SACP Constitution

Basics, Part 5

SACP Constitution

The jewel of the SACP Constitution is Rule 6.4, which says:

“Members active in fraternal organisations or in any sector of the mass movement have a duty to set an example of loyalty, hard work and zeal in the performance of their duties and shall be bound by the discipline and decisions of such organisations and movement.

“They shall not create or participate in SACP caucuses within such organisations and movements designed to influence either elections or policies.

“The advocacy of SACP policy on any question relating to the internal affairs of any such organisations or movements shall be by open public statements or at joint meetings between representatives of the SACP and such organisations or movements.”

This means that SACP members active in any part of the mass movement, including trade unions, and including the ANC, do so in the utmost good faith.

SACP members serve the mass organisations on the terms of those organisations.

This clause is the backbone of the Alliance of the SACP with the ANC and COSATU, including COSATU’s affiliates.

It is because the mass organisations understand this rule that the alliance has been so solid for so long.

It means that SACP members can be trusted, and are in fact trusted.

The SACP Constitution, as a whole, is a model of how a constitution needs to be written. It is as brief as it can be, as direct as it can be, and where necessary it is sufficiently detailed. It is a very fine document, of which SACP Party members can be justly proud.

Mastering the SACP Constitution

Taking the CU booklet version, which is 20 pages long, and reading backwards, the last three pages are on disciplinary procedure.

Pages from 7 to page 17, (clauses 8 to 23), roughly eleven in total, and therefore more than half of the entire constitution, are taken up with the structures of the Party from the National Congress down to Branches and Units. All of these are straightforward and easy to understand.

Clauses 1 and 2 have to do with the name, symbol and flag. Clause 7 establishes the Young communist League, in very few words.

The remainder of the clauses, 3, 4, 5 and 6 are where you will find the distinguishing features of the Party, mainly on pages 1 to six of the CU version.

These are the ones you should read first.

• The above is to introduce the original reading-text: SACP Constitution, 2007.

• To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Socialism, Utopian and Scientific

Basics, Part 4a

Frederick Engels, 1820 - 1895

Socialism, Utopian and Scientific

The main downloadable linked text below is “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific”, by Frederick Engels.

By Utopian, Engels meant imaginary, or ideal, and typical of the early socialists such as Robert Owen, Henri de Saint-Simon, and François Fourier (who was the historical inventor of the word “feminism”, among other things). Marx and Engels respected these pioneers but also distinguished themselves critically from them. The third part of the third section of the Communist Manifesto of 1848 is devoted to them.

In the previous post we had Lenin’s “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism”. “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific” has a similar three-part structure, and there is another work of Lenin’s (written as an entry for an encyclopedia) called “Karl Marx, A Brief Biographical Sketch with an Exposition of Marxism”, of a length that is intermediate between the two we have given, with a similar structure. That one might be the more “basic” text, but Engels’ work is the real classic.

Frederick Engels begins “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific” (see the link below), with the Great French Revolution that started in 1789. From this point on we can meet, in their developed form, the class protagonists who allied and clashed from that time onwards until now, in all possible permutations: alliances holy and unholy, strategic and tactical, marriages of convenience and marriages made in heaven.

These classes were the feudal aristocrats; the peasants; the bourgeoisie; and the proletariat.

Engels’ work has the additional benefit of introducing the rudiments of political philosophy, and leading our thoughts towards the “democratic bourgeois republic”, which is at one and the same time the highest form of political life before socialism, the prerequisite of concerted proletarian action, and a form of the State that has to be achieved, transcended and then left behind.

Those in need of an occasional quick, brief revision of the theory of socialism and communism might like to save these three texts, and read them again from time to time. Naturally, the same applies to all of the work used in this “basics” course.

There is no great need to search for modern summaries of the classics, when the masters have provided very good summaries of their work, themselves.

