Copyright © 2021, 2022 by Liberation Media

First edition published 2021

Second edition 2022
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reproduced without the prior permission of the author.
ISBN: 978-0-9910303-8-5
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Cover illustration: Vladimir Tatlin

Edited by
Nino Brown

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Gabriel Rockhill, and Marissa Sanchez

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 About Liberation School

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 Contents
Revolutionary education and the promotion of socialist
consciousness
Vygotsky and the Marxist approach to education
Paulo Freire and revolutionary leadership
Comrades: Made, not born
Research and presentation
Amílcar Cabral
Dual power, base building and serving the people in the U.S.
revolutionary movement
Building organization and creating cadre
The role of journalism in class society and in revolution
Interview with militant historian Sónia Vaz Borges
Formulating study and discussion questions
Teaching tactics
Endnotes
 Revolutionary education and the
promotion of socialist consciousness
Introduction
By Liberation School Editorial Collective

Marxist theory is one of the most potent weapons the working

and oppressed classes have. It is a weapon our class can and has
used to not only win reforms but to build revolutionary societies where
the people are in control, rather than profits. As the Party for
Socialism and Liberation identified at our Third Party Congress in
2016, one of our primary tasks is to mend the “break in ideological
continuity” that emerged after the overthrow of the Soviet Union. The
communist movement will do so by establishing “the theory of
revolutionary Marxism and the entire vision of workers’ power” as a
dominant guiding pole in people’s struggles.[1]
Objective factors like rampant unemployment and the growing
climate catastrophe have helped revive interest in socialism as the
only alternative to the exploitation and oppression of capitalism and
imperialism. While organizers cannot predict when a revolutionary
opportunity will arise, we know that the objective conditions for such
will present themselves as a result of capitalism’s internal
contradictions. In addition to building organizations that fight to
improve people’s lives in the here and now, one of our constant tasks
as revolutionaries is to prepare the subjective factors for revolution.
This means we have to organize our class, build connections to and
relationships with communities and organizations, raise the political
consciousness of the people and ourselves, and popularize socialism
amongst ever wider groups. A socialist revolution will not take place
spontaneously as a response to worsening conditions; it requires a
mass revolutionary movement of millions of human beings who have
the consciousness, confidence and desire to fight for it.
Education is a key component in preparing these subjective
conditions for revolution. On a daily basis socialist and other
progressive organizers and activists engage in educational
processes. Here we define education broadly, for processes that take
place both inside and outside of formal class settings. Organizers
read the news, history and theory on our own and with each other, we
organize and attend study and discussion groups, we attend and
present at public forums, we write informational and agitational
literature in response to the struggles we are engaged in, we
converse with our neighbors and coworkers about politics and we
even organize and teach classes and courses. The mentorship and
training that every organizer both receives and offers to others, in the
course of a struggle or campaign, all have educational dimensions to
it. Active political education is crucial for revolutionary struggle
because it raises the consciousness and long-term commitment of
the people who will confront the deepening objective crises of
capitalism.
A good deal of revolutionary education involves explanation,
argumentation, coming up with the appropriate formulation or slogan,
recommending the right reading or the right speech, and generally
promoting our analysis of the problems we face and the solutions to
those problems. All of these educational activities are absolutely
crucial, but they are only one aspect of education. Specifically, the
activities listed above are about the political content of revolutionary
education, what could be called the revolutionary curriculum.
The curriculum is about the political theories and goals we
want to learn and teach. Pedagogy — the method and practice of
teaching — on the other hand, is primarily about how we engage that
curriculum. In other words, the curriculum refers to the “what” of
education and pedagogy refers to the “how” of education, or to the
different approaches we take to education, the kinds of attitudes we
practice, the types of relationships we establish and how we
understand our own teaching and learning and more.
Pedagogy is important because even the most appropriate,
relevant and correct content can be engaged or taught in a way that
turns people off, shuts them down or otherwise disengages them.
Part of learning how to be a better organizer entails learning how to
be a better educator. Without explicitly considering educational theory
and practice, we will not have the frameworks, concepts and
language to intentionally plan, revise, implement, reflect on, discuss
and evaluate our educational practices. In this book, we focus on the
pedagogy — and not the curriculum — of revolutionary education.
The intent is not to tell you how to educate, but to provide you with
resources to inform your own educational endeavors.

Revolutionary optimism and the presumption of competence

If you ask any teacher in any setting, they will tell you there is
no “formula” or “recipe” for education. Corporate charter movements
often try to produce such recipes — like Teach for America’s “I do,
you do, we do” rote learning method. But teaching is dependent on
relationships, trust, respect and a host of other elements. All these
can change day to day. Teaching on a Monday after a big fight broke
out at a weekend party is different from teaching the next Wednesday
when things have settled down a bit. Teaching in a pandemic is
markedly different from teaching before one. These are just a few
examples of the unpredictable forces that shape the educational
experience.
Similarly, Marxist pedagogy is contingent on a multitude of
factors: the dominant political ideology at the place and time (is it
intensely anti-communist or more open?), the consciousness of
students as individuals or as a collective (are they coming from a
liberal issue-based organization or a strand of the movement?), the
autonomy we are allowed in certain settings (is it an after-school club
at a public/private school, a community meeting or a Party office?).
And of course, there are other factors like different skills,
personalities, time commitments, and relations between teachers and
students.
There is a caricature of Marxism we might encounter in the
movement and among left academics: the idea that Marxist revolution
is predicated on the “enlightened” revolutionary teaching the
“ignorant” masses. Nowhere do Marx or Engels even hint at this
condescending notion, and neither do the revolutionaries following in
their wake. As we will discuss in the first chapter, one of Lenin’s main
gripes with those “Marxists” who focused exclusively on bread-and-
butter issues, what he called “trade-union consciousness,” was their
assumption that workers could only understand their immediate
situation. It was also one of Marx and Engels’ main critiques of the
reformism of the Social Democratic Party in Germany. As Marx and
(primarily or wholly) Engels wrote in an 1879 letter for internal
circulation among some SDP leaders:

For almost 40 years we have emphasized that the class

struggle is the immediate motive force of history and, in
particular, that the class struggle between bourgeoisie and
proletariat is the great lever of modern social revolution; hence
we cannot possibly co-operate with men who seek to eliminate
that class struggle from the movement. At the founding of the
International we expressly formulated the battle cry: The
emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the
working class itself. … Hence we cannot cooperate with men
who say openly that the workers are too uneducated to
emancipate themselves, and must first be emancipated from
above by philanthropic members of the upper and lower middle
classes.[2]

What Marx and Engels are saying here is that we should

always presume the competence of the working class. This does not
mean we should presume the capitalist system sets everyone up for
success. Quite the contrary: The system sets the masses up for
poverty. What presuming competence does mean, however, is that
we should assume by default that those we are organizing alongside
have the capacity and potential for transforming their consciousness
and ideas, habits and actions, political beliefs and commitments. We
will not all have the same knowledge, but we always all have the
same capacities for utilizing our intelligence.
Presuming competence also puts the responsibility on the
educator, the revolutionary, the organizer and the organization,
insofar as it means that if the student is not “getting it,” then the
problem lies with us. Too often educators displace our own
incompetence onto students. This is not to say, as with “bad grades”
in the classroom, that it is all the teacher’s fault either. A Marxist
approach to education requires looking beyond concepts such as the
“innate” inability of the student and instead to a complex of factors,
some of which are beyond and some of which are within our
dominion. Our own teaching is one determining factor that is within
our control.

Outline of the book

Because teaching is unpredictable and dynamic, we have to
maintain flexibility with our educational tactics and strategies. The
questions of what teaching strategies to use and when and how to
use them, however, should be informed by Marxist pedagogical
theories. This is why this book begins with several pieces on Marxist
philosophies of education. The opening chapters are more theoretical
and introduce some of the foundational educational theories in the
Marxist tradition. While we give current examples of how they can
inform our own practices today, they do not directly answer the
question “What is to be done?” Instead, these theories provide
different frameworks socialist organizers can use to refine our own
teaching practices.
The book begins with chapters on educational practitioners
and theorists who are more popularly known in the United States, but
whose Marxist origins are often repressed or ignored. Chapter 1
focuses on Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who produced the first
specifically historical-materialist theory of education. Vygotsky
demonstrated that any person’s or group’s level of development and
potential for future growth is not biologically fixed or socially
predetermined. Instead, Vygotsky showed that people’s development
is dependent on their historical circumstances and based on social
experiences. In other words, there is nothing essential in the student
that explains why they have developed in a certain way or how they
can develop in the future. Vygotsky developed his theory of the “Zone
of Proximal Development” to help educators move students beyond
their present level of development by guiding them through problem-
solving scenarios. Many classroom teachers in the United States will
have some familiarity with these concepts, while others may find
them new and somewhat challenging. We believe the theory can be
extended to the task of raising class consciousness among the
working class, which requires meeting people where they are,
accompanying through struggles and experiences that challenge their
existing worldview, and then drawing out the lessons together.
 The second chapter focuses on Paulo Freire’s critique of
oppressive education and the conception of revolutionary pedagogy
he developed in response. Freire identified mainstream approaches
to education as “banking pedagogy” in which students are seen as
empty vessels to be filled with information by teachers. In this model,
students are raw materials for the teacher to mold. Against this,
Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed is based on shared dialogue and
action in order to identify and then transform the social structures that
must be transformed.
In Chapter 3, we build on Vygotsky’s historical-materialist
approach to intelligence and development to consider the kinds of
attitudes teachers and students should embody to develop
revolutionary consciousness. In particular, we look at research into
how communities in struggle, in a sense, carry out Vygotsky’s
educational theory when more advanced community members help
newer members develop their potential. We discuss the difference
between having a “fixed” mindset and a “growth” mindset, and why
the latter is so important for revolutionary organizers and for
facilitating cadre development. It begins with a simple truth that we
can never remind ourselves of too often: None of us were born
comrades.
Although Marx never explicitly addressed pedagogy, Chapter 4
— the last theoretical chapter — examines the distinction Marx
makes between the methods used for researching and for presenting.
The method of research is an open-ended, messy and unpredictable
process of studying and investigating a topic, whereas the method of
presentation is a clear, linear and neat process of learning and
understanding a topic. After discussing the distinction between
learning and studying, we analyze how Marx navigated between both.
From here the book takes a more practical turn with concrete
examples of Marxist pedagogy. In Chapter 5, we see the example of
Guinea-Bissauan, anti-colonial revolutionary Amílcar Cabral, who
offers an exceptional example of a revolutionary educator who takes
Marxism as a dynamic theory rather than a fixed dogma. As a leader
in the unified struggle against Portuguese colonialism in two of
Portugal’s African colonies, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, Cabral
exemplifies the revolutionary as educator, who wrote and theorized
as he led. Cabral and his focus on revolutionary forms of education
show us what inspired and deepened Freire’s grasp of pedagogical
praxis. They also demonstrate why Freire and Cabral’s legacies
continue to offer invaluable educational insights for communist
organizers today.
In Chapter 6, we address the concepts of dual power and base
building, which revolutionaries in the United States are wrestling with
today. After clarifying what dual power is and providing historical and
contemporary examples of it, we show — from the direct experience
of our organization — how “serving the people” is a tactic for
mobilizing the masses and building the party rather than as a political
strategy in itself. Mutual aid, for example, is an educational tactic
insofar as it teaches our communities who cares for their well-being,
and who does not, and it helps build genuine relationships and create
authentic dialogue with other working-class leaders and
organizations.
In Chapter 7, we turn specifically to the issue of building
cadrebased organizations through a mass-based approach. We
address overcoming some of the educational obstacles to building
revolutionary organizations, including the “paralysis of analysis,”
individualism and sectarianism.
A book on revolutionary pedagogy would not be complete
without a chapter on militant journalism. Chapter 8 not only covers
militant journalism, but it does so with Frank González, the director of
Cuba’s Prensa Latina news agency. González shows us a class-
conscious approach to international journalism from the perspective
of a socialist country. A view from Cuba into the “mentality” dominant
in the United States completes the picture González paints. Such
insights offer immense pedagogical lessons for progressive forces
around the world and within the United States.
The final chapter is an interview with militant historian Sónia
Vaz Borges. This provides an essential supplement to Chapter 5. As
a child of Cape Verdean immigrants who grew up in Portugal, Vaz
Borges provides indispensable insights into the so-called colonial
mother country. The interview includes additional background on the
movements leading up to the revolutionary struggle in Guinea-Bissau
and Cape Verde.
 The two appendices provide a range of tactics revolutionaries
can deploy as they design and implement educational processes.
The first appendix delineates different kinds of study and discussion
questions you can use in your own educational programs and
outreach. This is not meant as an instructional set of recipes to
replicate. It is more of a general framework for thinking about how
you might construct a set of reading and facilitation prompts to help
you, your comrades and other educational participants. It will also
help synthesize, apply and extend ideas in different directions based
on your own local conditions.
The final appendix presents a series of tactics you can use for
teaching or facilitating an educational meeting. We include an array of
different tactics and delineate the particular purposes of each. While
these are distinct tactics, you can — and should — feel free to
combine them with each other and use them with the different kinds
of questions articulated in the previous appendix.
We encourage readers to use this book as a tool to further the
class struggle ideologically and practically. Marxist theory is the
crystallization of the experience of the working class, its movements
and political instruments, in struggle with a broad range of other
trends and classes; it is never final or all inclusive, but open to future
developments. The purpose of this book is to facilitate the training of
growing numbers of revolutionary organizers and educators.

Revolutionary education
The theories, examples, and components of revolutionary
education explored in this book are intended to help socialist
organizers as we work to popularize socialism and demonstrate to
political theories and movements how socialism can address the
pressing needs of working and oppressed people in the United
States.
To win a socialist revolution in an imperialist country with a
highly developed capitalist system like the United States, we must
first win over large and significant segments of the population to
socialism and to the belief that the masses here can lead a socialist
transformation of society. This entails not only commitments to
internationalism and the active solidarity with all national liberation
struggles around the world, but also with all struggles of nationally
oppressed peoples within this country. The latter have conclusively
demonstrated that they are the sparks for a wide range of struggles
and will play a vanguard role in the socialist revolution here.
Socialist consciousness will not grow on its own. It requires the
organized and intentional efforts of an expansive base of militant
organizers equipped to intervene in a variety of campaigns and
movements. Such organizers are not only activists but also
educators. They learn, study, reflect, teach, sum up and use the
struggle as a school for developing themselves and thus the struggle
itself. All of these actions are ways that we develop the subjective
factor in building the revolutionary movement.
All revolutionary processes are inherently educational. From
organizing meetings, forums and study groups to protest speeches,
propaganda and agitation before the revolutionary moment, to the
creation of new revolutionary educational and cultural institutions and
the training of teachers and specialists after the seizure of power,
revolution is pedagogical through and through. By focusing on the
theory and practice of revolutionary education, we can accelerate the
promotion of socialist consciousness and the creation of revolutionary
organizations.
 Vygotsky and the Marxist approach
to education
Chapter 1
By Curry Malott

One of the first specifically Marxist approaches to education

emerged in the Soviet Union in the early 20th century and is credited
to Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky’s name is now commonplace in the field of
education worldwide. Most teachers can at least recall the name from
their child development or educational psychology classes. His
theories are still foundational but, as is the case with so many
revolutionaries, they have been stripped of their Marxist foundations.
One result is that the full revolutionary potential of Vygotsky’s theories
has remained largely unknown, not only inside schools and teacher
education programs but also inside social movements.
This chapter introduces Vygotsky’s theories on pedagogy and
human development. It contextualizes them within the transition from
Czarist Russia to the Soviet Union, draws out the main elements of
his work that have utility for revolutionary organizers and provides
concrete illustrations of their relevance today.

Conditions in Czarist Russia

Lev Semionovich Vygotsky was born in 1896 to a Jewish
family in the town of Orsha, Belarus, at the time a part of the Russian
Empire. Coming from such a family in Czarist Russia meant a lifetime
of discrimination. Jewish people lived in restricted territories, were
subject to strict quotas for university entrance and were excluded
from certain occupations.
These restrictions nearly blocked Vygotsky’s admittance to
university despite his youthful brilliance. His experiences with anti-
Jewish bigotry would go on to influence his later work in psychology.
Most clearly, these experiences pushed him to critique conceptions of
the mind that treated the development of cognitive processes as
purely internal to the individual, unaffected by the surrounding world.
 Vygotsky’s groundbreaking work was frequently and painfully
interrupted by tuberculosis, which eventually killed him at the young
age of 37. To his peers, he was a child genius. By the time he was 15
years old, he was known as the “little professor.”
Vygotsky’s contributions to educational psychology stemmed
not only from his own research, but also from the impact of his
environment: revolutionary Russia.

A communist theory of cognition

One central feature of Vygotsky’s theory is the rejection of the
“stagist” view of cognitive development. According to this view, all
people, regardless of their social context or historical moment,
develop according to predetermined and universal phases.[3] For
example, the Swiss researcher, Jean Piaget, a contemporary of
Vygotsky, developed a model of cognitive development based on four
predetermined age-based stages that proceeded from basic sensory
learning to complex, abstract thinking. Whatever utility this schema
may have, Piaget’s framework is rigid and ahistorical insofar as
cognitive development evolves through fixed, natural, separate and
unrelated stages.
Vygotsky demonstrated that cognitive development is not
simply a matter of someone’s biological makeup but is mediated by
social factors. Consequently, as society changes, so too does the
potential for cognitive development. Cognitive development is not
about an individual’s potential for development because individuals
are always members of class and other social groups. Moreover,
there’s nothing “inside” or inherent in anyone that determines their
path of intellectual growth.
Vygotsky’s theories were deeply influenced and inspired by the
Bolshevik Revolution, which coincided with Vygotsky’s graduation
from Moscow University in 1917. The Revolution transformed many
disciplines and opened up new realms of inquiry and opportunities for
young, formerly oppressed and marginalized scholars such as
Vygotsky. The Bolshevik leadership heavily emphasized education
after the revolution, to overturn the conservative, reactionary ideology
that permeated the predominantly peasant, semi-feudalist society.
The cognitive development of peasants, in other words, was not the
result of biology or their nationality, nor was it fixed forever; it was the
result of human-created social conditions, it was historical, and could
therefore be radically transformed. Lenin summed this up in his
address to the First All-Russian Congress on Adult Education. He
emphasized the working class and peasantry’s thirst for knowledge,
noting “how heavy the task of re-educating the masses was, the task
of organization and instruction, spreading knowledge, combating that
heritage of ignorance, primitiveness, barbarism and savagery that we
took over.”[4] As renowned Vygotskian scholar James Wertsch put it,
“Vygotsky and his followers devoted every hour of their lives to
making certain that the new socialist state, the first grand experiment
based on Marxist-Leninist principles, would succeed.”[5]
Vygotsky’s work therefore was situated in one of the most
intellectually and culturally stimulating settings of the 20th century. His
project was dedicated to remaking psychology in Marxist terms in
order to overcome the practical problems inherited from Czarist
Russia, including illiteracy and the oppression of national minorities
and women. Working in this exciting time of revolutionary
transformation unleashed a radical desire for new knowledge.
Vygotsky was taken by socialism’s elevation of the general potential
of cognitive development. By improving material conditions and
celebrating and supporting — rather than attacking — the people’s
national diversity, new models of cognitive development could
emerge.
Vygotsky worked out his core concepts in the field of child
psychology, which he called the “Zone of Proximal Development
(ZPD).”
Vygotsky showed that human beings’ independent activity —
what people can do on their own — is not the limit of what they can
achieve with a teacher, peer or other leader. This is where the
concept of the Zone of Proximal Development comes into play —
defined by the distance between the existing level of development of
a learner and their potential development “through problem solving
under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers.”[6]
He demonstrated that by creating the spaces and practices for
students to lead each other, and learn from each other, they can
multiply their abilities and surpass preassigned expectations.
 This concept is in some ways quite obvious to progressive
people today who understand the universal value of education, reject
the stultifying and excessively hierarchical forms of the bourgeois
classroom, and reject the classification of individuals’ potential based
on class and racial hierarchies. But in the early 20th century, to reject
those hierarchies and arbitrary limitations on students of all
backgrounds was quite revolutionary and novel.

