On Revolutionary Education
Three Key Starting Points on Education in a Society Built for the Bourgeoisie and How We Can Build Something Better
“The dictatorship of the proletariat is a persistent struggle—bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, educational and administrative—against the forces and traditions of the old society.”
— Vladimir Lenin, Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder page 34, emboldening mine.
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Introduction
Recently, in an organization meeting, we discussed the public education system and the consistent attacks happening towards it by the right wing local government. Schools have experienced continuous budget cuts for decades, policies are being passed to funnel local tax money into private schools instead, and the test scores of students have taken an immense hit ever since the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Educators everywhere, between kindergarten teachers to university professors, are feeling the pressure from failing systems, the Trump administration’s attack on them, and the ongoing battles between traitorous Boards of Trustees and the brave students fighting for the rights of immigrants and Palestinians.
The battlefield known as education in the United States has heightened, and many students, educators, and those who support them are being pushed to their limits.
The field of education has always been an area of struggle. While conservative and neoliberal politicians view any type of left-leaning ideology in broader education as ‘infiltration,’ the truth is that education has historically leaned left-ward and often attracts (and creates) leftists, anarchists, socialists, and communists. Our modern public education system, along with the compulsory laws that require parents to send their children to school, was fought for by these very groups; so it should be no surprise to hear that socialists are quite fond of education in general.
“… for along the whole line of our educational work we have to abandon the old standpoint that education should be non-political; we cannot conduct educational work in isolation from politics. That idea has always predominated in bourgeois society. The very term “apolitical” or “non-political” education is a piece of bourgeois hypocrisy, nothing but hum-buggery practiced on the masses, 99 percent of whom are humiliated and degraded by the rule of the church, private property and the like. That, in fact, is the way the bourgeoisie, still in the saddle in all bourgeois countries, is deceiving the masses.”
— Vladimir Lenin, Speech Delivered At An All-Russia Conference Of Political Education Workers Of Gubernia and Uyezd Education Departments, November 3, 1920.
Today, however, the public education system that so many people fought for has been co-opted to spread pro-capitalist & American propaganda. The few protections that these schools have against capitalist overreach are being whittled away. The rare ones that have not been overtaken are being circumvented through the burgeoning business of private education; charters, private, boys and girls, and religious schools are all examples. Propaganda against public education has risen due to pro-charter lobbyists funding politicians to push for the privatization of one of the few publicly funded programs the genocidal United States' government provides its constituents. The American populace is overall ignorant of the attacks against it; in many cases, they make that ignorance look like a virtue.1
"Not only does the enemy make you ignorant... he makes you want to love ignorance and hate knowledge."
— Kwame Ture
Many within the various revolutionary camps have stricken up the demand to defend public education from these multifaceted attacks. Some ultra ‘leftists’ see this as capitulation towards capitalists; in their minds, revolutionaries are defending bourgeois institutions instead of building alternatives to them. To an extent, both are right. On one end, we should defend public education since it is one of the few guarantees that the US government has to the masses; that being taken away only further atomizes people and will further impoverish the workers and our children. On the other hand, alternatives are important and should be worked towards — not because we want our versions next to the capitalist’s, nor do we wish to be co-opted by opportunists. Instead, we desire to build something entirely new over the bridle and decrepit versions we have today.
“Naive and utterly inexperienced people imagine that it is sufficient to admit the permissibility of compromises in general in order to obliterate the dividing line between opportunism, against which we wage and must wage an irreconcilable struggle, and revolutionary Marxism, or Communism. But if such people do not yet know that all dividing lines in nature and in society are mutable and to a certain extent conventional—they cannot be assisted otherwise than by a long process of training, education, enlightenment, and by political and everyday experience.”
— Vladimir Lenin, Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, page 63 [embolden mine].
Education is essential for any revolutionary cause. This is a fact that every famous revolutionary around the world understood well. It is something we should always fight for, no matter how the enemy looks at or talks about education. It is also something we should strive for in our own groups and organizations. Education, and all of its battlefields, is a war that revolutionaries must take up on all fronts.
We can not leave education in the hands of the pro-capitalist democracy we live in, no matter what shape it takes (public or private). Revolutionary schools are being built as I type this; designed to build a popular mass movement that will one day have to face the greatest monster in human history. And much of that building — that mundane, essential, and beautiful work — takes shape first in educating the masses.
What do I mean by “educating the masses?” It is not as simple as providing education for people to gain jobs, nor is our sole responsibility shaping people into ‘productive’ members of capitalist society. These certainly should be secondary goals, but secondary nonetheless. Instead, our primary goal in education is to make the constantly alienated human experience their human-ness; something that is taken from them as they constantly sell their labor for survival.
“The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theater, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.”
— Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.
“For as soon as the distribution of labor comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
— Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology.
