Working from a Freirean pedagogical perspective, Ewan Cameron assesses the state of political education in some of the major organizations of the contemporary UK Left.
Momentum banners at a 2016 protest in central London (AFP/Getty Images)
Introduction
In the late 1940s a group of Nigerian students in London, many of whom were working adults with much experience in revolutionary organizing, asked the British Communist Party why they had not been consulted in the publication of a recent party pamphlet on Nigerian democracy. The students claimed that this was an example of ‘imperialist methods’ in political education.1
Such an accusation highlighted the ways in which the sites of knowledge production are key battlegrounds for representation and legitimation as well as the way that institutions can stifle the social production of revolutionary knowledge. In what ways do current institutions of the UK left and progressive milieu maintain this division of intellectual labor? This article will explore the links between political education and institutional structure, with specific reference to the organizations of Momentum and Extinction Rebellion.
Key to the theoretical thrust here is the work of Paulo Freire, in particular his concept of praxis: “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it.”2 For Freire, praxis is a dialectical motion, with theory and action as inseparable parts of a whole. Nevertheless, praxis comes in a wide spectrum of possible forms and the aim of this article is to examine the ways in which organizations on the UK Left have deployed it, as well as how they might improve on it by deploying a more dialectical form. The scope of this article will at times appear to cover topics more traditionally thought of as ‘strategy’ or ‘action’ rather than education, but this is part of the overall argument that we cannot cover one without the other. The other key argument is that political education must take into account the institutional norms of the organizations within which it occurs, and in cases where those norms are restrictive, a struggle to reform them must be pursued.
The social production of knowledge
In order to develop our understanding of political education, we need to understand what we mean when we talk about knowledge, which is, presumably, the substance of education.
Mainstream ideas of knowledge understand it somewhat mechanically. In this sense, knowledge is seen as a sort of discrete particle that may be accumulated, distributed, traded, and even measured. This view chimes with similar atomistic theories in science (the conservation of energy) and economics (money as a stable value), and our understandings of these social phenomena reinforce each other by being built on the same ontological scaffolding.3
With knowledge conceived of as a discrete thing, education becomes about transfer. Freire critically described this as the ‘banking’ approach, as teachers are expected to deposit knowledge into student’s heads as though they were depositing money into a bank. Ideas of ‘human capital,’ of education as an investment in the self, have become the basis of many mainstream educational and economic theories.4
Of course, there are many cases in which our learning really does require an expert teacher to impart tangible items of knowledge to us. Technical skills, such as nursing or fixing a car, knowing which plants are safe to eat, or how to start a fire are generally fairly stable concepts that can generate value for those who possess them. More abstract knowledge too, can be passed from one person to another. We all probably remember friends, teachers, comrades, or even books in our life that gave us a startling insight that forever changed how we saw the world from then on.
However, the structures of capitalist society mean that when combined with a hierarchical division of labour, knowledge in the atomistic sense becomes something akin to a commodity, with resulting scarcity built in, even for non-technical learning.5 Fetishized in this way, educational policy becomes a question of distribution subject to the whims of the market and, just like other commodities, access to it can be restricted. In the realm of political education, this leads to viewing potential comrades as objects to mechanically operate on, taking out the bad and putting in the correct knowledge.
While it’s correct that legitimation of the current status quo often depends on the formation of a hegemonic ‘common sense’ curated by media and educational systems, hegemonic ideas are perhaps better seen as an exploited consciousness rather than a wholly ‘false’ one. Stuart Hall, writing at the dawn of Thatcherism in the late 1970s, noted that reactionary thought was not simply grafted from pure imagination, but while perhaps misled, it nevertheless was ‘operating on genuine contradiction,’ thus implying that any counter-hegemonic program of education needed to engage with the material lives of people and not just abstractions.6 As Wayne Au has demonstrated though, Freire’s view of consciousness and the world is a dialectical materialist one, whereby consciousness and the objective world are not oppositional, but exist within the same field of action.7
In the UK, with membership of political parties overwhelmingly made up of the middle classes, the task for any Left movement is to reconnect with the organic intellectuals of the working class, something that the recent Corbyn administration of Labour, significantly, failed to do.8 However, this material engagement must be more than a bribe. Thus, while engaging materially with people’s needs is vital, it cannot become another form of paternalism or charity. Rather, it must trust in the people to become more than receivers of services, but the makers of history themselves.9
In opposition to the mechanical, discrete view of knowledge is a relational view. For Freire, this means that education is built on “acts of cognition, not transferrals of information,” and through dialogue rather than hierarchy.2 Thus Freirian pedagogy stands in metaphysical opposition to the mechanical theories of human capital, and instead speaks to a more pragmatic account of being and knowledge.10
There are readings of Freire that lend themselves towards a postmodern relativism, to the point where any revolutionary strategy becomes lost in a soup of different ‘truths’ and lived experiences. Yet Freire is clear that an objective world of oppressors and oppressed exists. The commitment to the dialogical character of knowledge production is unequivocally connected to its power to grasp the totality of concrete oppressions more clearly and to take action socially, not individually, for change.