• The above is to introduce the original reading-texts: Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Engels, 1880, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

• To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Sources and Component Parts of Marxism

Basics, Part 4

Sources and Component Parts of Marxism

We have said, while discussing Machiavelli, that communism does not discard the past, but grows out of it. This week the main item is Lenin’s “Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism” (download linked below). This piece of writing, though extremely short, manages to embrace the whole of philosophy, politics and economics. For these reasons it is highly popular with teachers and students.

Lenin’s purpose is to show how comprehensive Marxism is, and that Marxism is on the “highroad of development of world civilisation”.

He puts the matter like this:

“…there is nothing resembling "sectarianism" in Marxism, in the sense of its being a hidebound, petrified doctrine, a doctrine which arose away from the highroad of development of world civilisation. On the contrary, the genius of Marx consists precisely in the fact that he furnished answers to questions which had already engrossed the foremost minds of humanity. His teachings arose as a direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism.”

One may appreciate Lenin’s point, without necessarily accepting every simplicity in this highly compressed account. It is a scheme of understanding, almost like a diagram. It raises many questions, for example:

• Is there any such thing as “Marxism”, in the sense described here by Lenin as “complete and harmonious” and “an integral world conception”? Karl Marx did not think so. From his own point of view, Marx had only completed a small part of what lay before him; and he refused the label “Marxist”.
• In what sense was Marx’s philosophy materialist? Did Marx see human beings first and foremost as arrangements of molecules – i.e. as an “extension” of material? Or is the actual point of Marx’s philosophy and politics to give the free human subject priority over the material, objective world in which it must toil for its development? Scholars still debate these questions.
• In what sense did Marx have an economic doctrine, or an economic theory? It is true that the question of surplus value is at the core of Marx’s Capital, Volume 1. But is that work therefore an economic text-book? Or is it really what Marx called it: A Critique of Political Economy? In other words, is it not anti-economics, rather than economics?

When it comes to politics, there is no doubt about “the struggle of classes as the basis and the motive force of the whole development”, as Lenin puts it. So there is a lot that is good in the “Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism”. But it is only a start and it does not absolve anyone from the necessity of further study.

It is pleasing that in this short, packed piece Lenin still has time to mention South Africa (in his last paragraph), and that news of proletarian organisation in our country had already reached Lenin in 1913.

• The above is to introduce the original reading-text: 3 Sources and 3 Component parts of Marxism, Lenin, 1913.

• To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Proletarians and Communists

Basics, Part 3a

Frederick Engels, 1820-1895

Proletarians and Communists

We only need one text for one discussion per week, but the Communist University always gives alternatives, which can also be used for supplementary reading. Yesterday we took the first part of the Communist Manifesto. Here is the second part, called Proletarians and Communists.

As with the first part of this highly-concentrated piece of writing, the simplest way to present it is with selected quotes. Here are some:

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.

They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement.

The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only:

(1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.

(2) In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

The text then deals with property, and with marriage, in similar terms to “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and The State”, which was written 35 years later. One of the remarkable things about the “Manifesto” is that it summarises ideas which had not yet been published and knocked into shape by controversy, yet it did so very accurately, and the Manifesto still stands tall today. On ideas, and on the struggle of ideas, it says, among other things:

The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

When people speak of the ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express that fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.

But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.

The communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.

Finally, the Manifesto arrives, at the end of the second part, at the following tremendous vision of communism as the purest possible kind of human freedom:

Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat… by means of a revolution, makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

• The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Communist Manifesto, Proletarians and Communists, Marx and Engels.

• To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Bourgeois and Proletarians

Basics, Part 3

Karl Marx, 1818 - 1883

Bourgeois and Proletarians

Bourgeois & Proletarians is the first of the three major parts of the Communist Manifesto, commissioned by the Communist League, written in London by Karl Marx, at the age of 29, with the help of his then 27-year-old friend Frederick Engels, and published in January, 1848.

Also included is the final page of the Manifesto, called “Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties.”