Applying Vygotsky’s insights to politics today

In what way do Vygotsky’s core insights about learning remain
important for all educators and organizers today? His concept of the
Zone of Proximal Development has continued to be closely studied
and hotly debated among educators; in the 1980s, his theories
generated a whole school of pedagogy in the United States. But
much of this discussion has occurred within the narrow parameters of
teaching schools, erasing Vygotsky’s corresponding political project:
to fight a war on inequality, bigotry and poverty.
To take the Marxist educational approach outside of the formal
classroom forces us to investigate the conditions determining the
level of a person’s or group’s development. In the realm of political
consciousness, furthermore, while all of us have been shaped by this
racist, sexist, capitalist society, we never lose the ability to grow,
change and think differently. Instead of writing people off, we should
recognize that a) workers are influenced by the constant capitalist
propaganda disseminated through the media and schooling, but b)
can also be moved by progressive political education, the changing
material conditions of life and most of all the class struggle.
For example, consider the rapid change in political
consciousness ushered in the United States by the nationwide revolts
against racism in the summer of 2020. The massive surge in
consciousness was the product of the social conditions that brought
people into the streets as well as the intervention of revolutionary
organizers and activists. This movement both represented the
emergence of a new radical consciousness, and in turn started to
radicalize and move a broad mass of people on the issues of racial
and class inequality. Regardless of where someone started when
they decided to first join a protest, they were inevitably influenced by
those around them — the speakers, the literature, the demands of the
movement, the interactions with the state and with each other. The
level of political development of the working class was starting to
change rapidly. Almost overnight, it was no longer considered fringe
or too radical to demand to abolish and defund the police. Socialist
organizers then had to assess what people’s potential level of
development was, to advance new slogans, in order to most
effectively carry out political education and build campaigns.
The 2020 uprising was an intense period, then, not just of
class struggle — but also of political education. To extend the
metaphor of Vygotsky’s theory, the “students” (the working class
engaged in anti-racist struggle) learned rapidly from each other and
from their “peers” (more experienced organizers), absorbing new
lessons quickly. In the span of a few months, the working class as a
whole skipped a few grades in a way that was considered
inconceivable just before. The space of political possibility and
openings in consciousness — or what could be called a “zone of
proximal development” on a mass scale — increased dramatically in
a way that was exhilarating and inspiring for all involved. It is useful to
remember this during downturns in the struggle, when all might
appear lost, when the working class seems largely inert and all the
gains of the previous period are no longer so visible. That can
radically change again, and it will.
What we need as organizers is an understanding of what we
can do to maximize the potential for change to occur by identifying
where the existing level of consciousness at every given moment is
and how much and in what direction it can, with political intervention,
change.
Correctly assessing where people are at — having a pulse of
the people — is indispensable. Beyond having awareness of the
larger political trends, this can be done with formal surveys and
simply by asking people what they think. The more people that are
talked to and the more outreach that is done, the better
understanding organizers will have regarding a particular
community’s space to grow, what issues can be pushed on, what
lessons can be drawn out.
 Getting people to an educational event is only one step. Their
presence alone does not ensure a successful breakthrough in
consciousness. The movement’s educational activities, like a good
classroom, must create an inviting atmosphere and foster the
willingness to engage (see Appendix B). If the event involves a
political discussion around a short article, selecting and creating the
most effective type of discussion questions for the audience and their
particular level of development is key (see Appendix A). The
questions should be within the same type of range that we outlined
above — in the space between what people already know and
experience on their own and what their consciousness can be moved
to next with some discussion and guidance. This is the essence of
good organizing and educating, not throwing out the most advanced
concepts and questions at any given point. Offering participants a
way to make connections to their own experiences tends to be an
effective way to foster the willingness needed to advance political
development.
The other factor Vygotsky identified in child psychology as
necessary for growth is play or imagination. That is, people need to
be able to think of themselves and the world as different than it is.
Here too, Marxist organizers must be creative. Appendix B offers
many activity ideas, such as role plays, that can help people achieve
their potential political development. Of course as Marxists our goal is
not just learning for the sake of learning, but for building a mass
movement, winning necessary reforms, and ultimately, state power.
Vygotsky further defined the zone of proximal development as
“those functions that have not yet matured but are in the process of
maturation, functions that can mature tomorrow but are currently in
an embryonic state. These functions could be termed the “buds” or
“flowers” of development rather than the “fruits” of development.[7]
Vygotsky referred to potential developmental levels as “buds”
or “flowers” rather than “fruits” because they are in the process of
coming into being and therefore not yet fully ripe. Further, their
process of coming into being is not predetermined. No one can know
in advance what form the developed function will take. This is the
same open-minded but optimistic outlook that organizers must take to
the political consciousness of the working class — always reaching
for and emphasizing that which is budding and could flower, and
ultimately bear fruit.
 The original edition of Vygotsky’s
‘Thought and Language,’ 1934
Wikimedia Commons
 Paulo Freire and revolutionary
leadership
Pedagogy of the oppressed for revolution
Chapter 2
By Derek R. Ford

Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” is a classic

among progressive educators, organizers and revolutionaries.
Although it is sometimes taken as a “how to” instructional book, it is
really a theoretical reflection on Freire’s own experiences teaching
peasants how to read and write, a theory he extends to revolutionary
movements, leadership and organization.
After spending 70 days in prison for the “treachery” of teaching
poor peasants to read and write, he was exiled from his native Brazil
following a military junta taking power in 1964. He eventually settled
in Chile until 1969, where he wrote “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.”
The book has been targeted by the U.S. right wing and is currently
banned from public schools in Arizona. It addresses the educational
components of revolutionary movements and, as such, is littered with
references to Marx, Lenin, Guevara and others. Specifically, the book
is concerned with how the revolutionary leadership pushes the
struggle forward, how it teaches and learns from the mass
movement.

The pedagogies of oppression and liberation

The pedagogy of the oppressed has two stages. During the
first stage, “the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through
praxis commit themselves to its transformation.” During the second
stage, which is after the world of oppression has been transformed,
“this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes a
pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation.”[8]
The first stage of Freire’s pedagogy addresses how the
oppressed view and relate to the world. It begins by acknowledging
that the oppressed possess both an oppressed consciousness and
an oppressor consciousness. The oppressor consciousness is the
enemy that needs to be liquidated: “The oppressor consciousness
tends to transform everything surrounding it into an object of its
domination. The earth, property, production, the creations of people,
people themselves, time — everything is reduced to the status of
objects at its disposal.”[9]
This is what capitalism does: It takes everything and makes it
into private property, including our ability to labor. This has a profound
impact on the world, even instilling the oppressor consciousness in
the oppressed. Thus, we have to distinguish an oppressor
consciousness from the oppressed person, and we have to transform
that consciousness to liberate the person.
The way that we engage in that transformation is crucial, and
this is where the question of pedagogy comes into play. The
traditional form of pedagogy Freire calls “banking pedagogy.” In
banking pedagogy, the teacher is the one who possesses knowledge
and the students are empty containers into which the teacher must
deposit their knowledge (like depositing money in a bank). The more
the teacher fills the receptacle, the better teacher they are. The
content remains abstract to the student, disconnected from the world
and external to the student’s life. Banking pedagogy — which is what
most of us in the United States have experienced in public schools —
assumes that the oppressed are ignorant and naïve. Further, it treats
the oppressed as objects in the same way that capitalism does.
Students are objects that the teacher works on. For Freire, education
must be rooted in the daily lives and experiences of students, who
are subjects rather than objects.
The correct educational method for revolutionaries is dialogue,
which means something very specific. To truly engage in dialogue
means becoming partners with the people. In this situation, “the
teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is
himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being
taught also teaches. They become jointly responsible for a process in
which all grow.”[10] This process is referred to in Portuguese as
conscientização, or coming-to-critical-consciousness.
A decisive element in the location and direction of
conscientização is the pedagogical relationship. This relates to
Freire’s critique of the banking model of education and to his
reconception of the teacher-student relationship. The dialogic model,
unlike the banking model, is a relationship between teacher and
student that is more — but, and this is crucial, not completely —
horizontal. In this schema, “people teach each other, mediated by the
world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are
‘owned’ by the teacher.”[11] The teacher does not relinquish authority
or power, as if that was even possible. Instead, the teacher takes
responsibility for producing new critical knowledge of reality with the
student.

Pedagogy cannot replace politics

While the pedagogical relationship and process are important
parts of Freire’s thought, they have tended to be isolated from Freire’s
ideological commitments and have come to stand in for Freire’s entire
work. As a graduate student in a fairly critical school of education, I
was only assigned the first two chapters of his book, and I am
convinced this is common practice. These chapters are rich: They are
where he denounces banking pedagogy and formulates dialogical
pedagogy in response. Yet we stop reading before we discover the
reason he bothered writing the book in the first place.
By selectively reading the book, Freire’s dialogic pedagogy is
substituted wholesale for his broader conceptual and political work,
his vocabularies and theories that generated new understandings of
education and revolution. There is nothing inherent in dialogue or
dialogic pedagogy that necessarily leads to progressive, critical
understandings.
For this to happen, the content must be placed in a particular
context by a teacher. Peter McLaren is one of the few U.S.
educational theorists to insist on Freire’s revolutionary commitments
(and a student and comrade of Freire himself). McLaren goes so far
as to say that “political choices and ideological paths chosen by
teachers are the fundamental stuff of Freirean pedagogy.”[12] We
cannot divorce the methodology from the ideology, the theory from
the method, or the critical from the pedagogy in Freire’s work.

The dangerous fourth chapter

Freire begins the last chapter of “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”
with “Lenin’s famous statement: ‘Without revolutionary theory there
can be no revolutionary movement,’” which Freire rephrases. Freire
insists that revolutions are achieved neither by verbalism nor by
activism “but rather with praxis, that is, with reflection and action
directed at the structures to be transformed.”[13] It would be just as
wrong to claim that reflecting on and helping name oppression to the
people is enough for revolution as to claim that activism is enough for
revolution.
The task for revolutionaries is to engage with our class and our
people in true, authentic dialogue, reflection and action. If we have
dialogue and reflection without action, then we are little more than
armchair revolutionaries. On the other hand, if we have only action
without dialogue and reflection, we are mere activists and remain
incapable of leading a revolution and erecting a new society.
Reflection and action are not divisions of labor between
revolutionary leaders and the people, whereby the leaders think and
direct and the people are only able to act on the leaders’ orders.
“Revolutionary leaders,” he writes, “do bear the responsibility for
coordination and, at times, direction — but leaders who deny praxis
to the oppressed thereby invalidate their own praxis.”[14] People and
revolutionary leaders act together, building and acting in unity before,
during and after the revolution.
The prerequisite for such leadership is the rejection of the
“myth of the ignorance of the people.”[15] Freire acknowledges that
revolutionary leaders, “due to their revolutionary consciousness,”
have “a level of revolutionary knowledge different from the level of
empirical knowledge held by the people.”[16] The act of dialogue
unites lived experience with revolutionary theory so people
understand what causes their lived experience to be as it is. This is a
restatement of Lenin’s conviction that spontaneous knowledge of
exploitation and oppression must be transformed through the party
into revolutionary consciousness of the relationship of our experience
to the relationship of broader social, economic and political forces at
differing scales: within the factory, the city, the state and the world.
This is a Marxist philosophy of education in that, as we
covered in the introduction, it rests on the presumption of
competence. We can see this at work in “What is to be Done?” as
Lenin argues against economist Marxists, who hold that the working
class develops its own political consciousness spontaneously as a
result of daily struggles with the bosses. Lenin argued that
spontaneity was only consciousness “in an embryonic form,” and that
something more was needed. Spontaneity is necessary but is
ultimately limited to “what is ‘at the present time.’”[17] In other words,
spontaneity by itself is not able to look beyond isolated daily struggles
and forward to a new society. Lenin called the spontaneously
generated mindset “trade-union consciousness.”
Lenin believed workers were capable of more than trade-union
consciousness. He actually derided those who insisted on appealing
to the “average worker”: “You gentlemen, who are so much
concerned about the ‘average worker,’ as a matter of fact, rather
insult the workers by your desire to talk down to them when
discussing labor politics and labor organization.” He wrote that
organizers had actually held workers “back by our silly speeches
about what ‘can be understood’ by the masses of the workers.”[18]
The economist organizers treated workers as objects rather than
subjects. They did not believe in the people or their potential.
When Freire argues that revolutionary leadership should be
open to and trusting of the people, he calls on Lenin. “As Lenin
pointed out,” he writes, “the more a revolution requires theory, the
more its leaders must be with the people in order to stand against the
power of oppression.”[19] This is not a naïve acquiesce but a belief in
the power of the masses to become not only agents of revolutionary
movements but creators of revolutionary theory through the party. As
Lenin also observed, the party creates a particular group of
theoreticians. In reference to the party Lenin writes, “all distinctions
as between workers and intellectuals … must be obliterated.”[20]
There is no abstract celebration of “horizontalism” within such
a pedagogy. The form of the revolution and its leadership are not
predetermined or abstractly posited; it can be more horizontal or
more vertical and triangular, depending on the circumstances. Here,
Freire turns to Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution to argue that
their historical conditions compelled them to revolt without building
widely with the people. Yet the leadership pursued this task
immediately after taking power through organization, specifically the
party. Tyson Lewis is one of the few to observe that “Freire himself
clearly saw his pedagogy as a tool to be used within revolutionary
organization to mediate the various relationships between the
oppressed and the leaders of resistance.”[21] As this book will show in
Chapter 5, this is why Freire looked so favorably upon Amílcar
Cabral.

Uniting politics and pedagogy for the oppressed

Revolutionary organizers, therefore, are defined not just by the
revolutionary ideals they hold or actions they take, but by their
humility, patience and willingness to engage with all exploited and
oppressed people. It is not possible for us to “implant” the conviction
to fight and struggle in others. Coming-to-critical-consciousness is a
delicate and contingent process that cannot be scripted in advance.
Still, there are a few general components to it.
First, we have to truly get to know our people, their problems
and their aspirations. This means that we have to learn from people,
acknowledging that, even if this is their first demonstration, or even if
they voted for a Democrat in the last election, they have something to
teach us. The more experiences we learn from the people the richer
our theories are and the more connection they can have to the daily
realities of workers and oppressed people today. Our class is bursting
with creative and intellectual powers that capitalist society does not
allow us to express or develop. The revolutionary party is stronger the
more it cultivates these powers.
Second, we have to provide opportunities for others to
understand their problems in a deeper and wider context, and to push
their aspirations forward. Freire gives a concrete and relatable
example:

… if at a given historical moment the basic aspiration of the

people goes no further than a demand for salary increases, the
leaders can commit one of two errors. They can limit their action
to stimulating this one demand or they can overrule this popular
aspiration and substitute something more far-reaching — but
something which has not yet come to the forefront of the
people’s attention. … The solution lies in synthesis: The leaders
must on the one hand identify with the people’s demand for
higher salaries, while on the other they must pose the meaning
 of that very demand as a problem. By doing this, the leaders
pose as a problem a real, concrete, historical situation of which
the salary demand is one dimension. It will thereby become clear
that salary demands alone cannot comprise a definitive solution.
[22]

Through this process, both the people and the revolutionary

leadership act together and collectively name the world. Genuine
knowledge is produced, authentic action is taken and real conviction
for the struggle is strengthened.
Freire’s popularity presents an opening to draw many into the
struggle and, in particular, the communist movement. By
reestablishing the link between his pedagogy and politics, we can
draw those who admire his work into the movement. At the same
time, we can better understand, adapt and practice his pedagogical
principles in our day-to-day organizing. “Only in the encounter of the
people with the revolutionary leaders,” Freire writes in the book’s last
sentence, “can this [revolutionary] theory be built.”[23]
Mural in the Faculty of Education and Humanities, University del
Bío-Bío in Concepción, Chile
Wikimedia Commons
 Comrades: Made, not born
Chapter 3
By Jane Cutter

All revolutionary politics are predicated on revolutionary

optimism: the belief, rooted in experiences in the struggle, that
workers and the oppressed can and will win. Yet revolutionary
optimism does not just apply to the masses as a whole. Revolutionary
organizers believe not just in the potential of the masses, but of
individuals as well.
Recently popularized research on “mindset” and learning may
shed additional light on this topic. It may help activists and
organizers, not only with their own development, but in developing
the potential of others with whom they come into contact. Before
delving into what “mindset” is and how understanding it could be of
interest to organizers, it would be useful to review a Marxist
understanding of “intelligence” in contrast with bourgeois and racist
conceptions.
Most people would probably agree that “being smart” is a
desirable attribute. The nature of “intelligence” or “intelligences” is
beyond the scope of this article. But the discourse over intelligence
seems to break down into two broad narratives: intelligence as an
innate characteristic of individuals versus intelligence as socially
defined and constructed behaviors and habits of mind.
Is one born with a set amount of intelligence, or can
intelligence change and grow over the course of a lifetime? The
notion that people are born with a fixed level of intelligence is one that
has been picked up by racist elements in society who have used
spurious “science” to make a case for the alleged superiority of white
people. If intelligence is not simply a fixed attribute of individuals, how
is it (or other forms of competence) socially constructed and
determined? And what is the role of the individual in fostering the
growth of one’s own practice of competence?
To broadly summarize a socialist approach to “intelligence,”
one might say: Not only is “intelligence” a dynamic characteristic that
can change over the course of an individual’s life, but, moreover,
what counts as intelligence also changes in response to changes in
the structure of human society, including developments in the means
of production. For instance, during the Middle Ages, the ability to
hand-copy documents was viewed as the sign of a true intellectual.
But the invention of the printing press and now, photocopiers and
printers, have made hand-copying mostly irrelevant.
Dominant conceptions of intelligence usually serve to reinforce
capitalism and its various forms of oppression, from racism to
ableism. Any socialist approach to intelligence must take this into
account, interrogating how certain standards of intelligence do this
and keeping our definition open to its various manifestations.

Vygotsky and the Zone of Proximal Development

As we previously wrote, Vygotsky’s work is foundational to our
understanding of this question. In the context of the early days of the
Russian Revolution, Vygotsky was a pioneer of communist
psychology who introduced the sociocultural or sociohistorical
analysis of human development. Vygotskian analysis sees human
development as a synthesis of biological, social and historical factors.
Each child develops in the context of a particular group structure
located in a particular culture at a particular time in history. Each of
these factors interacts to influence the child’s physical, mental and
emotional development. In turn, what counts as development in the
first place is also the product of historical and material conditions.
Vygotsky is best known today in the West for his theory of the
Zone of Proximal Development. Again, this is the idea that learning
occurs when someone aids the learner in doing that which they
cannot yet do independently. Instead of seeing intelligence as a static
attribute, Vygotsky was interested in the child’s ZPD. Rather than
looking at how much a child had already learned as a means of
assessing intelligence, Vygotsky was more interested in what the
child could potentially do. He also took into consideration the
understanding that what one has the potential to learn is also itself
socially and historically conditioned.