The parable of the three blind men and the elephant is one way to explain the relational concept of knowledge. Each man touches the elephant at different points: at the tail, the trunk, the tusks, and thus each one believes that he is touching a different kind of animal. To say that each of the men has a different experience of the elephant is not to say that the elephant does not exist. Instead it teaches us that our knowledge of objective reality can be better grasped collectively.11 By treating knowledge as a social product, rather than a discrete object, we can better grasp reality beyond mere abstractions.12
Institutional praxis
Nevertheless, it is not enough that our social movements and political organizations simply agree to seek out knowledge from the grassroots, whether it concerns political strategy or lived experiences, when the structural logic of their institutional forms prevents this. Political Ideas, even ones developed from a broad social base, still need a praxis rooted in an understanding of the institutions that can courier them. It is not enough to have theory and action, but a logical connection between them and the wider network of power in society.
The green movement organization Extinction Rebellion (XR) certainly had a theory of change when it burst onto the environmental campaigning scene a few years ago. XR’s ‘Tell the Truth’ campaign was based on raising publicity and awareness of the incoming climate crisis through active civil disobedience such as trespassing and blocking roads and bridges. The idea was that with enough people willfully getting themselves arrested, politicians would be compelled to act. Positively, this campaign did subvert establishment hierarchies of knowledge when it came to climate change and used action as a means of education regarding the chilling truth that much of the media was refusing to report on. While many on the left sniped from the sidelines, XR’s focus on action instead of endless meetings passing motions won them a core of activists in a short time. The decentralized nature of the organization also means they have been able to adapt their political demands, at least at the local level, where activists can self-organize both education and action. On the other hand, in terms of strategy, XR may have assumed too easily that those in power were rational actors. Instead, the government was, and is, locked into networks of patronage and subordinate to systemic hierarchies that ensured they would continue as usual. Thus, XR’s praxis failed to consider the need to win institutional power to implement change.
On the other side of the coin is Momentum, a left wing faction within the Labour Party who, despite the party’s administrative surge to the right, have remained firmly within its apparatus, fighting wars of attrition at the level of councillor and MP selection and keeping left wing ideas alive. Momentum’s praxis is more attuned towards capturing the seats of power than XR, but it still, at times, suffers from the same problem of assuming that free floating truth forces change. At the most recent Labour Party conference, the Momentum aligned group Labour for a Green New Deal won a conference vote on their set of social democratic climate policies. While this was, of course, more welcome than the vote not passing, the jubilant response from Momentum, who declared that “we won big on policy today” struck many as profoundly tone-deaf, given the fact that conference motions can be freely disregarded by leadership.13 Momentum member Matt Hollinshead recently criticized the previous NCG for its ‘navel-gazing’ approach to political education, one that has failed to link educative action to a strategy for winning control of the Labour Party back for socialism.14
Nevertheless, other initiatives such as Momentum’s Future Councillors program show a clear strategic praxis that combine both the idealism of socialist possibility and the technical know-how for dealing with party apparatus when it comes to selection meetings, etc. Knowledge, then, does not effect change in and of itself. Raising awareness of an issue only takes us so far. If we are passing out leaflets in the street, assuming the passerby who reads our material agrees with us, then what? Issues such as climate change or the crushing inequality of the current economic system are hardly obscure. Making people aware of these issues but not giving them the institutional tools to collectively and politically act on them to demand something better will only create a society of cynics.
