The year of the barricades that heralded an opportunity for change

And so, the process of neoliberal globalisation took hold. Before too long, a global super-rich appeared. Strangely, they had more in common with each other than with their own cultures. They were full of ideas about social status, and bought lots of really expensive stuff to show us all how very important they were. Consumerism was born! Not only did this create enormous social divisions, but it polluted the Earth with throwaway consumption!

The well-kept secret, though, is that people are not naturally selfish – this is another Big Lie. We have an empathy circuit in our brains, and to be more fully human, we need to be connected in community and society; we have a natural propensity to be compassionate and caring, and to cooperate with each other rather than compete! The trouble is that sometimes people don’t tell the truth and the story they tell leads to a different reality, a reality that is quite the opposite to the one we need in order to thrive!

The year of the barricades that heralded an opportunity for change

1968 was a critical juncture in world history. Social unrest sought change, and popular protest reverberated around the world. It was a year of rebellion in the form of race riots, student demonstrations, civil rights marches and anti-Vietnam protests, which also witnessed the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. It was a time of the emergence of new ideas which prompted new social movements. Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks both became available in English in the early 1970s, profoundly influencing people’s understanding of power and oppression. … Inspired by new thinking, grassroots movements erupted during the 1970s and 1980s, generating theory from lived experience – second-wave feminism, anti-racism, greens, LGBTQ rights, ‘dis’ability rights … – and street protests abounded.

Ideas and action are a symbiotic unity, a unity of praxis. Neither is much use without the other!

The way we make sense of the world has a direct impact on our being, how we behave towards each other and towards the planet. Ideas and action as a symbiotic unity, straddling the divide between theory and practice, constitute a unity of praxis. This is the foundation of Paulo Freire’s education for critical consciousness. Freire developed his critical praxis by listening to the stories people told about their lived reality in the favelas. He heard the consequences of structural discrimination in their stories, how power reaches into personal lives to privilege some and punish others. Practice for social justice begins by listening from the heart to people’s everyday

stories. Theory in action emerges from the stories we tell simply by questioning life’s unacceptable contradictions. This was the foundation of second-wave feminism and Black feminism: women meeting in local groups sharing their lived experience, identifying the contradictions we live by. Participatory practice is a bottom-up process, starting in people’s lives in community, questioning everyday experience by contextualising it in its bigger political context, recognising that surface-level symptoms of oppression are connected to structures of discrimination that are woven through society at every level to such an extent that they are accepted as normal and natural.

Freire’s vision was the transformation of humanity to a state of mutual and cooperative participatory democracy through a process of liberating education, developing critical consciousness which leads to collective action for social change.

A personal story of Freire in action …

As a grassroots community worker in the 1980s, I listened to Freire on the streets of Manchester. It brought his ideas to life for me. I learnt what his concepts looked like in reality, expressed in people’s everyday stories. And, it opened my mind to the way that injustice is woven into the structures of society. I began to see that the answers to understanding political power and social change are all around us, in the stories people tell about their lives!

This is the beginning of critical consciousness, the questioning of life’s everyday contradictions starts people seeing things differently and thinking more critically. Collective action for change grows from these small beginnings into global movements, all informed by understanding how power acts in the interests of the privileged.

In the 1980s, as activists, we took on international issues of freedom. I travelled out to Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, with the twinning agreement from Manchester City Council and witnessed the transformative power of Freirean approaches to literacy and health. The Sandinista Government, following their revolution, invited Paulo Freire to advise them on transforming the terrible levels of illiteracy and poor health their people were suffering. We connected local projects with Manchester community projects in alliances of mutual support.

In Manchester, we took to the streets to voice our dissent: “Free Nelson Mandela”, “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out”. Christy Moore’s ‘Hey! Ronnie Reagan’ was sung with great gusto as we proudly marched in solidarity: “Hey Ronnie Reagan,