I've only read the first few pages of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It's really good. For anyone who struggles with basic theory, Freire writes with a pretty incredible clarity and succinctness. To me it reads almost like a rehashing of The Communist Manifesto, just without the words "proletariat," "bourgeoisie," "workers," etc.: oppressed people around the world must organize to overthrow their oppressors. All Freire seems to add is that they shouldn't be dickheads when they finally succeed. (He also throws some shade at philanthropy.) In contrast to modern Hegelians like Todd McGowan, Freire believes that contradiction can be overcome, that we can really build a fucking sweet new world free of oppression and dehumanization.

Anyway, this is my question. I've worked for many years as a teacher although I've actually never received any formal training or gone to teacher's college or anything like that. (I worked as an ESL teacher abroad and as a sub in Amerikkka.) I've heard that Pedagogy of the Oppressed is basically required reading if you intend to become a professional teacher in the USA. Yet we all know that nearly all American teachers are either libs or chuds. (I will say however in their defense that the average American teacher is probably way more open to human liberation than the average American.) But still: how the fuck can you read this shit and then basically lick the boots of the pigs on patrol in the hallways of the school you work at? How do you read Pedagogy of the Oppressed and then teach an American history class where you say that the founding fathers were guided by the ideal of liberty rather than their thirst for human blood?i

Edit: lol okay as it turns out I am completely wrong about this book being assigned reading in the USA.

    • Chomsky [comrade/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Class contradiction, by eliminating class. The only way to not have class contradiction is to not have class.

      Look at the USSR, the proletariat and peasants allied, but being different classes they had differing material interests, which led to contradiction, often with pretty devasting consequences.

      I think Mao lays this out best in on contradiction.

      • ferristriangle [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        The way Mao would describe the peasant/proletariat contradiction is that of a non-antagonistic contradiction. As opposed to the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeois, which is an antagonistic contradiction.

        Not all contradiction is created equal, and identifying the character of a contradiction is essential to understanding the best approach for dealing with those contradictions.

        Mao touches on these ideas more in "On the correct handling of contradiction among the people."

        • Chomsky [comrade/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Yeah, petty and big bourgeoisie, labour aristocracy bourgeoisie. These are non antagonistic contradictions. Still contrdictions though. You can see maga republicans as a reputure between big and petty bourgeoisie leading to increasingly antagonistic contradiction.

            • Chomsky [comrade/them]
              ·
              3 years ago

              I guess dialectically speaking. The contradiction between the individual and the universal leads to the belief in self, which leads to desire and aversion, which leads to constant disequilibrium known as dukha, suffering, unease, discomfort. The only way to end dukha is to cut out the root by understanding non self, i guess you could say belief in self is the principal contradiction.

              Not really an expert, but that would be my best Buddhist dialectical understanding of the arising of suffering.

                • Chomsky [comrade/them]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  I think this basically stems from a secularized version of christian guilt/ christian conception of free will at least in NA context. I think Beyond Good and Evil kind of discusses this stuff.

    • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      That Hegalianism, which you don't have to be a communist to follow and vice versa. Marx was really big on Hegel and dialectics are usually built into Marxist theory. It's less about solving contradictions but seeing them. Like how you can't really describe many things just by its positive attributes, sometimes you need to describe what they aren't. It's a whole fucking thing. I can fuck with dialectics as it applies to Marxism for the most part but Hegel is notoriously hard to understand, good thinker fucking awful writer.

        • Chomsky [comrade/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          I don't think it's made up, it's an observation about the process of change. It's not more or less made up than any other observation.

        • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          It's a philosophical framework. And yeah, pretty much everything does have an inherent contradiction. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction is a law of thermodynamics.

            • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
              ·
              3 years ago

              That's covered here:

              http://www.marxist.com/what-is-dialectical-materialism.htm#_contents1

            • ferristriangle [he/him]
              ·
              3 years ago

              I think the problem you're running into is that you're defining contradiction in the colloquial sense, but in this context contradictions generally refers to any things that are in opposition.

        • Chomsky [comrade/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          I think you are actuay right. You look at Hindu philosophy and you have advaita vendanta, Shiva Shakti dualism, sankhya and all of them are present in the Tantra symbol proposing that you can understand reality as singular, dual, tripartite, and so on ad infinitum and they are all simultaneously correct. At some point it's a matter of perspective.

          Yantra* stupid auto correct .