Will Morrisey Reviews

Paulo Freire: Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Myra Bergman Ramos translation. New York: The Seabury Press, 1974 (1968).

Published in 1968, the annus mirabilis of ‘New Left’ politics, Pedagogy of the Oppressed appealed to the ideological trends of the 1960s university campuses in the West, trends conveniently but not misleadingly labeled as neo-Marxist. Neo-Marxists took the class-conflict theme of Marx and added several other ‘dialectical’ motifs: ‘Caucasians’ vs. ‘peoples of color’; men vs. women; adults vs. ‘youth’; ‘First World’ vs. ‘Third World’; colonialism vs. liberation. On American campuses, these several grievances paled beside the movement to end the war in Vietnam, but once President Nixon ended the draft and the anti-war movement dried up, these more enduring themes came into greater prominence. Meanwhile, in subsequent decades Freire’s pedagogy became the basis for what’s now called ‘action civics,’ whereby teachers encourage elementary and high school students to take up social and political ’causes’ as part of (and indeed central to) their civic education.

As a founding member of Brazil’s democratic-socialist Workers Party, Paulo Freire’s Marxism drew most heavily from the neo-Marxisms of his time and place. To the ‘Third World’ Marxism of Franz Fanon’s 1961 tract, The Wretched of the Earth —which argued that persons living in the impoverished Southern Hemisphere constituted a new, international proletariat, a body of oppressed persons who could be readied to overthrow the bourgeois capitalist imperialists of the North—and the Left-Christian Liberation Theology formulated by Marxisante demi-Christians in Latin America, Fanon added some Hegelian and Deweyan themes. So much so, in fact, that to this day more orthodox Marxists condemn him as a petty-bourgeois charlatan. But it is precisely his soft-focus eclecticism, partially concealing a much harder core, that still converts many of his readers first into disciples, then to advocates and practitioners of his “critical pedagogy.”

“Critical” is indeed the word that signals Marxism in the contemporary world. Freire begins by lauding conscienização or “critical consciousness.” In Marxism, proletarians take their first step toward liberating themselves from bourgeois domination by developing “class consciousness,” seeing themselves not so much as (for example) Brazilians, Christians, fathers and mothers, or any other social group but as workers—for Marx himself and the ‘Old Left’ animated by his ‘scientific socialism,’ factory workers more than agricultural workers, whom he deemed too backward to achieve the level of consciousness necessary to drive a revolution. Gathering around him the broader constituency of the New Left, Freire begins not with Marx but with Hegel, specifically, Hegel’s dialectical confrontation of master and slave. The slave wins his freedom by risking his life in resisting the master, “making it possible for men to enter the historical process as responsible subjects,” persons who know and act instead of ‘objects’ who are known and acted upon by their oppressors. Once liberation has been achieved, “subjectivity and objectivity…join in a dialectical unity” or synthesis “producing knowledge in solidarity with action, and vice versa.” This book, Freire writes, is “for radicals” who intend to remake education as part of “the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed,” which is “to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well.”

You see, we do this for the benefit of the oppressors as much as for the oppressed, as little as the oppressors may not now appreciate our efforts on their behalf. Even oppressors who wish to aid the oppressed, to reform regimes in ways that aim at ending poverty (for example) “cannot find in [their] power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves.” The apparently strong are actually weak. Fortunately, in Freire’s judgment, the weak are actually, or at least potentially strong. “Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.” Here is an excellent example of the Liberation-Theology line, which turns a Gospel prophecy—the last shall be first in the Kingdom of God, by the grace of God—into a very this-worldly prediction.

Freire doesn’t invoke the grace or the power of God in arguing for this claim. When oppressors attempt to aid the oppressed, they exercise only “false generosity” and “false charity.” Loveless and dehumanized themselves, they have none of the moral or intellectual resources to do what they profess to want to do.

Why would the oppressed behave any differently than the oppressors, were they to overthrow the oppressors? En route to revising the Marxist-Leninist stance, Freire admits it: they won’t. “During the initial phase of the struggle,” the oppressed “tend themselves to become oppressors” not because human beings of all classes love domination but because oppression has been “their model of humanity,” the only kind of behavior they have seen in the ruling classes. They want to end their oppression, but they fear freedom and the “authentic existence” that beckons them. Must the Marxist-Leninist ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ always be so, well, dictatorial?