Communities of practice and mindset

 In more recent years, ethnographers and educators have
explored the concept of communities of practice as a site for the
development of the ZPD. Researchers have looked at tailors,
Alcoholics Anonymous, party members, teachers and others as
forming communities of practice where more experienced community
members help newer community members develop competence in
the ways of the community. Again, this concept has clear relevance to
the movement, where we can conceptualize political organizations as
communities of practice in which the potential of new activists to do
various things is developed through interaction with more
experienced members — from writing, public speaking, project
management and community outreach to logistics, security, street
tactics and broader bodies of knowledge like studying and applying
theory.
Carol Dweck’s concept of mindset recently became quite
popular. Her seminal research looked at children who were given a
relatively easy puzzle to solve.[24] One group was praised for their
efforts and the other group was praised for being smart. The children
were then given another, more difficult puzzle to solve. Those praised
for effort persevered and solved the harder puzzle. Those praised for
intelligence tended to give up in the face of a more challenging task.
Ultimately, Dweck identified something that she termed
“mindset” as the key to developing potential. Learners with a “growth”
mindset tend to believe that academic success is a product of effort,
even when the learning task is difficult, while those with a “set” or
“fixed” mindset tend to believe that success is a result of innate ability.
A growth mindset has been correlated with greater academic success
as compared to a fixed mindset. Angela Duckworth’s related concept
of “grit” (perseverance in the face of difficulty plus passion) as well as
Steele’s stereotype threat (lowered performance when test conditions
evoke knowledge of a stereotype of the participant’s identity group —
a variant on “set” or fixed mindset) have also become widely known
among educators.[25]

The misuse of growth mindset and ‘grit’

Given that learning and “intelligence” are socially constructed
between the learner, the teacher and the sociocultural context,
concepts of mindset, grit and other elements of learner agency must
be understood as contextual, not as determining factors existing
independently or solely as attributes of individuals.
In the context of contemporary neoliberal education reform,
mindset and grit have been misused, especially in racist ways.[26]
Instead of fighting the gross inequalities in the education system —
by reducing class sizes, placing adequate support staff in every
school, guaranteeing housing, food and health care for children, as
well as implementing culturally appropriate and anti-racist curricula —
teachers are taught to praise children differently and to positively
reinforce effort and “grit.” While there is no harm in reinforcing effort,
the new focus on grit and mindset smacks of the “pull yourself up by
your bootstraps” ideology, divorced from efforts to tackle the
inherently inequitable social conditions in which children are learning
today. Even Duckworth, the scholar behind the concept of “grit,” has
criticized the uses to which her concept has been put.[27]
It is immoral to tell hungry, homeless children or those
traumatized by police brutality to be more “gritty,” when in fact the
most oppressed already put in tremendous effort just to survive.
Further, because of how intelligence is defined by the U.S. schooling
system, the vast knowledge and skills of children from oppressed
communities are totally disregarded.

Organizing and growth mindset

That said, is there a place for growth mindset among
communists? I would argue yes, there is.
In the recent uptick of interest in socialism, I have seen the
utility of a growth mindset among so many new activists. As an
organizer, I have met people whom I frankly doubted had the capacity
to become good comrades based on how they presented when we
first met. Despite what I saw as unpromising attributes and prior
experiences, some individuals were willing to participate, take on new
tasks, accept criticism, and keep trying. Beyond learning communist
theory and history, these activists became real organizers by
developing skills and habits of mind such as discipline, self-sacrifice,
humility, investigation, compassionate listening and more.
 I have also met those who say they want to be organizers but
express ideas more reflective of a fixed mindset. When challenged to
make changes, these fixed-mindset people say something like:
“People who can make that change are different, or special, smarter
or stronger than me,” or “I’m not like that so I can’t do it.” This
becomes an excuse to not change behavior or try new or difficult
things. When fixed-minded socialists experience a challenge or
failure, they become discouraged and want to give up instead of
trying to figure out how to learn from the experience.
All progressive people must be willing to go beyond our
comfort zones, learn from experiences, work collaboratively, accept
discipline and make sacrifices. As organizers we must also believe
this about potential recruits. We cannot write off anyone with a desire
to struggle based on their present level of development. Instead, we
must have revolutionary optimism about the potential for further
development.
PSL 10th anniversary conference in Los Angeles
Ben Huff
 Research and presentation
Marx’s pedagogies then and now
Chapter 4
By Derek R. Ford

After surveying the educational theories and practices of

revolutionaries and educators in the Marxist tradition, in this chapter
we look at Marx’s own pedagogical practice. Although Marx
considered education at various points, he did not write about
pedagogy. He did, however, make an important remark that is
pedagogical in nature in the afterword to the second German edition
of the first volume of “Capital.” Here Marx distinguished the process
of research (Forschung) from the method of presentation
(Darstellung). This short but sharp passage is important for those
who are taking up their own self-study of Marx’s texts — which at
times can be quite challenging — and generally for organizers as we
take on tasks related to research and presentation in our own
movements today.
In the section, Marx is responding to an assessment of
“Capital,” that had appeared in the European Messenger magazine
based in St. Petersburg. The article focused on Marx’s method of
presentation and commended Marx for showing the laws of
capitalism and of social transformation. Marx briefly noted the
necessary differences between inquiry and presentation, differences
that are pedagogical. Marx writes:

Of course the method of presentation must differ in form

from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in
detail, to analyze its different forms of development, to trace out
their inner connection. Only after this work is done, can the
actual movement be adequately described. If this is done
successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as
in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a
priori [or self-evident] construction.[28]
 I think that Marx is describing two different pedagogies — or
educational processes — here. The first, the method of inquiry or
research, is one that examines material in all of its nuances and
relationships, tracing out the different lineages, past, present and
future potential forms of development, and how they relate to each
other, and more. Researching is a process that entails wandering
around, looking for connections, thinking you are onto something and
then following it to a dead end, generating ideas, getting lost in the
archives (whether they be in a library or on the internet) and so on.
The questions are limitless and the possibilities are endless.
When researching, you have a goal in mind but the goal does
not totally dictate everything you do. Marx researched to understand
the inner logics and dynamics of capital, how these came to be, what
impact they had and might have on the world and how the
contradictions can be seized during the class struggle. But this goal
was not always at the forefront of his mind. What we might read as
“digressions” in his work are often the reality that the end goal had to
be suspended at moments for research to continue. In fact, a lot of
what we consider “distraction” or “procrastination” in schooling might
actually be profound moments of research.
Research, however, cannot last forever, especially for
revolutionaries. The goal is not just to understand the world, but to
change it — and that requires a clear presentation of one’s position.
Presentation takes a totally different pedagogical form. It begins with
a predetermined end that guides the demonstration from the start to
the end. It begins with the most elementary building blocks and
proceeds linearly toward the end goal. Whereas researching is about
means, presentation is about ends: The ends structure everything
that comes before.
Marx’s “Capital” is a presentation of a very particular type. It
leaves the historical beginnings of capitalism and leaves it to the very
end of Volume 1. Here we learn that it was through slavery,
colonialism, legal and extralegal theft, individual and state violence,
and repression, that capitalism came to be. But he does not begin
here because he is not attempting to tell the history of capitalism;
rather he wants to convey the inner logic of capitalism and its intrinsic
contradictions as it was most fully developed in England, and in some
ways working from the inside out.

Politics and examples of Marx’s pedagogies

Both presentation and research are of course necessary and
Marx did a great deal of both. Even though Marx never wrote about
pedagogy, his body of work provides us with potent examples of how
he put them into practice. Two works in particular illuminate Marx’s
pedagogies in action: the “Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of
Political Economy” (rough draft) and Volume 1 of “Capital.”
The “Grundrisse” consists of a series of notes written in the
frantic days of 1857-1858 and is a collection of eight notebooks. They
were effectively lost for decades until they were discovered and then
first published in 1939 in the Soviet Union and made available in
Europe and the United States during the 1960s and 70s. Never
intended for publication, they are a series of research notes, or traces
of Marx’s studying, which Eric Hobsbawm says, were “written in a sort
of private intellectual shorthand which is sometimes impenetrable, in
the form of rough notes interspersed with asides which, however
clear they may have been to Marx, are often ambiguous to us.” As a
result, “anyone who has tried to translate the manuscript or even to
study and interpret it, will know that it is sometimes quite impossible
to put the meaning of some sibylline passage beyond all reasonable
doubt.”[29]
The “Grundrisse” notebooks are quite different from the first
volume of “Capital,” Marx’s real magnum opus, the only volume
published (and translated and republished) during Marx’s lifetime.
The “Grundrisse” is almost pure research (because they were notes
Marx was not trying to present to others), while “Capital” is almost
pure presentation (because it was meant to articulate the inner
workings of capital to others).
For two distinct positions on these works, consider Louis
Althusser and Antonio Negri. The former wrote that “Capital” is the
only book “by which Marx has to be judged.”[30] It was the “mature”
Marx, clearly broken from his Hegelian roots (which still inflect the
“Grundrisse”) and any mention of humanism. Althusser, a lifelong
member of the French Communist Party, was intervening in debates
over “humanism” that he saw as diluting or abandoning the class
struggle. Instead of proletarians versus the bourgeoisie, the
colonizers versus the colonized, it was “humans”; a non-class
category bereft of an enemy against which to struggle. Althusser
returned to “Capital” to combat this trend.
On the other side, Antonio Negri contrasted the “Grundrisse”
with “Capital” in a more favorable light because of its “incredible
openness.” “Capital,” according to Negri, was a closed, determinate
and objective book where contradictions resolved themselves. Negri
did not dismiss “Capital,” of course, but insisted that the book only
represented one aspect of Marxism. The “Grundrisse” was an
endless unfolding of research and, for Negri, openness and
possibility. “Capital,” on the contrary, was more limited precisely
because of its “categorical presentation.”[31] In essence, the
“Grundrisse” was more open because it is a series of notebooks in
which Marx discovers something and presents it, which brings forth a
new problem, which then opens up a new field of inquiry, and so on.
Most Marxists agree that “Capital” represents Marx’s highest
work of thought precisely because the presentation was so elegant,
clear, and compelling. “Capital” is guided by a pedagogy of
presentation that begins with something simple and obvious (the
commodity), and then goes deeper and deeper until we see that this
“trivial” appearing thing that is all around us is an active crystallization
of a series of ongoing struggles, like those between and within
classes and the state that play out differently over history, that
assume different forms (like technology and machinery), and so on.

Research and presentation in ‘Capital’ and the ‘Grundrisse’

Marx’s distinction between research/presentation is not hard
and fast; it is not even as firmly delineated as Althusser and Negri
insisted. Marx sought to understand, articulate, learn, and relay the
precise logics of capital, its contradictions, and how the working class
has seized and can seize on these contradictions to institute the
revolutionary transition to communism. At the same time, he knew he
could not complete this project because no one can fully delineate all
the processes of capitalism so long as it exists, as capital is by
definition a dynamic social relation, always in motion and in the
process of change. This is one aspect of capital that Marx and Engels
marveled at in the “Manifesto of the Communist Party”:
 The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly
revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the
relations of production, and with them the whole relations of
society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered
form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all
earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production,
uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting
uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all
earlier ones. 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 conditions
of life, and his relations with his kind.[32]

Indeed, when one reads the various outlines that Marx

presented for “Capital” in the “Grundrisse” and elsewhere, it is clear
that he was taking on a project he knew he could never finish. He
wanted to write volumes on the state, the world market, foreign trade,
wages, the history of theory and more. Even in the first volume of
“Capital,” we see traces of Marx’s never-ending studying in the
various places he notes an absolutely crucial point — one we “must
understand” — only to move on by acknowledging he cannot address
it here and it will have to wait until later: until he has studied some
more. Sometimes, like when he brings up credit and rent in Volume 1,
he does return to them in Volume 3. But other times he never does;
he never found the time for more research.
The writings of Marx, Engels and other Marxists still explain
the workings of capitalism today because they get at its fundamental
dynamics and contradictions, even if they take on different weight at
different moments. And even though Marx could not — and never
claimed to — predict how capital would develop after his death, these
dynamics and contradictions remained fundamental cornerstones for
subsequent revolutionaries to take up, who extended his critique and
method to prepare the groundwork for revolutionary action in their
own era. Marxism develops by returning to the process of research
and studying, to inquiry, to tracing new lineages, and discovering
what Marx as an individual did not or could not write about.
 Marx’s own turns between inquiry and presentation were
dictated not only by his health problems but by the ups and downs of
the market as well as the workers’ movement. After the failure of the
1848 bourgeois-democratic revolutions, at which point Marx was
exiled to England, he did not see the prospect of another
revolutionary situation on the horizon. Absent a new revolutionary
situation, Marx began his study of political economy in earnest. With
the capitalist crisis of the mid 1850s, he was forced to speed up his
research. When the Paris Commune erupted on March 18, 1871, he
left his work on “Capital” to write about that. After the first volume of
“Capital” was published, the other two major works he wrote before
he died were “The Civil War in France” (1871) on the Paris Commune
and the “Critique of the Gotha Programme” (1875) — which was not
published until after Marx’s death but that circulated widely amongst
the newly-formed Social Democratic Party. Marx even pushed the
publication of the second volume of “Capital” back because he was
waiting to see how the European and U.S. economic crisis of 1873
would turn out.

Research and presentation in ‘Capital’

Both the “Grundrisse” and “Capital” represent different ways
Marx engaged learning and studying. Consider, for example, the
chapter in “Capital” on what established the “normal” workday, where
Marx announces that “between equal rights force decides.”[33] Here
he means that between the established “rights” of the capitalists to
set the terms of work for the employees, and the “rights” of the
workers to decide on what terms they will be contracted for work,
there is no magic number set by the market. It depends on the
relative strength of the two classes, and their organizations, in their
struggle against one another. Up until this point, Marx had taken
bourgeois political theory at face value, but here the reality of the
struggle forces a leap so that he must depart from abstracted
mathematical formulas to the living struggle. The chapter presents a
narrative of the struggle in England throughout the 19th century, one
that is filled with contradictory alliances and betrayals, advances and
defeats. It is a struggle waged not by individuals but by collectives:
capitalists and workers together through the mediation of the state.
Moreover, in a footnote he acknowledges the role that Protestant
ideology played in the process “by changing almost all the traditional
holidays into workdays” and later the role of the anti-slavery struggle
in the United States.[34] There is nothing predictable or deterministic
about any of this; and this is what we affirm when we say that class
struggle is the motor of history and the motor of revolutionary
transformation.
Another example of the importance of research and inquiry
within the largely linear presentation of “Capital” is the very last two
chapters.
In the penultimate chapter, Marx presented a clear and
concise dialectical and historical materialist analysis of the tendency
of capitalist accumulation, and how the contradictions of capitalism
might result in particular revolutionary paths.
Marx begins Chapter 32 with the scattered private property of
individuals in petty manufacture, handicraft and peasant labor. These
methods prevented the concentration of means of production,
preserving a more rudimentary division of labor. This in turn limited
the cooperation of labor (social labor), and obstructed the formation
of the collective laborer.
Halfway through this first paragraph, Marx notes that “at a
certain stage of development,” these property relations created “the
material agencies for its own dissolution,” producing “new passions”
that “the old social organization” prevented.[35] Individual private
property was annihilated by capital and, through theft, colonialism
and slavery, repression was centralized and concentrated by capital.
At the same time, this produced the collective laborer and a social
process of work that developed a universal (although not
undifferentiated) social worker. As capital concentrated the means of
production and concentrated the proletarian class, the latter’s
rebellious nature grew. Monopoly capital becomes a “fetter on
production” once the “centralization of the means of production and
socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become
incompatible” with their capitalist shell. That shell is “burst asunder.
The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are
expropriated.”[36]
 He ends the chapter with a speculation on the relative violence
of both revolutionary processes. The centralization and concentration
of capital was “incomparably more protracted, violent and difficult
than” would be the “transformation of capitalistic private property…
into socialized property.”[37] The former entailed the dispossession,
theft, and exploitation of the many by the few, while the latter might
entail the expropriation of the few by the many.
After this revolutionary and succinct clarion call to expropriate
the expropriators, Marx then turns to a relatively dull examination of
Ebbon Wakefield’s theory of colonialism in the final chapter, Chapter
33 — again moving from a mode of revolutionary presentation to
inquiry. Marx appreciates Wakefield’s theory for its honesty;
Wakefield does not try to hide the violence of colonialism or
exploitation through notions of equal and free rights, and he explicitly
acknowledged the need for dispossession.
Marx ends Volume 1 by reminding us again that the capitalist
mode of production and accumulation are based on expropriation,
colonialism, genocide and slavery. He returns to the antagonistic
class forces that animate Marxist theory and practice. The
contradictions of capitalism that he has laid out — which cannot be
solved within capitalism — do not necessarily lead to automatic
revolution, if the contradictions can be displaced or managed through
other forms of dispossession or super-oppression, such as
colonialism. “Capital” Volume 1 ends then with an opening to further
study and inquiry. If the revolutionary process in the prior chapter
appeared predetermined and closed, the final demonstrates that
there are no objective determinants guaranteeing victory outside of
the class struggle.

Marx’s pedagogies in action

Marxist pedagogy is a never-ending alteration between inquiry
and presentation, of trying to both understand the world and to
explain the world to those social forces that must transform it. The
key for Marx and for Marxist pedagogy is to keep these in tension, the
need to both assert the answer (presentation) and to keep studying
(inquiry). The emphasis will change depending on a host of
circumstances.
 In many fields of nonprofit organizing, there is a presentation
that only an immediately realizable and “winnable” goal is valid, and
therefore there is no space for inquiry and, more specifically,
revolutionary inquiry. While revolutionaries fight for reforms in the
here and now, we do not adopt reformism, which keeps us trapped
within the present, unable to see beyond it.
As an alternative, revolutionaries link the fight for reforms to
the end goal of the total revolutionary transformation and
restructuring of society. This is not winnable by any one action,
protest, campaign, etc., and so the end goal is there, but suspended;
it is not self-evident how exactly it unfolds. When we organize with
this ultimate goal in mind, it compels alongside our activism a process
of continuous research and study. This, after all, is what drove Marx.
Without the desire for a totally new world, we would not have
Marxism.
The key point is that Marx left us not only distinct yet
dialectically related educational processes; he also offered us
examples of navigating between the two, as well as the various
factors that shape which ones we engage. It is not that presentation
or inquiry comes first or second, and it is not that one is good and the
other bad. The communist organizer, leader, or teacher has to deploy
both depending on different external and class or site-specific
contingencies. Sometimes learning must take precedence, and
studying must be suspended. At other times, studying must take
precedence, we must be free to imagine alternatives, get lost in the
possibilities, reach our dead ends, and open up inquiry to a new
presentation and then to a new inquiry.
This might be what, in part, separates dogmatic Marxists from
those who take it as a living, breathing document. The economists,
for example, only learned Marx, while those who have made
revolutions, like we will see clearly with the next chapter, have
engaged Marxism as an infinite well of studying.
The Cuban Literacy Brigades exemplify Marxist pedagogies as
they play out inside and outside of classrooms.
Liborio Noval
 Marx referred to the working day as a struggle waged not by
individuals but by collectives. Here, an eight-hour day march in
Melbourne, Australia, circa 1900
 Amílcar Cabral
Liberator, theorist, and educator
Chapter 5
By Curry Malott

Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral was born September 12, 1924,

in Bafatá, Guinea-Bissau, one of Portugal’s African colonies. On
January 20, 1973, at the young age of 48, Cabral was murdered by
fascist Portuguese assassins just months before the national
liberation movement in which he played a central role won the
independence of Guinea-Bissau.
This particular struggle was waged for the liberation of not just
one country — Guinea-Bissau, where the fighting took place — but
also for another separate geographic region, the archipelago Cape
Verde. Cabral and the other leaders of the movement understood that
they were fighting in a larger anti-colonial struggle and global class
war and, as such, their immediate enemies were not only the colonial
governments of particular countries, but Portuguese colonialism in
general. For 500 years, Portuguese colonialism was built upon the
slave trade and the systematic pillaging of its African colonies:
Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Sao Tome e Principe, Angola and Cape
Verde.
Despite the worldwide focus on the struggle in Vietnam at the
time, the inspiring dynamism of the campaign waged in Guinea-
Bissau — together with the figure of Cabral — captured international
attention. In the introduction to an early collection of Cabral’s writings
and speeches, Basil Davidson describes Cabral as someone who
expressed a genuine “enduring interest in everyone and everything
that came his way.”[38]
Like so many revolutionary leaders Cabral was “loved as well
as followed” because “he was big hearted” and “devoted to his
peoples’ progress.” Due to his leadership and brilliance,
“governments asked his advice” and “the United Nations gave him its
platform.”[39] However deserved it was, Cabral never indulged in this
praise, and instead focused solely on his commitment to the liberation
and self-determination of the world’s working class and oppressed.
The Portuguese colonization of Guinea-Bissau was backed by
Spain, South Africa, the United States and NATO. Summarizing the
pooled imperialist power wielded by Portugal in a report on the status
of their struggle Cabral elaborates:

In the basic fields of economics, finance and arms, which

determine and condition the real political and moral behavior of
states, the Portuguese government is able to count more than
ever on the effective aid of the NATO allies and others. Anyone
familiar with the relations between Portugal and its allies, namely
the USA, Federal Germany and other Western powers, can see
that this assistance (economic, financial and in war material) is
constantly increasing, in the most diverse forms, overt and
covert. By skillfully playing on the contingencies of the cold war,
in particular on the strategic importance of its own geographical
position and that of the Azores islands, by granting military bases
to the USA and Federal Germany, by flying high the false banner
of the defense of Western and Christian civilization in Africa, and
by further subjecting the natural resources of the colonies and
the Portuguese economy itself to the big financial monopolies,
the Portuguese government has managed to guarantee for as
long as necessary the assistance which it receives from the
Western powers and from its racist allies in Southern Africa.[40]

Despite the immense power of their enemies, the struggle led

by the relatively small population in Guinea-Bissau prevailed,
remaining a beacon of inspiration to this day.
As a result of his role as a national liberation movement leader
for roughly 15 years, Cabral had become a widely influential theorist
of decolonization and non-deterministic, creatively applied re-
Africanization. World-renowned critical educator Paulo Freire, in a
1985 presentation about his experiences in liberated Guinea-Bissau
as a sort of militant consultant, concludes that Cabral, along with Ché
Guevara, represent “two of the greatest expressions of the twentieth
century.”[41] Freire describes Cabral as “a very good Marxist, who
undertook an African reading of Marx.”[42] Cabral, for Freire, “fully
lived the subjectivity of the struggle. For that reason, he theorized” as
he led.[43]
Although not fully acknowledged in the field of education,
Cabral’s decolonial theory and practice also sharpened and
influenced the trajectory of Freire’s (1921-1997) thought. Through the
revolutionary process led by Cabral, Guinea-Bissau became a world
leader in decolonial forms of education, which moved Freire deeply.
That is, because of the villainous process of Portuguese
colonialism, which included centuries of de-Africanization, re-
Africanization, through decolonial forms of education, was a central
feature of the anti-colonial struggle for self-determination.

