Pedagogy of the Oppressed
by Paulo Freire
reviewed by Adam L

Introduction

Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a 1970 book by Paulo Freire, a radical Brazilian educator. If one were to pick this book up at random, you would be forgiven for thinking it was an educational text for the underprivileged and it is, in a sense. But the unfolding of Freire’s theses across its brief four chapters leaves little room for interpretation: this is a radical text, intended to be a handbook for revolutionaries. It belongs more to the literary tradition of Lenin’s What is to be Done? than Dewey’s The Child and the Curriculum.

To understand why he connects these ideas we must first understand the historical context in which this book was written. In the death throes of multiple crises, the Empire of Brazil adopted direct elections in its final years, but inspired by John Stuart Mill limited it on two conditions: a census discrimination (minimum annual tax payments), and the ability to read and write.1 The vast majority of the country’s illiterate, peasant population were thereby excluded.23 Republican democracy came to Brazil in fits and starts, but this exclusion remained by the time of the Fourth Republic:

In 1963, Freire became head of Brazil’s National Commission of Popular Culture, under the liberal-populist government of João Goulart, who moved dramatically to the left once in power in response to popular movements. Policies to help the poor including opening the franchise to people who couldn’t read enraged many among the country’s upper and upper-middle classes. A right-wing dictatorship came to power in a military coup the following year, and Freire was thrown in prison by the new regime, which viewed mass literacy and political participation as a threat. After his release from prison, Freire went into exile for years… [during which] he wrote the book that would make him Brazil’s most famous global intellectual.4

Despite its abstract language, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is an urgent intervention: Freire speaks directly to the incipient movements of the well-intentioned petit-bourgeois intelligentsia of his time who were attempting to organize the masses against a fascist coup d’état and military dictatorship.

Freire’s Theses of Revolutionary Education

Humanity has a calling, an “ontological vocation”, says Freire: to “humanize” ourselves and the world. The “central problem” of humanity has been overcoming our self-inflicted dehumanization in pursuit of this goal. This serves as an idiosyncratic reference to Hegel’s account of alienation and its overcoming:

Neither Marx nor Hegel regards the state of alienation and disharmony as a purely negative one. Both see this condition as a stage in the process of human development and self-realization, and as a necessary part of the process, since we achieve development only in and through it.5

To dehumanize someone is to treat them like a thing. Objectification denies the object its status as Subject. This failure of recognition creates a situation of oppression and a state of distress in the oppressed. The act of dehumanizing also dehumanizes the oppressor.6 But this dialectic of oppressor-oppressed has far greater implications than subjective experience: it becomes the way in which we reshape the world to suit our purposes, and consequently it materializes this relationship of oppression. As Marx famously observed, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”7 Social relations of oppression continuously reproduce themselves. Freire describes both oppressor and oppressed as being “submerged in this situation”, bearing “the marks of oppression” (58). The prescription of how to live is imposed on the oppressed and they are made to “house” the oppressor’s consciousness in themselves (46–47, 128).

How this is done brings us to the most famous idea in this book: Freire’s critique of the “banking model” of education. This is the pedagogy of the oppressor: the teacher is the authority who “deposits” information into the passive student. “This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students)” (71).

The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them (75).

In this chapter of the book, Freire still coyly relates this observation to classroom dynamics, but it applies equally to the “monologue, slogans, and communiqués” (65) of the ersatz revolutionary,8 and the political system of the nation.9

The antidote to this annulment of creativity is “critical consciousness” [conscientização], in which the student learns “to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions,” and takes “action against the oppressive elements of reality” (35). The crux of this process is that the student ceases to be an object to be acted upon, and remakes themselves as Subject.10 Critical consciousness is stimulated by the banking model’s antithesis: problem-posing.