Divisions of Intellectual labour
“We have always maintained that the revolution must rely on the masses of the people, on everybody’s taking a hand, and have opposed relying merely on a few persons issuing orders. The mass line, however, is still not being thoroughly carried out in the work of some comrades; they still rely solely on a handful of people working in solitude”
-Mao Tse Tung15
In addition to the need for a theory of change within wider networks of power, political education also needs to consider the ways in which organizational structure helps or hinders praxis. To go back to the earlier point on atomistic knowledge versus dialectical knowledge, Momentum’s structures, in replicating the hierarchies of the Labour party, encourage the former at the expense of the latter. This comes from the ways in which the organization’s very structures enforce a strict division of labor that is co-constituent with a division of knowledge production.
In their landmark book, Schooling in Capitalist America, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis showed how the U.S. education system performed a dual role in reproducing the economic system; it gave students the preparatory tools to be productive members of the labor force while assigning a minority to develop skills to lead and direct the rest; simultaneously, it had something of a disciplinary effect, working to legitimize the system as a whole so as to defuse any future antagonisms between labor and capital.16 On a planetary level, institutions such as the World Bank control epistemic regimes that produce much of the discourse on education and development. The smooth running of an imperial division of labour is concomitant with a differentiated education system. Scholars in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia have noticed that IMF and World Bank-led restructuring in their countries has often gone hand in hand with a mandate that humanities-based education is reduced in favor of more vocational and entrepreneurial studies.
In Momentum, there seems to be a genuine desire from the National Coordinating Group (NCG) to involve members more in other political education initiatives and an encouragement, if not full empowerment, for local groups to self-organize. However, Momentum’s recent refounding process highlights the contradictions within the organization and the way that institutional structure can hinder transformative change. The refounding process called upon a series of member’s assemblies to deliberate over constitutional questions and put a series of proposals to an all member vote. By giving the grassroots an institutional forum, the refounding process recognized the link between empowering members and structure. At the same time the structure had some notable flaws. For example, members of the current NCG were part of the deliberation, which would have likely meant they were among the most influential voices in the process.17
The results of the refounding process did bring some positive change, however. For example term limits for the NCG and giving local groups access to member data for their locale. Term limits for elected leaders is not only about refreshing leaders, but in terms of praxis, they may help to start new institutional logics whereby organizational and strategic knowledge isn’t so tightly hoarded by incumbents so as to ensure that new generations of elected officials have the tools to continue the work of their predecessors. Access to member data gives local groups the power to organize much more effectively. On the other hand, some members of the assemblies felt that their proposals had been watered down in the intermediary steps and it was clear that some proposals, for instance, giving members the full say in which elected officials would sit on the NCG, were tampered with before being put to the members ruling out a fully elected NCG.
Whether in the Labour Party at large or Momentum, elected MPs use institutions to give themselves the privilege of a revered caste. During the Corbyn administration, the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs was among the most opaque groups on the Left, failing to communicate adequately with the base it relied on for campaigning. Christine Howard has noted this phenomenon of differential organizing, saying that “members are now treated more like foot-soldiers to be mobilized in elections rather than organizers in our own right.”18 Critics of Labour under Corbyn noted that despite the groundswell of support, the party maintained an “unwillingness to genuinely unleash the capacities of its own activists.”19
“How much easier if the people had no minds… then this clumsy business of reflection could be done away with,” were the bitterly ironic words of E.P. Thompson in his caustic denunciation of what he perceived as a mechanical dialectic of Stalinism, one that would reduce the productive ‘base’ to mere subordinates to the intellectual superstructure.20 For Thompson, the working classes were not simply a resource to be called upon to legitimize left wing power, but a vibrant intellectually creative community in and of themselves.
But divisions of intellectual labor remain baked into the very institutional structures that reinforce and are reinforced by it. There is certainly plenty of ideological paternalism within the left wing, but even if leadership genuinely desires member-led knowledge and praxis, then the institutions themselves form barriers. For instance, both the Labour left and Momentum operate within centralized hierarchies that control the information flow to local groups. This command structure means, for example, that chairs of local Momentum groups cannot even easily access a list of current members, a situation that hampers attempts at local praxis. The centralizing and opaque structures of Momentum means that skills and knowledge become ‘hoarded’ among staff within the head office with little means to either democratize this or hold them accountable.17
Towards Dialectical Praxis in Political Education
At times it feels like the standard left plan for political education is to draw up lists of speakers, whether it be for a rally, a lecture, a panel, etc.21 We’ve hopefully also been to events where the organizers made our voices part of the discussion. In the age of Zoom meetings, organizers who wish to start discussion have taken to using the ‘breakout rooms’ to split audiences into manageable chunks for discussion. But if there is no actual mechanism for the discussion to feed back into the organization, it becomes a mere ritual, an illusion of participation.