Cabral’s dialectical unity, building the party and the ‘weapon of

theory’
Cabral engaged the world dialectically. As a theory of change,
dialectics has been at the center of revolutionary thought since Marx
and Engels. Cabral wielded it with precision. Dialectically grasping
how competing social forces driving historical development are often
hidden or mystified, Cabral excelled at uncovering them, and in the
process, successfully mobilized the masses serving as the lever of
change.
Cabral knew that the people must not only abstractly
understand the interaction of forces behind the development of
society, but they must forge an anti-colonial practice that concretely,
collectively and creatively see themselves as one of those forces. To
do so, however, the masses had to be organized into and
represented by a Party.
In 1956, Cabral helped found the African Party for
Independence, which later became The African Party for the
Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). The PAIGC was
the first ever communist party in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, and
its founding was a monumental and inspiring feat.
In “The Weapon of Theory,” a 1966 address in Havana, Cabral
articulated the inseparability of national liberation and socialism,
telling the attendees that “in our present historical situation —
elimination of imperialism which uses every means to perpetuate its
domination over our peoples, and consolidation of socialism
throughout a large part of the world — there are only two possible
paths for an independent nation: to return to imperialist domination
(neo-colonialism, capitalism, state capitalism), or to take the way of
socialism.”[44]
Cabral had to build the party and its indispensable culture of
militant discipline from the ground up. Cabral’s ability to meet the new
party members where they were as co-learners speaks to his role as
a pedagogue of the revolution. Delivered as a series of nine lectures
to PAIGC members in 1969, Cabral covers the basics of the
revolution, including its organization. He describes the PAIGC as a
party in the Leninist tradition by referring to it as “an instrument of
struggle” comprised of those who “share a given idea, a given aim, on
a given path.”[45]
Of course, revolutionary crises do not emerge from the
correctness of ideas alone, but are driven by deteriorating economic
conditions, and a crisis in the legitimacy of the state and its ability to
meet the peoples’ needs. In the 1940s there were several droughts
that left tens of thousands of Cape Verdeans dead. Portugal’s
barbarism and indifferent response, situated in the context of the
mounting poverty and suffering within its African colonies, began to
alienate even the most privileged strata of the colonial state.
What made Cabral one of history’s great communist leaders,
outside of the larger historical moment that provided an outlet for his
talents, was his theoretically-informed tactical flexibility, which was
essential for a constantly shifting balance of forces. In other words,
in-the-midst-of-struggle decision making is enhanced by theory and
organization, which enables the ability to quickly grasp the immediate
and long-term implications of the shifting calculus of power.
For example, in 1957 in Paris, Cabral and two Angolans
formed the Movimento Anti-Colonista of Africans from the Portuguese
colonies during the Algerian War. The three, in Angola, would go on
to form the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola. What
developed was one of the toughest anti-colonial fights in Africa.
It is only fitting that in his opening remarks in the first of the
nine 1969 presentations to party members Cabral would choose as
his place of departure an explanation of PAIGC’s “motto” or “theme,”
the phrase “unity and struggle.”[46] Defining the concept of unity
dialectically, Cabral insists that “whatever might be the existing
differences” within the people, “we must be one, an entirety, to
achieve a given aim. This means that in our principle, unity is taken in
a dynamic sense, in motion.”[47]
The idea that unity is a movement and process of composition
means that it is “a means, not an end. We might have struggled a
little for unity, but if we achieve it, that does not mean the struggle is
over.”[48] The Party’s role here “is not necessary to unite the whole
population to struggle in a country. Are we sure that all the population
are united? No, a certain degree of unity is enough. Once we have
reached it, then we can struggle.”[49]
To explain struggle, Cabral likens it to the tension between
centrifugal force and gravity. As a concrete example Cabral notes that
for a spaceship to leave the Earth it must overcome the force of
gravity. Cabral then characterizes Portuguese colonialism as an
external force imposed upon the people and only through the
combined force of the people united can the force of colonialism be
overcome.
In the address, Cabral theorized the dialectical nature of
movement and change focusing specifically on how the anti-
imperialist struggle must emerge from the concrete conditions of each
national liberation movement.

We know that the development of a phenomenon in

movement, whatever its external appearance, depends mainly
on its internal characteristics. We also know that on the political
level our own reality — however fine and attractive the reality of
others may be — can only be transformed by detailed knowledge
of it, by our own efforts, by our own sacrifices. It is useful to recall
in this Tricontinental gathering, so rich in experience and
example, that however great the similarity between our various
cases and however identical our enemies, national liberation and
social revolution are not exportable commodities; they are, and
increasingly so every day, the outcome of local and national
elaboration, more or less influenced by external factors (be they
favorable or unfavorable) but essentially determined and formed
 by the historical reality of each people, and carried to success by
the overcoming or correct solution of the internal contradictions
between the various categories characterizing this reality.[50]

Cabral knew that to defeat Portuguese colonialism in Guinea-

Bissau, the liberation struggle could not merely reproduce the tactics
of struggles from other contexts, like Cuba. Rather, every particular
struggle has to base its tactics on an analysis of the specifics of its
own context. For example, while acknowledging the value of the
general principles Guevara outlined in his “Guerilla Warfare,” Cabral
commented that “nobody commits the error, in general, of blindly
applying the experience of others to his own country. To determine
the tactics for the struggle in our country, we had to take into account
the geographical, historical, economic, and social conditions of our
own country, both in Guinea and in Cabo [Cape] Verde.”[51]
Responding to Guevara’s argument, based on the experience
of Cuba, that revolutionary struggles go through three predetermined
phases or stages, Cabral stated:

In general, we have certain reservations about the

systematization of phenomena. In reality the phenomena don’t
always develop in practice according to the established
schemes. We greatly admire the scheme established by Che
Guevara essentially on the basis of the struggle of the Cuban
people and other experiences, and we are convinced that a
profound analysis of that scheme can have a certain application
to our struggle. However, we are not completely certain that, in
fact, the scheme is absolutely adaptable to our conditions.[52]

Cabral’s assessment was also informed by the dialectical

insight that the conditions in any one country do not develop in a
vacuum unaffected by external forces. Not only were deteriorating
conditions in Portugal, the imperial mother country, shifting the
balance of forces in favor of national liberation movements in its
African colonies, but the emergence of these struggles coincided with
the successful revolution in China in 1949.
Conscious of this larger dialectical totality — which points to
the interconnection between seemingly separate, unrelated parts —
Cabral consciously fostered solidarity with Portugal’s working class.
Representing the colonized Indigenous peoples of Guinea-Bissau
Cabral successfully reached out to the oppressed of Portugal in
solidarity against their common class enemy, the fascistic Portuguese
capitalist/colonialist class.
With dialectical theory and the spirit of anti-colonialist and anti-
capitalist unity the revolutionary forces in Guinea-Bissau routinely
freed Portuguese prisoners of war.[53] Cabral used such occasions to
make public statements designed to educate and win over Portugal’s
persecuted working class to shift the balance of power away from
Portugal’s fascist state.
Cabral spoke directly to the 20,000 Portuguese conscripts,
urging them to consider their class interests above and beyond the
national chauvinism their ruling class fed them:

In the framework of our struggle for national independence,

peace and progress for our people in Guinea and the Cabo
Verde Islands, the freeing of Portuguese soldiers captured by our
armed forces was both necessary and predictable. This
humanitarian gesture, whose political significance will escape
nobody, is the corollary of a fundamental principle of our party
and of our struggle. We are not fighting against the Portuguese
people, against Portuguese individuals or families. Without ever
confusing the Portuguese people with colonialism, we have had
to take up arms to wipe out from our homeland the shameful
domination of Portuguese colonialism.[54]

Central to this message, Cabral offered insights regarding the

awful treatment of not only prisoners of war in Guinea-Bissau and
Cape Verde, but of the civilian population as well:

Members of our armed forces captured by the colonial

troops are generally given a summary execution. Others are
tortured and forced to make declarations which the colonial
authorities use in their propaganda. In their vain but nonetheless
criminal attempt at genocide, the Portuguese colonialists carry
out daily acts of terrorism against the peaceful inhabitants of our
liberated areas, particularly against women, children and old
 people; they bomb and machine-gun our people, reducing our
villages to ashes and destroying our crops, using bombs of every
type, and in particular fragmentation bombs, napalm and white
phosphor bombs.[55]

The liberation of the Portuguese was connected to the

liberation of Portugal’s African colonies. If the Portuguese ruling class
began losing control in Africa, it could also fall in Portugal, and if it fell
in Portugal, it would fall in Africa.
Rather than a theoretical position worked out abstractly in
isolation, it was formulated practically. It had serious and determinant
results. Portuguese officers refused orders to fight in Africa, and
some formed an Armed Forces Movement that supported the
demands for independence.
The Portuguese soldiers led a rebellion against fascism at
home, which ended more than 40 years of fascist rule. It opened the
door to a popular upsurge that nearly claimed power for the
Portuguese workers. These social convulsions in the imperial center
in turn facilitated the independence of Portugal’s African colonies.

De-Africanization and anti-colonial resistance

The small region in West Africa that the Portuguese would
claim as Guinea-Bissau contained more than a dozen distinct ethnic
groups. Slavers worked tirelessly to sow divisions between them.
These divisions enabled slavers to enlist one group to facilitate the
enslavement of others. This anti-African divisiveness would lay the
foundation for centuries of de-Africanization.
Describing the role of colonial education in this epistemic
violence Walter Rodney, in his classic text, “How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa,” explains that, “the Portuguese…had always
shown contempt for African language and religion.”[56] Whereas
secondary schools were established for colonists, education beyond
two or three years of elementary school for Africans was rare.
Consequently:

Schools of kindergarten and primary level for Africans in

Portuguese colonies were nothing but agencies for the spread of
the Portuguese language…[T]he small amount of education
 given to Africans was based on eliminating the use of local
languages.[57]

The devastation of such practices reflects reports that

European colonists with smaller African colonial holdings like
Portugal were amongst the most desperate and thus cruelest in their
efforts at maintaining their occupations. Consequently, indigenous
resistance to Portuguese colonialism was so widespread for so many
centuries that colonial rule was always limited to specific regions. In
other words, colonial forces were never completely able to conquer
what amounts to the state power of indigeneity.
It is therefore not surprising that the Portuguese were not able
to rely merely on state violence for social control, but required
intensive ideological manipulation as well. The attempt to eradicate
Indigenous languages and cultures was crucial. Toward these ends,
the colonial authorities propagated a hypocritical discourse that
claimed their colonies were integral to the metropolis or mainland
while simultaneously brutally exploiting them.

Fascist Portugal and the struggle

The brutality in which the Portuguese ruling class managed its
African colonies would eventually be directed at its own working class
with a fascist turn in 1926. Rodney explains that “when the fascist
dictatorship was inaugurated in Portugal in 1926, it drew inspiration
from Portugal’s colonial past.”[58]
The decline of Portuguese capitalism that gave way to
Portuguese fascism would only deteriorate with the global capitalist
crisis of the 1930s. Consequently, the desperation of Portugal’s
capitalist class intensified. For example, when Salazar became the
dictator of Portugal in 1932, he declared that the “new” Portuguese
state would be built off of the exploitation of “inferior peoples.”[59]
Whereas the French ruling class had moved to neocolonialism
by 1960, Portugal’s decline had rendered it still largely backward and
feudalistic. Out of desperation, Portugal became even more
dependent on ruthlessly exploiting peoples not just in its colonial
holdings, but within its own national territory.
 Fascist Portuguese leaders, therefore, employing increasingly
violent forms of social control, rejected African demands for self-
determination. In response to the growing wave of national liberation
movements in their African colonies, the Portuguese establishment
sent armed forces to repress the struggle. Rather than cower in the
face of Portuguese fascism and overall deteriorating conditions,
national liberation movements grew and spread.

Relations with China

Following the establishment of the PAIGC, Cabral settled in
Guinea’s capital, Conakry. Cabral immediately reached out to China’s
Guinean embassy in 1960.
Since the emergence of the People’s Republic of China in
1949, China had established a clear commitment to the anti-colonial
movements in Africa. For example, in 1955 at the Bandung
Conference, in which 29 African countries participated, China
established foreign policy principles based upon supporting
oppressed nations’ right to self-determination. In 1957, China
organized the Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference and in 1960 founded
the Chinese-African Peoples’ Friendship Association, in which Cabral
enthusiastically participated.
Cabral and other leaders of PAIGC became regular guests at
the Chinese embassy in Conakry. In 1960, the PAIGC received an
invitation from the Chinese Committee for Afro-Asian Solidarity to visit
China. A delegation from the People’s Movement for the Liberation of
Angola (MPLA) was invited as well. During this visit, China agreed to
use their military academies to train combatants from both the PAIGC
and the MPLA.
Training included instruction in guerilla warfare, the history of
the Chinese Revolution and agrarian revolution, and socialist theory.
The first group trained in China would serve as the embryonic core of
the PAIGC’s fighting cadre.
As a result of Cabral’s leadership and diplomacy, China would
emerge as one of Guinea-Bissau’s first supporters in the early stage
of its struggle for independence. China provided the PAIGC with a
great diversity of support, from weaponry to assistance broadcasting
radio messages denouncing the regular, horrific crimes of the
Portuguese military in Guinea-Bissau. With support from China on
one hand, and Portuguese brutality on the other, the anti-colonial
struggle intensified between 1963 and 1974.

Anti-colonialism and decoloniality

An important part of carrying out the national liberation
movement entailed knowing what issues to organize around.
Based on his intimate understanding of the uniqueness of the
agricultural situation in his country, Cabral knew that the primary
economic issue the majority peasant population faced was not
access to land, as was the case in other colonies. Rather, the issue
was unsustainable trade deals that were particularly devastating
given the colonial insistence on not farming for sustenance but for
export through single-crop production.
The demand for cultural and political rights in the face of
fascistic Portuguese colonialism was another demand that resonated
widely. Cabral focused on the political developments required for
building a united movement for national liberation. In his formulations,
he argued that the armed struggle was intimately interconnected with
the political struggle, which were both part of a larger cultural
struggle.
Cabral’s Marxist formulations on culture were important for the
larger struggle and for resisting colonial education. He acknowledged
that fascists and imperialists were well aware “of the value of culture
as a factor of resistance to foreign domination,” which provided a
framework for understanding that subjugation can only be maintained
“by the permanent and organized repression of the cultural life of the
people.”[60]
Resistance, for Cabral, is also a cultural expression. What this
means is that “as long as part of that people can have a cultural life,
foreign domination cannot be sure of its perpetuation.”[61] In this
situation then, “at a given moment, depending on internal and
external factors…cultural resistance…may take on new (political,
economic, and armed) forms, in order…to contest foreign
domination.”[62] In practice, the still living Indigenous cultures that led
centuries of anti-colonial resistance would organically merge with,
and emerge from within, the political and national liberation and
socialist movements.
 In practice, Cabral promoted the development of the cultural
life of the people. Written as a directive to PAIGC cadre in 1965,
Cabral encouraged not only a more intensified military effort against
the Portuguese, but a more intensified educational effort in liberated
areas of Guinea-Bissau. Again, while the national liberation/anti-
colonial movement and the educational process of decolonizing
knowledge are often falsely posed as distinct or even antagonistic,
Cabral conceptualized them as dialectically interrelated:

Create schools and spread education in all liberated areas.

Select young people between 14 and 20, those who have at
least completed their fourth year, for further training. Oppose
without violence all prejudicial customs, the negative aspects of
the beliefs and traditions of our people. Oblige every responsible
and educated member of our Party to work daily for the
improvement of their cultural formation.[63]

A central part of developing this revolutionary consciousness

was the process of re-Africanization. This was not meant as a call to
return to the past, but a way to reclaim self-determination and build a
new future in the country.