Marx and Engels were under pressure from the Communist League to get this job done quickly. The brief was as difficult as it could be: to produce a short, emphatic, unambiguous, motivational description of historic processes, and to announce a credible determination to change the world under the leadership of the most exploited class of people, the working class, also known as the proletariat.

Marx and Engels were convinced that the new masters, the capitalists, also known as burghers, or burgesses, or bourgeoisie, that had grown up in the towns under feudal rule, were sooner or later going to be overthrown by the proletariat that the bourgeoisie had brought into existence.

Marx fell behind the agreed deadline, but came through with a magnificent text just a few weeks before the February, 1848 events in Paris that brought the proletariat on to the stage of history to an extent that had not previously been seen in the world.

The timing was great, and the text turned out to be classic to the extent that every line of it is memorable, especially in this first part. It is so rich and so compressed as to be saturated with meaning, and practically impossible to summarise. Therefore let us simply quote some of the most extraordinary sentences, so as to encourage you to read the document, not once but many times:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other - bourgeoisie and proletariat.

The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

The final words of the Manifesto are as follows:

In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.

In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.

Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

• The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Communist Manifesto, Bourgeois and Proletarians, Marx and Engels.

• To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation

Basics, Part 2a

Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation

In support of “The Prince” we now go straight to the most famous work of the Communist canon: Karl Marx’s “Capital”, in full strength.

The short Chapter 32 (attached) is the second last chapter in Volume 1 of “Capital”. It is a broad-brush summary of the first volume.

This chapter is only about 1000 words long - roughly the same length as a newspaper “feature” article. It is one of several passages in the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin that compress world history into a single sweep, in this case from the time of slaves and serfs, through the stages of the development of capitalism, to the anticipated proletarian revolution.

Other such passages in the “classics” include Chapter 9 of “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” by Frederick Engels, which will be posted as the next item, and the first few pages of “The Communist Manifesto”, by Marx and Engels, which is the main text in the next part of this “Basics” course.

The “Basics” course is partly an attempt to answer the frequently-expressed desire for a “simple” explanation of the politics of the working class and of the intellectual partisans of the working class.

In attempting this task, some texts have been chosen that exemplify the various original authors’ own attempts to respond to, and to satisfy, the manifest popular craving for a brief and easily-absorbed overall explanation of how politics works.

This chapter from Marx, wrapping up his master-work, "Capital, Volume 1" is one of those.

• The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Capital, V1, C32, Historical Tendency of Capital, Marx

• To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

The Prince

Basics, Part 2

Lorenzo di Piero De’ Medici

The Prince

Like the communists of today, Niccolò Machiavelli cultivated “long experience in contemporary affairs and a continual study of antiquity”. Both Machiavelli and Marx were familiar with the politics of ancient Greece and Rome.

Machiavelli’s “Prince” was written about 500 years ago, in Florence, Italy, and published in 1512. According to Karl Marx the sixteenth century was when capitalism first arose on the earth, especially in the Netherlands and in England, but it was Italy that had the most developed political culture at that time.

Hence “The Prince”  appeared much earlier than the first writings on Political Economy such as those by Thomas Hobbes, William Petty and Nicholas Barbon, which appeared between 1650 and 1700. Karl Marx was familiar with all of these, while Machiavelli’s work has been foundational for politicians throughout the five centuries of its existence.

Machiavelli was needing employment when he wrote this user-friendly text for the 20-year-old Florentine prince Lorenzo di Piero De’ Medici (pictured above), in the hope that the young man would give Machiavelli a job as a consultant, consigliore, or something of that sort. No job resulted for Machiavelli but what he left us as a result of this attempt was a set of “short texts” of very frank and still-useful political education, not very different in conception from a Communist University “Generic Course”.

The chapter in this selection of four that corresponds most closely to the politics of today is Chapter IX, “Concerning a Civil Principality”. All of them are very interesting and all contain advice that is still good after 500 years. Our discussion should be about this advice. If people have not read the material in advance, one chapter could be selected and read out loud. The chapters are very short, but powerful.