A problem-posing education is a dialogical education, where all parties learn through interaction with each other. The “teacher-student” enters dialogue with “students-teachers” and their cooperative perception of a “cognizable object” renders to them a collective interpretation of it. Oppressive relations are presented to the students-teachers as limiting situations. Rather than perceiving reality as static and eternal, they see transitory limitations that demand overcoming. This perception results in action to transform the world and transcend the limiting situation (49, 79–80).

Freire tips his hand in the fourth and final chapter: he has been speaking about the process of revolution all along. The “teacher” becomes the “revolutionary leader” and the “students” become the oppressed masses and ultimately the revolutionary cadre.

There is some precedent for this structure in the Marxist literature: Capital begins with the singular commodity and traces its relationships methodically until the frame of view is the entire world system of capitalism; Fanon opens The Wretched of the Earth from the consciousness of the oppressed Algerian and unfolds his narrative to encompass the world system of imperialism. But in Freire’s hands, this feels less like a logical progression and more like a sleight-of-hand.

Marx and Christ: Quarrelsome Bedfellows

Freire’s first and strongest influence was his mother’s Catholicism, an influence visible from the first page of the first chapter in his distinctive usage of “vocation.”11 But unlike the dramatis personae of the Catholic tradition, the Almighty is apparently absent from this work. Freire had a very tendentious relationship with the church, whose dissonance between word and action gave him “grave concerns” according to his wife Nita:

For example, he observed, since his childhood, how so many priests ate well and gained weight, yet the poor remained poor and hungry, only to hear the priests say to them, “Don’t worry, God is with you, and your reward is great in heaven.” For Paulo, many priests, with their belly full, did not have authentic compassion and empathy for the poor, and were not consistent with what they said and what they did.12

This may provide some insight into why Hegel became so central to Freire’s thought; this book is undeniably Hegelian from cover to cover, and while he draws upon many themes from Hegel’s work, this struggle bears a lot of resemblance to Hegel’s criticism of Christian charity:

The ethical precept orders: ‘Help the poor.’ Yet, the actual help would consist in freeing them from their poverty, but when there is no more poverty, there are no more poor people, and no more duty to help them. And if, for the sake of charity, we let these poor people continue to be poor, then, by letting poverty continue to exist, the duty [to actually help the poor, by freeing them from their poverty] is not being … fulfilled.13

“It was not the peasants,” he recalls, “who said to me: ‘Paulo, have you read Marx?’ No! They didn’t even read the newspaper. It was their reality that brought me back to Marx. And so I went to Marx.”14 The humanism of Hegel and the materialism of Marx had a profound impact on Freire’s thought, giving him the intellectual tools to make an impact in the lives of the poor here and now, rather than the hereafter. He diagnoses two common pathologies present in radical organizing: idle talk without action (verbalism), and action without reflection (activism). Only by integrating reflection and action do you achieve praxis. This can be interpreted as a straightforward description of dialectical materialism.1516

Armed with the weapon of Marxist criticism, Freire envisioned a Christianity that was militant in fulfilling its calling to help the poor. This brought him into the orbit of Gustavo Gutiérrez, at whose behest Freire developed an analysis of church forms for Liberation Theology.17 The Catholic Church of Brazil was “traditionalist,” and “still intensely colonialist.” Freire saw the Church stepping into the role of vanguard party, the priesthood as its revolutionary leaders: “this utopian, prophetic, and hope-filled movement rejects do-goodism and palliative reforms in order to commit itself to the dominated social classes and to radical social change.”18

An even more obvious sign that Freire was drawing inspiration from revolutionaries are the actual revolutionaries in his citations: Lenin (126, 138, 182), Mao (54, 93–94, 136), Castro (128, 166), and especially Che Guevara (89, 165–166, 169–171) for whom Nita says he “had an incredible love and admiration.”19

He very consciously sought to fuse Marxism with Christianity describing himself as “Christ’s comrade.”20 The immediate problem with this is Christ’s absolute rejection of violence for liberation:

You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’. But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also … You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Matt. 5:38-43 NRSV)

