The conditions for building popular hegemony: Paulo Freire’s ‘inédito viável’ and the experience of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST)

ABSTRACT

Paulo Freire’s concept of ‘inédito viável’ or untested feasibility, refers to the exploration of possibilities to transcend limiting situations and transform realities. In this paper, we examine how this idea is related to the counter-hegemonic pedagogical proposal of popular education by the Florestan Fernandes National School (ENFF), an organisation founded by the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil. We argue that the ENFF is not just a set of techniques and methodologies but a formative process that runs through the concrete reality of the subjects involved in the struggle for societal change. We conclude by proposing that the ‘inédito viável’ that constitutes the ENFF gains meaning from a broad, collective, and dynamic vision of concrete utopia involving a clear and mobilising orientation towards the future, a strong sense of agency, reflection, experimentation, and praxis.

KEYWORDS:

• Paulo Freire
• education
• utopia
• inédito viável
• Landless Workers’ Movement (MST)
• Florestan Fernandes National School (ENFF)

Disclosure statement

One of the authors declares that they are affiliated with the Florestan Fernandes National School (ENFF), the organisation that is the subject of the research presented in this paper. However, both authors state that the ENFF did not have any role in the conception, conduct, or interpretation of the results of this study.

Notes

1 Freire (2005, 102) wrote ‘When the themes are concealed by the limit-situations and thus are not clearly perceived, the corresponding tasks—people’s responses in the form of historical action—can be neither authentically nor critically fulfilled. In this situation, humans are unable to transcend the limit-situations to discover that beyond these situations—and in contradiction to them—lies an untested feasibility’.

2 In Freire’s works one can find numerous ‘word-concepts’; words which he created or resignified. ‘Paulo Freire was a man who sowed and cultivated words. Not just any words, but words ‘pregnant with the world,’ as he used to say. Words that have the gift of creating worlds, of pronouncing new realities’ (Streck, Redin, and Zitkoski 2010, 27).

3 The adjective Sisyphean denotes a task which can never be completed. See at: https://www.worldhistory.org/sisyphus/

4 ‘[T]he social function is met when the rural property complies simultaneously with, according to the criteria and standards prescribed by law, the following requirements: i – rational and adequate use; ii – adequate use of available natural resources and preservation of the environment; iii – compliance with the provisions that regulate labour relations; iv – exploitation that favours the well-being of the owners and labourers’ (Brasil 2013, 105).

5 Agribusiness in Brazil is characterized by the dominance of big transnational firms who supply inputs and set commodity prices, with strong state support and protection through measures such as negligible taxation, lax enforcement of laws, judicial favoritism, and inflated compensations for land expropriations, as described by Stédile (2009) and Carter (2010).

6 La Via Campesina is a global movement striving to establish rural economies that prioritize respect for peasants and land, as well as Food Sovereignty and fair trade. See at: https://viacampesina.org/en/.

7 MST’s mística, which draws on Christian mysticism to affirm unity with transcendent reality, is seen as an ontological resource integral to the movement and used to bring about changes in minds, spirits, and hearts.