Machiavelli had a good basic understanding of class politics, which is perhaps why his works were put on the Pope’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Forbidden Books) not long after his death – thereby quickly guaranteeing their eternal fame.

• The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Four selected parts from The Prince, by Machiavelli.

• To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Pedagogy is the Revolutionary Instrument

Basics, Part 1c

Paulo Freire, 1921-1997

Pedagogy is the Revolutionary Instrument

“While the problem of humanization has always, from an axiological [Axiology: The philosophical study of value] point of view, been humankind's central problem, it now takes on the character of an inescapable concern.1 Concern for humanization leads at once to the recognition of dehumanization, not only as an ontological possibility but as an historical reality And as an individual perceives the extent of dehumanization, he or she may ask if humanization is a viable possibility. Within history in concrete, objective contexts, both humanization and dehumanization are possibilities for a person as an uncompleted being conscious of their incompletion.

“But while both humanization and dehumanization are real alternatives, only the first is the people's vocation. This vocation is constantly negated, yet it is affirmed by that very negation. It is thwarted by injustice, exploitation, oppression, and the violence of the oppressors; it is affirmed by the yearning of the oppressed for freedom and justice, and by their struggle to recover their lost humanity.”

Thus begins Chapter 1 of Paul Freire’s masterpiece, “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (attached).

This “Basics” course has recently been criticised for not introducing any so-called “tools of analysis” or “dialectical materialism”. It is true that these things are not specifically dealt with until the CU course on Philosophy and Religion. But it is not true that there is no philosophy in the “Basics” course. It starts right here at the beginning, with Paulo Freire, and it is very profound and very advanced.

Although he never professes to be a Marxist, Paulo Freire is from the start of this book advocating the recovery of lost humanity, which is the fundamental intention of Karl Marx’s master-work, “Capital”.

Marx, by the way, was not a “dialectical materialist”. Marx’s understanding of the dialectical realationship between the human subject and the objective material world corresponded exactly to these two paragraphs from page 6 of the attached booklet:

“To present this radical demand for the objective transformation of reality to combat subjectivist immobility which would divert the recognition of oppression into patient waiting for oppression to disappear by itself is not to dismiss the role of subjectivity in the struggle to change structures. On the contrary one cannot conceive of objectivity without subjectivity. Neither can exist without the other, nor can they be dichotomized. The separation of objectivity from subjectivity, the denial of the latter when analyzing reality or acting upon it, is objectivism. On the other hand, the denial of objectivity in analysis or action, resulting in a subjectivism which leads to solipsistic positions, denies action itself by denying objective reality. Neither objectivism nor subjectivism, nor yet psychologism is propounded here, but rather subjectivity and objectivity in constant dialectical relationship.

“To deny the importance of subjectivity in the process of transforming the world and history is naive and simplistic. It is to admit the impossible: a world without people. This objectivistic position is as ingenuous as that of subjectivism, which postulates people without a world. World and human beings do not exist apart from each other, they exist in constant interaction. Man does not espouse such a dichotomy; nor does any other critical, realistic thinker. What Marx criticized and scientifically destroyed was not subjectivity, but subjectivism and psychologism. Just as objective social reality exists not by chance, but as the product of human action, so it is not transformed by chance. If humankind produce social reality (which in the "inversion of the praxis" turns back upon them and conditions them), then transforming that reality is an historical task, a task for humanity.”

These paragraphs assert that there is no priority of the objective or material world over the subjective human consciousness. Freire is highly preoccupied with the subject-object relationship, and insists “that the concrete situation which begets oppression must be transformed” (p.5). But the people’s vocation is humanisation, says Freire. Transforming social reality is an historical task, a task for humanity. This is the first item business that we have before us as human beings, and our “only effective instrument is a humanizing pedagogy.”

