A-Infos (en) Irish Anarchist Review #6 - Failing to unveil Capitalism at Occupy - Paulo Freire’s Theoretical Framework

The Occupy movement may have come into our lives just over a year ago with a bang but it 
went out months later with a whimper. Cathal Larkin uses the benefit of hindsight to look 
at the phenomenon as it manifested itself on these shores and what anarchists could have 
done to make it work better. The difficulties as Cathal argues did not lie in making 
arguments for democracy has been the case in so many other campaigns but in that the 
occupiers “didn’t see this conception extending to the realm of economic production” and 
in developing the 99%/1% analysis into a deeper class analysis. Recognising problems with 
current modes of consciousness raising, he utilises Paulo Freire’s pedagogical framework 
in an attempt to subject “our own political strategies, methodologies and theories to 
critical scrutiny”.

If the normal way revolutionaries engage in politics is to go to people suffering a 
particular injustice or oppression, fight it alongside them, and raise their consciousness 
of the systemic change necessary to end all oppressions; then Occupy was a movement that 
seemed to be happening the wrong way around.

Occupy started with the broad systemic critique and desire to put it into action, but 
never made the critique more coherent, nor translated it into the political activity 
necessary to effect social change at anywhere close to the scale initially hoped for. 
Obviously the 99%/1% critique was quite vague and ambiguous, but the movement placed 
central importance in open discussions about big societal issues and its goals and 
strategies. Despite this being an ideal situation for revolutionaries, our radical 
analyses didn’t win many supporters. A year on from participating in Occupy Cork I ask 
why, and hope to aid the learning of theoretical and practical lessons for future social 
movement engagements.

The approaches to consciousness raising vary for revolutionaries of the Marxist-Leninist 
and anarchist-communist variety. For Leninists, the only correct analysis for overcoming 
the oppression of capitalism lies in their party, therefore recruitment is central. Once 
in the party, recruits didactically receive the party analysis, with those not agreeing 
with it presumed to be labouring under a false consciousness. Anarchists tend to be 
uncomfortable with such an infallible and hierarchical epistemology, and instead prefer to 
focus on empowering people to organise and think for themselves. This tends to work very 
well in aiding understanding of the interpersonal aspects of power relations, and the way 
oppressive power can manifest itself in groups and through gender, race and other 
privileges – areas where we have seen huge advances against oppressive power since Marxism 
lost its hegemonic position as the way to do oppositional politics in the sixties. But 
with the more impersonal oppression of contemporary capitalism in the West, we see both 
that less people have a critical understanding of it, and that the gains made by the 
workers’ movements of the post war era have been pushed back for several decades. The 
logic of the commodity has expanded its control over more of our lives, while its further 
reification[1] has immunised it from critical scrutiny.

Soon after Occupy Cork started it was noted in our local Workers Solidarity Movement 
branch discussions that the arguments for internal democracy we’re used to having in 
campaigns wouldn’t be as much of a preoccupation in this case. The Occupiers were, so to 
speak, “even more anarchist” than us in their conception of democracy; but the problem was 
that they didn’t see this conception extending to the realm of economic production. 
Consequently we saw as one of our key tasks the promotion of the communist part of 
anarchist-communism. Like other anti-capitalists at the camp, I tried this in various 
ways: doing some talks and articles, bringing trade unionists and various left-wing and 
anti-capitalist academics and activists to speak, and in general conversations and 
discussions making radical arguments and pushing for a further development of the 99%/1% 
analysis.

While the strategy did have some positive effects on the overall consciousness of the 
camp, it wasn’t unproblematic, as radicals in many other camps have learned. Helena 
Sheehan in her essay, “Occupying Dublin: Considerations at a Crossroads”, talked of the 
hostility against the “intellectual elite” of the camp, who she indicates were vaguely 
defined as “people who read books, write blogs, organise talks and articulate 
criticism”[2]. Similarly, other Occupy writings have talked about the divide that 
developed between the experienced activists and the newcomers to social movements. Of 
course radicals could arrogantly discount this as a manifestation of bourgeois liberalism, 
but we could obviously learn a lot more by subjecting our own political strategies, 
methodologies and theories to critical scrutiny. In that spirit of revolutionary praxis 
being a constant process of action and reflection, it is to the work of the great 
Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, that we will now turn.

