Metropolitan powers offer reforms chiefly to preempt revolution.

Evidence

It is as if the metropolitan society were saying: “Let us carry out reforms before the people carry out a revolution.” And in order to achieve this goal, the metropolitan society has no options other than conquest, manipulation, economic and cultural (and sometimes military) invasion of the dependent society—an invasion in which the elite leaders of the dominated society to a large extent act as mere brokers for the leaders of the metropolitan society. — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 517

Categorization

• XREF: Parallel to Shannon’s point about reformist solutions preserving hegemony; connects to the reader’s question of whether Freire’s own method becomes a vanguard reform.