On Saturday, May 16, sociologist and Doctor of Education Esteban Wilson Pintos Andrade delivered the day's EnClave Libre with an open lecture titled "The Politics You Can't See: Education and Everyday Life." Joining from Buenos Aires via Zoom into the Territorio Liberté inside the maximum-security prison in Batán, he offered a thinking tool to distinguish between politics and the political — and showed how the latter seeps into routines, language, and decisions without being noticed.
The Enclave is part of the academic calendar of Universidad Liberté and the Cooperativa. The session was moderated from inside the prison by Pampa Aguirreal and hosted by Ángel M. from the studio. Lic. Cecilia Pintos — the speaker's sister and a permanent collaborator of Liberté — joined from Canada: a family and professional connection that has been taking shape with the cooperative over recent months. Among those who joined the Zoom was Daniel Q., released just days earlier, who introduced himself as a "Liberté graduate." The cooperative's Board of Directors — including, among others, Dra. Diana Márquez and Lic. Ricardo Augman — followed the session and contributed to the closing. Dra. Claudia Perlo, a member of Liberté, also joined the broadcast.
Politics and the political: a distinction that changes how we read the world
Pintos opened the lecture with a foundational clarification. "We are not going to talk about politics in institutional terms — democracy, parties, separation of powers." What he proposed was something else: thinking about the political as that set of "ideas, beliefs, and values that in some way shape the opinions and actions of individuals." The political runs through the simplest routines, configures language, gestures, and relationships in the classroom. Partisan politics, he argued, is merely the final expression — often unconscious — of that deeper construction of meaning.
First-order and second-order meanings
From that foundation, Pintos proposed an analytical distinction that organized the entire lecture. First-order meanings are historically sedimented: positivist, Eurocentric, ordering matrices that trace back to the construction of the modern state and are transmitted from generation to generation without those who carry them recognizing their origin. They are "very difficult to dislodge," he explained.
Second-order meanings, by contrast, are more conjunctural: they emerge over periods of ten or twenty years and can be either countercultural — Latin American progressive governments like Kirchnerism, Lula, Evo, Correa, the Frente Amplio — or conservative, those processes that reinforce the hegemonic matrix. More volatile, more changeable.
Politics is the only thing that holds back the enrichment of bourgeois sectors and the impoverishment of the majority of the population.
Positivism is not just a theory: it is a culture
A significant portion of the lecture was devoted to tracing how positivism — the philosophy of Augusto Comte and his banner of "order and progress" — ended up constituting us as subjects. "We are a set of positivist subjects," he stated. Brazil's flag reads Ordem e Progresso. The obsession with order, the separation between the technical and the ideological, the belief in a decontextualized "objectivity": all of this seeps into classrooms, into discourse, into common sense.
Pintos connected that idea to two key references: Althusser's ideological state apparatuses — the school, the family, the church, which reproduce order without resorting to force — and Gramsci's concept of hegemony, that moment when a social class convinces the rest that its cultural norms are universal and collectively produced. "That's when they achieve power," he quoted.
The phrases of common sense
To show how first-order meanings circulate unchecked, Pintos shared a list of phrases he hears from soccer teammates, acquaintances, and everyday life. "They should kill all the negros — not by skin color, I mean in the head." "The poor are poor because they don't want to work." "Politics is all corruption." "Under the military this didn't happen." "Feminism has already gotten too much." "There's no racism in Argentina, we're European." Each of those phrases, he said, operates as what Arturo Jauretche called las sonceras argentinas: functional errors that serve the system but present themselves as common sense rather than ideology.
Behind all of this, Pintos warned, lies a deeper process that Jauretche called pedagogical colonization: the education system, official culture, and the media install in the colonized a worldview that corresponds to the colonizer's interests, leading the dominated to think in borrowed categories and perceive themselves through foreign eyes.
When working-class people vote against their own interests
The central question of the closing was why working-class people vote for political projects that harm them. Pintos offered a reading: objective changes — distribution of wealth, wages, rights actually won — and subjective changes — hegemonic values and cultural norms — operate on different timescales. The former are fast. The latter stretch back to the construction of the Argentine agro-export state and are far more stable. That is why, he argued, "it's not so hard to understand how people who benefited objectively end up voting for projects that champion hegemonic values."
Pampa Aguirreal contributed a reading from the Territorio at the close. "I've asked myself many times how people in incarceration could have voted for political projects that clearly worked against them," he reflected. His hypothesis: "they build a story in their heads that they're part of the other side of society. For a moment they're not that excluded part locked up in here. They support things that go against their own interests — phones, early release, shorter sentences — but they believe, just for a little while, that they're the others." A soncera, in Esteban's terms.
Another voice, another perspective: Miguel Vega's rejoinder
The Enclave's closing left room for a dissenting intervention. Miguel Vega, a regular student in Liberté's educational spaces who joined by Zoom, with a background in political and constitutional theory, offered a different reading of positivism. He reclaimed its historical role: "it allowed truth to no longer depend on the dogma of a king, a church, or the government of the day, but on objective facts that anyone can verify." And he challenged the idea of politically categorizing teachers or validating the notion of indoctrination: "ordinary citizens vote according to their concrete reality — inflation, unemployment, insecurity — attributing that to cultural manipulation is paternalism."
The conversation remained open. That is the format of the EnClave Libre: it does not seek consensus, it seeks thought. And it preserves differences rather than erasing them.
A concept that emerged: the "Liberté graduate"
There was another moment from the session worth noting. Daniel Q., a longtime member of Liberté released just days earlier, joined the Zoom and introduced himself as "a freed Liberté member, a Liberté graduate." In his remarks, he expressed his desire to build a network among Liberté graduates to uphold the cooperative's emblem of zero recidivism. Dra. Diana Márquez took note of the concept: "Liberté graduate — that strikes me as an incredibly powerful concept, distinct from graduating from prison. We need to develop that." An editorial category the cooperative will continue to work with, and one that speaks directly to one of Pintos's central points: collective identities as countercultural construction, not natural inheritance.
What remains
The closing came from Esteban himself, in response to a question from Gerardo Short — a regular student joining by Zoom — about how significant these micro-actions sustained by the cooperative can really be. "Countercultural actions are countless, innumerable, across many individuals and many collectives. Liberté is a great example. Obviously you're swimming against the current, against that historically constructed set of values. But beyond the victories or defeats that come out of that collective countercultural effort — it is a life stance. And in that, I find peace."