That is why the oppressed need a new kind of education, “a pedagogy which must be forged with, not for, the oppressed,” a pedagogy which “makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed,” an “instrument for their critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization,” as in Hegel’s master-slave dichotomy and in Marx’s antinomy of bourgeois and proletarian. As in Hegel, “the oppressor is solidary with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with…when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualist gestures and risks an act of love.” Evidently recognizing that love does not figure prominently in the writings of Marx, Freire hastens to write, “What Marx criticized and scientifically destroyed was not subjectivity, but subjectivism and psychologism,” the latter being too individualistic for him. That doesn’t quite get us to acts of love, but Freire has his own strategy in mind.

The Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukàcs had wanted members of the proletarian vanguard to “explain to the masses their own action.” Freire demurs. Such a monologue would mostly serve the egoism of the explainers. So, don’t explain; talk with the oppressed about their actions. That goes for Christian Leftists, too. Although some of them hold up Jesus as the standard of human conduct, Freire contends that “the oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption.” This will happen in two stages: first, “the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through praxis commit themselves to its transformation”; this then “becomes a pedagogy of all men”—not only the oppressed—in “the process of permanent liberation.” This is the educational equivalent of Trotsky’s ‘permanent revolution.’ “In both stages, it is always through action in depth that the culture of domination is culturally confronted.” And what is “action in depth”? “This appears to be the fundamental aspect of Mao’s Cultural Revolution,” then ongoing, which, according to Freire, consists of consciousness-raising and “expulsion of the old order’s myths.” The violence of Mao’s Cultural Revolution rates no mention, perhaps because Freire offers an unusual definition of violence.

Violence arises in a situation characterized by a version of the master-slave dialectic, the situation of exploitation of one person or group by another. Or, somewhat more subtly, it hinders the “pursuit of self-affirmation of self-affirmation as a responsible person” by the exploited. Whether direct or indirect, violence “interferes with man’s ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human.” So far, Hegel. But unlike Hegel, a critic of the French Revolution, Freire supposes that “never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed,” only by “tyrants,” “those who cannot love because they only love themselves.” Where this leaves Mao, in whose thought love is no more conspicuous than it is in Marx, one can only guess, but Freire happily admits that “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.” After all, the oppressed only “desire to pursue the right to be human,” a right (it must be said, though assuredly not by Freire) that Mao and his colleagues pursued in a highly desultory manner. At any rate, Freire assures his reader that “the restraints imposed by the former oppressed on their oppressors, so the latter cannot resume their former position, do not constitute oppression,” as such “necessary restraints”—conveniently undefined— “cannot be compared” with acts of the “oppressive regime.” The problem here is not so much the principle—to overthrow a tyranny may well, although not necessarily, require rough treatment of the tyrant and his henchmen—but with Freire’s selection of political role models—here Mao, elsewhere Castro. That is, Freire numbers among the social democrats who find it difficult to identify any enemies to democracy on the Left.

He does see part of this problem, however, a problem that was staring Leftists in the face when he wrote his book and continues to stare at them, no longer so obviously, to this day. “The moment the new regime hardens into a dominating ‘bureaucracy’ the humanist dimension of the struggle is lost and it is no longer possible to speak of liberation.” Example then at hand: the Soviet Union. Mao’s ‘solution,’ the Cultural Revolution, proved savage in the short run, ineffective in the long run. Freire hopes to find a better solution to the dilemma of inegalitarian egalitarianism in education.

Christian love flows from trust in a loving God. Freirian love flows from trust in the people. The educator should enter into communion with the people, and that religious language is no accident. In a remarkable turn of phrase, Freire writes, “Conversion to the people requires a profound rebirth.” That is, the people take the place of Christ as the teacher seeks to be ‘born again.’