Oppose among the young, especially those over 20, the

mania for leaving the country so as to study elsewhere, the blind
ambition to acquire a degree, the complex of inferiority and the
mistaken idea which leads to the belief that those who study or
take courses will thereby become privileged in our country
tomorrow.[64]

At the same time, Cabral opposed fostering ill will toward those
who had studied or who desired to study abroad. Rather, Cabral
encouraged a pedagogy of patience and understanding as the correct
approach to winning people over and strengthening the movement.
This is one reason why Freire describes Cabral as one of
those “leaders always with the people, teaching and learning mutually
in the liberation struggle.”[65] As a pedagogue of the revolution, for
Freire, Cabral’s “constant concern” was the “patient impatience with
which he invariably gave himself to the political and ideological
formation of militants.”[66]
This commitment to the people’s cultural development as part
of the wider struggle for liberation informed his educational work in
the liberated zones. Freire writes that it also informed “the tenderness
he showed when, before going into battle, he visited the children in
the little schools, sharing in their games and always having just the
right word to say to them. He called them the ‘flowers of our
revolution.’”[67]

Victory before victory

Even though Cabral was murdered before victory, the ultimate
fate of Portuguese colonialism had already been sealed years before
his death, and he knew it. For example, in a communique released on
January 8, 1973, a mere 12 days before he was assassinated, Cabral
concludes that the situation in Guinea-Bissau “since 1968… is
comparable to that of an independent state.”[68] Cabral reports that
after dozens of international observers had visited Guinea-Bissau,
including a United Nations Special Mission, the international
legitimacy of their PAIGC-led struggle was mounting. It had become
irrefutable that:

Vast areas have been liberated from the colonial yoke and
a new political, administrative, economic, social and cultural life
is developing in these areas, while the patriotic forces, supported
by the population, are fighting successfully against the
colonialists to complete the liberation of the country.[69]

With this knowledge Cabral, again, denounces the “the

criminal obstinacy of the Lisbon Government, which intensifies its
genocidal colonial war against the legitimate rights of our people to
self-determination, independence and progress.”[70]
Making the case for the formation of a new internationally-
recognized state, Cabral argues that the people of Guinea-Bissau,
through the leadership of the PAIGC, were already functioning as
such:
 While our people have for years now possessed political,
administrative, judicial, military, social and cultural institutions —
hence a state — and are free and sovereign over more than two-
thirds of the national territory, they do not have a juridical
personality at the international level. Moreover the functioning of
such institutions in the framework of the new life developing in
the liberated areas demands a broader participation by the
people, through their representatives, not only in the study and
solution of the problems of the country and the struggle, but also
in the effective control of the activities of the Party which leads
them.[71]

To begin resolving this contradiction, in 1971 the Party voted to

hold general elections in the liberated areas “for the constitution of
the first People’s National Assembly” in Guinea-Bissau. After eight
months of debate, discussion and outreach, elections were
successfully held in 1972 in all of the liberated zones.
Several months after the election, Cabral issued another
statement referring to the creation of the People’s National Assembly
as “an epoch-making victory for the difficult but glorious struggle of
our people for independence.”[72] Underscoring how this was a
collective achievement of unity and struggle Cabral offered his
“warmest congratulations to our people.”[73]
He reminded the people that “a national assembly, like any
organ in any living body, must be able to function in order to justify its
existence. For this reason, we have a greater task to fulfill in the
framework of our struggle.”[74]
Cabral then announced that the PAIGC would be calling its
first National Assembly to formalize their constitution thereby
proclaiming to the world they exist and are “irrevocably determined to
march forward to independence without waiting for the consent of the
Portuguese colonists.”[75]
Yes, Cabral was killed before the final expulsion of Portuguese
colonialism, but, in a very real sense, he still ushered in a new,
independent state.
 Freire and Cabral’s decolonial education in a liberation Guinea-
Bissau
As a pedagogue of the revolution Basil Davidson refers to
Cabral as “a supreme educator in the widest sense of the word.”[76]
The importance of education was elevated to new heights by
Cabral and PAIGC leadership at every opportunity. It therefore made
sense for the Commission on Education of the recently liberated
Guinea-Bissau to invite the world’s leading expert on decolonial
approaches to education, Paulo Freire, to participate in further
developing their system of education.
Freire was part of a team from the Institute for Cultural Action
of the Department of Education within the World Council of Churches.
Their task was to help uproot the colonial residue that remained as a
result of generations of colonial education designed to de-Africanize
the people. Just as the capitalist model of education will have to be
replaced or severely remade, the colonial model of education had to
be dismantled and rebuilt anew.

The inherited colonial education had as one of its principal

objectives the de-Africanization of nationals. It was
discriminatory, mediocre, and based on verbalism. It could not
contribute anything to national reconstruction because it was not
constituted for this purpose.[77]

The colonial model of education was designed to foster a

sense of inferiority in the youth. Colonial education, with
predetermined outcomes, seeks to dominate learners by treating
them as if they were passive objects, and thus forcefully represses
the method of research or the logic of study at the expense of
presentation and learning.
Part of this process was negating the history, culture and
languages of the people. In the most cynical and wicked way, colonial
schooling sent the message that the history of the colonized really
only began “with the civilizing presence of the colonizers.”[78]
In preparation for their visit Freire and his team studied
Cabral’s works and learned as much as possible about the context.
Reflecting on some of what he had learned from Cabral, despite
never having met him, Freire offers the following:

In Cabral, I learned a great many things…[B]ut I learned

one thing that is a necessity for the progressive educator and for
the revolutionary educator. I make a distinction between the two:
For me, a progressive educator is one who works within the
bourgeois classed society such as ours, and whose dream goes
beyond just making schools better, which needs to be done. And
goes beyond because what [they] dream of is the radical
transformation of a bourgeois classed society into a socialist
society. For me this is a progressive educator. Whereas a
revolutionary educator, in my view, is one who already finds
[themselves] situated at a much more advanced level both
socially and historically within a society in process.[79]

For Freire, Cabral was certainly an advanced revolutionary

educator. Rejecting predetermination and dogmatism, Freire’s team
did not construct lesson plans or programs before coming to Guinea-
Bissau to be imposed upon the people.
Upon arrival Freire and his colleagues continued to listen and
discuss learning from the people. Only by learning about the
revolutionary government’s educational work could they assess it and
make recommendations. Decolonial guidance, that is, cannot be
offered outside of the concrete reality of the people and their struggle.
Such knowledge cannot be known or constructed without the active
participation of the learners as a collective.
Freire was aware that the education that was being created
could not be done “mechanically,” but must be informed by “the plan
for the society to be created.”[80] Although Cabral had been
assassinated, his writings and leadership had helped in the creation
of a force with the political clarity needed to counter the resistance
emerging from those who still carried the old ideology.
Through their process revolutionary leaders would encounter
teachers “captured” by the old ideology who consciously worked to
undermine the new decolonial practice. Others, however, also
conscious that they are captured by the old ideology, nevertheless
strive to free themselves of it. Cabral’s work on the need for the
middle class, including teachers, to commit class suicide, was
instructive. The middle class had two choices: betray the revolution or
commit class suicide. This choice remains true today, even in the
United States.
The work for a reconstituted system of education had already
been underway during the war in liberated zones. The post-
independence challenge was to improve upon all that had been
accomplished in areas that had been liberated before the war’s end.
In these liberated areas, Freire concluded, workers, organized
through the Party, “had taken the matter of education into their own
hands” and created, “a work school, closely linked to production and
dedicated to the political education of the learners.”[81]
Describing the education in the liberated zones, Freire says it
“not only expressed the climate of solidarity induced by the struggle
itself, but also deepened it. Incarnating the dramatic presence of the
war, it both searched for the authentic past of the people and offered
itself for their present.”[82]
After the war the revolutionary government chose not to simply
shut down the remaining colonial schools while a new system was
being created. Rather, they “introduced…some fundamental reforms
capable of accelerating…radical transformation.”[83] For example, the
curricula that were saturated in colonialist ideology were replaced.
Students would therefore no longer learn history from the perspective
of the colonizers. The history of the liberation struggle as told by the
formerly colonized was a fundamental addition.
However, a revolutionary education is not satisfied with simply
replacing the content to be passively consumed. Rather, learners
must have an opportunity to critically reflect on their own thought
process in relation to the new ideas. For Freire, this is the path
through which the passive objects of colonial indoctrination begin to
become active subjects of decoloniality.
Assessment here could not have been more significant. What
was potentially at stake was the success of the revolution and the
lives of millions. This is a lesson relevant to all revolutionaries who
must continually assess their work, always striving for improvement.
In this way it was clear to Freire that they must not express
“uncontained euphoria in the face of good work nor negativity
regarding…mistakes.”
From their assessment then Freire and his team sought, “to
see what was really happening under the limited material conditions
we knew existed.” The clear objective was therefore “to discover what
could be done better under these conditions and, if this were not
possible, to consider ways to improve the conditions themselves.”[84]
What Freire and his team concluded was that “the learners
and workers were engaged in an effort that was preponderantly
creative”[85] despite the many challenges and limited material
resources. At the same time, they characterized “the most obvious
errors” they observed as the result of “the impatience of some of the
workers that led them to create the words instead of challenging the
learners to do so for themselves.”[86]
From the foundation Cabral played such a central role in
building, and through this process of assessment, what was good in
the schools was made better, and what was in error was corrected.
As a pedagogue of the revolution Cabral “learned” with the people
and “taught them in the revolutionary praxis.”[87]

Conclusion
As we discussed in the second chapter, Freire’s work and
practice have inspired what has become a worldwide critical
pedagogy movement, although this movement has in many ways
abandoned its revolutionary foundations. Cabral is a centrally
important, yet mostly unacknowledged, influence of this movement.
The attention to decoloniality occupies one of critical education’s
most exciting and relatively recent cutting edges, which demands a
more thorough return to Cabral and the revolutionary movements,
figures and histories they animated.
Reflecting on Cabral’s contributions to decolonial theory and
practice a decade after his time in Guinea-Bissau, Freire, like Cabral
before his death, continued to insist that, “we need to decolonize the
mind because if we do not, our thinking will be in conflict with the new
context evolving from the struggle for freedom.”[88]
In the last prepared book before his death, subtitled Letters to
Those who Dare Teach, Cabral’s influence on Freire seems to have
remained central, as he insisted that “it is important to fight against
the colonial traditions we bring with us.”[89]
As the socialist and anti-racist movement in the United States
continues to grow in size and political sophistication, the educational
lessons from the era of anti-colonial socialist struggles will also grow
in relevance.
Amílcar Cabral, center
PAIGC fighters with a Portuguese military plane that had been
downed, 1974.
Roel Coutinho
 Dual power, base building and
serving the people in the U.S.
revolutionary movement
Chapter 6
By Walter Smolarek

The current period is the most favorable for socialists in the

United States in decades. Against the backdrop of the Great
Recession, waves of activity around the Occupy Movement, the Black
Lives Matter movement and the Bernie Sanders campaign have
produced a profound radicalization in political attitudes across
society. Socialism is viewed favorably by close to half of the
population and a substantial section of young people are sympathetic
towards communism and Marxism.[90]
The key challenge facing revolutionaries in this moment is how
to convert this explosion of pro-socialist consciousness into an
organized force in society. While this includes the rapidly-expanding
ranks of new cadres who are dedicating their lives to the cause of
socialist revolution, a real organized force in society will draw its
strength from the tens of millions of people who suffer the profound
injustices of the capitalist system and are searching for an alternative.
This base, or potential base, for the socialist movement can be found
primarily amongst the 140 million poor people in this country.[91]
As communists and other radicals across the country grapple
with this question, the concept of dual power has rightfully become a
topic of considerable interest and debate. However, the working
definition of dual power used by organizations and individuals is often
so broad and general that it renders the term practically useless. As
such, it is important to disentangle the concepts and history bound up
in these discussions in order to think clearly about the way forward for
those fighting for revolutionary change.

Problems with the contemporary debate over dual power in the

United States
 The bulk of the current debate over the role of dual power in a
strategy for revolution in the United States rests on a relatively recent
redefinition and decontextualization of the concept. It is effectively
stripped of its meaning by becoming so broad that it could refer to
almost anything. This, in turn, results in the misunderstanding and
misapplication of tactics related to directly meeting the needs of the
working class, building a base of support and ultimately making a
revolution.
The Black Rose Anarchist Federation is among the more
prominent organizations popularizing this new understanding of dual
power. This reformulation of the concept has its roots in anarchist
writings on the subject that emerged in the early 2000s, in the
aftermath of the anti-globalization movement. As an expression of its
current position, this organization republished an article last year
called “Active Revolution,” originally written in a 2002 issue of the
publication The Northeastern Anarchist. It defines dual power this
way:

Dual power theorizes a distinct and oppositional

relationship between the forces of the state/capitalism and the
revolutionary forces of oppressed people. The two can never be
peacefully reconciled. With the theory of dual power is a dual
strategy of public resistance to oppression (counter-power) and
building cooperative alternatives (counter-institutions). Public
resistance to oppression encompasses all of the direct action
and protest movements that fight authoritarianism, capitalism,
racism, sexism, homophobia, and the other institutionalized
oppressions. Building cooperative alternatives recreates the
social and economic relationships of society to replace
competitive with cooperative structures.[92]

It is hard to imagine what does not fall under such a broad

definition. Instead of institutions like Venezuela’s National Constituent
Assembly or the Soviets of the Russian Revolution that have the
capacity to exercise state power — to enforce the rule of either
workers and the oppressed or the capitalist class — the “power” in
dual power simply refers to the fact that there are two camps in
society locked in conflict with one another; that the interests of the
exploited and oppressed are opposite and irreconcilable with the
interests of the exploiters and oppressors is no revelation. This is
simply a restating of the materialist conception of history. That
revolutionaries should participate in politics — the struggle for power
in society — is a concept so elementary that it has little utility for
those looking for a concrete strategy to pursue.
The actions prescribed by this particular approach to dual
power are likewise impossibly broad. Two sets of activities are
proposed: creating vehicles to wage direct struggle against the ruling
class and carrying out direct services to meet the material needs of
working people.
The first type of activity is referred to by Black Rose Anarchist
Federation as action that “encompasses all of the direct action and
protest movements that fight authoritarianism, capitalism, racism,
sexism, homophobia and the other institutionalized oppressions.”[93]
This could be a group of employees organizing a union at their
workplace or going on strike. This could mean a community
campaign to hold a police officer guilty of brutality to legal
accountability. It could also refer to residents in an apartment building
holding a rent strike, students marching to demand free higher
education or activists holding a sit-in to demand action on climate
change. Of course revolutionaries should organize, but the question
of strategy is to determine which of these struggles and tactics (and
so many others) have particular social significance, under what
circumstances they arise and gain that significance, and for which
layers of the population.
The other side of the “dual power” approach encompasses
essentially all other types of activities that could possibly be
organized by revolutionaries, from community gardens and food
drives to crowd-funding campaigns.
Beyond the extreme generality of the concept, there is an
additional problem embedded in the popular understanding of the
purpose of activities meant to “recreate the social and economic
relationships of society to replace competitive with cooperative
structures.”[94] This recreates many of the errors that communists
have long pointed out regarding the creation of worker cooperatives
as a means of “overcoming” capitalism.
 No enterprise, cooperative or capitalist produces all of the raw
materials, machinery, software, means of transportation and other
inputs necessary for its own functioning. These can only be acquired
through commerce with other enterprises, which will rightfully
understand efforts to overthrow capitalism as a threat to their own
existence. Beyond the barriers of entry costs, scale and price
competition in capitalism, if a cooperative is somehow able to carve
out a spot for itself in the broader capitalist supply chain, would the
capitalist state not make their activities illegal if they ever truly
presented a threat to the rule of the capitalist class?
In addition, there is nothing inherently radicalizing about
having one’s needs met. There is a huge complex of nonprofit
organizations funded by ruling-class foundation money — many of
which mask themselves with radical-sounding language — that have
been established in recent decades and that meet the needs of
working people but in a political sense serve as a means to inhibit the
development of revolutionary consciousness. Promoting direct
service activities as a form of dual power undercuts the core of the
revolutionary socialist program: to have a society where people’s
needs are met we need to expropriate the capitalist class, smash
their state and establish a workers’ state in its place.

Dual power in the history of socialist revolutions

To think clearly about dual power, we have to put the concept
in its historical and political contexts. Previous generations of
revolutionaries have understood dual power as a highly unstable
situation in society that lasts usually for a temporary historical
moment. The revolution — the decisive seizure of state power by the
working class and oppressed — resolves the question of dual power
by shattering the authority of the old power and establishing the
legitimacy of the new power. Alternatively, a counterrevolution
restores the old power in a new form.
This concept originates in the Russian Revolution of 1917. In
February, the year’s first revolution took place, which overthrew the
absolutist monarchy. In its place, a provisional government was set
up that included representatives of the Russian capitalist class as
well as the more moderate elements of the country’s socialist
movement. But this was not the only source of authority in society.
Parallel to the provisional government, institutions called Soviets
emerged representing the interests of the country’s workers,
peasants and rank-and-file soldiers.
Lenin labeled this peculiar situation “dual power,” and
elaborated on it in the pamphlet “The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our
Revolution,” written in the period after the February Revolution but
before the socialist revolution in October:

The main feature of our revolution, a feature that most

imperatively demands thoughtful consideration, is the dual power
which arose in the very first days after the triumph of the
revolution.
This dual power is evident in the existence of two
governments: one is the main, the real, the actual government of
the bourgeoisie, the “Provisional Government” of Lvov [the first
Prime Minister of the provisional government] and Co., which
holds in its hands all the organs of power; the other is a
supplementary and parallel government, a “controlling”
government in the shape of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and
Soldiers’ Deputies, which holds no organs of state power, but
directly rests on the support of an obvious and indisputable
majority of the people, on the armed workers and soldiers...[95]
This remarkable feature, unparalleled in history in such a
form, has led to the interlocking of two dictatorships: the
dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (for the government of Lvov and
Co. is a dictatorship, i.e., a power based not on the law, not on
the previously expressed will of the people, but on seizure by
force, accomplished by a definite class, namely, the bourgeoisie)
and the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry (the
Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies).
There is not the slightest doubt that such an “interlocking”
cannot last long. Two powers cannot exist in a state. One of
them is bound to pass away; and the entire Russian bourgeoisie
is already trying its hardest everywhere and in every way to keep
out and weaken the Soviets, to reduce them to naught, and to
establish the undivided power of the bourgeoisie.
The dual power merely expresses a transitional phase in
the revolution’s development, when it has gone farther than the
 ordinary bourgeois-democratic revolution, but has not yet
reached a “pure” dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.
[96]

A contemporary example of dual power can be found in

Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. Parallel to the institutions of the
bourgeois state — the presidency, the National Assembly, the
Supreme Court, etc. — inherited by the revolutionaries after Hugo
Chavez’s 1998 election victory, there exists a “communal state” in
formation. The basic units of the communal state are the communal
councils, which were first formally created in 2006. Steve Ellner, a
professor at Universidad de Oriente in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela,
explained in a 2009 article:

The community councils are horizontally structured, with all

of their leaders (called voceros, or “spokespeople”) working free
of charge and considered of equal rank. Spokespeople can
belong to no more than one of their council’s various
commissions, which include a communal bank, which handles
grant money; a ‘social controllership,’ which monitors spending;
and an ‘employment commission,’ which enlists qualified
community members for remunerative jobs and attempts to
ensure that they receive preferential hiring. All decisions,
including the selection of spokespeople, are ratified in an
‘assembly of citizens,’ which represents the community council’s
‘maximum instance of decision making.’[97]

The communal councils are grouped together into federations

called socialist communes, which carry out larger-scale projects and
develop socially-owned productive industries called “communal
enterprises.” The framework for the communes is laid out in the 2010
Organic Law of Communes. Augusto Montiel, then a member of the
National Assembly who now serves as Venezuela’s ambassador to
India, described the goal of the law at the time of its passage: “To put
an end to the bourgeois state that we still have, we need to create
conditions for the development of a community-based, communal,
democratic, protagonistic and revolutionary state. That is, to create a
state that doesn’t allow power to be concentrated in the hands of a
few privileged people.”[98]
While dual power today in Venezuela and in Russia in 1917
have their own unique characteristics, because of the particular
historical circumstances they arose out of, there are fundamental
common features. Both involve the creation of grassroots decision-
making institutions based on the direct participation of the organized
working class, which is capable of carrying out the functions of the
state. Both emerged as the result of revolutionary situations that
radically shifted power in society. As such, in both cases, dual power
is highly volatile and involves constant clashes between the
competing sources of authority. In Venezuela, this instability reached
new heights in 2019 when the counter-revolutionary National
Assembly backed Juan Guaidó’s coup against President Nicolás
Maduro, who had convened the National Constituent Assembly as
the highest expression of revolutionary authority.