So how better to conceive of political education? One way to view praxis within political organizations is to see education as the first step towards action. Praxis in this scenario is a two-step movement; educate people, so that they might participate in an action. This ‘capacity building’ approach to political education is useful for the more technical aspects of organizing, but in terms of building power, the gap between education and action often becomes an institutional canyon.
The more dialectical way to approach praxis is thinking in terms of relationships rather than discrete homogeneous structures. In this sense, dialectics is not the chemical synthesis of prior opposites, but an understanding that “the very identity of the terms is constituted by their relation, so that the terms have no autonomous existence.”22 Just as consciousness and the world are co-constitutive of each other, so too are theory and action.
So rather than seeing “political education” as a device that supplies the ‘action’ component of political groups, the (much harder) task is to struggle for institutional forms that empower education and action to spiral tightly together so that the hard institutional boundaries between them become porous. These boundaries often manifest institutionally as a division between those who control the resources and those who are expected to be called upon only for their volunteer labor.
This article does not mean to suggest that all organizations must devolve their entire apparatus into an amorphous blob of meetings where everyone gets a turn on the microphone and we all leave with nothing getting done. Political organizations need structure and teachers. We just have to think more critically about how they operate. Rodrigo Nunes offers the metaphor of tweaking in opposition to both the arrogance of the vanguard and the rejection of leadership altogether.23 In the former, agents assume themselves to be outside the political society they command which in turn justifies divisions of labor between knowers and non-knowers within its organization. Whilst in the latter, change is assumed to be somewhat spontaneous once certain thresholds are met.
Nunes calls for revolutionary leadership to consciously embed itself within the social forms it hopes to revolutionize, a function that ‘leads to the extent that it is followed’ and is accountable to its ability to launch and succeed in successful actions. Freire is also instructive here. His ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ does not deny the role of leaders and facilitators, but he speaks of the need for teachers to be embedded in the maxim of “teacher-student with students-teachers’.
There is a very loose resemblance to both Momentum and XR in Nunes’ descriptions of the vanguard and the leadership-less party. Momentum’s leadership still assumes the role of social vanguard in and outside its party which in its institutional structures necessitate a division of intellectual labor. On the other side, XR’s strategy is to hope that bringing enough people out into the streets will force a change in government policy.
What does thinking dialectically about praxis mean in practical terms? There are perhaps a million ways in which dialectical political education could manifest, here are a few practical suggestions.
Firstly, education projects should be planned to include space for resulting action. Liberatory education necessarily leads to the desire to act. Indeed it is precisely at those points where we begin to comprehend the mechanisms of oppression that we are most motivated to act on. Following a socially produced model of knowledge, however, giving funding to educational programs for further action means that the action itself is not pre-planned, but is decided upon and evolves as part of the knowledge building process. With funding pre-allocated it prevents NGO-style application processes where grassroots action is pre-ordained and thus fails to capitalize on the knowledge and skills of its members.
Secondly, assemblies are a means to collective decision making and praxis as they facilitate dialogue towards political aims. There are many caveats to the use of assemblies and the rules that define them can make the difference between a dynamic means of collective learning and demanding, and a ritualistic consultation. Participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, for instance, helped to shift funding towards the poorest parts of the city. Yet, in many other places ‘participatory budgeting’ became a buzzword that was co-opted to function as a legitimizer for existing powers.24 As noted above, Momentum’s refounding assemblies were flawed exercises as demands from members ended up watered down by institutional fiat. Whether they are in organizations or in communities that organizations hope to learn from, the organizational rules that structure assemblies should be clear from the onset and flexible to pressure from participants. While facilitators are needed to help guide participants, they should not be from any executive branch of the hosting organization.