The masses, through their constant estrangement caused by them being forced to choose between selling their labor or dying — both societal and physical death — require an education that is fulfilling; an education built to make them human once again, not cogs in machines or beasts of burden, but real, authentic, revolutionary human beings. Bourgeois education systems, whether they are public or private, will never fulfill this requirement. The capitalists do not require individuals with a desire for life; they require semi-sapient drones to fill the factories, halls, complexes, and fields. Only revolutionary education can make the worker human again because such a pedagogy gives them the tools to build a more human world.
“…both humanization and dehumanization are possibilities for a person as an uncompleted being conscious of their incompletion. But while both humanization and dehumanization are real alternatives, only the first is the people's vocation. This vocation is constantly negated, yet it is affirmed by that very negation. It is thwarted by injustice, exploitation, oppression, and the violence of the oppressors; it is affirmed by the yearning of the oppressed for freedom and justice, and by their struggle to recover their lost humanity.”
— Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Pages 17-18.
“As education spreads among the people the workers will want to enjoy life more; they will assert their right to the full fruits of their labor, and by that act of self-assertion lay the foundation of that Socialist Republic in which labor will be so easy, and the reward so great, that life will seem a perpetual holiday.”
— James Connolly, Workshop Talks (1909).
This is the modus operandi of any revolutionary organization’s education program: To raise the class-consciousness of the masses to make revolution. This pedagogical objective is the central fuse that lights the spark of the masses to further propagandize and agitate against the capitalists in favor of a socialist — a truly democratic — cause. Any organization that educates, whether that be in helping the formerly incarcerated reenter society or helping people find a trade, must have a revolutionary teaching method that does not just make effective workers, but makes effective class-conscious workers.
In these educational programs, the revolutionary must listen fervently to the students — not just so they can be educated in what they are learning, nor simply for helping them understand the necessity of class-consciousness — to find the ones who ask a plethora of questions, show a keen interest in learning more about making revolution, and the organization’s role in that process.
Such students are burgeoning professional revolutionaries and must be further educated on becoming one.
Many students will desire to understand what it means to be class-conscious. They will go into their jobs, help organize the labor force, and agitate for the organization’s cause of socialist revolution. But the professional revolutionary makes this agitation their raison d'être, what they wish to do with the entirety of their life, their job. Both the class-conscious worker and the professional revolutionary are vital for any revolutionary organization. Neither are more important than the other, as both need each other to fulfill their shared goal.
Educating professional revolutionaries requires further steps than educating a worker into class-consciousness. This is the core principle we are examining in this article: a revolutionary pedagogy to make professional revolutionaries. To understand said pedagogy, we must examine the contradictions within the US educational system and culture, the student-teacher contradiction specifically, and analyze what revolutionary education is in the first place.
On the Contradictions within Education
The first step of any analysis on education — let alone a pedagogy with revolutionary content and form — is to examine the contradictions within our school systems. These contradictions, with the word used in the Marxist sense,2 are throughout the entirety of our society here in the United States; these contradictions are replicated both within our individual experiences of academia and within the very systems themselves. These contradictions have to be seen, understood, and properly critiqued — whether they are antagonistic towards our goals or not — if we are to build something counter to the pro-capitalist and American propaganda education that infects all of us.
Many of the antagonistic contradictions with the US educational system stems from how the working class, immigrant, and the incarcerated (enslaved) populaces often regurgitate the same oppression that they experience.
For example, as is well known, the black populace within the United States is one of the most oppressed peoples when it comes to their interactions with the military-police specifically. Only the blind and ignorant would argue the opposite is the truth (as is common in many right-wing circles). and yet, around 10% of all cops were black in 2020. The same can also be said of women, a population that is often harassed and targeted by the majority white occupation force, who made up around 15% in the same year. I am sure some will see these statistics and assume I am saying that black people and women are the cause of their oppression. This is the furthest from the truth, as this is — as Paulo Friere puts it in his seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed — the oppressed recreating their reality of oppression.
“But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or "sub-oppressors.” The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors… This does not necessarily mean that the oppressed are unaware that they are downtrodden. But their perception of themselves as oppressed is impaired by their submersion in the reality of oppression. At this level, their perception of themselves as opposites of the oppressor does not yet signify engagement in a struggle to overcome the contradiction; the one pole aspires not to liberation, but to identification with its opposite pole.”
— Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, pages 19-20, emboldening mine.
When it comes to the oppressed populaces of the United States, it is default to identify with or strive to become the oppressor. We see examples of this in the celebrity worship of millionaires and billionaires,3 along with the ‘hustle’ culture that ridicules those who do not wish to constantly make money off of everything they do. This is partially due to the ignorance or lack of desire to identify with their own class because said class is oppressed. And why would they want to identify with the lowest strata of our society? The working class, Afro-American, POC, queer, and immigrant have far less materially than the upper echelon of society; the capitalist, the white, the heterosexual, the gender normative, and the ‘natural born’ citizen. It is far easier to identify with the oppressor because they do not ‘look’ weak to the individualized oppressed.