Related questions on base building

Direct services activities — what proponents of the new
conceptualization of dual power refer to as “counter-institutions” — do
indeed have a great deal of utility. However, the provision of direct
service must be understood as a tactic, rather than a strategy in and
of itself. Alongside the discussion in the socialist movement on the
meaning and application of dual power, a related debate has
emerged over base building.
For revolutionaries, base building refers to long-term efforts to
create a durable reserve of support within a particular section of the
working class. This is usually constructed on the basis of a workplace
or a neighborhood. The provision of services is an important element
of base building work. But this needs to be done in a way that does
not promote the view that the creation of a vast network of worker-
owned cooperatives or activist-administered social programs is a path
to power. Properly applied, “serve the people” programs are primarily
an outreach tactic with the goal of identifying sites of potential class
struggle, rather than a manifestation of dual power.
To consider some practical examples, the Philadelphia branch
of the Party for Socialism and Liberation is involved in a number of
base building activities that utilize direct service events along these
lines. In May 2019, we organized a block party through our
Kensington-based community center called the Philadelphia
Liberation Center. At the block party, we distributed bags of
household essentials and child care goods marked with our Party
logo, and also organized music, childrens’ activities and a cookout to
give neighbors a chance to socialize. Events geared towards meeting
residents’ cultural and recreational needs can be just as effective as
those aimed at meeting material needs, and has the added benefit of
attracting in greater numbers the layers of the neighborhood with a
baseline level of stability conducive to future organizing efforts.
Kensington is being intensely targeted by the big banks and
real estate firms for gentrification. We made the right to housing the
political theme of the block party, produced a special pamphlet for it,
and promoted the event with the framing “strong communities can
resist gentrification.” In the course of our outreach for the block party,
we met a long-time, well-respected resident of the neighborhood who
was fighting the construction of a massive, luxury apartment complex
on the small residential street where she lived. She invited us to
attend an upcoming hearing on the construction, and from there to
join the fight on an ongoing basis. The practical commitment to the
well-being of people in the neighborhood demonstrated by the PSL’s
cadre earned the trust of the people, who invited us to intervene in
this local issue. From there, we were able to help launch the Norris
Square Community Action Network, which carried out a well-attended
picket of the construction site and is also moving forward with other
projects in the neighborhood.
Another practical example involves our work with a community
of recently-arrived immigrants from Central America. Through a pre-
existing contact, we were able to partner with a congregation to set
up an after-school program called Escuelita Óscar Romero.[99] This
project provides both child care and educational services to families
struggling to survive under the weight of the U.S. government’s war
on immigrants.
Some time after Escuelita Óscar Romero was launched, the
father of one of the participants was arrested by ICE and held for
deportation. Because we had already developed a foundation of trust
between ourselves and the people, we were able to immediately
organize a well-attended meeting that resolved to form an anti-ICE
emergency response network to prevent tragedies like this from
happening again. We have subsequently held a number of door-
knocking sessions along with members of the community to develop
a contact list of people who are alerted when ICE is spotted in or
around the neighborhood.
To build a base, communist cadre first need to insert
themselves into the designated workplace or geographic location.
Because this is a long-term effort, the reputation of the revolutionaries
is of paramount importance. Working people will not follow any group
into a struggle in sufficient numbers unless there is pre-existing trust
and confidence that is established, and this is impossible to do
through rhetoric alone. Direct service activities demonstrate, through
practical deeds, that communists are upstanding members of the
community who care deeply for the well-being of the people and
sacrifice their time and resources for the benefit of others. Those
most excited about these activities tend to be organic leaders in the
community who are also the most receptive to struggle-oriented
politics.

Preparing for the revolutionary crisis

The pressing task of the day for those who seek a socialist
transformation of society is not to build dual power, but rather to build
a revolutionary party. The capitalist class is able to remain in power
despite its microscopic size because it has at its disposal a state
staffed by people who are effectively professional
counterrevolutionaries dedicated to maintaining the status quo.
The only instrument that has historically proven capable of
overcoming the entrenched power of the state is a revolutionary party
composed of cadre — professional revolutionaries. But a
revolutionary party cannot be constructed overnight. The ideological
and practical training of its membership, the development of new
generations of leadership and the recruitment of the most committed
activists from a wide range of social movements is a long and
painstaking process. Whether or not the revolutionary party has built
deep, lasting bonds of trust and confidence with the workers and
oppressed is of decisive importance.
 Independent of the actions of the revolutionaries, a
revolutionary crisis in society can and will occur. Usually brought
about as a consequence of an economic crisis or a war, a
revolutionary crisis is a brief period of time when the existing social
order is so deeply despised and delegitimized in the eyes of the vast
majority of the population that the state can no longer go on ruling in
the old way. Under these circumstances, dual power in the true sense
of the term can emerge, and the rule of the capitalists can give way to
the rule of the people.
The North Front Street Community Block Party, organized by the
Philadelphia Liberation Center.
Philadelphia Liberation Center
 Building organization and creating
cadre
Pedagogy in the streets
Chapter 7
By Nino Brown

The job of a revolutionary is to help make the revolution. In

order to do this, we need to make more revolutionaries. Right now,
our comrades are learning and struggling, all over the nation, on how
to build mass organizations, how to strengthen and steel the party’s
ideological line, how to consolidate the gains our party has made, and
how to build a revolutionary movement that is fundamentally anti-
imperialist and anti-racist. More broadly, the masses are in motion
everywhere. Capitalism is entering into another crisis period, although
the objective movement of capital and its internal processes are
beyond the scope of our control. What we do control are the
subjective forces of the revolution: how organized, disciplined,
ideologically steeled and connected we are to the masses of working
and oppressed people.

The path to revolution is one of many obstacles

As we have seen from the Egyptian revolution and the Occupy
Wall Street movement of 2011, if we — the revolutionary forces who
have a vision and program for the transformation of society — are
weak or unable to strongly influence, if not lead the masses of
people, then we will simply have a reconstitution of the same
bourgeois social order with minor changes at best.
For the movement to grow into a force that can lend sustained
leadership to the struggles of the masses of working and oppressed
people, it is important that we assimilate the lessons from
revolutionary movements that have not only challenged capitalism,
but actually set out to build an alternative: socialism. As we are not
academics, none of us are trying to wage a “war with words” and
obscure the glaring necessity for fundamental social transformation. It
is this necessity for socialism that drives all of what the party does.
We want to be a vehicle for revolution — a body capable of holding
together the various struggles of the masses of people and directing
fatal blows to capitalism.
In “‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder,” Lenin notes
that “Russia achieved Marxism, the only correct revolutionary theory,
through veritable suffering, through half a century of unprecedented
torment and sacrifice, of unprecedented revolutionary heroism,
incredible energy, devoted searching, study, practical trial,
disappointment, verification and comparison with European
experience.”[100] We cannot state ahead of time that we can
overcome every obstacle our class will face. We cannot even predict
what obstacles will confront us. But what we can do is prepare
ourselves by imbibing the lessons of not just Russia but of all the
lessons of the global class struggle: from Egypt to France, from
Venezuela to Nepal, and Greece to Turkey. We must learn from the
suffering, sacrifices and victories of our comrades in struggle all over
the world, for we are all linked by our common oppression under
imperialism. If we refuse to learn, to assimilate and humble ourselves,
we will certainly become obstacles to ourselves and to building a
revolutionary movement.

March with — not ahead of — the masses

Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong describes two
outlooks of revolutionaries who are “rightist” and “leftist” in their
thinking:

Those with a Rightist way of thinking make no distinction

between ourselves and the enemy and take the enemy for our
own people. They regard as friends the very persons whom the
broad masses regard as enemies. Those with a ‘Left’ way of
thinking magnify contradictions between ourselves and the
enemy to such an extent that they take certain contradictions
among the people for contradictions with the enemy and regard
as counterrevolutionary persons who are actually not
counterrevolutionaries.[101]

Today, we see various tendencies cropping up within the broad

left and progressive movements. We have new forms of rightism and
leftism, and while we must reflect on the past communist movements,
this cannot substitute for an analysis of the concrete conditions of the
day.
Some tendencies see no contradiction between building
working-class power and collaborating with the Democrats.
Oftentimes this comes up in our coalition and mass organization work
where we run into individuals and organizations that cannot tell a
friend from an enemy or an opportunist from a confused person trying
to grapple with politics. At the same time, we run into those who are
of the “leftist” orientation. They make enemies out of friends and
obscure the contradictions among the people by magnifying our
differences to the point where we are not only at each other’s throats,
but where our movement is unnecessarily circumscribed. These
“leftists” march so far ahead of the people and magnify secondary
and minor contradictions to the point where one would be left to
believe that a revolution is not made by the masses of people but
made solely by the reddest of red communists and socialists.
This is a grave error, which Assata Shakur affirms:

...without the support of the people, no movement for

liberation can exist, no matter how correct its analysis of the
situation is. That’s why political work and organizing are so
important. Unless you are addressing the issues people are
concerned about and contributing positive direction, they’ll never
support you. The first thing the enemy tries to do is isolate
revolutionaries from the masses of people, making us horrible
and hideous monsters so that our people will hate us.[102]

No matter how “correct” our analyses are, if we fail to translate

them into concrete policy, policies that not only “meet people where
they are at” — which is often used as an excuse to keep people
where they are at — and raise the consciousness of the masses,
After all, what does it mean for us that socialism is increasing
in popularity? Does it mean that we simply declare loudly that we are
socialists? Well, yes, but this is not enough, nor is it even primary for
us. Even more important is that we demonstrate what is distinctive
about our organization, which is that it is a vanguard party. Vanguard
simply means to lead, and the party cannot declare itself as the
vanguard — that must be left to the masses and history. As the Black
Panthers put it, the vanguard is merely the tip of the spear, and the
rest of the spear, the mantle or butt is what does the real deep
damage. Our movement’s ability to land blows against imperialism
depend simultaneously on the sharpness of the vanguard and the
determination of the masses. If the masses are determined and our
links with them are deep and broad, then the spear will not only
pierce our enemies but land a fatal blow.

Revolutionary theory and the ‘paralysis of analysis’

Sometimes in our movement we see what Martin Luther King
Jr. called the “paralysis of analysis,” where activists and would-be
revolutionaries are so caught in analyzing phenomena that they
forget the essence of Marxism: the act of changing the world, not just
understanding it.
In the work we do, we must have a mass-based approach. We
cannot proceed from what we subjectively desire, but from a concrete
analysis of the conditions. Many “leftists” make this error of
subjectivism, of substituting their personal desire for what is
necessary for a particular set of conditions.
No amount of revolutionary phrase mongering and flag waving
can make a revolution. We have to merge theory and practice and
make our politics speak to the people. Our comrades are activists
and organizers. They are in the streets with the people, struggling in
mass organizations to win demands of the masses, whether they be
around housing and gentrification, prisons reforms, wages and union
battles or the fight against police terror. Our campaigns, during this
very polarizing time, seek to be a pole to draw all those disaffected by
the system to socialist politics. We have a political program which
puts forth demands as wide-ranging as reparations for African
Americans, Hawaiians, and other oppressed nations; the dismantling
of the U.S. imperialist state; and the combating of women’s and
LGBTQ oppression.

Cadres and communicative pedagogy

It is not enough to simply join the Party. For us to truly develop
a living and breathing body that can carry on the struggle in a highly
concentrated way, after all the protests and street actions take place,
we need cadre. The PSL has guidelines, a constitution and a
program. These exist to help our members be disciplined. It is much
harder to be disciplined now more than ever in the face of rampant
individualism, facilitated by neoliberalism and amplified by social
media.
An example of this is simple conduct online. At times, instead
of trying to professionally and clearly explain things to people, we do
what is sometimes referred to as “dunking” on people. This is where
revolutionaries assume what is essentially an ultra-left position. We
see ourselves as being “beyond” explaining things to people in terms
they can understand. We forget that it is not what we say, but who is
watching. And, who is watching (aside from the state!)? It is other
working-class people! It is our friends, co-workers and other people in
the movement. If we were to assume this position in real life, or “IRL”
as people say today, we would isolate ourselves from the masses
and the party would become irrelevant. We would be seen as
standoffish and snobby, not the patient, disciplined and pedagogic
comrades that we need.
Coming from bourgeois society, with all of its ills, we are
inculcated with bourgeois individualism. We see our individual
freedom as the endpoint and the axis of what we consider to be
genuine freedom. Learning to take discipline from an organization
(that isn’t our job or boss!) and being expected to do more for the
party, our mass organizations and ultimately the coming revolution,
hurts our egos sometimes, but we outgrow that with the help of our
cadres.[103]
Our cadres are to be shining examples of self-sacrifice and
dedication. Our commitment to advancing the struggle to victory must
be that of a “professional revolutionary,” who carries on when others
falter, or flee to safety and comfort. Our motto must be “for self
nothing, for the masses everything!” Unlike the “leftists” who forget
that they are a part of an organization and not a loose organization of
like minded individuals, cadres know that a revolutionary vanguard is
only as strong and solid as its members or cadre, who must be rooted
among the masses in struggle.
It is vital that the cadre be good at communicating and
connecting with oppressed people. We must be the natural leaders of
the people whom others look to and seek the opinions of. If we use
and abuse our social media and project ourselves simply as
individuals, we fail to see that this will harm not only ourselves, but
our organization. What good is having a program, guidelines and a
constitution, if we simply continue to act as if we are just a social
group or a group of like minded individuals?
Cadre must be patient, sensitive and tolerant, and most
important, be good at listening. As a teacher I see the need for
communication, patience, discipline, listening skills, collectivity,
execution, going over mistakes, having a mind for the entire class
and more, in order to move a body of people forward. Usually it is my
classroom of 20 plus students, 9 to 11 years old, but the same
applies to a revolutionary party.
As a teacher, my obligation is to teach all of my students, not
just the most advanced or the most engaged. I have to listen to all of
my students. I have to learn from all of my students. It is the same
with being a revolutionary.
We must be serious, loving, disciplined, attentive, courageous,
approachable, and most importantly, have a mass-based approach. If
we simply parade around the most revolutionary of phrases, speak
about revolution but not have a mind for the masses or the party, we
will be muddleheaded phrase mongers caught in the “paralysis of
analysis,” isolated from the masses, and substituting fantasy for
reality.
 Our cadres are to be shining examples of self-sacrifice and
dedication. Our commitment to advancing the struggle to victory must
be that of a ‘professional revolutionary,’ who carries on when others
falter, or flee to safety and comfort.
Liberation News
 The role of journalism in class
society and in revolution
Militant journalism
Chapter 8
By Frank González and Gloria La Riva

Frank González is the director of Cuba’s Prensa Latina news

agency. This article is based on a December 2006 interview with
Gloria La Riva. It provides background on Prensa Latina and the
theoretical and practical considerations of revolutionary journalism,
including the distinctions between “objectivity” and “impartiality,” top-
down and dialogical journalism, and bourgeois and socialist
journalism.

For more than 47 years, Prensa Latina has been in the midst
of all the important news developments that have taken place in Latin
America and the rest of the world. In the 1970s and 1980s, it reached
its greatest reach, with global coverage. We had 40 offices in an
equal number of countries with information services in text, radio,
television and photography.
At the start of the 1990s, Prensa Latina experienced a very
difficult economic situation. We went through the disappearance of
the socialist camp in Europe and the Soviet Union, with whom we had
a special relationship of exchange and collaboration. We had to
reduce our operation from 40 offices worldwide to 14 offices, all
operating at a much-reduced level of personnel and with a lot of
sacrifice. But the agency survived.
Our recovery began at the end of the 1990s. Today we have
23 offices abroad in addition to our headquarters in Havana. We have
plans to expand by two offices per year.
Prensa Latina has a presence in Luanda, Angola, as well as in
China and Vietnam. We are in Madrid, Moscow, Paris and Istanbul.
And we have 16 offices in Latin America, practically in all parts of the
continent. This year we will open in Kiev, Ukraine, where we will cover
events in Moldova, Georgia and Poland.
 The agency transmits more than 400 daily dispatches and
news stories in Spanish, English, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and,
most recently, in Turkish. We have a strong presence on the Internet
with 12 websites. This year we have had some 14 million visits to our
sites.
About 50,000 media institutions and individuals in 147
countries receive Prensa Latina’s news. Our multimedia division has
produced more than 150 titles in CD-ROM, DVD and Super DVD
formats.
We are currently moving towards the use of open-source
software, specifically Linux, to operate within the Intranet, Extranet
and Internet. The reach of our websites is constantly expanding.

‘Objective, but not impartial’

The reasons that motivated the founding of Prensa Latina
more than 47 years ago are more relevant today than ever.
Today, the flow of international information is in the hands of
five large media conglomerates. If just 20 years ago there were 50
U.S. news organizations that controlled more than 90 percent of the
international information flow, today there are only five. And of those
five, four are U.S.-controlled and one is German. I say four from the
United States because Fox, even though its owner, Murdoch, is
Australian, is really a U.S. corporation. And those five media
conglomerates do not only tell us what we should see, read or listen
to. They tell us how we should see, read or listen.
Prensa Latina is more important than ever. We are very
conscious of that. We journalists at Prensa Latina not only produce
revolutionary journalism, but journalism of a very high quality. The
bourgeois press presents itself as the defender of objectivity. The
concept of objectivity arose in the 19th century as a feature of the
U.S. elite’s journalism. It was The New York Times that took the lead
in advancing the idea of objectivity as one of the attributes of
supposedly independent journalism. [The use of objectivity by elite
journalism (i.e. the corporate media) was advanced to hide or mask
their capitalist-class bias.]
The concept of “objectivity” evolved in the 20th century not just
as an attribute but as a standard. We also defend the concept of
objectivity, but not just to defend it. We ourselves say that we are
objective.
[Prensa Latina founder Jorge Ricardo] Masetti used to say,
“We are objective, but not impartial.” All discourse, including the
media’s discourse, implies intent. In terms of the media, it means an
intent that is motivated by the relations of power, by market relations
and by other such considerations.
Prensa Latina promotes a journalism that is different from that
being produced today [by the media monopolies]. When we speak of
alternative communication, we are not talking of just substituting one
content for another. It is not simply a matter of journalism that is
counterposed to the media monopolies. What we are talking about is
creating a new form of journalism.

Interactive journalism and the role of alternative media

The journalism of domination, of bourgeois journalism, is a top-
down, unilogical and unidirectional journalism, in which an
enlightened person becomes a transmitter issuing a message.
But we have reached a point where now everyone recognizes
that the persons transmitting and receiving are constantly exchanging
their roles in a communicative process, where both interact and
enrich each other.
That is the journalism in which we place ourselves. When we
speak of journalism that presents an alternative vision of reality, we
are talking of a reality that is based on the truth.
It is the truth that José Martí spoke of, but it is also the truth
that Bertolt Brecht spoke of. He said, “We have to search for the truth
wherever it is, no matter how much they try to hide it. We have to
convert the truth into a weapon, and to see in whose hands that truth
is placed, so that truth reaches where it should.”
For us, the alternative vision of reality is an anti-capitalist
vision. What is the capitalist vision? The objective of capitalism is
surplus value.
The system and the laws of the market create the institutions
that make up capitalist society — the family, the church, the school,
the youth and community associations and the means of mass
communication.
 All of this is meant to provide the system with the ideological
support that prepares the citizens from birth to be raised and behave
according to the laws of a system and the representation of reality
that that system requires those citizens to have.
It would be naïve to think otherwise. The idea of an
independent media and an objective press is a fantasy. I am not even
referring to Marx in this case, but to Berger and Luckmann’s “The
Social Construction of Reality,” to the sociologists who study
knowledge, and to the philosophers and theorists of communication.
Therefore, each time that we in Prensa Latina witness the
debate about “freedom of the press,” “freedom of expression,” “the
independent press” and “objectivity,” in reality these terms are being
used in a discourse whose only aim is to conceal the class character
of those institutions.
We do not have to conceal the class character of our
journalism. What we do oppose and reject is the idea that there is a
division between, on the one hand, professional journalism, and on
the other, what is called militant or activist journalism.
We believe there is only one type of journalism and that we
should defend journalism as a profession. We believe that just
posting something on the Internet does not make one a journalist,
although it is correct to say that the person who does so is carrying
out an act of communication.
But the journalist has to have command of the narrative
technique, command of the new technology of information and
communication as a professional. Now, in this struggle to promote an
alternative vision of reality, we believe that we cannot be
exclusionary. That is why we call it an anti-capitalist vision. All those
who are in favor of promoting a vision of reality that is polemical, that
develops critical thought, that is a vision of totality, not totalitarian,
that embraces all human thought in a general sense, we believe that
all of us who believe in this should join together.
And we should make links, because there is something very
important that can help us confront the enormous economic power
and reach of the large media monopolies, and that is networking.
Information is circulated throughout all the interstices of the
Internet. It allows us to establish alliances and exchange with each
other, but in a flexible manner, where one does not direct or dominate
others.

