ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PAULO FREIRE

dialogues with Antonio Gramsci about common sense, immersion and intransitivity

Abstract

This article aims to carry out a theoretical approach between Paulo Freire and Antônio Gramsci, focusing on the concepts of common sense, immersion and intransitivity. And, in this way, to establish a set of contact points that
offer the reader theoretical tools to analyze capitalist society and the processes of domination/oppression. The main question of the article is: how do the dominators dominate? Freire and Gramsci, in the author’s view, together
offer a powerful negative critique of capitalist society and the various forms of oppression to which the oppressed are subjected. The forms of immersion of consciences in a certain type of common sense establish a debilitating state of intransitivity of conscience, transforming the oppressed into dual beings, uncritical, adherent to the oppressor. In this way, beings that are accommodated and adapted, duly conforming to the functioning of capitalist society. And, in this sense, “banking” education plays an important role, contributing to the promotion and maintenance of class domination. In the centennial of Paulo Freire, this article also demonstrates one of the main characteristics of Freirian and Gramscian reflections: the critical dialogue with different philosophical traditions, enabling the construction of a dense theoretical contribution to the process of liberation of the oppressed.