“The oppressed must see examples of the vulnerability of the oppressor so that a contrary conviction can begin to grow within them. Until this occurs, they will continue disheartened, fearful, and beaten… As long as the oppressed remain unaware of the causes of their condition, they fatalistically "accept" their exploitation.”
— Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, pages 22 & 38.
Therefore, the oppressed replicate their own oppression attempting to become an oppressor themselves; with the unrealistic goal of ridding themselves of their oppressed identity. Looking towards the educational system; contest, climbing the corporate ladder, and becoming a ‘better’ working drone is how students and teachers create and recreate capitalist oppression. Rather than school being a place to create members of society who can fulfill their human-ness through working for a greater cause, they are taught the bare minimum to become cogs in the machine for the capitalist, beasts of burden for the landlord, and another office drone for the boss.
They may hate this reality, and they often do whether they admit it or not, but if they can ‘take care of their own’ after school (due to becoming a worker), then becoming adversarial to their fellow oppressed peoples is not only preferred in their eyes, but something they are destined to want to recreate. They recreate their people’s oppression so they can struggle less, at least that is what they believe, due to the individualistic society that capitalism constantly reproduces in the minds of every American.
“Their vision of the new man or woman is individualistic; because of their identification with the oppressor, they have no consciousness of themselves as persons or as members of an oppressed class.”
— Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 20.
“American education, like American society, is based upon the philosophy of individualism.”
— The Advocators, Education to Govern, page 58.
Teachers especially recreate these oppressive systems in their day to day work while educating the next generation. History teachers, for example, often teach a mythologized and white-washed version of American history where the white settlers were peaceful to the ‘savage natives’; the burgeoning capitalists altruistically built railroads, hospitals, schools, and libraries for the betterment of everyone; the brave presidents of the Civil War era freed the ‘inferior blacks’ from eternal servitude. For many Americans, this is the history they are taught. History stops at the Civil War, with everyone now being at peace, singing kumbaya around campfires — up until recently, of course.
Is this to say that history teachers, let alone every teacher, is somehow the sole reason for the contradictions within education? No, that would be ridiculous, as they are simply reiterating what they were taught and told to teach; they are doing what capitalism deems ‘natural’: recreating their own oppression onto those like them. But this way of teaching, where we treat students as empty vessels waiting to be filled with propaganda is untenable. We see this with the youth of today, whom have no reason to care for their education since they have already been destined by the ‘invisible hand’ of capital to surrender everything — body, mind, and soul — to their future boss. Students, whether they are youth or elder, are not ignorant to this fact; so they lash out at their teachers and the system that has condemned them, whether they understand their rebellion or not.
“Our children are not learning because the present system is depriving them of such natural stimuli to learning as exercising their resourcefulness to solve the real problems of their own communities; working together rather than competitively, with younger children emulating older ones and older children teaching younger ones; experiencing the intrinsic consequences of their own actions; judging issues.”
— The Advocators, Education to Govern, page 63.
The student sees their fellow as competition, both in how they are graded and in their desire for future employment.4 School does not teach them practical things — if they are lucky, they may have a finance class that teaches them how to balance a checking account. Instead, school teaches them just enough to get by, recreates their oppression through pro-US propaganda disguised as history, science, literature, and prepares them to become a patriotic worker. The student, as said before, may lash out in rebellion; eventually, that rebellious fire dwindles as the weight of being a worker crushes their soul to become the obedient drone capital desires from them. “Functionally, oppression is domesticating,” as Paulo Friere states.5
This way of teaching is unsustainable; and it is called ‘the banking concept’.
The System of the Teacher-Student Dialectic
As stated above, much of our ideals on how to educate comes in the form of viewing those being taught — i.e, the student — as an empty vessel waiting to be filled; people who come in with no knowledge of their own waiting to have said knowledge put within them by the person who holds it, the teacher. In this banking style of education, the student is treated as something entirely empty; they are void of skills, attributes, experience, and knowledge on the matter being taught. They are viewed as objects — in a philosophical point-of-view — for the subject, i.e, the teacher, to fill. The teacher, the purveyor of all knowledge in the banking concept, justifies their existence by considering the student wholly ignorant and needing the teacher to actively educate them; the student, the object waiting to be filled with knowledge, justifies their existence by considering the teacher the only authentic source for knowledge.
“In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teachers existence ...”
— Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 45.