This last phrase comes from the final paragraphs of Chapter 1 of “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, which are here given in full:

“The struggle begins with men's recognition that they have been destroyed. Propaganda, management, manipulation - all arms of domination - cannot be the instruments of their rehumanization. The only effective instrument is a humanizing pedagogy in which the revolutionary leadership establishes a permanent relationship of dialogue with the oppressed. In a humanizing pedagogy the method ceases to be an instrument by which the teachers (in this instance, the revolutionary leadership) can manipulate the students (in this instance, the oppressed), because it expresses the consciousness of the students themselves.

The method is, in fact, the external form of consciousness manifest in acts, which takes on the fundamental property of consciousness - its intentionality. The essence of consciousness is being with the world, and this behavior is permanent and unavoidable. Accordingly consciousness is in essence a 'way towards' something apart from itself outside itself, which surrounds it and which it apprehends by means of its ideational capacity Consciousness is thus by definition a method, in the most general sense of the word. [Alvaro Vieira Pinto, from a work in preparation on the philosophy of science.]

“A revolutionary leadership must accordingly practice co-intentional education. Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge. As they attain this knowledge of reality through common reflection and action, they discover themselves as its permanent re-creators. In this way, the presence of the oppressed in the struggle for their liberation will be what it should be: not pseudo-participation, but committed involvement.”

Not only does this explain the basis upon which the entire Communist University project been built. It is also a fully-worked-out manual for day-to-day revolutionary practice. It tells you, directly, what to do.

In the course of Freire’s development of his argument and even in the few paragraphs quoted in this introduction, above, Freire explains a great deal of philosophy, including the subject and the object, and dialectics.

But he does so in a way that is immediately linked to the practical way forward, and this is why Paulo Freire’s writing serves as a better introduction to philosophy in our Basics course than Engels would be, or “Dialego”, for that matter.

• The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970, Chapter 1.

• To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Use Your Head

Basics, Part 1b

Use Your Head

The third item in the first part of the ten-week Communist University “Basics” course is your VC’s own “conspectus” (= overview or synopsis) of Tony Buzan’s book, “Use Your Head” (download linked below).

We have sometimes been defensive about the inclusion of this book in a Communist course. The author Buzan does not propose, or proceed from, any overt political premises. If anything he appears at first sight to resemble a utilitarian bourgeois “management guru” or “motivational speaker”. What makes his work stand out from the others of that kind is its great practical effectiveness, and not any obvious political aspect.

Yet, after all the years of forcing Buzan’s work to cohabit with Marxist texts, it becomes clearer to this VC why it fits in so well: It is dialectical! And it is intentional! Therefore it is Freirean, whether consciously or unconsciously.

From a practical point of view, Buzan’s appeal is that he offers assistance with faster, more purposeful reading; with memorising; and with note-taking, particularly using his invention, the “mind-map” technique, of which an example is given above. These techniques are just what students need to help them get through their studies, and just what conventional education often failed to give them.

Students used to be obliged to try to learn before having learned how to learn. Buzan filled this gap very well.

But what underlies Buzan’s approach? It is not that he was lucky to stumble upon three techniques, like a prospector discovering diamonds. No. What distinguishes the mind-map, in particular, from other forms of note-taking characterised by lists and bullet-points, is that it begins and ends as a “unity and struggle of opposites”. It is a representation, in one glance, of the way in which any phenomenon is the product, or resultant, of many abstract dynamic forces, or vectors, pulling in different directions.

The mind-map is a very good illustration of exactly what is meant by “dialectics”.

The other main characteristic of Buzan’s approach is its “intentionality”, to borrow a term from Paulo Freire’s vocabulary. Towards the end of Chapter 1 of Freire’s “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, (download linked below) Freire quotes Alvaro Vieira Pinto saying that intentionality is “the fundamental property of consciousness”, remarking that this concept is “of great importance for the understanding of a problem-posing pedagogy”.

Buzan’s approach is full of intentionality. There is no question, for Buzan, of wandering about, learning for learning’s sake, in a random, eclectic way. Buzan says that you must be looking for a result.