Paulo Freire’s Theoretical Framework

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire expands a dialectical understanding of oppression, 
conscientizcão, and liberation. (Conscientizcão, sometimes translated as conscientization, 
refers, to quote Freire’s translator, to “learning to perceive social, political and 
economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of 
reality”[3]). Drawing on Marx’s ontology of labour, Freire sees the ability to consciously 
and collectively shape one’s environment and social relations as the defining feature of 
humanity[4]. Humankind has a vocation to become more fully human; oppression is what 
negates it. It is dehumanising for both oppressor and oppressed, but it is the oppressed 
that must engage in the revolutionary praxis or “gesture of love”[5] necessary to return 
the humanity to both (although the oppressors are unlikely to see it that way).

On first glance some may feel the oppressor/ oppressed dichotomy is far too simplistic for 
the contemporary West and much more applicable to the conditions of mass poverty and 
illiteracy of the global south where Freire worked. But this objection misses the point. 
Freire isn’t making an empirical observation that the world is unambiguously divided into 
two homogeneous groups; he is rather expanding a dialectical theoretical framework for 
understanding oppression. And neither is he projecting a total innocence onto the 
oppressed. Instead he talks of how the oppressed can become sub-oppressors, and of the 
need to eject the oppressor within because it is from them that we get our model of 
humanity. To see the contemporary relevance here one need only look back at the mawkish 
reaction to the recent death of Steve Jobs, a man who was responsible for factory 
conditions that have driven many workers to suicide[6], and who, according to his 
biographer, was an all-round boorish bully (who even constantly parked in disabled parking 
spaces!).

Revolutionary leadership plays an important part in aiding conscientization; but how 
Freire defines the role of these revolutionaries has far more in common with the anarchist 
conception of the Leadership of Ideas than with the Leninist vanguard.[7] Unlike Lenin’s 
assertion that peasants can’t be trusted and that workers by themselves can only develop a 
trade union consciousness; for Freire a lack of confidence in people’s ability to think 
and reason is incompatible with mutually achieving liberation. Likewise, talk of winning 
the people over to our side “does not belong in the vocabulary of revolutionary leaders, 
but in that of the oppressor”[8]. Instead dialogical engagement is aimed at achieving 
their adherence to liberation – an important distinction for how we construct and adapt 
radical theoretical work and political strategies. In the praxis of liberation – “the 
action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it”[9] – 
arguments based on authority are no longer valid. Accordingly, that there are inherent 
contradictions to the capitalist mode of production is not asserted as correct because 
Marx has shown it to be so. Rather, through collective dialogue, we critically investigate 
the logic of capital and those contradictions (a process for which Marx’s work could of 
course be utilised). Since social reality is not static, our theory shouldn’t be either; 
using Freire’s methods, those who wish to transform social realities become theory’s 
permanent re-creators.

Freirean Practice

Dialogue happens through a problem-posing pedagogical process, which Freire contrasts with 
what he calls the banking method of education. We are probably all familiar with the 
latter from school; it is where educators sees their role as making deposits of 
information into ostensibly empty receptacles. In this method the students’ role is to 
receive, file and store information – a role which prevents the development of critical 
consciousness. It’s therefore a great shame that
“those who espouse the cause of liberation are themselves surrounded and influenced by the 
climate which generates the banking concept, and often do not perceive its true 
significance or its dehumanizing power. Paradoxically, then, they utilize this same 
instrument of alienation in what they consider an effort to liberate.”[10]

For Freire the banking concept of education is, like sloganeering and propaganda, a tool 
of the oppressor. Liberatory education, on the other hand, is practiced through the 
problem-posing method. Instead of transferrals of information, it consists of acts of 
cognition between teacher/ students and student/teachers. Together the group “cognize 
cognizable objects” or “decode codifications” – both terms basically mean the 
teacher/student facilitates a group critical analysis of some aspect of social reality. 
The codifications or cognizable objects could be visual aids like pictures, or orally 
presented existential problems. Freire warns that overly explicit codifications risk 
degeneration into propaganda – so it’s best not to explore the capital-labour 
contradiction with an image of a capitalist with a cigar and a top hat. Conversely, if 
they’re too enigmatic the process may become a guessing game.