The goal of the banking method of education is to replicate the oppression of the masses onto them through their education, no matter how ‘simplistic’ the education is. Education, especially in the west, was a top-down concept historically; it arose for nobility and clergy first, only then reaching the poor and disenfranchised once communists and the like began threatening the capitalist establishment. Even one of the greatest victories of liberalism, the French Revolutions, attempted to enshrine education for all into their republics, only to fall back into the supposed ‘pre-modern’ understanding of education as for solely the materially wealthy. With this historical fact, we can see how education replicates oppressive ideology onto the oppressed who are now begrudgingly given poor education; through indoctrinating the masses to adapt to their oppression.
“Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression.”
— Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 51.
Education, much like the welfare state in western countries, is actually a form of capitalist oppression due to the systems replicating and regurgitating the oppressive ideals that stamp down the masses outside of education. As stated above, the goal with education for the capitalist society is not to create human beings, nor is it to give them the tools to change their reality of oppression; instead, education is to make them accept oppression and to attempt to find a way to survive it, since it has ‘always been this way.’ The goal of this changing of consciousness of the oppressed is to make them more malleable, to make them adapt to their oppressive situation so they can be easily dominated everywhere else. The worker who is on welfare was taught that they can change nothing of their circumstances first at grade-school, since they are just an individual who is at the margins. In other words, the masses are taught to view themselves as individual failures who failed to survive the system that has rigged them for failure in the first place.
“Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in "changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them"; for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated. To achieve this end, the oppressors use the banking concept of education in conjunction with a paternalistic social action apparatus, within which the oppressed receive the euphemistic title of "welfare recipients." They are treated as individual cases, as marginal persons who deviate from the general configuration of a "good, organized, and just" society. The oppressed are regarded as the pathology of the healthy society, which must therefore adjust these "incompetent and lazy" folk to its own patterns by changing their mentality. These marginals need to be "integrated," "incorporated" into the healthy society that they have "forsaken."“
— Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 47.
This style of education in places like the United States considers itself altruistic or humanistic; with the goal of giving the oppressed the ability to climb out of their oppression. This capitalist humanism, providing education, welfare, pay, and material support to the workers, serves the interest of maintaining the systems that uphold oppression. The capitalist long understood that if they do not provide any type of material support to their workers that they are liable to revolt — worst case, they may be swayed by the always evil communist movement towards socialist revolution.
However, they also can not provide too much assistance, lest they lose the workers they have fought so hard to keep. The capitalist must provide just enough assistance to keep the worker alive, healthy enough, and content enough to keep showing up to work. The assistance in education, in this case, is enough to maintain the workers' abilities as members of a capitalist society — how to drive a cars so they can go to their job, how to do their taxes for the state, understand the general myths of the state for propaganda purposes, etc. — but never enough to actually change the material conditions that make the oppressed work to survive in the first place.
However, a major contradiction within capitalism is the constant desire from capitalist to roll back worker protections over time so they can accrue a higher monetary gain. In the case of both labor and education, we see this plainly in the rolling back of multiple state laws that protect children from becoming full-time workers and unable to go to school. We also see this reality in the attack on public education, whose biggest benefactors are working class and oppressed peoples who do benefit from access to free education. In certain states, it is becoming more and more permissible that children aged 13 to 17 are able to work a full 40 hour work week while still having to go to school; in some states, they are attempting to roll back this mandatory education to force children into working.6
These laws were put in place due to communist agitation in the oppressed peoples in the United States; more importantly, they were put in place in fear of a popular people’s movement that demanded they receive an education just like all the rich white kids were able to. The capitalists reacted to this reality by pushing for mandatory education, something that their state apparatus was able to have a modicum amount of control over. This was the start of education being a humanitarian concern for the capitalist class; the humanitarian aspect being a fear that humans would overthrow the system that the bourgeoisie need to ‘survive’.
“The "humanism" of the banking approach masks the effort to turn women and men into automatons—the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human.”
— Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 47.
This is why they push for private education now — because the capitalist were beginning to lose, at least they perceived it as a loss, ground. The heterodox views the capitalist preferred were no longer seen as the only truth — and since they could not so easily co-opt the new progressive language on science, history, and literature, they began to push an even more reactionary form of education to force the oppressed to accept their oppression.7 It is an attempt to control the “thinking and action” of the masses, pushing their pro-capitalist and pro-US onto children to make them better workers for the system that oppresses them.8 This system of education, this capitalist banking system, is inherently contradictory. They need to teach just enough for the studentry to survive in a world built by their oppression, for their oppressors; all the while, it slowly destroys the very nature of what it means to be human — the ability to analyze their conditions and to create a better world.9
The teacher, in this case, ultimately teaches subjects in a certain way that seemingly is out of touch with the reality of the students they are educating. The words, numbers, literature, history and science are all taught in a hollowed manner; isolated from the concrete reality that has shaped these very subjects. It is pure idealism that makes these subjects seem insignificant to the future-worker.10 This way of doing education, which is replicated in even revolutionary organizations, removes the agency of the student and places importance on whether or not said student is able to retain and repeat slogans, quotes, numbers, or factoids that are devoid of all their material realities.11
“Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking" concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits.”
— Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 44-45.
What Kind of Education is Revolutionary?
Creating an education centered around making revolutionaries from the oppressed classes of the United States, revolutionaries must always remember that we go to the masses to understand what their material conditions are.12 If we are to build professional revolutionaries whom will make up the political apparatus of revolutionary organizations, then we must engage with our revolutionary students in the same way we would engage with the entirety of the masses.13 Instead of viewing ourselves as revolutionary teachers who will dispense all the historical and material knowledge to make revolution, which is an antagonistic contradiction within our educational structures, we must view ourselves as students to our students. We must take in their knowledge on the material situation around them, analyze the conditions in conjunction with them, take these analyses out to the people and see if it lines with the peoples needs, and come back with true solutions to these problems.14 The revolutionary teacher must be a revolutionary student to their students; the revolutionary student must be a revolutionary teacher to their teachers.1516
“The fundamental teaching of mass line is for us to have complete trust and reliance on the masses. It emphasizes that the revolution must depend on the masses of the people and on the mobilization of the majority. It opposes pinning one’s hope on a handful of leaders, geniuses, heroes or saviors. It upholds the view that the masses, and only the masses, are the makers of history.” — Communist Party of the Philippines, On Mass Work.
Is this to say that the teachers have nothing to teach and should simply listen to their students? Of course not. Revolutionary teachers are teachers due to their extensive knowledge(theory) and participation(praxis) in making revolution; revolutionary students are students because of their new burning desire to understand and make revolution. However, it is to argue that the teacher-student dialectic must be rectified so that we can create and recreate authentic professional revolutionaries in both groups within our organizations.
“Both students and [teachers] should study hard. In addition to the study of their specialized subjects, they must make progress ideologically and politically, which means they should study Marxism, current events and politics.”
— Mao Zedong, On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People.
‘Revolutionary’ teachers mimicking the bourgeois style of teaching leads to opportunism, tailism, and ivory-tower levels of hubris. ‘Revolutionary’ students mimicking the banking style of education will compete between each other instead of attempting to solve the problems within their communities. The distinction of teacher and student are still there, but they must not replicate the bourgeois educational system, nor can they create the same cultural individualism that permeates the United States’ society.17
The dialectic of teacher-student, at this moment, is antagonistic due to competitive individualism brought about through pro-capitalist propaganda and agitation.18 The goals of the revolutionary teacher and student are three fold: a) to go against capitalist education propaganda; b) reject the competitive individualism in our minds; c) build up both groups to become professional revolutionaries in their specific conditions so they can more effectively go to the masses and build a socialist society by showing that communists can effectively study, analyze, and solve their ailments.19
“[The bourgeois society] bends every effort to play down an even more important mission of the dictatorship of the proletariat, its educational mission… this mission must be given priority, for we must prepare the masses to build up socialism. The dictatorship of the proletariat would have been out of the question if, in the struggle against the bourgeoisie, the proletariat had not developed a keen class-consciousness, strict discipline and profound devotion, in other words, all the qualities required to assure the proletariat’s complete victory over its old enemy.”
— Vladimir Lenin, “Speech Delivered At An All-Russia Conference Of Political Education Workers Of Gubernia and Uyezd Education Departments,” November 3, 1920.
“Proper analysis of present conditions and experiences is a very important part of revolutionary study.”
— Activist Study, Araling Aktibista (ARAK) page 84.
“We must study and must not become conceited or look down on others… In short, we must remain modest, be willing to learn, retain our perseverance and adhere to the system of collective leadership so as to achieve socialist transformation and attain victory for socialism.”
— Mao Zedong, “Combat Bourgeois Ideas in the Party,” Writings on Organization & Mass Line, page 140-141.
A revolutionary educational structure is built around not just dismantling the competitive, individualist, and pro-capitalist education that has enraptured our minds,20 but also replacing it with a dialogical approach to solving the contradictions within our communities, our organizations, our interpersonal relations, and within ourselves.21 The fully realized professional revolutionary, whether they be a student or teacher, works in tandem with the rest of their comrades to enter into a dialogue with one another and the rest of the masses.22 It is when we keep these ideas of de-propangdization, dialogue, and replicating our work with the masses into our educational structures, we can begin to see our burgeoning revolutionary pedagogy within our organizations.
“It is important for our mass education work to have a program for systematically developing the consciousness and capacity of the masses, mass activists and those targeted for recruitment as members of the Party. We must make sure we allot some time for carrying out these education plans. This is one essential revolutionary work and task which we must not neglect.” — Communist Party of the Philippines, On Mass Work.
