Rosano / Journal

Friday, June 12, 2020

[Swimming, one learns to swim. Working, one learns to work. Practicing, one learns to practice better.]

The difference between starting to learn a language with "Hi, How are you? My name is…" and starting to practice literacy with "school, land, cultivate, product". Can the pedagogical process for learning also be improved by focusing on the student's social context and the self-empowerment of self-expression?

We might underestimate the value of repetition: what is the value of repeating at every exercise "Practice to learn, learn to practice better"?

Part of: Paulo Friere: A Importância do Ato de Ler.

[The people have a right to seek a better understanding of themselves, rather than merely responding to researchers' questions.]

[The process of alphabetization must contribute to the people's remaking of themselves, with their history in their hands.]

[To be present in history means to be conscious of the difficulties in one's process of liberation. To be merely represented in history happens when passively accepting how another recounts.]

[Alphabetization needs to be grounded in the political activation of its students. Mechanical training in linguistics will lead them to be represented in history as opposed to present within it.]

Part of: Paulo Friere: A Importância do Ato de Ler.

Thursday, June 11, 2020

[Students are not patients to be fixed. The position of 'whoever knows should teach whoever doesn't know' is authoritarian.]

[Knowledge is not something fixed and final to be transferred to those who don't have it.]

[The leverage of reading and writing comes from the words of the literate and not from the educator's experience.]

Part of: Paulo Friere: A Importância do Ato de Ler.

[Reading words is preceded by reading the world.]

[Education is political. Politics educates.]

Part of: Paulo Friere: A Importância do Ato de Ler.

Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Asking a question is usually about sharing and not about answering the question as specifically as possible.

Thursday, June 4, 2020

If you are feeling unable to follow the protocol or conform to the rhythm, acknowledge it and bring yourself to the place where you can participate most fully — be real and in the moment.

Tuesday, June 2, 2020

It's a privilege having enough space to constantly consider what someone else is going through.

Sunday, May 31, 2020

Thursday, May 28, 2020

[Multiple examples and analogies, as opposed to just one, help illuminate variability in the application of a concept.]

[Negative transfer refers to memorizing something in the wrong context; almost like functional fixedness. Positive transfer refers to the successful application of a concept to a new context.]

[People can misinterpret short-term failure as an indicator that they don't belong. Help them re-frame it as simply setbacks and nothing more, provide models of others who felt similarly in their situation.]

[Mitigate stereotype threat by emphasizing how people have multiple identities and focusing on the facets that are in-group.]

[Feeling a social connection or group belonging increases persistence on challenging tasks.]

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

[Establishing property and separating people from the land as a means of doing or self-sustainability leaves them with no choice but to freely choose to be exploited.]

[Property restricts the flight of those without it while not restricting flight for those who own it.]

[The system of property, like a maze with no exit, eventually funnels people back into the labour market to work as wage slaves.]

[The more capital is repelled by people, the more violently it tries to enclose them by extending the notion of property (genes, software, land) and refashioning people in its own image.]

[The most important outcome of struggle is often not the fulfillment of immediate demands but the creation of a community united in its opposition to oppressive forms, a collective doing.]

[Property is a noun used to describe and conceal an active separating process. To think of it as a noun is to accept the terms of domination.]

[Capital is the movement of denying movement.]

[Revolution is conceivable only if it is imagined as ordinary, that everyone can be a revolutionary.]

[There can be no recipes for revolutionary organization because it is anti-recipe.]

[Politics of events rather than politics of organization.]

[Representative democracy ensures that the masses want what the bourgeoisie thinks they should want. The masses are included in a form of articulation that excludes them. It is not a victory against capitalist rule, it is an extension of capital's domination.]

[at the very least ensure that we die of our own poison as opposed to that of others.]

[The representatives do not betray us: we betray ourselves when we elect them to speak on behalf of us.]

Part of: John Holloway: Change the world without taking power.

Monday, May 25, 2020

[Constantly expanding credit implies a weakening of market discipline. Postponing a crisis prolongs the life of inefficient capital and insubordinate workers.]

[Moving off the gold standard undermined the stability of currency. As capital tends towards crisis, credit is expanded to ward off the destruction of fictitious capital, the banks, and the financial system.]

[Money has expanded much faster than the value it represents.]

[Credit and debt is so fundamental to the financial structure of capitalism that threat or occurrence of default by a major debtor can wreak havoc on the markets. There was an urgency in putting together a package to support the peso in 1994 when it became clear that the Mexican government could default.]

Part of: John Holloway: Change the world without taking power.

[Capital is an inherently mobile form of domination: if it doesn't like the workers it subordinates, it can eject them from the premises, dissolve itself into money, and find more subordinate, more 'flexible' workers.]

[Credit, like the extending of a leash, gives both the dog and master the illusion of freedom.]

Part of: John Holloway: Change the world without taking power.

Sunday, May 24, 2020

[We can understand capitalist domination's vulnerability by understanding that capital is not external to labour.]

