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Our essays reflect only their author's point of view. We ask only that they respect our Principles.← Back to all essays | Author's essays Debate culture is bourgeois and should be abolished
by Charhapiti
Published: 2025-12-7 (last update: 2025-12-08)
5-15 minutes
In my experiences of online and offline political discourse, one of the great successes I've observed was a motion raised by Comrade:LocalEldritchComrade on the futility and unproductivity of debate towards cultivating Marxist political education. In our spaces we held the rule against debates, and therefore were able to remove a variety of unpleasant and unhealthy dynamics that would otherwise have festered and created a white-male-cis-liberal dominated space. Not everyone wants to engage with our scientific socialist outlook, but by filtering out the unwilling we focus on only the ones who are truly interested. It may seem either impossible or evil to ban debates, because it may seem like it amounts to banning opposing opinions, but it's not and let me explain how we see it. We would love for more comrades to consider joining us in our approach, thereby creating healthier learning spaces for Marxism and Juche.
Paulo Freire criticized traditional education as a “banking” system, where knowledge is treated as a commodity deposited by a knowledgeable teacher into empty student receptacles. Debate culture is the embodiment of this "banking" concept of education, and of sectarianism. Debates do nothing for revolutionary education, and are also metaphysical and idealist approaches to community education. They are diametrically opposite to dialectical engagement in education. Therefore, Communists should not rely on debates to raise class consciousness, and we need to be careful to avoid the "banking" model of education when we are trying to spread awareness about revolutionary ideas which require "critical consciousness" and "intervention" into the world to become "transformers of that world". Neglect in this area can deactivate or deviate the radical consciousness of otherwise interested revolutionaries of all ages.
The similarities between debate and the "banking" model of education is not just a coincidence. Debate culture is a widespread mode of engagement because most of us are products of the "banking" model of education.
In debate culture, the debater acts as the authority who owns and dispenses 'correct' knowledge, definitions, and logic. Ideas are treated as fixed assets to be defended, not as living tools for understanding. The other person is positioned as a vessel to be corrected, filled with the debater’s superior knowledge, or proven empty. The objective is to make the opponent conform to the debater’s framework, definitions, and conclusions. Debate requires rigidly defending a pre-formed thesis. Exploration and subjectivity is off limits or devalued. Debate privileges universal definitions and abstract logical consistency. Debate prioritizes winning within existing rules over transforming understanding or addressing real-world problems. Debate is inherently conservative, favoring established definitions and canonical authorities over novel, context-specific, or revolutionary ideas. In debate, contradictions in an opponent’s argument are treated as fatal “logical fallacies” that end discussion. The energy of debate is adversarial, aiming for the absolute defeat of an opponent. While some people may find debates fun or entertaining, other people may find debates extremely draining, infuriating or demotivational. Debate culture should be relegated to rap battles, which are at least more fun and creative.
Dialectics seeks to develop understanding through the clash and reconciliation of ideas (synthesis). In dialectics, contradictions are the fertile ground for deeper investigation and the driver of progress, and incomplete thoughts are doors to be opened for further development rather than slammed shut and aborted. Dialectics insists that ideas can only be understood within their historical and material context: why an idea emerges is as important as its logical form. The energy of dialectics is collaborative, aiming for a transformed, more adequate understanding shared by all participants.
Debate cultivates would-be revolutionaries with a fixed (and therefore fatalistic) mindset, which is the opposite of what the revolution needs:
When challenged to make changes, these fixed-mindset people say something like: "People who can make that change are different, or special, smarter or stronger than me," or "I'm not like that so I can't do it." This becomes an excuse to not change behavior or try new or difficult things. When fixed-minded socialists experience a challenge or failure, they become discouraged and want to give up instead of trying to figure out how to learn from the experience. - Revolutionary Education (3)
Debate is theory-as-sport; dialectics is theory-as-tool-for-praxis. Within revolutionary spaces, debate serves as entertainment and intrigue, but doesn't contribute as much knowledge as a decent theoretical work. While Marxists and Jucheists deal with daily opposition from political opponents and questioners, the most productive response and one that liberates the people, is one that attempts to awaken the people; debate simply leads to splits and dissolved relationships.