The Christian approach to dehumanization and oppression is, in the last analysis, to suffer and wait for death. Freire could not accept this. “I cannot permit myself to be a mere spectator. On the contrary, I must demand my place in the process of change.”21

“The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons,” Marx observed, “material force must be overthrown by material force.”22 Lenin concurred that liberation was “impossible” without “violent revolution”;23 “a revolution is not a dinner party,” writes Mao, “[it] is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”24 This was no mere preference, but hard-won experience. “Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of [violence] of the armed people against the bourgeois?” Engels asks. “Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?”25

While Freire saw the evident truth of Marxist theory, he could not bring himself to contradict the Son of God, maintaining a distinctly Christian perspective on the use of violence. Nita says,

According to Paulo, the use of violence was rarely necessary. Paulo profoundly changed much through non-violent means, particularly through critical-ethical-political education. Instead of weapons and wars, he fostered the notion of dialogue and love.26

Caught in a dilemma, he resorted to creative reinterpretation. “Never in history,” he declares, “has violence been initiated by the oppressed.” How could this be so?

How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? … There would be no oppressed had there been no prior situation of violence to establish their subjugation… Consciously or unconsciously, the act of rebellion by the oppressed (an act which is always, or nearly always, as violent as the initial violence of the oppressors) can initiate love (55–56).

This begins by expressing a very similar sentiment as Engels attributed to the Chartists, that “the oppressed have the right to use the same means against their oppressors as the latter use against them”;27 and many revolutionaries have expressed the necessity for love in a revolution,282930 but to transfigure the process of revolution itself to an act of love is a stretch. Love is a uniting force, and a socialist revolution is premised on a politico-moral de-specification,31 a bright dividing line between us and them. It is totally counterproductive to seek unity with your oppressor during revolution, they must be separated from you completely.32

As with poverty, so too with revolution: Christian Socialism twists itself into knots over the pragmatic acts necessary for liberating the oppressed. Rather than spark a revolutionary flame in Christianity, it imprisons the revolutionary in self-doubt. Original Sin has been crossed out and replaced with Dehumanization, but to a materialist eye this all reads a bit too much like theodicy.33 And so, taken in its totality, Freire’s use of dialectics falls short of Marx’s materialism, landing more in the vein of Hegel’s idealist dialectic but absent the monist commitment of either a sort of utopian syncretism.34

This unholy admixture did not escape the notice of the Vatican. “Impatience and a desire for results has led certain Christians, despairing of every other method, to turn to what they call ‘marxist analysis’,” writes Cardinal Ratzinger, some years before ascending to the Papacy. He saw clearly the critical flaw in the dualism of Liberation Theology:

…the thought of Marx is such a global vision of reality that all data received [from] observation and analysis are brought together in a philosophical and ideological structure … no separation of the parts of this epistemologically unique complex is possible. If one tries to take only one part, say, the analysis, one ends up having to accept the entire ideology… the ultimate and decisive criterion for truth can only be a criterion which is itself theological.35

But Marx’s opposing critique of religion was altogether more perceptive: “Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again.” He saw in religion not pure error, but a “mystical shell” containing truth of the human experience:

To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up the state of affairs which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of tears, the halo of which is religion. Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower… The immediate task of philosophy, which is at the service of history, once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked, is to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms. Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.36

While the fideism of Christianity entrenches it in a losing battle against the encroachment of knowledge, defending ever-diminishing territory, the totalizing character of Marx’s materialist method is able to seek truth fearlessly from all directions.

The compromises Freire made to Marxist theory in order to fuse it with Christianity ended up for naught, both in theory and in practice. “It is true that education is not the ultimate lever for social transformation,” he conceded, reflecting on his work late in life, “but without it transformation cannot occur.”37 It’s difficult not to see this as a self-demotion, considering the pride of place given pedagogy in this book.

He has much more useful things to say regarding what not to do.