[We are the only contradictions to capitalism; history is about the struggle to classify and against being classified, not laws of capitalist development. There are no gods such as money, capital, production forces, or history: we are the only creators, we are the only saviours, we are the guilty.]

[In any power dynamic, the relation between dominator and dominated is mutual, not one-way: the exploiters always depend on the exploited.]

[The feudalist relations between serfs and lords bound them to each other geographically and thus socially. Neither was free to choose another to dominate or be dominated by. The transition to capitalism gave both the freedom to do so.]

[The serfs were not free to stop working for someone else because they didn't control the means pf production. The lords were not free from exploitation because the expansion of their wealth depended on subordination of labour. Both flights to freedom arrive at a new form of dependence.]

[The interdependence between capital and labour is not symmetrical: capital dissolves without labour whereas labour without capital transformation into creativity and humanity.]

[Capitalism is a society of non-correspondence, things don't fit together functionally, the law of value is inseparable from

Part of: John Holloway: Change the world without taking power.

[A positive autonomous subject is akin to a prisoner in a cell who believes they are already free: it's an attractive fiction that leads easily to other fictions.]

[Neither ants nor machines revolt. Any theory of revolution must recognize our humanity regardless of where we are on the spectrum between natural and cybernetic.]

Part of: John Holloway: Change the world without taking power.

Saturday, May 23, 2020

[Anti-power is ubiquitous and exists in our everyday experiences of friendship, love, community comradeship, cooperation – and all of the contradictions and issues that come with them.]

[Domination implies not absence of resistance but its invisibility. Oppression implies invisibility of the oppressed.]

[The only way to construct relations of dignity is through negation of what denies dignity.]

Part of: John Holloway: Change the world without taking power.

Friday, May 22, 2020

[If social relations are self-determining and not fetishized, they cannot conform to laws and are inherently void of certainty.]

[If capitalism can be understood completely through the laws of its own motion, it means that society is fetishized.]

[Certainty is the negation of revolutionary change, therefore our struggle is therefore against certainty.]

[Classes cannot be separated from their constitution: to say that they exist implies the framework which necessitates them.]

[We don't struggle as the working class: we struggle against being classified.]

[We can only be emancipated to the extent that we are not what we are classified, identified as.]

[During production, the worker produces an object as well as the value that perpetuates the command over his labour.]

[We don't need to be explicit in our negation: our existence as not-ness is the most fundamental force against identity."

Part of: John Holloway: Change the world without taking power.

Next time somebody comes to you with a feature request, try this: "Can you tell me a story about a time that you wanted to do that and what you had to do instead?" The first part of the question gives you proper context. The second lets you evaluate the loss.

How did you find these possible solutions?

Why not just keep doing things the same way?

What was happening that made you feel it wasn't working?

Thursday, May 21, 2020

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

[A rational basis for identity doesn't exist. We follow the chain of dependencies until arriving at some assumption that must be made in order for the system to hold.]

[When we question why things are the way they are, it is often answered within the framework of identity. When we except these boundaries we reinforce them.]

[We can only know about something to the extent that we have created it.]

[Marx does not see science as correct and objective knowledge but as the active movement of criticism and anti-power. Criticism tries to go beyond analysis and understand how a phenomenon is constructed.]

[We cannot stand outside of society. To say that society is sick implies that we too are sick.]

Part of: John Holloway: Change the world without taking power.

Monday, May 18, 2020

[Start with the perspective that the scream is an inevitable consequence of capitalist society and the established 'facts' of state, money, commodity, value become revealed as processes. Money becomes monetization, value valorization, commodity commodification, capital capitalization, power domination, state stateification.]

[The state reproduces capitalist social relations but through trial and error, not in a functionalist fashion.]

[By separating and categorizing certain social relations as 'political' or 'economic', the state reconstitutes itself as separate from society. By characterizing conflict as political, it distracts from questioning the legitimacy of economic ideas such as private property. It is defined and sub-defined to ensure that the proper channels of the bureaucracy will be dispatched to deal with it.]

[Capital is not tied to a specific group or place. The transition from feudalism to capitalism liberated power-over from geographic borders.]

[National states continuously fragment global social relations by asserting their sovereignty.]

[Citizenship / citizenization reproduces the mirage of democracy and the daily violence against foreigners.]

[Money appears to be established and unchangeable, but the appearance negates our struggle; monetization has no moment to relax in the comfort of guaranteed existence.]

[The existence of capital is insecure, if it fails to exploit labour then it ceases to exist, hence the ferocity of its struggle.]

[Capitalism is two-faced: it instability which fragments is what generates the appearance of stability.]

[Repetition of the exploitative process, as well as repetition of the anti-exploitative process, changes the conditions in which the struggle takes place.]

[The struggle against fetishization is not democratic, which is commonly considered to be a coming together of individuals, but rather it is a struggle of those who are all part of the movement against that which maims and perverts us.]

Part of: John Holloway: Change the world without taking power.