Thirdly, we should understand that someone’s position within an institution is not necessarily a reflection of their knowledge of political issues. MPs and elected leaders have a set of skills that help them lead, and certainly have their own specialisms, but this does mean that they are more knowledgeable on everything. Yet, within institutions, political education is virtually always conducted from the top-down. Would it really be so radical to have a member of parliament or an executive official of an organization attending an education session hosted by a member of the rank and file? Not to give an introductory speech, but to learn enthusiastically alongside other members? Such a situation would both emphasize the diverse sources of our collective knowledge while strengthening intra-group solidarity and lines of communication.
To conclude, in both XR and Momentum, and in many other political groups on the left, knowledge and education have been kept artificially separate from strategic political action. In turn, this creates a division of labor that fails to truly capitalize on the energies and knowledge of grassroots members and the wider public. Reversing this trend means thinking critically about institutions and how their structures maintain these divisions. But there is no one weird pedagogical trick to making praxis dialectical. Alongside useful initiatives such as assemblies and democratizing funding and data, perhaps what is needed is a culture of good faith in each other and trust in the ability of collective reasoning towards a better objective picture of the oppressions of capitalism. As Freire notes: “The faith in humanity is not a naive one, but one that accepts that everyone has the power to create and transform.”2
- Cited in Sherwood, M. (1999) Claudia Jones. A Life in Exile. London. Lawrence and Wishart.
- Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin.
- Mirowski, P. (1989) More Heat than Light. Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
- Becker, G. (1993) Human Capital Third Edition. Chicago. University of Chicago Press.
- Bob Jessop describes knowledge as a fictional commodity akin to land labour and money. See: https://bobjessop.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/knowledge-as-a-fictitious-commodity-insights-and-limits-of-a-polanyian-perspective/.
- Hall, S. 1979 The Great Moving Right Show. Marxism Today. http://banmarchive.org.uk/collections/mt/pdf/79_01_hall.pdf.
- Au, W. (2018) A Marxist Education. Chicago. Haymarket Books.
- Wayne, M. 2021. Roadmaps After Corbyn. New Left Review.
- Lake, K. Malcolm X Didn’t Dish Out Free Bean Pies.
- See Dewey, J. 1977. The Subject Matter of Metaphysical Inquiry. In Dewey, J. The Essential Writings. London. Harper Torchbooks.
- This is similar to Sandra Harding’s term “Strong Objectivity.”
- See Marx, K. 1857 Outline of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse) https://www.marxists.org/subject/dialectics/marx-engels/grundisse.htm.
- https://twitter.com/PeoplesMomentum/status/1442193580534091781.
- Hollinshead, M. (2022) Why Momentum is in Crisis. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2022/07/momentum-uk-labour-party-jeremy-corbyn-keir-starmer-left.
- https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch11.htm.
- Bowles, S. Gintis, S. (2011)[1976] Schooling in Capitalist America. Chicago. Haymarket Books.
- Soni, V. 2022. Lost Momentum? New Socialist. http://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/lost-momentum/
- Christine Howard, quoted in https://labourlist.org/2020/04/exclusive-forward-momentum-campaign-launches-to-refound-corbynite-group/.
- Blackburn, T. 2019 Office without Counter power. New Socialist. https://newsocialist.org.uk/office-without-counter-power/.
- Thompson, E.P. 1957. Socialist Humanism. https://www.marxists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1957/sochum.htm.
- John Walsh identifies what he calls a “pedagogical regression” at events such as The World Transformed, which prioritise panel presentations over more dialogical forms of political education. See Walsh, J. Extra-Parliamentary Counter Power. Momentum Community and Refounding Momentum. New Socialist. http://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/extra-parliamentary-counter-power-momentum-community-and-refounding-momentum/.
- Delanda M (2016) Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh, UK: University of Edinburgh Press; Campbell, S. (2019) Rendering Assemblage Dialectical. Anthropological Theory. P.1-20. An enlightening overview of thinking on dialectics and assemblage, and the difference between a restrictive “closed” dialectics and a more ‘open’ form that acknowledges a more fluid relation between elements relating to each other internally.
- Rodrigo Nunes, “Notes toward a Rethinking of the Militant,” in Communism in the 21st Century, vol. 3, ed. Shannon Brincat (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2014), 163-87.
- Peck, J., Theodore, N. (2015) Fast Policy. London. University of Minnesota Press.