The Conduct of a Revolutionary

Historically, many, if not most, revolutionary leaders come from the oppressor classes, and so Freire spends several passages exploring the subjective experience of this class and its pitfalls.

The first is recognizing the situation of oppression and your place in it. An oppressor confronted by what they are has a tendency to retreat into subjectivism; they substitute objective reality by choosing to “see it differently.” This all-too-familiar process of rationalization “ceases to be concrete and becomes a myth created in defense of the class of the perceiver” (52). When this process is carried out on a world-scale, the individual rationalization becomes mythicization (139). “Neither objectivism nor subjectivism, nor yet psychologism is propounded here, but rather subjectivity and objectivity in constant dialectical relationship” (50).

Another form of rationalization is to see the oppressed as childlike, and adopt the position of savior. This paternalistic attitude is also all-too-familiar, and Freire rejects its presence in a revolutionary movement (54). “It is only the oppressed,” he insists, “who by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors” (56). But good intentions are not enough. Oppressors turned revolutionaries bring with them “the marks of their origin: their prejudices … which includes a lack of confidence in the people’s ability to think” (60).

Neither does Freire believe in the inherent goodness of the oppressed: they also bear the marks of their oppression in the form of a “fear of freedom”, a sense of “fatalism”, and a negative “self-deprecation” (36, 61–64). This leads to the interesting observation that historical conditions produce two kinds of revolutionary movements, or two moments within one movement:

…the movement by the revolutionary leaders to the people is either horizontal so that leaders and people form one body in contradiction to the oppressor or it is triangular, with the revolutionary leaders occupying the vertex of the triangle in contradiction to the oppressors and to the oppressed as well (165).

A three-way contradiction naturally occurs when the oppressed have not yet developed a critical consciousness, and this is okay so long as the revolutionaries begin their work by resolving this.38 But since they see themselves as the voice of the people, there is a temptation to dismiss this problem and consequently a danger of going out on a limb. This is why Freire emphasizes the importance of critical consciousness-raising so much: a revolution can only succeed when there is unity between the revolutionaries and the people. To press onward to revolution regardless results in a coup d’état instead, a situation where the provisional government lacks legitimacy.39

A Complicated Legacy

Pedagogy of the Oppressed is widely considered a foundational text of critical pedagogy, and is the third-most cited work of social science.40 Influential though it may be, needless to say neither the socialist revolution in Brazil nor the obsolescence of the banking model of education have been forthcoming. Perhaps that is too much to ask of a book written in exile, but there are certainly some weaknesses we can identify within.

Freire’s philosophical language is highly abstract, and idiosyncratic. Even when you know the intellectual origins of his ideas, it can be challenging to parse. Then there are cases where he should have been more circumspect deploying phrases from the Frankfurt School such as Fromm’s “biophily” and “necrophily” feels rather inapposite to the material in which they’re used.

The wholesale embrace of Mao’s Cultural Revolution a position not even the Communist Party of China holds today has not withstood the test of time. Together with hints at Heidegger’s philosophy of dasein,41 this introduces a very voluntarist theme that has no opposing force of objective conditions. In his eulogy for the Second International, Lenin argued for the necessity of both objective and subjective conditions of revolution. Only when “objective changes are accompanied by a subjective change” can revolution occur.42 The errors of Mao, Heidegger, and by extension Freire, place too much emphasis on the subject as if the objective conditions can be altered via force of will. To Freire’s credit, he does address the opposing errors of subjectivity and objectivity (50), which makes it even more curious that his embrace of cultural revolution apparently ignores the material basis of culture.