And at the same time, as some of the above quotes mentioned, there must be a level of humility to admit wrongdoing — whether in dialogue with the masses or in dialogue with our students or teachers. It is important, then, to properly criticize our educational structures to find the weak spots that can be improved upon. A revolutionary educational structure always asks such questions, “How can we properly educate the masses on the role of the communist in revolution?”23, “How can we improve our educational structures to weed out bourgeois thinking, even amidst our newest students or our most seasoned teachers?”, and “How can we continue to replicate “from the masses, to the masses” in our educational structures?”24 An organization unable to properly criticize will never lead the masses and will inevitably fall to opportunism and tailism.
“Every revolutionary party and every revolutionary comrade will be put to the test, to be accepted or rejected as they decide. There are three alternatives. To march at their head and lead them? To trail behind them, gesticulating and criticizing? Or to stand in their way and oppose them? Every [person] is free to choose, but events will force you to make the choice quickly.”
— Mao Zedong, "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan " (March 1927), Selected Works, Vol. I, pages 23-24.
Ultimately, all of these points are to reach for the same organizational goal: raise the level of revolutionary consciousness within both the masses and within our own revolutionary organization. Revolutionary education must always move forward, mind clear, in the goal of strengthening and expanding the communist revolutionary consciousness. A proper revolutionary education builds up the budding professional revolutionary’s/student’s theoretical knowledge and pushes them, with the teacher and their fellow comrades in tow, to a) go out amongst the masses to solve the problems of the people; b) agitate through communist propaganda that the communist movement has the answers to the ills of capitalism; c) develop the skills and capacity of the masses to commit to the revolutionary work required; and d) always keep an eye out for new members for the party, the burgeoning but not-yet-born professional revolutionary. A proper revolutionary educational structure does these things with humility, criticizing both individual and systemic faults of the party along the way, and builds up the communist movement further because of it.25
Conclusion
This article dissects the material and social contradictions within the US educational system, detail how these clashes create an unhealthy relationship between the student and teacher, and how we must combat these contradictions so that the revolutionary student and teacher can further the revolutionary consciousness of the masses. It is only when we know how to deal with the overall ignorance that has been forced upon the masses by the capitalist class can we understand how to implement said structures in our revolutionary organizations. When we begin to implement these dialogical structures within our party education programs, we will see how the revolutionary teachers — with their knowledge and practice on revolution — join their fellow comrades, the revolutionary students — with their desire and readiness to understand how to make revolution — to better agitate for a socialist future, to better propagandize the masses on why communism is required to solve the ills of capital, to better educate the masses on what it means to be a revolutionary26 and who their enemies actually are; the capitalist class who horde their wealth like dragons of old.27
“We are living in an historic period of struggle against the world bourgeoisie, which is far stronger than we are. At this stage of the struggle, we have to safeguard the development of the revolution and combat the bourgeoisie in the military sense and still more by means of our ideology through education, so that the habits, usages and convictions acquired by the working class in the course of many decades of struggle for political liberty-the sum total of these habits, usages and ideas should serve as an instrument for the education of all working people.” — Vladimir Lenin, “Speech Delivered At An All-Russia Conference Of Political Education Workers Of Gubernia and Uyezd Education Departments,” November 3, 1920.
“The working class were able to prove this in 1905, and they will be able to prove again, and to prove more impressively, and much more seriously, that they are capable of a revolutionary struggle for real freedom and for real public education and not that of [the current education department of the Forth Duma] or of the nobility.” — Vladimir Lenin, “The Question of Ministry of Education Policy” (SUPPLEMENT TO THE DISCUSSION ON PUBLIC EDUCATION), Written April 27 (May 10), 1913, embolden mine.
This all starts with understanding the most basic of contradictions of the United States; more specifically, the contradictions with education. Afterwards, then the revolutionary educational programs can move forward in teaching the Marxist way of analyzing problems, finding solutions to said problems, implementing said solutions, reviewing whether or not the fix was as effective as desired, and, if needed, finding a way to improve the situation further. these steps of study, analysis, investigation, action, criticism, and self-criticism all play a role in the communist education program.
All comrades must understand these principles of revolutionary education; the professional revolutionaries must know these principles better then they know themselves and implement them in all that they do. Due to the length of this article, we will examine these principles more in depth in a part two where we will deal with what does a professional revolutionary and their education programs looks like in a correct revolutionary format. What does the correct thinking and action of an educated professional revolutionary look like? What does the organizational structure of a group of educated professional revolutionaries look like? And, how do educated professional revolutionaries deal with perceived issues within their organizations and strategies? All will be dealt with in the next part coming out soon.
The American populace’s ignorance stems from the capitalist exploitation done unto them, and also is magnified by the capitalist propaganda pushed by said populace to hate outside groups. This originates, in many cases, from a Eurocentric mindset. As Marx points out about the English worker in 1870, they “hate the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A..” — Karl Marx, Letters of Karl Marx 1870, “Marx to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt In New York.”