Before this happens, the teacher/students engage in “thematic investigation” – the process 
of understanding how people in a certain group look at the world and construct their 
thought. This is the section of the book that most strongly bears the imprint of the 
context in which it was written – the imagery is of white middle class Brazilians going to 
indigenous peasant communities with notebooks. Still, it is vitally important in all 
contexts of social change as “[o]ne 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.”[11]

Freire’s use of the word respect should not be interpreted as a form of cultural 
relativism, rather it means that the people’s thematic universe, their understanding of 
the social relations they live under, is the starting point in the problem-posing 
pedagogical process which aims to unveil the oppressive elements of those relations. Most 
radicals in their organising already apply some knowledge of their informal or 
subconscious thematic investigations – for example most of us would probably make 
arguments at a trade union meeting slightly differently than we would at a student council 
– but being more cognizant of what we’re doing here is vitally important as it helps us 
avoid the twin perils of either alienating people with metaphors and themes that don’t 
connect with their reality, or instead watering down our political arguments for fear of 
them being alienating.

Pedagogy of Postmodern Capitalism

And now to ask ourselves what a Freirean problem-posing workshop, aimed at beginning a 
process of understanding contemporary capitalism, would look like in an Occupy-type 
milieu. Even the most cursory thematic investigation would reveal that Marx’s factory 
metaphor[12] is not the smartest place to start. Neither, I would say, is the worker-boss 
relation put in a broader context. Firstly because there doesn’t exist anything close to a 
homogeneous experience of the production side of capitalism amongst the Occupy milieu, and 
secondly, and more generally, because of the changes in the surface appearance of 
capitalism in the last 4 decades – changes that far too many revolutionary groups seem to 
ignore in their literature.

That is not to claim that the laws of capital accumulation are now different than before, 
just that the surface appearances and contemporary forms of capitalism are important to 
take into account in order for our analysis to resonate – or, to put in Freirean terms, 
these appearances form part of the thematic universe of people’s understanding of the 
social relations they live under.

The new spirit of capitalism, writes Slavoj Zizek, “triumphantly recuperated the 
egalitarian and anti-hierarchical rhetoric of 1968, presenting itself as a successful 
libertarian revolt against the oppressive social organizations characteristic of both 
corporate capitalism and Really Existing Socialism – a new libertarian spirit epitomized 
by dressed- down ‘cool’ capitalists such as Bill Gates and the founders of Ben and Jerry’s 
ice-cream.”[13] This ostensibly non-exploitative capitalism is epitomized in such products 
as Fairtrade coffee. The Fairtrade epithet is a de facto admission that trade under the 
normal laws of capitalism is unfair. But in line with the “add more free market” genre of 
politics, “fairness” becomes a commodity that Western consumers can pay more for, if they 
so desire. Thus redemption for just being a consumer is found in the very act of commodity 
consumption. I see it as a postmodern example of how oppression is mythicized in order for 
it to be concealed. Given that “problem-posing pedagogy sets itself the task of 
demythologizing”[14], and that the myths of ethical consumption are very much part of all 
our thematic universes, I would argue that a bag of fairtrade coffee is an ideal 
codification to start the conscientization process.

As the cognizing process is nothing if not a dialogical relation between co-investigators, 
it’s impossible to predict its course. Starting, for example, with a discussion of the 
“coffee karma” PR on the package may lead in any number of directions. However if the task 
is to unveil capitalist exploitation being masked with an ethical branding, the 
teacher/student needs to be prepared. Therefore here, from my solely literary interaction 
with Freire’s methods, are what I would see as some of the key problems to pose in order 
to aid the process:

Do all the workers involved in this coffee get ‘fairly traded’ with? What about the 
workers that made the plane that flew it over here? And the workers that made the shelf on 
which it sits in the supermarket? Aren’t they also subject to the same ‘normal trade’ or 
‘unfair trade’ that ordinarily makes coffee pickers wages so low? What makes normal trade 
unfair? Are consumer choices a useful way to effect change? Is it a fair way?