Freire sharply delineates human and animal, a tendency common to both his Christian and Hegelian roots. Hegel considered the performance of labor the exclusive domain of humanity; a view which Marx rightly corrected by drawing our attention to such animals as the beaver, the spider, and the bee. “What separates the worst builder from the best bee,” Marx suggests, “is that before the builder creates a structure in wax, he creates it in his head.”43 But this notion that animals lack any sort of interiority is plainly false; to take Marx’s example of the bee, they have been observed engaging in play activity.44 Even more striking is the case of Herring overfishing off the coast of Norway: by targeting the elder fish due to age regulation, the fishing industry appears to have interfered with the knowledge transfer to the younger generations, such that the latter populations have forgotten their ideal spawning grounds.45

A much more serious problem is the oppressor-oppressed dialectic. Some naïvely describe Freire’s work as “class analysis”46 but missing from this text is any concrete analysis of class whatsoever. Freire does quote Brazilian peasants here and there as a primary source, but no analysis of Brazil’s history or the agrarian class relations of the latifundia are to be found here.

This vagueness produces two undesirable consequences: (i) this lends itself to expansive self-insertions in the role of oppressed,47 in potentially anti-modernist (e.g. anarchist) ways. (ii) The binary conception of class struggle predominates. The Divide and Rule section of Chapter 4 does provide some minimal acknowledgement of inter-class conflicts between the oppressed: “As the oppressor minority subordinates and dominates the majority, it must divide it and keep it divided in order to remain in power” (141). But he never goes further to analyze how classes may objectively conflict with one another; in Freire’s account, this division is imposed entirely from without. This is worth highlighting because this deficiency is endemic in the Marxist literature; not even Marx and Engels themselves have consistently avoided it.48

Freire’s utopianism does not succeed in overcoming Plekhanov’s criticism that

The utopian in working out his “ideal” always starts, as we know, from some abstract notion for example, the notion of human nature or from some abstract principle for example, the principle of such and such rights of personality, or the principle of “individuality”, etc., etc. Once such a principle has been adopted, it is not difficult, starting from it, to define with the most perfect exactness and to the last detail what ought to be (naturally, we do not know at what time and in what circumstances)49

Joshua Clover made the same point even more succinctly: “The subjunctive is a lovely mood, but it is not the mood of historical materialism.”50

On the positive side of the balance sheet, Freire’s depiction of revolution as process and not an event is very welcome:

The newness of the revolution is generated within the old, oppressive society; the taking of power constitutes only a decisive moment of the continuing revolutionary process. In a dynamic, rather than static, view of revolution, there is no absolute “before” or “after,” with the taking of power as the dividing line (137).

Somehow, the Christian socialist utopian avoided the error of messianism committed by many atheist Marxists!

Conclusion

Just as there is value for Marxists in reading and understanding Hegel’s thought, there is value in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It is a necessary corrective against the “false generosity” of the petit-bourgeois revolutionary. It’s also a strong dose of humanism in an age where a narrowly-economistic Marxism prevails in the west. If you take nothing else from this, take Freire’s uncompromising stance against imperialism of the global south.

Despite its short length, hopefully this review has impressed on the reader the philosophical depth of its contents; this is not a book for the junior Marxist beginning their study of theory. Rather, this is for the well-read Marxist who has a strong grasp of Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Mao (etc), and is determined to start organizing. Do not preach to the oppressed, Freire says to us: commune with them in a spirit of humility and service.

References

Carr, Edward Hallett. The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923, Vol. 3. MacMillan & Co. Ltd (1953).

Clover, Joshua. Riot. Strike. Riot. Verso (2016).

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. “Instruction on Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation’.” The Holy See (1984). vatican.va

Corey, David. “Paulo Freire’s Oppressive Pedagogy.” National Affairs, no. 54 (2023). 36–52. nationalaffairs.com

Featherstone, Liza. “Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed at Fifty.” JSTOR Daily (blog). 30 September, 2020. jstor.org

Ferraro, Alceu Ravanello. “Education, class, gender and the vote in imperial Brazil: the Saraiva Law - 1881.” Educar em Revista (2013). 181–206. scielo.br

Ferraro, Alceu Ravanello, and Michele de Leão. “The Saraiva Law (1881): On the arguments invoked by liberals to exclude illiterates from the right to vote.” Educação Unisinos 16, no. 3 (2012). 241. proquest.com

Freire, Paulo. The Politics of Education: Culture Power and Liberation, trans. Donald Macedo. Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc. (1985).