For a more thorough explanation on what Marxist’s mean by contradiction, see “ON CONTRADICTION” by Mao Zedong, along with a companion study guide by the Redspark Collective.
Elon Musk’s fans are an example of such worship. The very fact Elon is a rich capitalist, according to his poorer adherents, is enough of a reason to strive to be like him.
“[The new social order] will, in other words, abolish competition and replace it with association.” — Friedrich Engels, Principles of Communism.
Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 25.
Child labor laws are under attack in states across the country, by Economic Policiy Institute.
“The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed. The oppressors use their "humanitarianism" to preserve a profitable situation. Thus they react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality but always seeks out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another.” — Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, pages 46-47.
“In all bourgeois states the connection between the political apparatus and education is very strong, although bourgeois society cannot frankly acknowledge it. Nevertheless, this society indoctrinates the masses through the church and the institution of private property.” — Vladimir Lenin, “Speech Delivered At An All-Russia Conference Of Political Education Workers Of Gubernia and Uyezd Education Departments,” November 3, 1920.
“Oppression—overwhelming control—is necrophilic; it is nourished by love of death, not life. The banking concept of education, which serves the interests of oppression, is also necrophilic. Based on a mechanistic, static, naturalistic, spatialized view of consciousness, it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads women and men to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power.” — Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 50.
“[The Teacher’s] task is to "fill" the students with the contents of his narration— contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.” — Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 44.
“In the school’s system this means relating to the teacher and not to our classmates. It means accepting what is taught you as the “objective” or “gospel” or “immaculately conceived” truth which stares at you out of the pages of the textbook. You then feed these truths back to the teacher (“the correct answer”), evading controversial questions that require thinking for yourself or taking a position.” — The Advocators, Education to Govern, pages 58-59.
“In all the practical work of our Party, all correct leadership is necessarily “from the masses, to the masses.” This means: take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them and translate them into action, and test the correctness of these ideas in such action. Then once again concentrate ideas from the masses and once again go to the masses so that the ideas are persevered in and carried through. And so on, over and over again in an endless spiral, with the ideas becoming more correct, more vital and richer each time. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge.” — Mao Zedong, “Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership,” Writings on Organization & Mass Line, pages 102-103.
“People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realize that every old institution, how ever barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes. And there is only one way of smashing the resistance of those classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, the forces which can—and, owing to their social position, must—constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organize those forces for the struggle.” — Vladimir Lenin, Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism
“Almost never do [the oppressed] realize that they, too, "know things" they have learned in their relations with the world and with other women and men. Given the circumstances which have produced their duality [of being oppressed and internalizing the oppressor], it is only natural that they distrust themselves.” — Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 37.
“[The revolutionary educator’s] efforts must coincide with those of the students to engage in critical thinking and the quest for mutual humanization. His efforts must be imbued with a profound trust in people and their creative power. To achieve this, they must be partners of the students in their relations with them. The banking concept does not admit to such partnership—and necessarily so. To resolve the teacher-student contradiction, to exchange the role of depositor, prescriber, domesticator, for the role of student among students would be to undermine the power of oppression and serve the cause of liberation.” — Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 48.
“Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. 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 teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow.” — Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 53.
“Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression. This accusation is not made in the naive hope that the dominant elites will thereby simply abandon the practice. Its objective is to call the attention of true humanists to the fact that they cannot use banking educational methods in the pursuit of liberation, for they would only negate that very pursuit. Nor may a revolutionary society inherit these methods from an oppressor society. The revolutionary society which practices banking education is either misguided or mistrusting of people. In either event, it is threatened by the specter of reaction.” — Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 51.
“The man or woman who proclaims devotion to the cause of liberation yet is unable to enter into communion with the people, whom he or she continues to regard as totally ignorant, is grievously self-deceived. The convert who approaches the people but feels alarm at each feels they take, each doubt they express, and each suggestion they offer, and attempts to impose his "status," remains nostalgic towards his [oppressive] origins.” — Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 35
“In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression… as a limiting situation which they can transform.” — Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 23.
“At all stages of their liberation, the oppressed must see them selves as women and men engaged in the ontological and historical vocation of becoming more fully human. Reflection and action become imperative when one does not erroneously attempt to dichotomize the content of humanity from its historical forms.” — Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, pages 39-40.
“…problem-posing education sets itself the task of demythologizing… problem-posing education regards dialogue as indispensable to the act of cognition which unveils reality… problem-posing education makes [the oppressed] critical thinkers.” — Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 56.
