Critical Thinking Strategies

Critical Thinking Strategies

There is no Critical Thinking that is worth it if it does not start on its own. If it does not have as its "first stop" the rigor of systematically questioning its aims and principles, its tools, its horizons and its limitations. Self-excepting critical thinking is entirely exceptable. No matter how much safe conducts it is invented, Critical Thinking that does not soak its beards, that does not have itself as an object of permanent study, ends up being a dogmatic alibi identical to those that have fed us throughout history. As resourceful as their fashion agents are, crouched in bureaucracy, show business, ideological war machines, churches or fake news sanctuaries ... no matter how "critical" they seem, if they do not pass by themselves They are suspect themselves. More clear?. Prudence is not synonymous with weakness. The landscape is becoming a minefield where any clown tries to detonate a debate beyond his reach. Tyrians and Trojans abound. But political leaders are obliged to deepen self-criticism if they want to deepen trust. "Irreverence in debate, loyalty in battle."
Critical Thinking Strategies

It will be bad for us if, when reviewing the damages caused by the ideas of the oppressing class, we believe ourselves immaculate, undamaged or safe. The problem is not accepting that we are (also) monsters of the ideology of the ruling class, the problem is identifying how proud we are and what we do with it. Critical Thinking that flirts with utopias or becomes purely speculative ambush can no longer be validated. We need Critical Thinking to think and make the transformation of reality but with a methodological support of permanent self-criticism and reworking, within the effective reach of the peoples, to overcome the economic-social order in use. And it is that the ideas of the ruling class are expressed, first, as an economic model and, therefore, developing criticism must serve to gain organizing strength against the worst class inheritances, that is, its economy, its laws and its values moral.

It is necessary to break from its bowels the forms and uses of conventional reasoning inoculated in our most invisible daily routine. Develop a change, not only in forms, with a new method trained to overcome all hegemonic logic that, orphaned by questioning the essence of productive activity and the dominant relations of production, has indoctrinated us with its content and class membership and its ability to paralyze intellectual and political functions. That has made us defenders of our executioner.


 

The Critical Thinking we need must contain a subversive effect, even on itself, if it wants to have it for any other field of subversion. The praxis of Critical Thinking can be taken as a synthesis of a new kind of humanism that puts social interest above all else. Critical thinking submitted, himself, to the principle of historical development, operating in the bowels of the conjuncture, with rigorous revolutionary statements incompatible with the myths of conservative "stability". To avoid the ambush of living by abstractly reconstructing escapist categories, it is necessary to re-politicize Critical Thinking, to distance it from academicist gurus and saints and to trace its scientific development alongside social struggles. Each renewal of Critical Thought must be a response to the transforming needs of historical practice ready to intervene at the heart of all our contradictions.

It is necessary to produce a scientific statute of Critical Thinking whose condition, first and last, is not to stagnate between reformulations, abandonments and fashionable revisionisms, nor between pure concepts or propositions that are not linked to the fight for the transformation of the world. Critical Thinking could not develop independently of the history of the working people whose struggles determine their advances and setbacks, their transformations and rectifications. It cannot depend on "models of the future" or prescriptions in the abstract. On the contrary, it must express the real movement of social struggles, not as a "finished theory" but as an organized and popular intervention against the logic and actions of dominant, large-scale reproduction and accelerated accumulation of capital. Especially the fight against the oppressive ideology that is like a virus inoculated in the reason to superimpose the logical connections and the scientific evidence itself, until it becomes a tare against critical reasoning.

 Certainly, in daily life, the current evaluation of Critical Thinking is far from being that of a theoretical-practical necessity trained since childhood. For the most part it is splintered from its revolutionary force and it is reduced to the catalog of good purposes almost exclusively, "intellectuals". Distorted. That is the academicist ambush to prevent Critical Thinking from advancing against the ideological focuses scattered to the most unsuspected corners of the mind, technology and body, as a dynamic expression of domination. That is why it is necessary to intervene against alienation, ignorance and the hegemonic conditions of production, simultaneously.

What it is about is not (only) to interpret the world but to transform it, suppressing social classes. That needs a worldwide flourishing of Critical Thinking capable of taking it to the field of emotions, feelings, beliefs, and tastes. Critical Thinking of the mode of production and of the social relations imposed by capitalism ... in its model of State, of "civil society", of class division, of parties without real democracy, of mercantile and commercialized art and ecology And, necessarily Critical Thinking for daily life, to question what we are, how we are and what we should be to stop being societies subject to the whim of the oppressors. Critical thinking, then, subject and object, also, of criticism. Praxis, then, as a weapon of Criticism.