Latin America and the media

The relation between the United States and Latin America is
key. Latin America is emerging as a new pole of attraction. Latin
American integration is on a course that is definitive and determined
with the new processes taking place in the continental South. It is
very important that the alternative U.S. press be aware of what is
happening in Latin America and to see it from different angles to
avoid stereotypes.
What the so-called “independent press” and “objective press”
has tried to do throughout its history is to create stereotypes and
make false claims.
For the “objective press,” President Hugo Chávez is not a new
Latin American revolutionary leader, inheritor of the best traditions of
struggles of the peoples of our continent, but rather a putschist
militarist who took power, who presides over a pool of petroleum, and
who has a close relationship with Fidel Castro. And they present that
relationship not as a great merit, as Chávez describes it, but as a
stigma.
There is a very interesting alternative press in the United
States that does good things and gives us the key to interpret what is
happening in United States society. If you ask me as a journalist, I
think that U.S. society is reaching the boiling point.
The political, economic and social conditions are being created
that will cause that bubble to burst at some point. There we see what
is happening in Iraq, what is happening in Afghanistan, what is
happening in Latin America. The current United States administration
insists on creating a false image of prosperity, a false image that the
struggle against terrorism has to be fought thousands of miles away
from the United States to “prevent them from coming here to attack
us.” It is based on the politics of fear and terror.
And within that U.S. society, where there are such noble and
good people, we Cubans and Latin Americans have been able to
experience solidarity and affection. We have seen it in concrete
causes. If it were not for the solidarity of the people of the United
States, Elián González would have not returned to his family as he
did in June 2000.
It is the people of the United States who made it possible to
stop the war in Vietnam. And it will be the people of the United States
who will make it possible to stop the aggression and massacre of the
Iraqi people.

A model of dialogue
When we think of alternative communication we do not think of
it as substituting one domination for another. It means establishing a
model of dialogue that respects multicultural and multi-ethnic
diversity, because the wealth of a society lies in its diversity.
In Prensa Latina, there is something we always need to clarify.
The dialogue that we advocate is not with all members of society. We
call for dialogue with those who are committed to an anti-capitalist
vision. Dialogue with those who are committed to a capitalist vision is
not dialogue. Such a “dialogue” will always be a struggle for power.
Although we say that the media is a tool of the system to
consolidate the hegemony of the ruling class, it is not a simple
process. It does not mean that behind each piece of information there
is a conspiracy of a small group of millionaires who decide what to
publish and how they will do it.
There are very complex processes that have a lot to do with
the production routines of the media, that process of “newsmaking”
that is so well researched in the United States, within which the
hypotheses of “agenda-setting” and “framing” play their part.

Independence and power

There is a generalized idea that the alternative media is an
impoverished media, with few resources, not controlled by anyone,
with no links to anything official. Let us talk about power. Jean-Jacque
Rousseau, the French philosopher, wrote of the “natural person.”
The baby, when it is born, is a natural person. But when it
relates to its mother and begins to drink milk from the mother’s
breast, it becomes a social person. The baby has begun to interact
with someone, and this creates a dependency on someone else. It is
a dependency for food, the primary basic necessity for a human
being.
 But there also begins a relationship of power. The mother has
a certain quota of power, that is, “I will feed you when I can feed you,
or when I want to feed you.” The baby cries and demands because it
also exercises a quota of power, that is, “You have to feed me now.”
The baby becomes a social being.
Therefore, it is not possible to speak of the independence of
even small media organizations, tiny ones that are very poor and
lacking in resources. You will always depend on the orientation as to
where you seek your power.

‘Just doing my job’

One of the things that capitalism tries to present to us, or to
convince us of, is that historical processes do not count. Things are
the way they are — simply because that is how it is.
Let us say I am part of U.S. society. For me the most important
thing is myself and my family, and that is how it is because it has to
be that way. The mentality in the United States says, “I do this no
matter what happens because it is my job.” Your job? How is it
possible that Mrs. Madeleine Albright was the secretary of state of the
United States, the sworn enemy of Cuba, and two weeks after leaving
that post says the blockade of Cuba makes no sense?
Or Mr. Colin Powell, who stated recently in Dubai that there is
a civil war in Iraq and that they committed an error with regard to Iraq.
When he was the secretary of state he lied to the world, saying that
there were weapons of mass destruction and that there were links
between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
I was in New York City once, speaking with an executive of
one of the large U.S. media chains. I asked him, “How can that
happen?” He told me, “No, the problem is that they were doing their
job.”

Ideology and emancipation

Yes, but what are the roots of that problem? It lies in the
support for capitalism. I don’t mean a capitalist who literally forces me
to work with a whip. Rather, capitalism develops a mentality in the
person that the most important thing is work.
But what [kind of] work? The part they pay me for my support?
Of course, the capitalist converted my labor power into a commodity.
And for that commodity to be better exploited, I need that mentality
inculcated into my consciousness.
We believe that alternative communication has to give the
person, the receiver, all the keys to be able to interpret the events.
Everything that happens has a historicity, every event has an origin
and a process of development. It is not like television, where images
overwhelm us but, in the end, do not allow us to interpret events, and
therefore, leave us with nothing. It is simply one of the tools that the
bourgeois press uses to maintain its rule over the minds of people.
When we in Prensa Latina speak of alternative communication
— again, we say alternative communication and not alternative
journalism — in our opinion it means critical thought — anti-
hegemonic, all-encompassing thought — a liberating and
emancipatory thought.
I said earlier that the objective of capitalism is surplus value.
What is the objective of socialism? It is the emancipation of the
human being. And we believe that alternative communication should
act toward that goal of liberating humanity.
Gloria La Riva (left) visits Prensa Latina. Havana, Cuba
Prensa Latina
 Interview with militant historian Sónia
Vaz Borges
Chapter 9
By Sónia Vaz Borges and Andira Alves

This interview was originally published in the Spring 2021 issue of

Breaking the Chains, a one-of-its-kind feminist, socialist magazine,
deeply connected to the everyday experiences of working women
from generations past to today.

Andira Alves: You mentioned being born in Portugal, child of

Cape Verdean immigrants. How did you see our history being
reflected in Portugal?
Sónia Vaz Borges: Well, if you look at the Portuguese school
curriculum, we have a couple of moments and none of them are
really uplifting. We have the so-called discoveries of when the
Portuguese start to do their maritime travels around the world, then
you have slavery and then you have colonization. Those are the three
moments, at least in the history manuals. Normally you combine that
with geography manuals regarding the African continent and images
of war and starvation. None of it is really uplifting.
And when you go to history again and you talk about
colonization and mention the colonial war, you have a small footnote
about the liberation struggles. And you have maybe one or two
pictures of Amílcar Cabral, Samora Machel, or Eduardo Mondlane.
There’s a small footnote and that’s it. There’s not really a connection
and you don’t see any reflection of that in the school manuals from
what you learn and hear in conversations at home, conversations in
the neighborhood, even the music reflects other aspects you don’t
see there.
Although Portuguese history is deeply intertwined with African
history, it’s only one side that is shown. The large African and African
descendent community in Portugal does not see themselves reflected
in official versions of Portuguese history. Then, of course, you have a
clash in the classroom, in the school and in the playground because
you do not see yourself represented.
And then if you add that to the initiatives to where these kids
are invited to, the only invitations they receive are to dance or to
cook. So if you compile all this information, then you see how
disconnected the curriculum is and how the Portuguese mentality
already sees the African community.

Andira Alves: I think that’s especially interesting. My mom had all

of her primary education in Cabo Verde, in Fogo. You still spoke only
Portuguese and you were not able to speak your actual language,
and what the repercussions of that are. Cabo Verde, being more
isolated from the African continent, somehow became closer to
Portugal. It does seem like a lot of Cape Verdeans do have that
disconnect because of history and what they are taught. With that,
what led to the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and
Cape Verde (PAIGC) developing their militant education?
Sónia Vaz Borges: I think when we talk about PAIGC, which was
founded in the 1950s, we have to look further back at the history of
PAIGC. Otherwise, we place PAIGC in the middle of nothing. Before
the PAIGC was actually founded, there were several other
movements — movements in Portugal, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau,
Angola, Mozambique and so on. PAIGC is a result of all these
movements. For example, you have, in Cape Verde, the rebel[lion] of
Ribeirão Manuel, then you have, in Guinea Bissau, the rebel[lion]
against the taxes that Africans had to pay. And then you have in
Portugal, the centers like the African Study Center, which was a
secret club where African students would join and talk about Africa,
their situation in the metropolis and their situations in their lens [from
their perspective]. If you put this all together, there’s a long history, a
long trajectory of the PAIGC.
To add to that, there were Pan-African movements happening
during the 1920s in Portugal at that time. So the PAIGC comes as a
result, one of the results of all these struggles. You cannot talk about
the PAIGC without talking about Amílcar Cabral [who], with other
comrades, founded the party in 1956.
And of course, then the party is created. The armed struggle
starts, the program starts from a military civil[ian] radio, all these
kinds of things that PAIGC created during the struggle. And of course,
you have the process of militant education, which you have to go
further into the past of seeing, for example, the students’ activities in
Portugal, their own process of conscientization, which is part of
militant education.
The militant education the PAIGC developed during the
struggle is a reflection of what was already happening. Even for the
party to exist, to be founded in 1956, it had to go through this process
of education, of self-education, of self-decolonization. The PAIGC
[emerges] as an extension of what was happening before [and what]
was happening in a different situation because there was a situation
of war, a situation of being a party that [had] its headquarters in a
foreign country in Conakry, Guinea. It had to do with several other
elements happening in the world like the Non-Aligned Movement, the
anti-colonial movement that emerged with the Movimiento Anti
Colonial, and in the 1960s it turned into the Conference of Nationalist
Organizations of the Portuguese Colonies. You have all these
combinations of small things, then you can see militant education not
just as a school product but also as a long process of
conscientization and decolonization at the same time.

Andira Alves: People have always been resisting and this did not
come out of thin air. It was years of organization and trying different
tactics and strategies before resulting in armed struggle. For women
and young girls to have access to education became a priority task
within the organization. What was the development of young girls and
women like with the PAIGC?
Sónia Vaz Borges: Even within the PAIGC, you have highly
educated women, which I find amazing. You have Dulce Almada
Duarte who wrote her PhD thesis in Portugal. You have Ana Maria
Cabral, the same thing. And then you go to Guinea-Bissau and you
have a different group of women that are already politicized, but with
no official degree. Then you go to the countryside and we have also,
again, highly politicized women without knowing how to read and
write, but highly politicized.
And what I found amazing in the struggle of the PAIGC is how
these three groups just combine their forces. These three groups of
women put their skills and their knowledge together to work toward
their self-education or reeducation. Those who are studying in the
Portuguese colonial schools, they still have to re-educate themselves
in a decolonized way. And how do they put their skills and their
strengths together to build themselves, to build this system or this
organization that was the PAIGC? How do they place and conquer
their space inside the organization?
That’s why I call the liberation struggle an individual collective
process response. Because it’s not just [that] individual that turns into
collective and collective that turns into individual. And it’s not just, “it
happens.” It’s a process and it’s a response to something.

Andira Alves: Exactly. Going back to educational structures and

things you take for granted like logistical planning for schooling. I saw
pictures of teachers sitting on a log. How do you do this in the midst
of armed warfare? What extra measures did schools have to take for
students to attend?
Sónia Vaz Borges: I also had the same thought. What is my
reference [to] schools? It’s the reference that I know in Europe.
Somehow your brain is so messed up, I’m referring to my brain, that
you don’t associate that it was an armed struggle in the forest, so of
course, you cannot have the same infrastructure that I have as a
reference.
In doing this work, this research forced me to deconstruct
these ideas of the school as a building, of the need of having all this
infrastructure, or how one can speak and think of an alternative
infrastructure due to the conditions that they have at the moment.
It was to really take in consideration the situation of the
country. You have two seasons in Guinea-Bissau: the dry season and
the rainy season. You have to consider the time that people go to
work in the fields. You have to take into consideration how much food
is produced. You have to take into consideration where villages are
located. All of this to determine where you can locate the school. You
have to try to make sure that children can still go to school in a safe
situation.
So the first PAIGC schools in the liberated zones were located
in the barracks with the military because that was what was
considered a safe space for children. But then they slowly started to
realize that actually it was not a safe space because if the barrack
was attacked, the kids were also attacked. They had to stop creating
the schools in the barracks, but they can’t put the school right close to
the village because if the village is a target, the school would be a
target.
So they have to build a school in a place in between. We have
the boarding school in the North, and we have the boarding school in
the South, but you don’t have a specific location.
And then they also have to think about [having] water around,
to build shelters, a bunker. So they have to build all these logistics
around the school and then use the environment, the forest, as a
protection against air raids, against even foot raids because it’s still a
guerrilla struggle.
They had to use all the knowledge that they had about the
forest, which is more traditional knowledge or local knowledge and
combine it with the guerilla knowledge in order to see where to put
the school. And this is a combination of two kinds of knowledge that
look so distant, but the PAIGC actually put it to work together for self-
defense.

Andira Alves: The book — “Militant Education, Liberation

Struggle, Consciousness: The PAIGC education in Guinea Bissau
1963-1978” — discusses what is a militant educator. You could not
separate your ideology from the school. They informed one another.
School was during wartime. It was a teacher’s responsibility to create
a joyful ambience, both disciplined and attractive.
Sónia Vaz Borges: Teachers, they also have to have military
training for defense of the school. And there were a couple of
teachers who died from this duty of protecting the students.
There is also this idea of not teaching political education as
something abstract. The situation, the conditions you are living [in]
was already political education training.
So you cannot avoid to talk about the bombings. You cannot
avoid talking about the exploitation. You cannot [avoid] talking about
oppression. You feel that airplane flying over you and you’re already
like, “maybe I’ll die today.” You have to explain why there are
airplanes flying around. So all these “whys” that are happening at the
time of teaching is part of the political education. At the same time,
the situation of war causes trauma in everyone.
 So there is also this environment, and you can see [s]till today
when you interview students and teachers, this love and care for
each other that was central in the process of PAIGC political
education. Militant education is not just a structure.

Andira Alves: You are now collecting these oral histories of

adults and elders who were students during the liberation struggle.
What was their reflection on their educational process or
development during that time?
Sónia Vaz Borges: Well, none of them is a kid anymore. They’re
in their fifties [and] sixties. Their first reflection is, “if it wasn’t the
struggle, I won’t be here in the position that I am, that I have today. I
won’t be a student. I won’t know how to read and write. Probably, I
would be working on the farm. I won’t have the opportunity to study
abroad, to become a lawyer, to become an architect, to become an
engineer and to come and give my contribution to my country.”
They say, “I am what I am today because of PAIGC. It doesn’t
matter how wrong the party went after independence, but I am what I
am because of PAIGC. Because of the struggle that PAIGC initiated
and the creation of the schools that gave me the opportunity to be
what I am and have today.” And that’s their primary reflection.

Biography (From Sónia Vaz Borges’ Website)

Sónia Vaz Borges is a militant interdisciplinary historian and
long-time social and political organizer. She was born and raised in
Portugal by Cape Verdean immigrants who immigrated during the
colonial period.
Vaz Borges holds a B.A. in Modern and Contemporary History-
Politics and International Affairs from ISCTE-University Institute of
Lisbon, and an M.A in African History from the Faculty of Humanities
of the University of Lisbon and a Ph.D. in Education Sciences —
History of Education from the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Her work includes editing “Cadernos Consciência e
Resistência Negra” (“Notebooks Consciousness and Black
Resistance”), “Na Pó di Spéra. Percursos nos Bairros da Estrada
Militar, Santa Filomena e Encosta Nascente” (“In the Dust of Waiting.
Paths in the neighborhoods of Estrada Militar, Santa Filomena and
Encosta Nascente”), co-authoring the short film “Navigating the Pilot
School” (2016); and “Militant Education, Liberation Struggle,
Consciousness: The PAIGC education in Guinea Bissau 1963-1978.”
She currently works as a researcher at the Humboldt
University Berlin, working on the project “Education for all” and a
personal research project focused on The Walking Archives, the
liberation struggle, memory, generation and imaginaries.
Sónia Vaz Borges
 Formulating study and discussion
questions
Appendix A
By Liberation School Editorial Collective

Revolutionaries study texts to understand and engage them

from the perspective of our class and for the purpose of advancing
the class struggle. What kind of questions do we face as
revolutionaries? Having different kinds of questions enables us to
probe and think about potentialities, possibilities and practicalities.
Broadly speaking, there are a few different kinds of questions
that are helpful for learning, studying and discussing texts.
Traditionally, they are presented as different levels of a "scaffold," in
that only once you can answer one kind of question can you move
onto the next. This kind of approach can be helpful, especially for
facilitating discussion, because in order to apply and extend the ideas
from a reading to our local and contemporary struggles, we have to
first actually have a handle on what the ideas are. In a sense, the
scaffolding approach can be useful because it ensures that we have
a baseline understanding before we move to extending the ideas or
synthesizing them.
At the same time, the scaffolding approach is based on the
pedagogy of learning rather than studying, or, more precisely, it
prioritizes learning over studying rather than dialectically engaging
both. Having a knowledge of facts, timelines, contexts and so on, is
incredibly important. Yet this implies a certain predetermined
trajectory that can exclude other forms of knowledge and intelligence:
that understanding facts and ideas is easier than thinking about
synthesizing or applying them. This is not a universal truth.
As a result, the different kinds of questions we offer below are
intended as a possible set of tactics you can deploy in formulating
your own reading guides and collective discussions of texts. These
tactics should be used flexibly and in relation to the overall goals of
the out-reach and educational program. The order of their
presentation is not meant to be linear and we also try to include
examples of questions from this book that can activate different forms
of knowledge. These examples and question types are not
comprehensive.

Comprehension
The most straightforward kinds of questions are aimed at
comprehending the content of the text. These are baseline questions
that ensure we are understanding what the text actually says before
we begin applying and extending it in our own contexts. Knowing a
fact is one thing, but comprehension requires an understanding of
how facts and ideas relate to make more complex ideas and
concepts. Questions in this category can ask for readers to write
more complicated ideas in their own words or to phrase them so that
someone outside of or new to the struggle might understand.
You might include more comprehension questions for texts that
are denser and more theoretical, or for texts that make references to
other events, ideas, theorists or organizations readers might not be
familiar with. For example, although Lenin is a very clear writer, his
texts are primarily polemical. In order to get the essence of a text, it is
not always necessary to know everything about the different trends of
the movement he is engaging with. As a result, com-prehension
questions can help prevent the reader from getting lost in the weeds,
so to speak.

