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Once again vindicated for not watching "BreadTube" slop.
One time someone on here tried to argue to me that reading theory was too hard and it's the same to just consume someone else's summary. Sounds great until your only knowledge of socialism is a convicted sex trafficker/pedophile YouTuber explaining to you how Lenin would have voted for Kamala
Put it that way you're not wrong but:
I maintain that if a socialist movement actually requires a majority of its membership to have actually read every volume of capital cover to cover and be able to write a college level paper on the subject: we all might as well just take the black pill right here and now because comrade that just simply ain't gonna happen.
Reading theory should always be encouraged but like it or not: any organized mass movement is going to depend on people who are operating purely on the cliff notes.
Precisely why everyone should be encouraged to read theory, even if not everyone actually ends up doing it. The more people who have actually read theory, the more people can get away with having read the summary
As an English teacher, trust me when I say that no one is less under the illusion that everyone will do the assigned reading than me
I maintain that if a socialist movement actually requires a majority of its membership to have actually read every volume of capital cover to cover and be able to write a college level paper on the subject: we all might as well just take the black pill right here and now because comrade that just simply ain't gonna happen.
No one is demanding that from anybody. They’re just demanding that people stop jerking off and throwing away their life and money to e-celebs who talk to a camera for a living and maybe read a book. Any book.
any organized mass movement is going to depend on people who are operating purely on the cliff notes.
Ok? Then tell the ecelebs to actually make good cliff notes
First-worlders need to read theory to combat the first-world desire to just tune out from the struggles of the bottom rungs of imperial core society and more specifically those struggling outside the imperial core. Vibes-based imperial "leftism" is going to make you more wrong than right at some point, maybe no right now when all the left gets to to do is chat about ideology and news events. You could see how astray people got as soon as Bernie pseudo-ran or BLM and people had to actually start looking at society through a marxist lens and not a passive consumer but kept doing shit like telling Canadians to phonebank for Bernie Sanders and whites to not talk over corporate-backed POC shitlibs.
The comrades outside the imperial core have their lives directly linked to improving global working politics, though they too still need to engage with communist theory and thought/consciousness, just not as much and for different reasons than us.
In the global south, you got unions, parties, organizations, clubs, and media run by leftists.
In the west you just got the media, and half of the problem is that everyone calls themselves a leftist including liberals who hate themselves, and the other half of the problem is that the media is dog shit culture crap 90% of the time.
The local libs in DSA and other socialist orgs make political and community gains in their areas, but you rarely hear a peep about it from these big radlib channels.
Millions of socialists have not read theory, it's fine.
Edit: very anglo-online-centric responses here lol
It really isn't fine. You don't have to read quickly or even that much, but please just read a few pages here and there.
Better hope they listen to a principled person who has actually read theory then rather than some Nazbol piece of shit
Explains why we're losing
Yeah I've met those socialists and their opinions are bad and wrong
Counterpoint: Elon Musk reads theory
Sorry, there's no coming back from that one
The difference is that most of the socialists aren’t western. They have actual vanguard parties to guide them through the struggle, and they also have communities where friends and neighbors help keep each other accountable and set expectations. You don’t necessarily need to understand The Word of Marx 100% when everyone around is dedicated to struggle for a better life. You see the words in the life you live.
Westerners don’t have any of that. They have SpongeBob and Spider-Man with the exception of workers who have been beaten down so much they don’t even have the capacity to know what the fuck a vaush tube streamer is - those guys are comparable to the exploited in the global south. Some of them (not all) are in the exact conditions
If one cannot do the bare minimum of reading pop history by leftist writers or even listen to Audiobooks because it’s too hard, then it’s going to be very grim. It’s better to just watch cool guy stream with his fancy RGB lights spinning and watch news clips with him.