‘Born again’ socialism rules the agent of secularized ‘grace’ as much as that agent rules the converted. (In this it differs noticeably from Christianity.) It turns out that the teacher will be doing a lot of converting himself: “Critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes action, must be carried out with the oppressed at whatever the stage of their struggle for liberation.” “Critical” here means Marxist critique of the oppressors: “The oppressed must see examples of the vulnerability of the oppressor so that a contrary conviction”—notice again the religious language—can “begin to grow within them.” “Liberating” means the freeing of minds from the assumption that there is nothing the oppressed can do, a liberation achieved by that critique, which identifies chinks in the enemy armor. 

The reason Freire hopes that this form of pedagogy will not lead to terrorist excesses before, during or after the revolution, and why it can counter bureaucratic sclerosis in the decades of rule by the formerly oppressed, is precisely the technique of “dialogue.” Previous generations of Marxists had understood propaganda as monologic. The dictatorship of the proletariat emerged from a one-way form of ideological propagation whereby the vanguard of the proletariat, those most fully ‘conscious’ of the dialectical laws of history and of the current point to which those laws had brought world history, would tell the proles what they needed to think and what they needed to do. This too closely resembled one of the prime techniques of capitalism: advertising. But “conviction cannot be packaged and sold” like a commercial product; it cannot be brought about with a passive, capitalistic “banking concept of education.” Marxist-Leninist socialism stays too close to some of the elements of the capitalism from which it emerged. As a result, the would-be liberators of the oppressed become oppressors themselves, albeit in the name of ‘the people.’ Many socialists of earlier generations had understood some of that, recognizing that socialism bore the “birth marks” of capitalism, which socialists confidently expected to see their societies outgrow. The problem was that the birth marks had in fact been birth defects, perpetuating class inequalities in a new form. Dialogue between activists and the poor, each ‘converting’ the other, is Freire’s answer to that dilemma. “The revolutionary’s role is to liberate, and be liberated, by the people—not to win them over.”

And so, teaching today consists of a subject (the teacher) instructing an object (the student). This violates the Hegelian and Marxist insistence that the subject-object dichotomy distorts the dialectic, whether it is dialectic in logic or dialectic in practice, in society and politics. Hegel and Marx want to resolve the contradictions that cause the dialectic by ‘synthesizing’ the contradictory elements into a new ‘whole.’ Merchants clashed with feudal lords, defeating them but appropriating some of their ways of ruling, most especially their military prowess; the proletariat clashes with the bourgeoisie and in its future triumph will appropriate some of bourgeois techniques of ruling (e.g., accounting). Freire hopes that by introducing dialogue between activists and the oppressed he can make the dialectical clash humane, first of all by the “rehumanization” of the oppressed, taking their intentions and desires seriously—as it were, working with those intentions and desires, not simply prating against them. Today, “education is suffering from narration sickness,” which not only makes teachers into preachers handing down the gospel of Marx but too often falls into lecturing on such general principles or abstractions as ‘commodification’ and all the various ‘isms’ one is told to venerate or to abominate, depending upon whose ‘class interests’ they allegedly serve. “Words are emptied of their concreteness,” thereby losing their “transforming power” as the listeners’ eyes glaze over. Students “memorize mechanically” as if they were not human beings but mere ‘containers,’ objects “like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic.” Too much of that, and the oppressed will not only risk his life in fighting to make his oppressor recognize his humanity but turn into an oppressor himself. Oddly but perhaps tellingly, although Freire emphasizes dialogue and concrete language, his book is monologuish and full of abstract language and argumentation.

“Apart from inquiry, apart from praxis, men cannot be fully human.” Inquiry, yes, and understandably so, given the rational capacity of human nature. “Praxis” is the question. Socratic irony suggests that the discoveries resulting from human thought readily be transferred practice. Accordingly, Socrates’ ‘praxis’ is the philosophic life itself, engaging in dialectics of word, of logos, with interlocutors, many of them fellow citizens of Athens. And even that eventually got him into difficulties. The Marxian Freire denies that intellectual discoveries cannot fully be transferred into practice, although he does prudently recognize that they cannot be so transferred immediately. His notion of permanent revolution, which implies a continual and practically transformative dialogue amongst the people while they rule themselves, will (he hopes) avoid both tyrannic oppression and bureaucratic sclerosis.

