, it is necessary to trust in the oppressed and in their ability to reason. Whoever lacks this trust will fail to bring about (or will abandon) dialogue, reflection and communication, and will fall into using slogans, communiqué’s, monologues and instructions.

The insistence that the oppressed engage in reflection on their concrete situation is not a call to armchair revolution. On the contrary, reflection - true reflection - leads to action.

Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat them as objects which must be saved from a burning building; it is to lead them into the populist pitfall and transform them into masses which can be manipulated.

It is only when the oppressed find the oppressor out and become involved in the organized struggle for their liberation that they begin to believe in themselves. This discovery cannot be purely intellectual but must involve action; nor can it be limited to mere activism, but must include serious reflection: only then will it be a praxis.

Not infrequently peasants in educational projects begin to discuss a generative theme in a lively manner, then stop suddenly and say to the educator: ‘Excuse us, we should keep quiet and let you talk. You are the one who knows, we don’t know anything’. They often insist that there is no difference between them and the animals; when they do admit a difference, it favours the animals.’ They are freer than we are.’

In their alienation, the oppressed want at any cost to resemble the oppressor, to imitate him, to follow him. This phenomenon is especially prevalent in the middle-class oppressed, who yearn to be equal to the ‘eminent’ men of the upper class.

Accordingly, until they concretely ‘discover’ their oppressor and in turn their own consciousness, they nearly always express fatalistic attitudes towards their situation.

The man who proclaims devotion to the cause of liberation yet is unable to enter into communion with the people, whom he continues to regard as totally ignorant, is grievously self-deceived.

The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly of having more as a privilege which dehumanizes others and themselves. They cannot see that, in the egoistic pursuit of having as a possessing class, they suffocate in their own possessions and no longer are; they merely have. For them, having more is an inalienable right, a right they acquired through their own ‘effort’, with their ‘courage to take risks’. If others do not have more, it is because they are incompetent and lazy, and worst of all is their unjustifiable ingratitude towards the ‘generous gestures’ of the dominant class. Precisely because they are ‘ungrateful’ and ‘envious’, the oppressed are regarded as potential enemies who must be watched.

In their unrestrained eagerness to possess, the oppressors develop the conviction that it is possible for them to transform everything into objects of their purchasing power; hence their strictly materialistic concept of existence. Money is the measure of all things, and profit the primary goal. For the oppressors, what is worthwhile is to have more - always more - even at the cost of the oppressed having less or having nothing. For them, to be is to have and to be of the ‘having’ class.

But even when contradiction is resolved authentically by a new situation established by liberated workers, the former oppressors do not feel liberated. On the contrary, they genuinely consider themselves to be oppressed. Condi-tioned by the experience of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression. Formerly, they could eat, dress, wear shoes, be educated, travel, and hear Beethoven; while millions did not eat, had no clothes or shoes, neither studied nor travelled, much less listened to Beethoven. Any restriction on this way of life, in the name of the rights of the community, appears to the former oppressors as a profound violation of their individual rights - although they had no respect for the millions who suffered and died of hunger, pain, sorrow, and despair. For the oppressors, ‘human beings’ refers only to themselves; other people are ‘things’.

However, the restraints imposed by the former oppressed on their oppressors, so that the latter cannot reassume their former position, do not constitute oppression. An act is oppressive only when it prevents men from being more fully human.

Whereas the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human.

Consciously or unconsciously, the act of rebellion by the oppressed (an act which is always, or nearly always, as violent as the initial violence of the oppressors) can initiate love.

For us, however, the requirement is seen not in terms of explaining to, but rather entering into a dialogue with, the people about their actions. In any event, no reality transforms itself, and the duty which Lukacs ascribes to the revolutionary party of ‘explaining to the masses their own action’ coincides with our affirmation of the need for the critical intervention of the people in reality through the praxis. The pedagogy of the oppressed, which is the pedagogy of men engaged in the fight for their own liberation, has its roots here. And those who recognize, or begin to recognize, themselves as oppressed must be among the developers of this pedagogy. No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption.

Cultural synthesis does not deny the differences between the two views; indeed, it is based on these differences. It does deny the invasion of one by the other, but affirms the undeniable support each gives to each other.

At a certain point in their existential experience, under certain historical conditions, these leaders renounce the class to which they belong and join the oppressed, in an act of true solidarity (or so one would hope). Whether or not this adherence results from a scientific analysis of reality, it represents (when authentic) an act of love and true commitment. Joining the oppressed requires going to them and communicating with them. The people must find themselves in the emerging leaders, and the latter must find themselves in the people.

There is no historical reality which is not human. There is no history without humankind, and no history for human beings; there is only history of humanity, made by people and (as Marx pointed out) in turn making them. It is when the majorities are denied their right to participate in history as Subjects that they become dominated and alienated. Thus, to supersede their condition as objects by the status of Subjects-the objective of any true revolution— requires that the people act, as well as reflect, upon the reality to be transformed.

It is absolutely essential that the oppressed participate in the revolutionary process with an increasingly critical awareness of their role as Subjects of the transformation. If they are drawn into the process as ambiguous beings, partly themselves and partly the oppressors housed within them —and if they come to power still embodying that ambiguity imposed on them by the situation of oppression- it is my contention that they will merely imagine they have reached power? Their existential duality may even facilitate the rise of a sectarian climate leading to the installation of bureaucracies which undermine the revolution. If the oppressed do not become aware of this ambiguity during the course of the revolutionary proc-ess, they may participate in that process with a spirit more revanchist than revolutionary? They may aspire to revolution as a means of domination, rather than as a road to liberation.

Alongside the people for the recovery of the peoples stolen humanity, not to "win the people over" to their side. Such a phrase does not belong in the vocabulary of revolutionary leaders, but in that of the oppressor. The revolutionary's role is to liberate, and be liberated, with the people—not to win them over.

We simply cannot go to the laborers- urban or peasant'— in the banking style, to give them "knowledge" or to impose upon them the model of the "good man" contained in a program whose content we have ourselves organized. Many political and educational plans have failed because their authors designed them according to their own personal views of reality, never once taking into account (except as mere objects of their actions) the men-in-a-situation to whom their program was ostensibly directed.

Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause-the cause of liberation. And this commitment, because it is loving, is dialogical.