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Robert R. Barr. The Continuum Publishing Company (1994).

Freire, Paulo. Última entrevista (Last interview). PUC São Paulo, São Paulo (1997). youtube.com

Freire, Paulo. Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach, trans. Donald Macedo, Dale Koike, Alexandre Oliveira. Westview Press (2005).

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th anniversary ed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. Bloomsbury Academic (2017).

Galpayage Dona, H.S., Solvi, C., Kowalewski, A. et. al., “Do bumble bees play?” in Animal Behavior, Vol. 194 (2022). 239–251. sciencedirect.com

Green, Elliot. What are the most-cited publications in the social sciences (according to Google Scholar)? LSE Impact Blog (2016). blogs.lse.ac.uk

Guevara, Che. The Che Guevara Reader. Ocean Press (1997).

Hegel, G.W.F. Introduction to The Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch. Hackett (1988). archive.org

Hunt, Richard N. The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels: Marxism and Totalitarian Democracy, 1818–1850, vol. I. University of Pittsburgh Press (1974).

Khaled, Leila. My People Shall Live, ed. George Hajjar. Hodder and Stoughton (1973).

Kirylo, James D. Paulo Freire: The Man from Recife. Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education. Volume 385. Peter Lang New York (2011).

Kollontai, Alexandra. “Make Way for Winged Eros!” In Young Guard No. 3. C. (1923). 111–124. redsails.org

Lenin, Vladimir I. Collected Works. Progress Publishers (1964).

Lewis, John. Introduction to A Textbook of Marxist Philosophy, ed. Mikhail Shirokov. The Camelot Press Ltd (1941).

Losurdo, Domenico. Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns, trans. Marella and Jon Morris. Duke University Press (2004).

Losurdo, Domenico. War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century, trans. Gregory Elliott. Verso Books (2015).

Maddray, Gray. “Paulo Freire and Political Education.” National Political Education Committee, Democratic Socialists of America. 1 March 2023. dsausa.org

Mao, Zedong. Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung. Foreign Languages Press (2021).

Maritain, Jacques. The Rights of Man and Natural Law, trans. Doris C. Anson. Charles Scribner’s Sons (1943).

Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich. Marx & Engels Collected Works. Lawrence & Wishart (2010).

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, trans. Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press (2024).

McLaren, P., and Jandrić, P. “Paulo Freire and liberation theology: The Christian consciousness of critical pedagogy”. Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Pädagogik, 94(2). chapman.edu

Plekhanov, G.V. In Defense of Materialism: The Development of the Monist View of History. Laika Press (2022). marxists.org

Sayers, Sean. Marxism and Human Nature. Routledge (1998).

Schümann, Reiner. Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principle to Anarchy, trans. Christine-Marie Gros. Indiana University Press (1987).

Slotte, A., Salthaug, A., Vatnehol, S., et. al. “Herring spawned poleward following fishery-induced collective memory loss.” Nature (2025). ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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  1. Ferraro, 2013. ↩︎

  2. “…suddenly, illiteracy, which was the status of over 80% of the Brazilian population according to the 1872 census, began to mean blindness, ignorance, dependence, incapacity and even dangerousness. Indeed, it became a stigma, invoked to disqualify and keep the large illiterate mass from voting.” Ferraro, 2012. ↩︎

  3. For a more general history of the restriction of suffrage to the wealthy, see Losurdo, Domenico. Democracy Or Bonapartism: Two Centuries of War on Democracy, trans. David Broder. Verso Books (2024), particularly Chapter 1, “Property, Culture and Political Rights in John Stuart Mill.” ↩︎