Thus, ‘critique’ will be constant, along with a sort of ‘creation.’ “Knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention”; with “critical consciousness,” students can become “transformers of the world.” Indeed, since “men are fulfilled only to the extent that they create their world…with their transforming labor,” those accustomed to hard labor can, with “unity and organization,” “change their weakness into a transforming force with which they can re-create the world and make it more human,” despite their oppressors’ attempt to keep them divided and conquered. Since, as Hegel, Marx, and indeed their fellow historicist, John Dewey, all claim, “reality is really a process,” education cannot educate unless it reconceives itself as a process that lines up with the larger process of ‘History,’ that grand dialectical synthesizer of contradictions in theory and in practice, that comprehensive and constantly ‘laboring’ force by which human beings can make themselves into world-creators and rulers.

What are these student critics learning to criticize (or as one says, ‘critiquing’) more acutely with their heightened consciousness (or as one says, ‘wokeness’)? Oppressors rest confidently, even complacently, on their ability to “fit” the oppressed into “the world the oppressors have created,” largely by inducing them never to question its hierarchies. They churn out myths, as for example “the myth that rebellion is a sin against God,” or “the myth that the oppressive order is a ‘free society,'” or (horror of horrors) the insidious ways in which they “inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success.” Supposedly ‘populist’ leaders (he may be thinking of Peron) are really “amphibians” who go back and forth, pretending to defend the people but keeping close ties with their capitalist oppressors. Oppressors may reform the world they have created, appease grievances, but they never willingly transform it, revolutionize it, fundamentally change the regime itself. Because it refuses to acknowledge that reality is an ever-changing process, oppression is “necrophiliac,” death-loving, because it takes a “mechanistic, static, spatialized view of consciousness,” ignoring the flowing, dialectical, temporal character of the consciousness of those it rules. This causes suffering because it cuts people off from their real nature as ‘historical’ beings. “Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men upon their world in order to transform it.” Only with those who act with a “consciousness intent upon the world” will liberate themselves from the oppressors. And the “essence of consciousness” itself is intentionality; that is, as Marx urged, the point isn’t to understand the world, as previous philosophers had tried to do, but to change it. This puts considerable premium not on knowledge as understanding reality—even if reality is reconceived as ever-changing, ‘Heraclitean’ not ‘Platonic’—but on the will of the student, now determined to fuse theory and practice in order to revolutionize what he sees in front of him. No wonder that orthodox Marxists dislike Freire: He doesn’t believe that ‘History’ will end; as with Trotsky, the revolution will be permanent, although unlike Trotsky, it need not be driven by state-sponsored terrorism.

Rather than violent force, revolutionary education, “through dialogue,” causes the categories of “teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher [to] cease to exist.” “A new term emerges: teacher-student and student-teachers,” persons “jointly responsible for a process in which all will grow”—that last word invoking Dewey’s central theme. Knowledge is no longer (mis)understood as property. This can occur when “the teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration and re-considers his earlier considerations as the students express their own.” That is, logos replaces doxa. This amounts to a “problem-posing education,” again as with Dewey, instead of a “banking education.” That is, instead of depositing knowledge in the vault of each student’s mind, the teacher will identify a problem the students have, then work with them to solve it. This now is called ‘activist pedagogy.’ 

Whether it will really work out this way, and even whether Freire expects it to work out this way, remain open questions for now. His underlying point here is ontological. Without consciousness, he claims, there would be no ‘world’ at all because there would be no one to say, ‘This is a world.’ “The world which brings consciousness into existence becomes the world of that consciousness,” the world of historicism, itself a form of human godlikeness without the God of the Bible. There is no ‘being’ in the Platonic or Biblical sense, only ‘becoming’—the happy becoming of the optimist, a becoming that is “revolutionary,” “prophetic,” and “hopeful” because guided by “men as historical beings” who know themselves as such and (evidently) know which way to move the course of events in a good direction, away from oppression and toward liberation. “Critical thinking” is “historical thinking.” Such thinking, including self-reflection, distinguishes man from animals, which “live in an overwhelming present,” unaware of taking risks, incapable of making commitments of transforming themselves for better or for worse. Human consciousness implies “a dialectical relationship between the determination of limits and [men’s] own freedom.”

