#14: Self-Education

Thinking about positive forms of organization and education leads us directly towards recent developments in Venezuela, which have taken place in various social and political spheres since Hugo Chávez won the presidential elections in 1998. Venezuela is maybe the most inspiring example to highlight possibilities a State nowadays has in globalized capitalism in order to make the participation of the people in decision-making processes possible or to support existing forms of self-organization throughout the society.

Sites for self-organization in Venezuela were at the beginning the “Bolivarian Circles”, kinds of neighborhood organizations in which people meet and take responsibility for different social and cultural matters. “Bolivarian Circles” differed from traditional social oriented organizations, because their aim is political and ideological self-education in order to defend and continue the “Bolivarian Process”. “Bolivarian Circles” were grassroots organizations, which had to be founded from at least seven individuals who agreed on certain agendas and working modes. One year after the Venezuelan people prevented the coup d’etat against the democratically elected president Chávez, in 2003, around 2.5 million individuals allover Venezuela organized themselves in “Bolivarian Circles”. Since then forms of organization changed, following the needs of the people and of the process of social transformation. The “Bolivarian Circles” are not anymore the main organizational form, but nowadays even more people are organized in grassroots organizations of different types.

There is no disjunction between life, work, struggle, politics or education when, in our theory and praxis, we move beyond static and fetishised notions of the world. Even if we have learned otherwise all human creativities develop mutually within the same processes. By considering work, art and education separately, as distinct segments of our lives, we create a fundamental antogonism which cheats us of both life and doing. But this interconnectedness can only be fully grasped by emancipated subjects who are ready to struggle, ready to challenge the enforced reality of day to day life.

One of the important issues in today’s world is the question on how to circumvent dominant assumption and practices of any fixed categories in a society. A possible strategy to that is that we should be creating constructive-productive spaces – spaces of collective resistance that are also meeting places for all peripheralized or/and marginalized subjectivities. In doing so, radically new and different forms of citizenship could be redefined and realized. But it is important, first of all and before any further actions are taken that we recognize what our pre-judgments and our fixed and determined viewpoints are and realize that there exist numerous standpoints and horizons. Which means that we should try and understand “a horizon that is not our own in relation to our own”. Of course, this does not mean we should agree on everything; on the contrary, “the less we agree, the more we create an area, a field of vitality in different branches of this phylum of molecular revolution, and the more we reinforce this area.” ¹

This text-dialogue is based on a conversation we [1] held with educator Fátima Freire [2]. At that moment, our background was composed by the questions proposed by the group What is to be Done? [3] and by our common ground developed in the Politics of the Impossible [4], a project that has been carried out in the last year and a half in the city of Campinas (São Paulo State, Brazil) with different groups, both organized in neighbourhood communities and those without ties with a stable ground.Fatima’s greatest contribution to our work has been the ceaseless listening devoted to each one of us and to the wider group involved in the project. What we have learned in our meetings is, above all, how to deal with the very deep dimensions of our own knowledges and non-knowledges, reflected at each instant in the knowledges and non-knowledges of the other.

When the brain learns something new it generates its own opioids. Opium and morphine do not completely cancel the perception of pain, but rather cancel its affective aspect: “I am in pain but it doesn’t affect me.” They reduce the phantasmagoric component of pain, the part that frightens. The affective component of fear is reduced only by learning to detach paralyzing anxiety from fear of real danger. By understanding that much of what we experience and feel is not an exclusive property of our individual experience, but rather something we share with many others, we can move away from egocentric suffering and confront, along with others, the social contradictions that express themselves through our bodies.
Dr. Joseph Feelgood, “Hacia una fisiologia de las luchas emancipatorias”, p. 19,  Ed. See you Later, Alligator 2006