For his or her part, the sectarian of whatever persuasion, blinded by irrationality, does not (or cannot) perceive the dynamic of reality — or else misinterprets it. Should this person think dialectically, it is with a "domesticated dialectic." The rightist sectarian (whom I have previously termed a born sectarian) wants to slow down the historical process, to "domesticate" time and thus to domesticate men and women. The leftist-turned-sectarian goes totally astray when he or she attempts to interpret reality and history dialectically, and falls into essentially fatalistic positions. ... [Sectarians are] closing themselves into "circles of certainty" from which they cannot escape, these individuals "make" their own truth. It is not the truth of men and women who struggle to build the future, running the risks involved in this very construction. Nor is it the truth of men and women who fight side by side and learn together how to build this future — which is not something given to be received by people, but is rather something to be created by them. Both types of sectarian, treating history in an equally proprietary fashion, end up without the people — which is another way of being against them. - Paulo Freire (2)
Pedagogy is important because even the most appropriate, relevant and correct content can be engaged or taught in a way that turns people off, shuts them down or otherwise disengages them. Part of learning how to be a better organizer entails learning how to be a better educator. ... There is a caricature of Marxism we might encounter in the movement and among left academics: the idea that Marxist revolution is predicated on the "enlightened" revolutionary teaching the "ignorant" masses. Nowhere do Marx or Engels even hint at this condescending notion, and neither do the revolutionaries following in their wake. [Rather...] we should always presume the competence of the working class. ... Presuming competence also puts the responsibility on the educator, the revolutionary, the organizer and the organization, insofar as it means that if the student is not "getting it," then the problem lies with us. ... A Marxist approach to education requires looking beyond concepts such as the "innate" inability of the student and instead to a complex of factors, some of which are beyond and some of which are within our dominion. Our own teaching is one determining factor that is within our control. ... However, a revolutionary education is not satisfied with simply replacing the content to be passively consumed. Rather, learners must have an opportunity to critically reflect on their own thought process in relation to the new ideas. For Freire, this is the path through which the passive objects of colonial indoctrination begin to become active subjects of decoloniality. - Revolutionary Education (3)
The true Marxist educators are not academics. They are revolutionaries in engaged in the true practice. Amilcar Cabral was one such revolutionary. Basil Davidson refers to Cabral as "a supreme educator in the widest sense of the word," (3) and Freire says:
In Cabral, I learned a great many things...[B]ut I learned one thing that is a necessity for the progressive educator and for the revolutionary educator. I make a distinction between the two: For me, a progressive educator is one who works within the bourgeois classed society such as ours, and whose dream goes beyond just making schools better, which needs to be done. And goes beyond because what [they] dream of is the radical transformation of a bourgeois classed society into a socialist society. For me this is a progressive educator. Whereas a revolutionary educator, in my view, is one who already finds [themselves] situated at a much more advanced level both socially and historically within a society in process. - Revolutionary Education (3)
Moving from a debate model (banking, adversarial, static) to a dialectical/dialogic model (problem-posing, collaborative, process-oriented) facilitates collective knowledge creation, and ensures that theory is never divorced from practice, i.e. preventing "the idea that Marxist revolution is predicated on the 'enlightened' revolutionary teaching the 'ignorant' masses". As Freire says, "Subjectivity and objectivity thus join in a dialectical unity producing knowledge in solidarity with action, and vice versa." (2) We must look towards what Marx himself pointed out in his own work, the dialectic of inquiry and presentation:
Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connection. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori [or self-evident] construction. - Marx (1)
In other words, Marx found that he moved dialectically between inquiry or research mode which involved ample exploration, and presentation mode which distilled all the inquiry into a simple easily digestible thoughts. Revolutionaries, rather than debating, should basically use these two modes of engagement with their interlocutors.
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