  4. Featherstone, “Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed at Fifty” jstor.org ↩︎

  5. Sayers, Marxism and Human Nature, p. 89. ↩︎

  6. “No matter that the oppressor eat well, be well regarded, or sleep well. It would be impossible to dehumanize without being dehumanized so deep are the social roots of the [vocation]. I am not, I do not be, unless you are, unless you be. Above all, I am not if I forbid you to be.” Freire, Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 89. ↩︎

  7. Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)”, MECW vol. 29, p. 263. marxists.org ↩︎

  8. “Trotsky, the newly appointed People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, describing his attitude as one of ‘active internationalism’, announced his functions in an epigram recorded in his autobiography: ‘I will issue a few revolutionary proclamations to the peoples of the world and then shut up shop.’” Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923, vol. 3, p. 16. ↩︎

  9. “In a democracy the people choose a leader whom they trust. Then the chosen man says, ‘Now shut your mouths and obey me. The people and the parties are no longer free to interfere in the leader’s business.’” Max Weber quoted in Weber, Marianne, Max Weber: A Biography, p. 653 ↩︎

  10. “Functionally, oppression is domesticating. To no longer be prey to its force, one must emerge from it and turn upon it. This can be done only by means of the praxis: reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it.” (51) ↩︎

  11. An intellectual forefather of Freire’s writes: “whether it has remained Christian or become secularized, this idea of the historic vocation of mankind is of Christian origin and derives from Christian inspiration” Maritain, The Rights of Man and Natural Law, p. 34 ↩︎

  12. Kirylo, Paulo Freire: The Man from Recife, p. 278. ↩︎

  13. Losurdo, Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns, p. 227. ↩︎

  14. Freire, Última entrevista (Last interview), youtube.com ↩︎

  15. “Dialectical materialism creates systems out of reflection on the facts, verifies them by action on the facts, and corrects and amplifies them by the changes brought about by that very action.” Lewis, Introduction to A Textbook of Marxist Philosophy, p. 24. ↩︎

  16. “The dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge places practice in the primary position, holding that human knowledge can in no way be separated from practice and repudiating all the erroneous theories which deny the importance of practice or separate knowledge from practice.” Mao, “On Practice (1937)”, Selected Works, vol. I, p. 297 redsails.org ↩︎

  17. Kirylo, p. 278. ↩︎

  18. Freire, The Politics of Education, p. 137. ↩︎

  19. Kirylo, p. 286. ↩︎

  20. “The more I read Marx, the more I found a certain, fundamental basis for remaining Christ’s comrade. So, my reading of Marx and extended understanding of Marx never suggested to me that I should stop finding Christ on the corners of the slums … I stayed with Marx in his worldliness, looking for Christ in his transcendence.” Freire, Última entrevista (Last interview) ↩︎

  21. Freire, The Politics of Education, p. 129. ↩︎

  22. Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (1844)”, MECW vol. 3, p. 182. marxists.org ↩︎

  23. Lenin, “The State and Revolution (1917)”, Collected Works, vol. 25, p. 393. marxists.org ↩︎

  24. Mao, “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan (1927)”, Selected Works, vol. I, p. 28. marxists.org ↩︎

  25. Engels, “On Authority (1873)”, MECW vol. 6, p. 425. marxists.org ↩︎

  26. Kirylo, p. 278. ↩︎

  27. Engels, “The Festival of Nations in London (1845)”, MECW vol. 6, p. 7. marxists.org ↩︎

  28. “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” Guevara, The Che Guevara Reader, p. 211 marxists.org ↩︎

  29. “These warm emotions empathy, responsiveness, compassion are all facets of love… Love is an emotion that unites, and therefore it has the power to organize society.” Kollontai, “Make Way for Winged Eros!”, In Young Guard (1923) redsails.org ↩︎

  30. “It is not enough to hate and believe in the past to make a revolution. Hatred and belief in the past are sufficient prods for the rebellion phase. We must love and be future-oriented if we wish to carry out the revolution.” Ghassan Kanafani quoted in Khaled, My People Shall Live, p. 6. ↩︎