It is true, Freire concedes, that the word is “the essence of dialogue.” However, “there is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis.” If word “is deprived of its dimension of action,” if it does not advance us in time in some practical way, then “reflection suffers automatically as well,” descending into mere wordplay or verbalism, “an empty word, one which cannot denounce the world, for denunciation is impossible without a commitment to transform.” This comports with the elevated status of the will in Freire’s pedagogy. In Platonic terms, words that denounce belong more to the realm of thumos or spiritedness, not so much to the realm of logos or reason. He does, nonetheless, understand that action without reflection is mere activism, which “mak[es] dialogue impossible” by coercing human beings, treating them as objects. “Only men are praxis,” capable of combining knowledge and creation to produce material goods, social institutions, ideas and concepts.

“Dialogue is the encounter between men, mediated by the world, in order to name the world,” since “no one can say a true word alone…nor can he say it for another.” In today’s jargon, this means that truth is ‘socially constructed,’ a point that might well be contested. Be that as it may, in order for social dialogue in Freire’s sense to proceed, the oppressed must reclaim the right to speak. They must also learn to speak in the right way, as polemical argument isn’t true dialogue but an attempt to impose truth on another—true enough, although belied by the earlier praise of denunciation. In this latter, unpolemical sense, dialogue requires “profound love for the world and for men”—the replacement of God in the Christian command with “world” well noted—and revolution founded upon such dialogue is “an act of love.”  “The naming of the world, which is an act of creation and re-creation, is not possible if it is not infused with love,” Freire writes, now paraphrasing Che Guevara. 

Moving away from this quasi-theological language, Freire faithfully adopts the historicist concept of various historical epochs, each constituted by complex dialectical interactions among ideas, hopes, values, and material conditions. In each epoch, “generative themes” develop, defended by some and attacked by others. Those whose self-interest a given theme serves will defend it. “I consider the fundamental theme of our epoch to be domination—which implies its opposite, the theme of liberation, as the objective to be achieved by those dominated by “the method of conscientizaçāo,” whereby those who investigate “the people’s thinking” and the people…act as co-investigators.” Freire thus attempt to democratize Marx’s ‘science.’ It aims at changing people’s minds voluntarily, by which Freire hopes to preclude dictatorship by the oppressed after they overthrow their oppressors.

By contrast, “the investigator who, in the name of scientific objectivity, transforms the organic into something inorganic, what is becoming into what is, life into death, is a man who fears change,” seeing in it “not a sign of life, but a sign of death and decay,” thereby “betray[ing] his own character as a killer of life.” This presupposes, all too optimistically, that change cannot be deadly. 

At any rate, the change Freire has in mind enables men to “emerge from their submersion and acquire the ability to intervene in reality as it is unveiled.” His “problem-posing method” begins with a task to be done, not a subject to be known; in this pedagogy, ‘knowledge’ comes out of the dialogue-praxis undertaken to solve the “problem,” itself identified in dialogue with the oppressed, as defined by—whom? Freire never gets around to specifying that, but it is well worth specifying, inasmuch as claims of oppression, of victimhood, abound, easily asserted by manipulative minds.

Or perhaps we do know who defines ‘the oppressed.’ It is the investigator-revolutionaries who determine “the area in which they will work,” acquiring “a preliminary acquaintance with the area through secondary sources.” They then will observe, listen, discuss, all in order to discover “the structure of [the people’s] thought.” The next step will be to discuss these findings among themselves along with a small number of volunteers from the area, identifying “contradictions” between what the people want and what they experience.

This begins to sound suspiciously like a somewhat more sophisticated form of standard Marxist practice. The next step will be to develop oral, written, and/or pictorial “codifications” of recognizable situations familiar to the people,” supposedly threading the needle between “overly explicit” (i.e., propagandistic) and “overly enigmatic” representations of those situations. These “codifications” (for example, a picture of a drunken worker weaving his way home) must relate objectively to “the makeup of the whole” social system in which the people find themselves while relating only to their “felt needs.” It is noteworthy that the revolutionaries take charge of selecting among the many possible “codifications.” [1] Once the participants review the materials, they will be ready to engage in “correcting” their habitual opinions and perceptions.” After “several days” of such “dialogue, the people can suggest themes,” having gotten the hang of what’s going on. The result? “Individuals who were submerged in reality, merely feeling their needs, emerge from reality and perceive the causes of their needs.” Quite obviously, this also enables the revolutionaries to ‘get into the heads’ of the people, both in terms of learning what they actually feel and in terms of influencing those feelings. That drunken worker now sobers up, seeing that his urge to drink as caused by his capitalist oppressor. Men thus “come to feel like masters of their thinking.” But are they?