In Chapter 1, the author introduces Vygotsky's "Zone of

Proximal Development." In your own words, write a one
sentence definition of this concept; or draw a picture that
represents the ZPD.
In Chapter 2, what do you think the author means when they
write that "We cannot divorce the methodology from the
ideology, the theory from the method, or the critical from the
pedagogy in Freire's work?"
In Chapter 4, the author writes about the distinction between
the method of inquiry and the method of presentation. How
would you describe each method to someone new to the
struggle? You can think generally or specifically (in terms of
 someone you are trying to recruit or bring into the
movement's orbit).
Chapter 6 argues that when revolutionaries perform direct
service activities they are not creating "counter-institutions."
Why is this the case?

Takeaways
These questions also promote comprehension, although they
help participants under-stand the text from their own experiences.
Personal takeaways generally ask readers and participants to focus
on a broader set of themes and focus on what resonates with them
the most.

One of the sections in Chapter 5 is titled "Anti-colonialism

and decoloniality." What one or two points stuck out to you
the most and why?
The beginning of Chapter 3 discusses bourgeois ideas of
intelligence and socialist ideas. What is the most important
distinction, and why?
The socialist idea of intelligence is "broadly summarized."
What specifics, if any, would you add to the socialist idea of
intelligence, and why?
Reflecting on your own experiences, have you ever been
subjected to bourgeois standards of intelligence? Was this
experience stifling, and, if so, how might socialist ideas of
intelligence and forms of knowledge have helped you in this
situation?
What lessons from Chapter 7 can you take with you and
your organization to better relate to and move the people?

Identification of significance
These questions ask participants to think about why certain
parts of the text are important. They can be combined with other
kinds of questions, such as those aimed at comprehension.
 Chapter 8 makes a distinction between journalists being
"objective" and "impartial." What is this distinction and why is
it important for revolutionaries?
Chapter 9 talks about the need to rethink schooling and
education, and how this happened in the particular context
of the PAIGC. What was most compelling to you about this
process and why?
Why do you think the qualities outlined at the end of Chapter
8 are so important for revolutionaries?
Chapter 2 argues that Freire's dialogic pedagogy has to be
seen as part of his political project, and says there is nothing
inherently liberating about dialogic pedagogy. Can you think
of examples of certain educational practices that are seen
as inherently liberating but actually reinforce capitalist and
other oppressive social relations?

Analysis and synthesis

Analysis and synthesis questions require us to critically
examine and break down information into parts. We analyze motives,
causes, and make inferences based on the evidence and information
provided. By analyzing the parts of concepts or any given
phenomena, analysis questions position us to have a better
understanding of the whole. The whole may be a generalization or
axiom, but is based on the concrete and meticulous analysis of
component parts of a thing.

What does the idea, in Chapter 2, that the teacher has to

place the content of education in a particular context imply
about the authority of the teacher?
What other ways would you classify the distinctions between
learning and studying from Chapter 4?
What does the Zone of Proximal Development have to do
with Freire's conception of dialogic pedagogy?

Application and extension

Application and extension questions are the kinds that
revolutionaries hunger after the most. These questions ask us to take
something from the reading and either think of examples or use the
idea to make sense of a contemporary issue or struggle. After all, the
point of Marxism, of revolutionary theory, is not to simply interpret the
world but to change it. Application questions require us to think as
problem solvers who use the acquired knowledge, understanding and
comprehension. This type of thinking and questioning require us to
consider the facts, conditions, contradictions of various concepts and
phenomena, as we approach solving problems. Revolutionaries
fundamentally seek to change the capitalist social order and thus
should center the testing of their theories and ideas in and through
collective social practice.

Chapters 1 and 2 focus on revolutionary educators who are

well known in the U.S. but whose work has been divorced
from its revolutionary context and importance. What other
figures has this happened to? How can this provide an
opening for moving people further to the left? What
arguments or strategies would you use to try and
accomplish this?
Chapter 3 discusses fixed versus growth mindsets. What
examples can you think of in your own experience where
you or someone close to you has evidenced each kind of
mindset?
Have you ever had a fixed mindset approach to something?
If so, what would have helped you change to a growth
mindset?
The end of Chapter 6 provides examples of "serve the
people" programs that helped build support within
communities and raise support for and trust in the Party's
cadre. What — if any — are some direct service activities
your organization could start that would help build a base
amongst the local population? How would you plan to make
these outreach programs create trust and solidarity with the
population and build the Party? What long term goals would
your organization have for these pro-grams?
Chapter 4 ends with an example of educational programs
based solely on learning (presentation) and an example that
combines learning (presentation) with inquiry (research, or
studying). What other examples can you think of for each?
How can these two dialectically-related pedagogies better
inform your own organization's practices?
 Teaching tactics
Appendix B
By Liberation School Editorial Committee

The following is a series of tactics you can use for teaching or

facilitating an educational meeting. While we present them as distinct
tactics, you can — and should — feel free to merge some together.
Further, these tactics can be combined with the different study and
discussion questions provided in the previous appendix.

Introductions
It is helpful to start an educational session with a brief round of
introductions. There are an infinite variety of ways to do this.
Especially if it is a group that does not know each other well, you can
ask people to share their name, why they came to the event, how
they heard about it, and what, if anything, they hope to get out of it. If
it is an event for a specific organization, you might ask people to
share why they joined the organization. If the group members know
each other somewhat well, you can ask other questions to build
community — anything from “what song is the soundtrack to your life
right now” to “if you could live in any fictional setting from a movie,
book, or television series, what would it be and why?” It is important
to give people a minute to prepare their answers, and even more
important to be strict about time, because introductions have a
tendency to go longer than needed.

Lecturing and presenting

As we stated in the introduction, Marxist education presumes
the competence of all involved. Relative to educational settings, this
means that we should not assume that just because most of us are
sitting silently watching one person speak that we are not active. In
fact, listening and watching are active processes of engagement.
There is an unfortunate trend in many progressive educational circles
that devalues teaching and lecturing and sees it as inherently
oppressive.
 This can certainly be the case. Yet who watched the great —
and long — speeches of the world’s communist revolutionaries and
asked if there could be time for worksheets or small-group work?
How many people listen to podcasts, read articles, or watch news
shows without also thinking and engaging in the content we are being
exposed to? Who has not been moved to action by a rousing speech
at a political demonstration? Who has not been won over to the
cause, at least in part, because we finally heard someone explain the
reasons for our poverty and oppression?
Delivering prepared speeches and presentations are important
tactics in revolutionary education. In study groups, opening and
closing with presentations can be especially helpful for providing
participants with the historical, political, organizational and other
context that is crucial to what we are studying but that we might not
know. The important thing is that they are engaging and that they are
not presented as the definitive and conclusive analysis that we all
must uncritically accept. There might be times when presentations
are the primary form of teaching that take place, with room for
questions and answers at the end. There might be other times when
they should be kept to a minimum, or where they are one tactic
deployed among many.

Facilitating discussions
Leading educational sessions by merely asking questions and
responding to the first people to raise their hands can result in those
who are the “fastest” thinkers or the most “confident” speakers to
dominate the conversation. Especially under capitalism, this can
reinforce existing hierarchies and forms of oppression such as racism
and sexism. This is because many of our experiences in oppressive
educational systems recognize certain groups as “knowledgeable”
authorities (even if they are not).
Fortunately, there are a number of tactics you can use to
include everyone who really wants to participate. Some of these
involve individual reflection and writing, while others involve small
group work or paired discussions.

Think-pair-share
 This activity asks participants to think — and write — about a
question for a period of time, usually between 3-5 minutes. For
example, you could ask everyone to think about what they found to
be the most relevant point in a reading and write about why and how
they found it so relevant.
Then, participants are paired with another person to discuss
what they wrote, usually between 3-10 minutes, depending on the
prompt. You can pair them with whoever is next to them or, if space
allows and you want the participants to get to know each other, you
can move them around and have them count off and pair up that way.
Sometimes, you might ask them to combine their definitions or
writings into one, taking the best or more relevant parts from each.
Finally, the pairs go around the room and share what they
have discussed. Often, participants organically identify connections
between different pairs. The teacher could also write down the main
points from each report back on the board, and use those points to
facilitate a larger discussion.
It is important to tell participants the time limits for each part of
this process ahead of time. This is especially true when it comes to
the final sharing portion.
One reason to deploy this tactic is to facilitate participants
getting to know each other. Another important reason is that often,
after sharing their ideas with someone in a one-on-one setting,
participants feel more comfortable and confident in sharing it with the
entire group.

Concept maps
This tactic asks participants to visually represent not only key
concepts from the reading, but to trace links and connections
between different concepts. For example, you might ask participants
to identify the main idea from the introductory section of the text.
Next, you ask them to think about how the idea is developed in the
later sections of the text. Finally, you have students find a way to
diagram the connections they have identified. This can take various
forms — from Venn diagrams to flow charts.

Quote curation
 For this activity, you isolate a certain section of the reading (if it
is long) and give students time to find the one quote (or part of a
quote) that they think is the most important. After, students can go
around and share their quotes and why they found them significant.
Alternatively, teachers or students can write them on the board and
refer to the board for a large-group discussion. Another option would
be to follow this activity with a presentation or lecture, in which case
the teacher would reference the quotes on the board throughout their
presentation.

Jigsaw presentations
These are usually small-group activities (anywhere between
two to five people) where different groups take on different parts of a
text to later present on. After breaking up into groups, the teacher
assigns each group a section of the reading. Next, give all groups an
appropriate time-frame (e.g., five, 10, 15 minutes) to revisit their
portion, discuss it, and respond to any specific prompts you have
assigned. For example, groups could be asked to come up with the
three main points from their section, or they could be asked to write a
two paragraph summary of it. Afterwards, each group has a certain
amount of time to present to the rest of the group. The teacher can
address any gaps or omissions from the presentations, or to help the
different pieces of the jigsaw cohere.

Media analysis
For this activity, the organizers come prepared with a relevant
contemporary news article, song, video clip or other form of media.
You could also bring in excerpts from other readings or articles about
local struggles. Usually — but not necessarily — after engaging in a
discussion about the content, students are asked to engage the
media from the perspective of the text. The teacher can write and
assign prompts such as: What would the author say about this? What
would they add to it? What would they critique in it?

Role play
Role playing activities can be developed in many different
ways. For example, one approach is to ask participants to practice
elevator speeches by simulating an outreach situation where one
person plays the role of the organizer and the other person the
community member of workers being reached out to. In some
situations the teacher can prepare scripts for participants to practice
with each other before practicing without the scripts. In other
situations the teacher may ask participants to generate their own
scripts.
Another example of role playing may be less focused on
preparing to launch a specific campaign and more about engaging
with a specific text or historical event. In these instances the teacher
may need to make more elaborate preparations. For example, a text
outlining a complex constellation of class forces and their
development over time might provide an opportunity to write scripts,
roles, interests, etc. for all actors assigning specific characters or
entities to individual participants accompanied with directions to
facilitate their engagement with each other and comprehension and
ultimate application of the material.
 Endnotes

[1] Brian Becker, “Theory and Revolution: Addressing the Break in Ideological
Continuity,” Liberation School, accessed Oct. 27, 2021, www.liberationschool.org/theory-and-
revolution-addressing-the-break-of-ideological-continuity/.
[2] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Marx and Engels to August Bebel, Wilhelm
Liebknecht, Wilhelm Bracke and Others (Circular Letter),” trans. P. Ross & B. Ross, in “Marx
and Engels Collected Works,” vol. 45 (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 408.
[3] Vygotsky’s work is particularly significant for challenging decontextualized and
racialized conceptions of mind because there is a tendency in capitalist schooling to attribute
students’ actual level of development with innate or biological factors, thereby ignoring the
ways unequal and highly segregated educational systems produce unequal outcomes.
[4] V.I. Lenin, “First All-Russia Congress on Adult Education: Speech of Greeting,” in
Learning with Lenin: Selected Works on Education and Revolution, ed. D.R. Ford and C.S.
Malott (Charlotte: Information Age Publishing, 1919/2019), 24.
[5] James Wertsch, Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1985), 10.
[6] Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language, ed. A. Kozulin (London: MIT Press, 1986).
[7] Ibid.
[8] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1970/2011),
54.
[9] Ibid., 58.
[10] Ibid., 80.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Peter McLaren, Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the
Foundations of Education, 6th ed. (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2015), 241.
[13] Freire, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” 125-126.
[14] Ibid., 126.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid., 134.
[17] V.I. Lenin, “What is to be Done?” in Essential Works of Lenin, ed. H.M. Christman
(New York: Dover Publications, 1902/1987), 67.
[18] Ibid., 156.
[19] Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 138.
[20] Lenin, What is to be Done?, 137. For more on Lenin’s pedagogical theory, see
Derek R. Ford, “Joining the Party: Critical Education and the Question of Organization,”
Critical Education 7, no. 15 (2016): 1-18.
 [21] Tyson E. Lewis, “Mapping the Constellation of Educational Marxism(s),” Educational
Philosophy and Theory 44, no. S1 (2012): 98-114.
[22] Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 183
[23] Ibid.
[24] Kathleen M. Cain and Carol S. Dweck, “The Relation Between Motivational Patterns
and Achievement Cognitions Through the Elementary School Years,” Merrill-Palmer
Quarterly 41, no. 1 (1995): 25-52.
[25] See Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (New York:
Scribner, 2016) and Privanka B. Carr and Claude M. Steele, “Stereotype Threat and
Inflexible Perseverance in Problem Solving,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45,
no. 4 (2009): 853-859.
[26] Kenneth J. Saltman, “The Austerity School: Grit, Character, and the Privatization of
Public Education,” symploke 22, nos. 1-2 (2014): 41-57.
[27] Melissa Dahl, “Don’t Believe the Hype About Grit, Pleads the Scientist Behind the
Concept,” The Cut, accessed Oct. 27, 2021. https://www.thecut.com/2016/05/dont-believe-
the-hype-about-grit-pleads-the-scientist-behind-the-concept.html.
[28] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1): A Critical Analysis of
Capitalist Production, trans. S. Moore & E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers,
1867/1967), 28.
[29] Eric J. Hobsbawm, “Introduction,” in Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic
Foundations, ed. E.J. Hobsbawm, trans. J. Cohen (New York: International Publishers,
1964), 10.
[30] Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. B. Brewster (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 70.
[31] Antonio Negri, Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, trans. H. Cleaver, M.
Ryan, & M. Viano (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991), 9; 12. Negri was a leading theoretician
and organizer of the “autonomous” school that participated in the Italian Civil War in the
1960s-70s before being falsely arrested in 1979 for kidnapping the former Italian Prime
Minister Aldo Moro of the Christian Democratic Party. He was later exonerated, but was still
facing 30 years in prison. Yet in 1983, he was elected to Parliament and used parliamentary
immunity to escape to France to continue researching and organizing. He only returned to
Italy in 1997 to serve out his remaining (and bargained-down) 13 years to raise awareness of
the political prisoners still being held behind bars. While in prison, he co-wrote the (in)famous
book Empire with Michael Hardt.
[32] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The
Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd. ed., ed. R.C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 476.
[33] Marx, Capital, 225.
[34] Ibid., 262 f2.
[35] Ibid., 714.
[36] Ibid., 715.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Basil Davidson, “Introduction,” in A. Cabral, Unity and Struggle: Speeches and
Writings of Amílcar Cabral, trans. M. Wolfers (New York: Monthly Review, 1979), x.
[39] Ibid., xi.
 [40] Amílcar Cabral, “The Development of the Struggle.” Accessed Oct. 27, 2021,
https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1968/tds.htm.
[41] Paulo Freire, “South African Freedom Fighter Amílcar Cabral: Pedagogue of the
Revolution,” in Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Times: Hope and Possibility, ed. S. Macrine
(New York: Palgrave, 2020), 171.
[42] Ibid., 178.
[43] Ibid., 179.
[44] Amílcar Cabral, “Weapon of Theory: Address delivered to the First Tricontinental
Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America Held in Havana in January
1966.” Accessed Oct. 27, 2021, https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1966/weapon-
theory.htm.
[45] Cabral, Unity and Struggle, 85
[46] Ibid., 28.
[47] Ibid., 28-29.
[48] Ibid., 31.
[49] Ibid., 31.
[50] Ibid., 32.
[51] Amílcar Cabral, “Practical Problems and Tactics,” 1968. Accessed Oct. 27, 2021,
https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1968/ppt.htm.
[52] Ibid.
[53] Amílcar Cabral,“On Freeing Portuguese Soldiers,” 1968. Accessed Oct. 27, 2021,
https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1968/ofcpsI.htm.
[54] Ibid.
[55] Ibid.
[56] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (New York: Verso, 1972/2018),
304.
[57] Ibid.
[58] Ibid., 244.
[59] Ibid.
[60] Cabral, Unity and Struggle, 139.
[61] Ibid.,140.
[62] Ibid.
[63] Amílcar Cabral, “Tell no Lies, Claim no Easy Victories,” 1965. Accessed Oct. 27,
2021, https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1965/tnlcnev.htm.
[64] Ibid.
[65] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy in Process: The Letters to Guinea-Bissau (New York:
Continuum, 1978), 18.
[66] Ibid., 19.
[67] Ibid.
[68] Cabral, Unity and Struggle, 277.
 [69] Ibid.
[70] Ibid.
[71] Ibid., 278.
[72] Ibid., 288.
[73] Ibid., 289.
[74] Ibid.
[75] Ibid.
[76] Davidson, “Introduction,” x.
[77] Freire, Pedagogy in Process, 13.
[78] Ibid., 14.
[79] Freire, “South African Freedom Fighter Amílcar Cabral,” 170.
[80] Freire, Pedagogy in Process, 14.
[81] Ibid., 17.
[82] Ibid.
[83] Ibid., 20.
[84] Ibid.
[85] Ibid., 28.
[86] Ibid.
[87] Ibid., 33.
[88] Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation. (London:
Bergin & Garvey, 1985), 187.
[89] Paulo Freire, Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those who Dare to Teach
(Boulder, CO: Westview, 1977), 64.
[90] Mohamed Younis, “Four in 10 Americans Embrace Some Form of Socialism,”
Gallup, 10 May 2019. Accessed Oct. 27, 2021, https://news.gallup.com/poll/257639/four-
americans-embrace-form-socialism.aspx.
[91] Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, “Our Demands.”
Accessed Oct. 27, 2021, https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/about/our-demands.
[92] Adam Weaver, “Active Revolution: Organizing, Base Building, and Dual Power,”
Black Rose Anarchist Federation, 29 March 2019. Accessed Oct. 27, 2021,
https://blackrosefed.org/base-building-dual-power/.
[93] Ibid.
[94] Ibid.
[95] V.I. Lenin, “The Tasks of the Proletariat in our Revolution (Draft Platform for the
Proletarian Party),” in Lenin Collected Works (Vol. 24): April-June 1917, trans. B. Isaacs
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1917/1980), 60.
[96] Ibid., 60-61, emphasis in original.
[97] Steve Ellner, “A New Model with Rough Edges: Venezuela’s Community Councils,”
Venezuela Analysis, 11 June 2009. Accessed Oct. 27, 2021,
https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4512.
 [98] Ibid.
[99] Felipe Neri, “Escualita Óscar Romero in Philadelphia Builds Unity in the Face of
Anti-Immigrant Terror,” Liberation News, 23 August 2019. Accessed Oct. 27, 2021,
https://www.liberationnews.org/escuelita-oscar-romero-in-philadelphia-builds-unity-in-the-
face-of-anti-immigrant-terror.
[100] V.I. Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder (Peking: Foreign
Language Press, 1920/1975), 8, emphasis in original.
[101] Mao Zedong, Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (Peking: Foreign Language
Press, 1972), 49.
[102] Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (New York: Lawrence & Hill,
1987/2001), 181.
[103] Ben Becker, “Social Media and Democratic Centralism: Opportunities and
Challenges.” Liberation School, accessed October 20, 2021,
https://liberationschool.org/social-media-and-democratic-centralism-opportunities-and-
challenges/