“It should be said that the hundreds of thousands of teachers constitute a body that must get the work moving, stimulate thought, and combat the prejudices that to this day still persist among the masses. The heritage of capitalist culture, the fact that the mass of the teachers are imbued with its defects, which prevent them from being Communists, should not deter us from admitting these teachers into the ranks of the political education workers, for these teachers possess the knowledge without which we cannot achieve our aim.” — Vladimir Lenin, “Speech Delivered At An All-Russia Conference Of Political Education Workers Of Gubernia and Uyezd Education Departments,” November 3, 1920.
“It is only when the oppressed find the oppressor out and become involved in the organized struggle for their liberation that they begin to believe in themselves. This discovery cannot be purely intellectual but must involve action; nor can it be limited to mere activism, but must include serious reflection: only then will it be a praxis. Critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes action, must be carried on with the oppressed at whatever the stage of their struggle for liberation. The content of that dialogue can and should vary in accordance with historical conditions and the level at which the oppressed perceive reality… Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat them as objects which must be saved from a burning building; it is to lead them into the populist pitfall and transform them into masses which can be manipulated.” — Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 39.
“In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation. Although the dialectical relations of women and men with the world exist independently of how these relations are perceived (or whether or not they are perceived at all), it is also true that the form of action they adopt is to a large extent a function of how they perceive themselves in the world. Hence, the teacher-student and the students-teachers reflect simultaneously on themselves and the world without dichotomizing this reflection from action, and thus establish an authentic form of thought and action.” — Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 56.
“A revolutionary leadership must accordingly practice co-intentional education. Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge. As they attain this knowledge of reality through common reflection and action, they discover themselves as it’s permanent re-creators. In this way, the presence of the oppressed in the struggle for their liberation will be what it should be: not pseudo-participation, but committed involvement.” — Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 43.
“Let us consider the means of establishing organizational links between people who are so different. In principle, we cannot for a moment doubt the need of the Communist Party’s primacy. Consequently, the purpose of political culture, of political instruction, is to train genuine Communists capable of stamping out falsehood and prejudices and helping the working masses to vanquish the old system and build up a state without capitalists, without exploiters, and without landowners. How can that be done? Only by acquiring the sum total of knowledge that the teachers have inherited from the bourgeoisie. Without this the technical achievements of communism will be impossible, and all hopes for those achievements would be pipe dreams. So the question arises: how are we to organize these people, who are not used to bringing politics into their work, especially the politics that is to our advantage, i.e., politics essential to communism?” — Vladimir Lenin, “Speech Delivered At An All-Russia Conference Of Political Education Workers Of Gubernia and Uyezd Education Departments,” November 3, 1920.
"In all the practical work of our Party, all correct leadership is necessarily "from the masses, to the masses". This means: take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them and translate them into action, and test the correctness of these ideas in such action. Then once again concentrate ideas from the masses and once again go to the masses so that the ideas are persevered in and carried through. And so on, over and over again in an endless spiral, with the ideas becoming more correct, more vital and richer each time. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge.” — Mao Zedong, "Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership" (June 1, 1943), Selected Works, Vol. III, p. 119.
“Basically, the objective of propaganda and education work is the same: raise the level of revolutionary consciousness of the masses in order for them to participate actively and wholeheartedly in the revolutionary movement. Education is the formal, concentrated and systematic study of the revolution by the organized masses. Education work places their participation in the revolutionary struggle on a sturdy theoretical foundation. Education also develops the capacity and skill of the masses in order for them to carry out their revolutionary work and tasks more effectively. Providing education cannot be separated from the establishment and consolidation of mass organizations. If the masses are able to study systematically and regularly, the ideological and political outlook takes root among them which will guide their every action and their long-term development in the revolution. Their capacity and skill to carry out and complete more numerous and more complex revolutionary work will continue to develop and broaden. It is also necessary to propagate among the masses the results of the summing-up of the work of the revolutionary movement, especially the positive and negative lessons, strengths and weaknesses, successes and setbacks. The masses must conduct a detailed study of the lessons from their own revolutionary experience in order to persevere along the correct path, and to correct the errors as a result of the “Left” and Right opportunist lines. This will serve as a guide and a firm footing for the further strengthening and development of the revolutionary mass movement. The content of mass education is comprehended better by the masses when it is linked to their own revolutionary experience.” — Communist Party of the Philippines, On Mass Work
“Communism must be made comprehensible to the masses of the workers so that they will regard it as their own cause.” — Vladimir Lenin, “Speech Delivered At An All-Russia Conference Of Political Education Workers Of Gubernia and Uyezd Education Departments,” November 3, 1920.
“If politics is understood in the old sense, one may fall into a grave and profound error. Politics means a struggle between classes; means the relations of the proletariat in its struggle for its emancipation, against the world bourgeoisie.” — Vladimir Lenin, “Speech Delivered At An All-Russia Conference Of Political Education Workers Of Gubernia and Uyezd Education Departments,” November 3, 1920