In fact, “the leaders do bear responsibility for coordination—and at times, direction—but leaders who deny praxis”—which Freire defines by citing Lenin’s demand for fusing theory and action—to “the oppressed thereby invalidate their own praxis.” That is, Freire revises Lenin’s famous notion of the proletarian vanguard—primarily in terms of how it’s presented. Once the vanguard-leader-teachers nudge them in the direction of Marxian analysis and action, the oppressed will have “a fundamental role”—a fundamental role—thanks to their “increasingly critical awareness”—Marxist class consciousness—of “their role as Subjects of the transformation.” Although Freire claims that they will thereby avoid the temptation to oppress, once in power, his citation of Castro as an example of such a leader gives the game away. While describing the revolutionary leaders as engaging in a “humble, loving, and courageous encounter with the people,” he, very much like Castro, Lenin, Mao, and his other heroes, insists that “this dialogical encounter cannot take place between antagonists.” In Freire’s Liberation-Theology Christianity, loving one’s enemies evaporates in the heat of class conflict, despite his earlier protestations that in liberating themselves the oppressed act not only for their own good but for that of their oppressors. [2]

Freire instead calls for a “scientific, revolutionary humanism,” one that stresses “intersubjectivity” and “interaction” with the oppressed, inasmuch as “revolutionary leaders cannot think without the people, nor for the people, but only with the people.” If they don’t, “they become devitalized” and will end as the people’s new oppressors. Education and revolutionary activity must proceed simultaneously, beginning with the pedagogy but quickly moving to a synthesis, lest a stratified “counter-revolutionary bureaucracy”—product of a “counter-revolution…carried out by revolutionaries who become reactionary”—re-subordinate the people. What Freire calls “cultural invasion,” a means by which oppressors “impose their own view of the world” while “assuming the role of a helping friend,” can as readily be undertaken by ex-revolutionary bureaucrats as by reformist elements within the bourgeoisie. Castro and his comrades, however, shine forth as “an eminently dialogical leadership group,” gradually drawing the people away from the oppressor by “objectify[ing] him” while “never enter[ing] into contradiction with the people,” never getting too far ahead their state of consciousness. Freire evidently never listened to any of Fidel’s eight-hour monologues, delivered once securely in power. Or maybe he calculates that his readers won’t know about them.

Dialogue bespeaks Martin Buber’s ‘I-Thou’ relationship, Freire hastens to assure us. Still, in cultivating that relationship, revolutionaries “must not be naive” about the people. To be sure, one may have confidence in their “potentialities.” But “always mistrust the ambiguity of oppressed men, mistrust the oppressor ‘housed‘ in the latter” in the form of the myths the oppressors have insinuated into their minds. The people’s “natural fear of freedom may lead them to denounce the revolutionary leaders instead!” as no less an authority than Che Guevara warned. Communion with the people brings cooperation from the people, the fusion of revolutionaries with the people.

With the new regime of socialism established, bureaucracy threatens. At the same time, to be a regime there must be some sort of organization. What will that be? Freire holds out the possibility that it can grow out of the unity of the people with the revolutionary teachers. The dialogue that preceded the revolution will continue after it. The new regime’s authoritative institutions will provide space for the “intersubjective” relationship of leaders and the people. “Organization is…a highly educational process in which leaders and people together experience true authority and freedom, which they then seek to establish in society by transforming the reality which mediates them.” You know—it will all be like Cuba under Fidel.

Notes

1. Another example: the teacher-leader-revolutionaries will endorse a particular demand of the people—for example, a salary increase—while at the same time “pos[ing] as a problem a real, concrete historical situation of which the salary demand is one dimension,” namely that oppressive capitalist system that denies them the salary they want.
2. For a discussion if Liberation Theology, see Will Morrisey: A Political Approach to Pacifism (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1996), pp. 288-306.