Karl Marx, in the 11^th Thesis on Feuerbach, said that while the philosophers have interpreted it, the point is to change the world.

Thus intentionality, as well as dialectics and dialogue, are common and basic themes in Freire, Buzan and Marx.

• The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Tony Buzan, Use Your Head, 1974, Conspectus by D Tweedie.

• To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

How to be a Good Communist

Basics, Part 1a

Liu Shaoqi, 1898-1969

How to be a Good Communist

In today’s document (download linked below) Liu-Shaoqui discusses how members of a Communist Party should “cultivate and temper themselves” and “why communists must undertake self cultivation.”

Liu says “…the proletariat must conscientiously go through long periods of social revolutionary struggles and in such struggles change society and change itself.”

The linked document is the first chapter. The remainder of the book can be found on the Marxists Internet Archive.

This text is quite in demand, possibly because of its title, and because of the simple didactic certainties that it offers.

Let it speak for itself.

But we should in any case note that Liu Shaoqi’s political career ended with his arrest in 1969 during the “cultural revolution”. He was expelled from the Party in 1968, accused of being a “capitalist-roader”. His death followed in 1969.

So in life, being a good communist, or being recognised as such, turned out to be problematic for Liu Shaoqui.

• The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Liu Shaoqi, How to be a good Communist, 1939.

• To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Pedagogy According to Paulo Freire

Basics, Part 1

Paulo Freire, 1921-1997

Pedagogy According to Paulo Freire

For the purpose of this set of studies called Basics, designed for study circles without a lecturer, it helps to have an overt theory of “pedagogy” - a simple theory of learning and teaching - as a starting point.

The great 20^th-century theoretician of liberation pedagogy was Paolo Freire. It was Freire who gave us the word “conscientise”. It was Paulo Freire, more than any other, who showed how the bourgeois education system, with its “banking” theory of pedagogy (see today’s text, downloadable via the link at the bottom of this document), is not well designed to educate, in the fullest sense, but rather tends to reproduce the class relations that suit the bourgeoisie. Education, which should by nature liberate the student, is made by the bourgeoisie into a means of repression, said Freire.

How can we make sure that education is part of the building of socialism and communism? To ask such a question is to “problematise” education. To ask such a question is to begin a “dialogue” about education. Freire thought that for the political education of the oppressed, if it was not to be patronising and therefore counter-productive, by reproducing and reinforcing features of the oppressive bourgeois state, then the method for this purpose would have to be different and new.

In the dialogical method that Paulo Freire devised and called the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, or otherwise Critical Pedagogy, there is no elementary, junior, senior, matriculation, undergraduate, post-graduate, doctorate or professor level. Teachers are learners and learners are teachers; yet all are free-willing “subjects”, having “agency”, capable of leadership.

As much as there may be a room and a gathering of individuals, each known by name, and a “codification” which is the text or other object to make the occasion, yet the dialogue admits no limits. The Freirean gathering is not sheltered. It is one of the essentials of Freirean Pedagogy that we refuse the fiction of the sheltered classroom, and instead recognise that the oppressor is all around us and even within us, while we strive to liberate ourselves through our mutual, pedagogical dialogue.

In Freirean practice, there is no such thing as a basic level, or an advanced level. All that we can do is to begin a process of “problematising”, beginning with education itself.

As a rule, we will use original authors, and not commentaries on their original texts. In that spirit, the first of the chosen building blocks is the second chapter of Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (downloadable via the link given below), here supplemented with a glossary of “critical pedagogy” terms (the link to the download is below). This text provides an opportunity to reflect upon what you are trying to do by learning and teaching.

You may ask: What is political education for?

For the late Freire (pictured above), and for the Freireans of today, all education is a political act and a social act; an act of liberation and of self-liberation.

• The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Pedagogy of the Oppressed, C2, plus Glossary and Political Education.

• To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.