If we’re voting with our euros, who gets more votes? Who gets more power? If our power 
isn’t in our pockets, where is it? If we can choose between fairly and unfairly traded 
coffee, why can’t we also choose chattel slave picked coffee? Should it be consumers’ 
responsibility to ensure coffee pickers get fairly paid? Do consumers have the information 
necessary to make such choices with everything they purchase? Would that ever be possible? 
What other products are also commonly labelled fairtrade? What do they all have in common? 
What are people usually doing when they consume these products? If there were fairtrade 
plain black socks, would anyone buy them? In the nineties there was lots of discussion of 
the sweatshop conditions runners were made under, why do you think there aren’t fairtrade 
versions of them sitting alongside the unfair trade ones in every sports shop? If you 
can’t afford fairtrade coffee, are you being unethical? What’s the emotional experience of 
seeing the smiling farmer on the package of coffee? Is it fair that this farmers’ 
livelihood and happiness depend on the whims of Western consumers? What would be a truly 
fair situation for the farmer?

Obviously such questions are only suggestions; it would be the dialogue that would guide 
the collective decoding. And the teachers are also students, so what is actually unveiled 
might be quite different to what was originally considered problematic. In any case it’s 
not difficult to see how such workshops would help develop better understandings of the 
reified capitalist mode of production we live under. Freire’s methods could be seen as a 
cognitive application of the “learn by doing” principal. Just as no one would feel they 
know how to brew beer until they actually use their homebrew kit, in the same way, we 
don’t critically engage with ideas until we actually do the thinking that conceptualises them.

Conclusion

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire tells a story of a group of armed peasants who 
planned to take over a latifundium, but couldn’t find a single volunteer to guard the 
owner they planned to keep hostage. It was an example of the magical beliefs in the 
invulnerability and power of the oppressor that Freire commonly found amongst the peasants 
of Brazil. At Occupy we witnessed similar magical beliefs in, for example, vast 
international conspiracies, spiritually transcending social reality, and the possibility 
of creating a local ethical capitalism. That many left Occupy with as fragmentary an 
understanding of capitalism that they entered with, and, sometimes, bad impressions of 
“know-it-all activists”[15], shows the need for revolutionaries to alter their often 
ineffective approaches to conscientization. For this, Freire’s dialogical pedagogy offers 
a robust and insightful framework from which to develop more attuned methods of engagement 
in social movements.

WORDS: Cathal Larkin

All photography from facebook.com/occupycork

[1]Reification refers to how the constructed social relations of capitalism appear as 
objective natural laws of civilization.
[2]Helana Sheehan, “Occupying Dublin: Considerations at a crossroads”, 
http://www.irishleftreview. org/2012/01/19/occupying-dublin-consideration....
[3]Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, (Penguin, 1996) pp.17.
[4]To quote Marx: ‘A spider constructs operations that resemble that of a weaver, and a 
bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what 
distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises 
his structure in imagination before he erects in reality.’
[5]Freire, pp.38.
[6]After 19 suicide attempts in two years, one factory installed suicide nets to catch the 
jumpers. A former Apple executive has even admitted to the New York Times, ‘most people 
would still be really disturbed if they say where their iPhone comes from’. 
http://www.dailymail. 
co.uk/news/article-2092277/Apple-Poor-working-conditions-inside-Chinese-factories-making-iPads.html
[7]In fact, I don’t see any practical incompatibility with the anarchist conception. In 
this Freire augments a major trend in Marxism which has seen several reformulations move 
the philosophy ever closer to anarchism. Todd May in chapter 2 of The Political Philosophy 
of Poststructuralist Anarchism details how this trend devel- ops from Luxembourg to 
Lukacs, to the Frankfurt school critical theorists, to Althusser, to the autonomists, and 
finally to Cornelius Castoriadis.
[8]Freire, pp.76.
[9]Freire. pp.60.
[10]Freire, pp.60.
[11][11]Freire, pp.76.
[12]Meaning the way Marx saw the factory as the ideal metaphor for the social relations of 
capitalism.
[13]Slavoj Zizek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (Verso 2009) pp.76. Emphasis in original.
[14]Freire, pp.64.
[15] To quote a Facebook argument I had with an Occupy Cork friend who was quite taken by 
the prevalent and highly questionable Freeman of the Land ideas.
_________________________________________
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