  31. “total conflicts presuppose a ‘de-specification’ of the enemy. They involve the exclusion or expulsion of particular ethnic, social or political groups from the valued community, the properly civilized group, even the human race… Starting leastwise from the French Revolution and the universalism characteristic of it, revolutionaries mostly practised de-specification of the enemy on a politico-moral basis. Morality was the sole foundation of a society worthy of the name, asserted Robespierre, who criminalized all other political orders accordingly” Losurdo, War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century, p. 57. ↩︎

  32. “It is good if we are attacked by the enemy, since it proves that we have drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves. It is still better if the enemy attacks us wildly and paints us as utterly black and without a single virtue; it demonstrates that we have not only drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves but achieved a great deal in our work.” Mao, “To be Attacked by the Enemy is Not a Bad Thing but a Good Thing (1939)”, Selected Works, vol. VI, p. 215 marxists.org ↩︎

  33. If this sounds far-fetched to you, note that Hegel explicitly described his philosophy of history in such terms: “…our approach is a theodicy, a justification of the ways of God.” Hegel, Introduction to The Philosophy of History, p. 18. ↩︎

  34. “Paulo… was a materialist and a Catholic but he did not have an ideological belief in materialism and this helped to open the door to a form of utopianism, one which often bore the brunt of derision from some of his fellow philosophers” McLaren, “Paulo Freire and liberation theology: The Christian consciousness of critical pedagogy” chapman.edu ↩︎

  35. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Instruction on Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation’” vatican.va ↩︎

  36. Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (1844)”, MECW vol. 3, p. 176. marxists.org ↩︎

  37. Freire, Teachers as Cultural Workers, p. 69. ↩︎

  38. “Some contradictions are characterized by open antagonism, others are not. In accordance with the concrete development of things, some contradictions which were originally non-antagonistic develop into antagonistic ones, while others which were originally antagonistic develop into non-antagonistic ones.” Mao, “On Contradiction (1937)”, Selected Works Vol. I, p. 344. redsails.org ↩︎

  39. In The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, Richard N. Hunt argues pursuasively against the notion that Marxism is in any form an inheritor of the minority revolutionism of Babeuf and Blanqui, instead they were unambiguous in their words and actions that a majority coalition of the masses were necessary for a successful revolution. ↩︎

  40. Green, “What are the most-cited publications in the social sciences (according to Google Scholar)?”, blogs.lse.ac.uk ↩︎

  41. “In Being and Time, the will is rooted phenomenally in care, and therefore in Dasein’s existential openness. The voluntary and the involuntary, then, are opposable as the authentic is to the inauthentic.” Schümann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principle to Anarchy, p. 245. ↩︎

  42. Lenin, “The Collapse of the Second International (1915)”, Collected Works, vol. 21, pp. 213–214. marxists.org ↩︎

  43. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 154. ↩︎

  44. Galpayage Dona, “Do bumble bees play?”, Animal Behavior ↩︎

  45. Slotte, “Herring spawned poleward following fishery-induced collective memory loss”, Nature ↩︎

  46. Maddray, “Paulo Freire and Political Education”, National Political Education Committee, DSA. education.dsausa.org ↩︎

  47. An amusing counter-example of this is David Corey’s negative review of the book; one supposes that he interprets himself as the “oppressor” in this case because he is a professor of political science, and “teacher” is the solitary concrete example of an oppressor given. (Corey, “Paulo Freire’s Oppressive Pedagogy”, National Affairs, nationalaffairs.com↩︎

  48. For a deeper exploration on this theme, see: Losurdo, Domenico. Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History, trans. Gregory Elliot. Palgrave Macmillan (2016). ↩︎

  49. Plekhanov, In Defense of Materialism: The Development of the Monist View of History, pp. 258–259. ↩︎

  50. Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot., p. 4. ↩︎


Last modified on 2025-08-15